Copy of email sent to customers as an update on April 5, 2014Hello,
First off please excuse me for not sending out an updated newsletter recently. We have been keeping very busy working to get the nTek miners ready as quickly as we can. I have been spending a lot of time doing my best to be as responsive as possible to any customers who directly contacted us with questions. However, I feel it is important to send out this group message to make sure anyone who has not been in contact will know the latest status.
We have really great news; this past week, through some colleagues in the supercomputing community we have been able to get the help of Troy Benjegerdes
http://bitspjoule.org/troy/resume.htmlTroy worked at Cray and IBM and was introduced to us as the best of the best at firmware related to processors. He even wrote the first Linux firmware for the PowerPC cpu from IBM. This last week while Troy was working with us we were able to find a design issue on the Hashing PCB. This means we can correct it still since the PCB's are in the process of production but luckily it was not too late to pause production at the factory just for a short time while Troy our team debug and then thoroughly test the optimization. The key part we learned from this is that we are confident that we will be able to push the A1 Coincraft ASICchips much further with more hashing power.
In combination with our unique patent pending heatsink and cooling design I am excited to see what the full production systems will be able to do!
All along the way since we started on this project we have strived to make sure we will ship a top quality product. We have had our fair share of delays but we are now very close to having our own 10-chip A1 ASIC hashing board design that after all this hard work and time will be well worth it. No one else on the market has a 10-chip A1 based design and even more importantly no one has spent the kind of time and effort required to properly cool the A1 chips.
Please see the attached photos showing the latest design of the Patent Pending nTek ASIC cooling heatsink assembly. In March we experimented with using 3M high quality thermal pad material but even that was not something we felt comfortable using to get the best performance. Instead we sent the heatsink assemblies across town to a metal plater for a high quality anodized finish. With this high quality aluminum and the anodized finish we experimented with several heating and cooling tests and found that having less barrier between the perfectly flat bottom of the PCB and the heatsink helps transfer the heat much better. The anodized finish is non-conductive as well which is very important to reduce EF interference or shorting with the board.
IMPORTANT: ROI Compensation Agreement: LINK TO ROI AGREEMENT
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6KRhsHRUZToRURDaTNJbXo1Qm8/edit?usp=sharingPlease see the attached ROI agreement. I understand better than anyone how difficult these delays have been with the rise in the mining difficulty and the strange things that have happened in the Bitcoin industry so far this year. I want to make one thing perfectly clear; nTek has not been mining either and we had planned on keeping just a few extra miners ourselves from this first batch. There has been some confusion because the ROI agreement states that we will compensate customers from an nTek mining cloud. That mining cloud does not exist yet and will only be built from the next batch of miners. We are not a gigantic mining hardware company like KnC or BFL's and we are not going to build a pool that would in any way compete with customers mining themselves. That would just simply not be possible because the size of the Bitcoin mining network is way to large.
We are striving to go above and beyond other mining hardware companies and that is why we are giving the attached agreement with a plan to compensate you for the lost Bitcoin from the time you expected to get your miner(s). In fact you will be getting more Bitcoin in the end because we are covering the electricity cost in the mining used for this compensation. Please carefully read the agreement and do not hesitate to ask any questions if any of the terms are unclear. We are open to taking suggestions on how to refine the final version that will be distributed to all customers.
In addition if you did purchase a miner originally and already received a refund we are making a one time offer right now to be fair and allow you to take advantage of the ROI agreement if you would like to re-purchase the miner(s) you got refunded for already. The re-purchase will have to be at the same price you originally paid because the compensation for the Bitcoin from LMT (lost mining time) will be a more than fair option when you do the math. Let me know if you would like me to send the calculation based on the original date of your order.
Response to TH/s Miners Flooding Market from China:Many people have asked or mentioned in the forum about why our prices are higher than the TH/s miners coming out of China that are using questionable A1 chips. We happened to come across some very interesting information while working with a reputable PCB manufacturer in China who does a lot of work for large American electronics companies. The cheap Chinese miners that have recently flooded the market are using very low quality refurbished parts. They almost certainly are using DC/DC converter components that are not genuine and will burn out after not that long. This could even cause the difficulty rate that jumped so much recently to drop when those cheap miners start burning out. We learned about how these cheap DC converter components over in China are refurbished with bad IC (integrated circuitry) because some vendors over there tried to sell us the same kind of parts for 1/5 the cost of the genuine parts. We made the decision to only use genuine Linear Technologies parts
http://www.linear.com/ while the same kind of part is sold in China for much less for a reason. Even some name brand Graphics Cards (GPU's) on the market have been known to have DC converter parts burn out very quickly and it is safe to say they are also cutting corners and playing a numbers game. Those big GPU companies are happy if they sell 50,000 GPU's and only 1,000 of them burn out.
Asking ourselves WWSJD (What would Steve Jobs do?) we know companies like Apple would only buy top quality genuine parts. As the founder of RevUp Render, Inc. and nTek Computers I would be extremely happy if someday we could have a long term reputation similar at all to Apple. This is why we are asking right now, what is the right thing to do and what will people remember several years from now when they look back at what BFL's, KnC and these other companies. My hope is that they remember that we are doing the right thing for our early customers and not excepting to deliver a sub par product just to save money right now.
If it means we have to do something that some people have said I am crazy to offer to the early customers but it allows you to see that we are in fact different; then I am happy to present this ROI agreement to you. I hope it sets a new standard in the mining hardware industry later on.
Lastly, I know it is not right to say the miners will begin shipping next week once again because I said that last time. I honestly did think our board design was completely ready. We have been fortunate to get someone with the kind of experience that Troy Benjegerdes has on our team. The fact that we caught the PCB layout design changes that will take a short amount of time to fix now but save much more time later on. Hashing power is time and the more we can squeeze out of each A1 chip later on by having the PCB layout perfect simply means that Troy will be able to optimize the firmware for the A1 chips and push it further.
I know you all want to just know the exact shipping date now. Please give us until next week to continue to flesh out the bench testing so Troy and the rest of the team can figure out the best design change to improve the power flow across the board. Since we are working with the top of the line PCB factory in China and not the same kind of place over there that the cheap TH/s miners are coming out of, we are already ready to continue production. Things will move very fast once we confirm the design and I promise to give an update early next week and through the week as we get closer.
This is a long email update, but I missed the recent ones so I am packing a lot of information into this message. I greatly appreciate your time to read through our progress and updates and I am happy to answer any questions or concerns you have.
Sincerely,
Ry
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nTek Computers
