Novello Technologies new Mining System Project, prices as low as $0.3/GH

[novello]

Well,mining at home will be dead VERY soon.With power costing me .13 cents per kwh,I've already sold my 1 TH in Antminers.

I saw the end coming & sold my miners while I could get a decent amount for them,had I waited another month or so their cash value will have decreased by a significant amount.

Sooo,unless BTC hits $700-$1000+ & STAYS there,I personally don't see it staying at those prices for very long,NO miner is worth it at ANY price.

Even if it does,we already are knocking on the 100PH door & its early June,150 looks easy to hit by Sept & 200 by years end or shortly thereafter,so the diff is going kill any at home mining projects.

I wish you the best of luck & will be watching,but you may as well just make miners for datacenters,they will control network very soon............ 

Dear me, that's a very pessimistic attitude, If you look at our plan, we predict a network hash rate of 280PH by December...our systems will still be very viable at that time, please look at the section about 'Jane', our typical citizen from Colorado who pays about the same you do for electricity. Look at the prediction we made for her earnings using our Guaranteed Supply Program, it was based on BTC at $500, not $600 or $700. Jane would make over $2200 off her miner plus the upgrades in 2015, even when the network hash rate hits 500+PH by the end of 2015.

So please look at the plan again. Thanks for your good wishes, please keep watching our project, if you would like to be added to our
e-mailing list, drop us a line.

Well.lets see....I've been mining since June 2011 & started with $1000 in vid cards & PC parts & made out very well.Well enough to upgrade with my earnings until now....the cost of miners & power consumption is what has turned me to altcoins,those will be hit with diff rises soon too, but with many coins to choose it'll be easier to keep going.Not to mention considerable reduction in power consumption & lower cost of miners.

I read your plan & IF you keep your prices low & IF you deliver,it MAY work.I personally can't chance it.December is a long time to wait for a return,if it works...........

I've been unemployed due to our wonderful bank & wallstreet greed & our gov's failure to get the economy rolling & inflation under control.So my personal earnings are not going to feed the miner makers.

Yes I am a pessimist,you would be too if you were in my shoes.....

30 years of construction & service industry work(HVAC install,service/Electrician/Plumber/Carpentry/Roofer/Painter) that is worthless here in Fla..............

Sure, I appreciate the feedback. We don' know what will happen to the value of BTC or the network hash rate in December any more than anyone else does, but we think our predictions are pessimistically realistic - if that makes sense.

I'm genuinely sorry to hear about your situation. It's not nice being made redundant, or worse still to be made to FEEL redundant, especially when you have spent the larger part of your life in a skilled job. I've been there and it's not a good place. Hope that you get work again and get back on your feet.

Just as an aside, have you thought about trying to get work in the UK or the Middle East? the UK economy in South East England is on a roll just now, and there's lots of jobs in construction (residential and commercial). I can't see a skilled US citizen having any problems getting a work visa. Try looking on indeed.co.uk or monster.com. Good luck,

[novello]

Why present the project here when you could do it to some VC firms?

Just happened to drop in, not shilling for anyone but I'd rather see directly funded or crowdsourced stuff than venture capital. It's a lot less conceptually soul-sucking to have the actual customer give you money to build them stuff, than some jerkoff with money to burn on pet companies. Just throwing that out there.

Thanks for your post. I can tell you from experience that VC companies most definitely do not have the interests of the end customers at heart.

The ones that we approached were happy to fund us, but not for selling mining equipment to the public, only for in house use. There are quite clearly  lots of them now bankrolling the building of massive hashing farms, and the individual miner is going to be squeezed out of existence unless someone does something about it.

Here's some facts to consider about VC funded programs:

1. The first thing they want is an Exit Strategy, which translates to "how soon do I get my 3 times my investment back?"

2. They don't like anything that involves very long leadtimes unless there's a huge prize at the end

3. They don't like anything that sounds remotely altruistic or that panders to a special group of people - quick profit is everything

4. They will want a company run in a manner that gets then the fastest return, not one that builds a good, sustainable business.


Of course they have their place, and like it or not the world needs them.

They are no friends of Bitcoin miners, I can tell you that,

[jimmothy]

So how about anything that suggests you're a real company?

The more you avoid the real questions the more you look like a scammer.

Who works for your company?

Why can't you give us any technical details about the chip?

Why can't you point us towards any of your company/employees previous work?

[mrcable]

I can see that you have selected flexible funding , which means you will get the cash anyway if you hit Your target or not .  What happens then , if you dont hit Your target. ? Do they get refunded or ?

[novello]

UPDATE

Well, it's coming to nearly the end of out first day on this forum, and it's been very interesting.

First of all, thank you to everyone that's taken the time to post on our thread. There's been a fair old mixture and it's obvious that there's many different views about our project and how we're going about it. That's perfectly normal and healthy.

Secondly, thank you to the posters that have taken the time to read right through the proposal and come back with sensible, relevant questions.

Lastly, we really appreciate the numerous emails sent to us wishing us good luck with the project and commenting on how the mining community needs something like this (even if it's not our chip) to compete in the future. It's sad to note that some said they wouldn't post on the thread for fear of being harangued by trolls, but that's the way of things.

As regards the comments about our lack of technical information, it's rather puzzling to us. Give any one of our engineers a die size, process step, power dissipation and hashrate of a mining asic and he'll tell you in about two minutes what it might look like inside. Any competent asic engineer could do the same thing. An SHA256 pipeline mostly contains only three building blocks, namely a full adder, flip flops and a 32 bit fast adder. Yes, there are other gate functions but those three dominate the area and power.

There are few different ways to implement the function as the arithmetic algorithm is fixed. We've saved some gates by using a word expander that generates 2 words per stage instead of one, but that's not particularly original. Where we have saved most area is in the implementation of the full adders and to  lesser extent in the stage flip flops. No matter who asks, we are not going to reveal how we have done these implementations or give nay clues to said - that's our IP and what makes our solution different. What we can tell you is that the power distribution looks like this:

Flip flops : 46.2%
Full Adders (in carry save chain):31.3%
A,E and Word generator Adders: 22.5%

We can also tell you that the area of our full adder is 1.74 square microns, the flip flop is  2.02. The rest of the design information is confidential.


No one has as yet commented about some aspects of our proposal, which we find odd, namely:

- The fact that we have designed our chip to be fault tolerant using extra pipelines as 'spares'

- Our Guaranteed Supply Program to support our core customers

- Our metrics for measuring what price should be paid per GH of capacity over time

So it either means that no one has read about them, or has no comment to make. Are they good/bad/informative/deceptive/wrong/right and soon. Instead there's been constant badgering about who we are.

We expect that most of this comes about from the fact that we come from a corporate environment where individuality is not seen as an asset. We have a different way of approaching sale pitches and projects that is probably somewhat alien to the forum members. Giving you a list of names, companies and accomplishments is totally meaningless because you cannot check if they are accurate or made up. Technical details you can check, and when our engineers saw some of the original specs for power dissipation on competitors chips, they knew they were way too optimistic. Who designed them was irrelevant.

So no, we are not going to give you any other details about our staff. At least we're being up front about it instead of pulling in some guys (and gals) off the street, doing a photo shoot and giving you a load of baloney about their background.

For any competent electronic engineer, our fault tolerance approach should be a dead giveaway as to the environment it came from, as should the fact that we've put a 32 bit microcontroller on each hashing module that will constantly test and rotate the pipelines to ensure data coherency, AND allows them to self test before they get bolted into a machine. That type of system approach doesn't come out of thin air, yet draws no comment, nor does our comments about product engineering.

We also thought long and hard about how we could keep our customers competitive long term. Now if we wanted to scam people, that's not the first thing that we would take any time or effort to consider. We've come up with a way to do it that's original - as a far as we can see no other company has ever suggested anything remotely like it - and it doesn't rely on the customer funding a second round of asic development.

So all in all a mixed bag, but interesting. Please keep the relevant questions coming.

I must also apologise to Spondoolies for even suggesting that they might employ someone to 'represent' them on the forums. It was unprofessional, so sorry guys, good luck with your 28nm chip.

[novello]

I can see that you have selected flexible funding , which means you will get the cash anyway if you hit Your target or not .  What happens then , if you dont hit Your target. ? Do they get refunded or ?

If you look a couple of posts back, we've already answered this. Thanks for popping by, though. Did you like our pitch?

[taipo]

No one has as yet commented about some aspects of our proposal, which we find odd, namely....

Well for many the reason is we don't really care. All most miners care about are the following:
- does the manufacturer deliver ( on time )
- does the miner do what the specs say it does
- is the power to hash to dollar ratio a good one

Reason many dont get motivated about proposals is because these forums are full of scam artists, big talking wannabe manufacturers who may never ever produce a working machine from their 3D rendered dream machines. The most popular method now is, you produce the miner to a working sellable batch one level, send one or two to the various testers on these forums, they do an assessment of those three things, they post about it, and then, well speaking for myself, I will start to care.

[novello]

No one has as yet commented about some aspects of our proposal, which we find odd, namely....

Well for many the reason is we don't really care. All most miners care about are the following:
- does the manufacturer deliver ( on time )
- does the miner do what the specs say it does
- is the power to hash to dollar ratio a good one

Reason many dont get motivated about proposals is because these forums are full of scam artists, big talking wannabe manufacturers who may never ever produce a working machine from their 3D rendered dream machines. The most popular method now is, you produce the miner to a working sellable batch one level, send one or two to the various testers on these forums, they do an assessment of those three things, they post about it, and then, well speaking for myself, I will start to care.

That's a perfectly reasonable approach. Trouble is, to get to the stage of being able to produce a sellable product you need a huge amount of money, and the only way to do that is to get funding - a lot of it. If it comes from a single third party, then it usually means that the end customer will pay a lot more as the third party wants their money back, and then some.

If there's no new players to compete against the existing suppliers then you have limited choices, and that's not so good.

Thanks for your feedback.

[BenTuras]

... get funding ...

You're asking for us to be investors, why not give us the benefits of investors in return ?

[novello]

... get funding ...

You're asking for us to be investors, why not give us the benefits of investors in return ?

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your input.

Strictly speaking you're buyers, not investors. We promise you delivery of an item at a future date in return for your payment. I can see why you might think that though, your 'investment' , as it were, is to give you a commercial advantage when your item gets delivered.

As a company we will use virtually all the money we get in orders to fund system development, satisfy those orders and stay afloat while doing so. After that we have to try to solicit more orders to keep the company going and invest in R&D for new products.   

[s1lverbox]

buyer is the one who pays for working unit which is ready to be picked up. what you selling is promises. nothing more.

[BenTuras]

... get funding ...

You're asking for us to be investors, why not give us the benefits of investors in return ?

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your input.

Strictly speaking you're buyers, not investors. We promise you delivery of an item at a future date in return for your payment. I can see why you might think that though, your 'investment' , as it were, is to give you a commercial advantage when your item gets delivered.

As a company we will use virtually all the money we get in orders to fund system development, satisfy those orders and stay afloat while doing so. After that we have to try to solicit more orders to keep the company going and invest in R&D for new products.   

My problem is this: I have done pre-orders before only to later see that the company used a big part of my payment to invest in their own mining farm, hurting me by increasing the network difficulty and lowering the amount of mBTC that I generate. So I "digged my own grave" by ordering from them and not being part of their profit rewards.

(They also promised they would never mine with their own equipment, yeah right).

Reward my order and payment by keeping me informed about the progress(no BS or lies), sending me a great product when it is ready and make me an investor with the benefits that come with that. That's how I would do a pre-order nowadays in bitcoin land.

[novello]

UPDATE

Forgot to add in the technical information, the power distribution figures include all relevant clock power. In all it makes up about 14%.

[novello]

... get funding ...

You're asking for us to be investors, why not give us the benefits of investors in return ?

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your input.

Strictly speaking you're buyers, not investors. We promise you delivery of an item at a future date in return for your payment. I can see why you might think that though, your 'investment' , as it were, is to give you a commercial advantage when your item gets delivered.

As a company we will use virtually all the money we get in orders to fund system development, satisfy those orders and stay afloat while doing so. After that we have to try to solicit more orders to keep the company going and invest in R&D for new products.   

My problem is this: I have done pre-orders before only to later see that the company used a big part of my payment to invest in their own mining farm, hurting me by increasing the network difficulty and lowering the amount of mBTC that I generate. So I "digged my own grave" by ordering from them and not being part of their profit rewards.

(They also promised they would never mine with their own equipment, yeah right).

Reward my order and payment by keeping me informed about the progress(no BS or lies), sending me a great product when it is ready and make me an investor with the benefits that come with that. That's how I would do a pre-order nowadays in bitcoin land.

Fair comment, and that's exactly what we would propose to deliver except that after you get you product we give you incentives to make more money in return for further production orders delivered exacty when needed. That's as close to an 'investor' reward as any company will give you. If you look at our proposal and our prediction for 'Jane', you'll see that we have absolutely no need to mine with customers machines, if every early customer took up our GSP program then we would make our margin off discounted machines/modules.

We are the only company that seems to have actually looked to the future after we get funded. Hashing farms are not on our radar, but we can see a tidal wave of the damn things approaching rapidly, so unless one of the existing manufacturers steps up to the plate and drops their prices very significantly, most miners are totally screwed.

I can only offer my sympathies for what happened to you before. Must have led a very bad taste in your mouth.

[marto74]

You have nice introduction.
Our team is specialized in designing 3-rd parity mining boards.
After reading your ASIC specs we are interested in design of a miner board with your chips.
If you are interested , please drop me a PM or mail at  office@technobit.eu

[novello]

You have nice introduction.
Our team is specialized in designing 3-rd parity mining boards.
After reading your ASIC specs we are interested in design of a miner board with your chips.
If you are interested , please drop me a PM or mail at  office@technobit.eu

Thanks for reading our proposal Martin. We'll get back to you soon on this.

[RoadStress]

So no, we are not going to give you any other details about our staff. At least we're being up front about it instead of pulling in some guys (and gals) off the street, doing a photo shoot and giving you a load of baloney about their background.

Having over 120 years of accumulated experience then it means that you can be easily checked about your background. Saying that you won't give any details about your staff is very very weird. I don't see how can you give us a lot of baloney when people could easily check. Maybe LinkedIn or another way.

May I ask you about your Bitcoin background? Like when you found about it, how many bitcoins do you own etc. You seem to know some stuff about this forum, but you don't know much about the past companies and the past fails/scams.

Labcoin even managed to print out some fake PCBs just to convince people to give them money. They stole 7000 BTC. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=263445.0

TerraHash managed to have some third party chips on their PCB board, but they still scammed people and didn't ship anything. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=198489.0

And I can go on. BFL has a over 9 months delay at this moment (or is it more?) and only a few refunds are going to the customers.

HashFast (http://hashfast.com/team/) is in bankruptcy after raising more than 20M and having 40k chips in hands after numerous failed PCB revisions.

BA is currently in a 4 months delay (Feb-June).

So yes the team is important since we had/have a lot of pretty projects at start and nice marketing and nice presentations and LOTS of promises. We need more tangible proof and the team would be a start. We will need even more proof after the team, but the team sounds the most easy/accessible one. If you can't provide that how do you expect to provide on time and on specs cutting edge technology in a very fast moving market?

[Bicknellski]

http://www.spondoolies-tech.com/pages/team  

Some faces with experience sure made pre-ordering at Stech easier for me. Do you not think it would be better to list out your team and their experience?

Remember you came to the forum hat in hand so it is well within the scope to ask before we even consider the proposal who makes up the team? That is a pretty fair question.

[Qbert]

(snip)
For any competent electronic engineer, our fault tolerance approach should be a dead giveaway as to the environment it came from, as should the fact that we've put a 32 bit microcontroller on each hashing module that will constantly test and rotate the pipelines to ensure data coherency, AND allows them to self test before they get bolted into a machine. That type of system approach doesn't come out of thin air, yet draws no comment, nor does our comments about product engineering.
(/snip)

I read thru your proposal, and some sections (including 4.5) several times. The "fault tolerant" approach did catch my eye, seeing as I came from a similar design environment.  I tend to read more than shoot my mouth off, so I didn't really think to comment.  Please forgive my fellow bitcoin enthusiasts, but you'll have to agree that any ASIC manufacturer not only has to prove their own mettle, but also overcome the stigma the majority of every ASIC manufacturer that has come before them.  Just take a quick look at the "scam accusations" subforum and you'll understand.

I wish you good luck in your endeavour and will be watching closely.  God knows the bitcoin space needs more honest and on-time delivery of mining hardware.

[novello]

(snip)
For any competent electronic engineer, our fault tolerance approach should be a dead giveaway as to the environment it came from, as should the fact that we've put a 32 bit microcontroller on each hashing module that will constantly test and rotate the pipelines to ensure data coherency, AND allows them to self test before they get bolted into a machine. That type of system approach doesn't come out of thin air, yet draws no comment, nor does our comments about product engineering.
(/snip)

I read thru your proposal, and some sections (including 4.5) several times. The "fault tolerant" approach did catch my eye, seeing as I came from a similar design environment.  I tend to read more than shoot my mouth off, so I didn't really think to comment.  Please forgive my fellow bitcoin enthusiasts, but you'll have to agree that any ASIC manufacturer not only has to prove their own mettle, but also overcome the stigma the majority of every ASIC manufacturer that has come before them.  Just take a quick look at the "scam accusations" subforum and you'll understand.

I wish you good luck in your endeavour and will be watching closely.  God knows the bitcoin space needs more honest and on-time delivery of mining hardware.

Thanks for posting that. We quite understand people's skepticism, it's not nice to have your money and/or resources stolen, especially if they are the only resources you have.

 If you come from a similar environment then you'll know that being patient is a very necessary virtue, as is integrity and accuracy. We are very patient, and are more than happy to keep defending our project for as long as necessary. We may not get funded in the end, but as I'm sure you know any project can yield potentially yield future rewards even if it fails.

You're dead right about the 'space' though. A lot of the behaviour inside it certainly doesn't entice outsider to participate, and that impedes it's growth.

Thanks also for your good wishes.