Hey guys, super excited to finally be entering the Bitcoin market. As most of you know the team and I have been building and refining our home mining system/platform over the years, and our number one request has been when we will release a Bitcoin product. I believe the Apollo has finally matured enough where our production capabilities and hardware has reached a point where it makes sense to release our Bitcoin version.
The FutureBit Apollo BTC has been in development for over a year now, and our focus from the beginning was to create a unified platform where anyone can run any aspect of the Bitcoin system in one easy to use, quiet, lower power device, and I think we have achieved that. Our platform essentially combines the 300-800 dollar node market, with a controller that is more capable, and a mining hashboard on top for "free."
This aspect is critical to why I founded Futurebit and its mission. Almost no new users to the Bitcoin space run nodes or mine, and both are important in maintaining Bitcoin's independence and decentralized nature. We wanted to create a device that combined both these features in a seamless zero-config way, and offered utility beyond just sitting there looking pretty running a node or mining. The powerful SBC with our custom designed NVMe drive bay can host a Full Bitcoin node and run almost any Bitcoin Application we can throw at it. We hope more Bitcoin devs join our Platform in the future and provide even more utility to the device.
On the mining side we wanted to build a low cost hashboard and cram as much hash power within the thermal and noise limits that make sense for a home setting. Those limits were 1) not exceed power that would have any significant impact on anyones electric bill (sub 200 watt), and 2) Run quiet in anyones home/apt. In ECO mode (~125 watts 2TH/S) our custom designed fan runs under 2k RPM and is almost inaudible. In Turbo mode (~200 watts 3TH/s) its no louder than a typical desktop system.
These design choices were made so we can start to tell Bitcoin users interested in the future of the ecosystem that there are solutions where everyone can be mining, and not worry about what the ROI or power costs are, and only care that the are accumulating Bitcoin in a cost effective way over the long term and securing the network.
I really hope we get to the future where the network is secured by 10's of millions of individual devices like mine and others, instead of the of the couple hundred centralized mines that secure > 50% of Bitcoin's hashrate today.
Im not going to post all the details of the device here as almost everything is covered in the below two links:
https://www.futurebit.iohttps://shop.futurebit.io/products/pre-order-apollo-btc-a-bitcoin-asic-miner-and-desktop-class-computer-running-a-full-node-and-much-more-batch-1-ships-in-late-april-to-may?variant=33404796928099Pre-Order starts this Friday at 6PM EST at the above link. Well be handling all NA orders there directly. Happy to also announce that Bitshopper.de will be participating in the Pre-Order, and will be handling all UK/Euro orders directly.
Also might have an Australia/NZ distributor up for pre-order but not sure yet.
For Rest of World we have really good Fedex rates and can almost ship anywhere. Obviously check with your local laws for import costs/fees etc.
Shipping will start at the end of April into May barring and major delays. Design is complete and we have running prototypes, and all major components including ASICs are on order. We have learned a bunch from our past launches and have built thousands of units so we dont anticipate any major setbacks. As always this is a pre-order so expect delays regardless.
Ill keep this thread up as the main community discussion/question thread for the time being, and open a support thread when we have our OS and support docs finalized in the coming weeks.
Even if this is not the device for you hope all you guys at least appreciate what we are trying to do and spread the word out to people that might be interested, especially newer users that would never consider mining or running a full node!
Thanks for all your support over the years...its been a wild ride and hope it gets even crazier in the future
