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

[Phinnaeus Gage]

http://news.stv.tv/west-central/107195-jail-for-businessman-who-ran-counterfeiting-operation/

A businessman whose company has been jailed for five years and eight months for running a counterfeiting operation while his business was failing.

The High Court in Glasgow heard that John Farrell, 51, sourced specialist paper and inks and forged hundreds of thousands of pounds of counterfeit money when his IT business got into financial difficulties.

He recruited his son Craig, 23, who used his skills to improve the quality of the fake cash.

The printing enterprise set up in Farrell's IT company in  East Kilbride  managed to produce counterfeit £10 and £20 Royal Bank of Scotland and Bank of Scotland notes, which experts described as of "extremely good" quality.

Strathclyde Police and Serious Organised Crime Agency officers found numerous sheets of paper with  front and rear images of the notes on them.  They also found a considerable quantity of Royal Bank of Scotland and Bank of Scotland £10 notes at various stages of completion. The court heard that they were able to print between 15 and 25 £20 notes an hour at the premises.

John Farrell's lawyer said said that his client: "Feels shame and embarrassment at what  he has brought on his family. It will adversely affect his his wife and daughter and his sons." 

Jailing Farrell, judge Lord Turnbull told him that he had used his intelligence to build up a successful business and an affluent lifestyle.  But added: "You then chose to put your business skills to criminal use. It is clear  considerable research and  application would have be needed to initiate  this exercise."

Craig Farrell was jailed for two years and nine months. His brother  Paul Farrell, 20, and employee Gordon Grainger, 20, who passed off counterfeit cash as genuine in shops were each ordered to perform 300 hours community service.

[jimmothy]

Once again, Gordon Grainger has foiled their elaborate scam..

[Phinnaeus Gage]

Once again, Gordon Grainger has foiled their elaborate scam..

Thanks to Gordon Boy, Cryptocoins News is now taking a mighty big hit: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=647683

[Bicknellski]

Not sure I understand what 'fragmentary results' you would like to see?

It would be best for you if you've reviewed the posts from bitfury. It was his first ASIC and he went directly into full custom. See how he dealt with disbelievers. You can just read his English posts although his detractors were mostly posting in Russian and his responses were in Russian too.

Basically, we want to see that there is a real technical depth in your organization. What we don't want to see is another Cointerra, where the "dream team" was really part-timers that quickly disassociated themselves from the CEO and the only technical person left was some German guy on a temporary visa in the USA.

Your post, while quite good overall, essentially looks like a case study done by an MBA student.

Edit: You can also review Spondoolies-Tech posts. The forum account is mostly manned by a their CEO, who isn't afraid to admit that he doesn't understand some technical issues, but is always capable of delegating the Q/A to an appropriate person within his organization.

Edit2: some grammar fixes

You might want to start showing your cards technically you are clearly losing the PR war. Time to listen to 2112 and show the slide-rules what you really have if you have anything that is. Pretty documents are one thing having some clear "results" that the engineers here can pour over and determine if you have a viable concept or not is what you have to do now. No one on these boards is going to give you a pass. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence was a phrase made popular by Carl Sagan let us see what evidence you can provide.

[novello]

Good Morning everyone,

Again I'm under some time constraints today so I wont have time to fully explore the implcations of what I started in my post yesterday.

I do see that my new best friend Mr Gage has again been busy, seem he can't quite make us him mind as to who he wants to accuse us of being or doing. He really doesn't seem to grasp the concept of limited company structure - just because you've got a business address in an area doesn't mean to say that any of your directors or employees live there, so to make wild leaps of logic that someone who shares a name with a convicted criminal in that area must be that person are absurd. Can't wait to see his next claim, what will it be? That we started the Second World War, shot JFK or perhaps were solely responsible for the 18th century slave trade?

So the return to the real world, yesterday I showed how to calculate what a mining rig will earn on a daily or monthly basis, and what that means for how much you should pay for it. There seems to be a lot of opinions that very soon it might not be possible for people to mine at home or independently due to the growth in the network hash rate. Certainly 'small time' miner face challenges, but htey're not impossible to overcome.

In earlier posts, Mr. Canary said that Asicminer have 60PH of capacity in the process of being built, and I've no reason to doubt him. Whether that's on their own account or simply guessing it from chip sales he didn't say. it's a fair old lump of capacity, that's for sure but I doubt that it could be deployed in a period of less than two months. Canary also said there is a lot more to come, namely 1500PH in the next year. To fund that amount based on rough calculations we've done about the likely system costs you would need approximately $600,000,000, and thats not including the costs of actually getting the capcity inot a data centre, setting it up and paying for the rental and so on. That's an awful lot of cash. You might argue that they'll be earning tons of Btc from the earlier capacity they put in, but as difficulty goes up earnings go down and so it takes longer and longer to pay for you initial purchase.

And of course Asicminer aren't the only show in town. So let's assume that come September the network grows by 60PH a month, starting at 185PH. The full chart hasn't been shown so it can fit in and be legible, but it assumes continuous growth at 60 PH/month.




What you can see is that all starts well, a 4TH rig installed in September with a J/Gh rating of 0.7 will earn $6409 in it's first year - fantastic! It will cost $1600 to manufacture, about $350 to ship and install. the Electricity cost has already been accounted for at $0.04/kWh. However, it's share of the maintenance  and operations costs of the data centre will come out at about $80 per month, and someone has to pay for the initial setup and configuration of the data centre, so take another $250 per system out of that. So the total costs per system in the first year are: $1600+12x$80 + $350 + $250 per system, ie $3160. Subtract that from the $6409 and you get $3249. Not bad at all.

However, for machines installed in October the net yearly earnings drop to $2095, and by December to $795. Still a profit, but you can see where this is going, and the network rate is 'only' at 385PH. A machine installed in April 2015 will barely break even. Yes, it will continue to make money in it's second year, but the return on investment is looking decidedly shaky.

Of course, BTC might go up in value. It might also fall, who really knows.

The point to all this is that sometimes people are afraid of the demons others conjure up to scare them. Unless you do a comprehensive analysis of their facts and figures, which for many is difficult because they don't have access to the necessary information, then you get stuck in a situation where fear rules the day.

I'm short of time again today, so tomorrow I'll look at how individual miners might cope with the situation I've described.

[Bicknellski]

Great information.

Got any data to share on your products?

[watcoin]

I will wait for an actual product and buy it, if you get there. I've also been looking at ASIC for scrypt and they seem to be in FAIL mode. The pre-order bullshit is too much. I really hope that you do release a product that has the specs that you claim. It will be a miners orgasm. Good luck. Anyway back to lurking.

[novello]

Good morning everyone,

Sadly, I won't be posting the second part of what I started writing yesterday, thanks to those of you that took the time to read it and for your comments. We had a meeting last night with our MD and she's asked me to post the following:



"Dear all,

After some discussions with my engineers and the other members of the company, I’ve decided to take a few steps in relation to the project, in the first instance, we’ll be contacting each of the individuals who donated to the Indiegogo campaign clarifying our position, how their donations will be refunded once the campaign ends, and our future plans. Our first responsibility is to the people who put money into the campaign albeit it not directly to us,and if you're one of them and haven’t received an email from us by close of business on Friday, please get in touch as soon as possible. We have not taken any other monies for those orders that were placed outside Indiegogo, and we apologise to those that tried to place them for the delays.

The second is to admit that in our excitement over the design of the technology and the models we developed to try and offer some new possibilities to customers, we clearly misjudged the level of disaffection for crowd-funding models, especially in the situation where the professional commitments of the majority of our group complicate the level of disclosure demanded by the community. We don’t disagree on the fact that the demand is partially justified in light of the many people who have lost money and time with previous ventures. A quick summary of the other threads in this forum suggest that those problems are sadly not a thing of the past, and so the current cynicism – while necessarily frustrating from our perspective – is understandable, and probably a good thing for the community as a whole in terms of weeding out unprofessional business practices.

As it is clear that the model is probably not sustainable for a project of this magnitude, our future attempts to bring our products to market will have to be through other means. From our perspective that is regrettable, as our intention was to have our backers interests at heart rather than those of investors, but in light of how things have gone in the last week or so, it’s clear that we’ll need to look at alternative models. There have been a few interesting ideas that have been suggested in this thread and others, and the individuals who have contributed those have our thanks – we’ll consider all those options as we consider the best way to bring our designs to market.

The third step will be to step away from discussing our campaign or designs on the forum, though I will encourage my engineers to occasionally contribute to technical discussions. Some of you who have read the proposal in its entirety, regardless of your opinion about the project itself, have noted that there’s plenty of sensible discussion about the feasibility of mining with the current state of play, and I think it’s to everyone’s benefit that those discussions keep happening. It's probably also worth reflecting on the tone and nature of the prospectus we put forward; funding would have been much easier to achieve with less pessimistic assessments of potential earnings using our equipment, and indeed with fewer warnings about the dangers of investing in any hardware-related project, and those concerned with legitimacy might consider reflecting on that point. 

Many of you have no doubt settled down with the expectation of an angry set of back-and-forth around the accusations made against us, but we’ve seen enough exchanges of this sort to know that discourse of this sort on forums rarely leads to much productive discussion – especially when the overwrought interpretive efforts of some of the community do tend towards the paranoid (and do not appear limited to us, based on some of the suggestions made elsewhere). I will only gesture to the fact that in the space of a day several wildly different interpretations have been offered, threads begun in multiple places on the forums, and the whole thing accompanied by no less a claim than denial would equal guilt. Ponder for a moment exactly how one can proceed against kind of logic and you’ll appreciate our disinterest in engaging in a ‘discussion’ where the outcome has very much already been decided.

As we mentioned above, we’ll be contacting all the individuals who have contributed and inform them of the situation and the timetable for Indiegogo returning their donations to them [crucially, Indiegogo, not us, controls the finances for the campaign]. Rather unfortunately, evidence that our contributors have not been defrauded of a penny will come rather too late for it to be much more than a hollow victory for those who expressed interest or hope in the project. I can only apologise for letting you down. But for those that have phoned or emailed us – and indeed those who have offered reasonable discussion on the forum – we extend our thanks, and hope that whatever projects you do decide to back prove successful for you. If you do have any interest in how our efforts to pursue alternative funding turn out, let us know and we’ll be more than willing to communicate any news if and when we have it.

Olivia Walker
Managing Director
Novello Technologies Limited"

So there you have it. As Olivia said, we will try to keep those interested in our project up to date with what's happening, although from my past experiences with VC's they usually aren't very good at sharing.

[Bicknellski]

Great move.

Let us see what happens next. My guess some sort of Spondoolies like rebirth. Anyone else?

[cathoderay]

***SHORTENED VERSION***

Dear all,

We got totally busted & lost our bottle.

Dammit.

[loshia]

Great move.

Let us see what happens next. My guess some sort of Spondoolies like rebirth. Anyone else?

Or it is your beloved friend Joshua
Just saying

[Bicknellski]

***SHORTENED VERSION***

Dear all,

We got totally busted & lost our bottle.

Dammit.

I don't think so. But most people do I bet.

[Biffa]

Great move.

Let us see what happens next. My guess some sort of Spondoolies like rebirth. Anyone else?

My guess is a couple of dozen "investors" who never get their money back.

[TheRealSteve]

My guess is a couple of dozen "investors" who never get their money back.

Unless that includes some private investors, that's a bit of an overestimate.  The indiegogo project funders count is stuck at 11, with a total of $5,997 pledged.

[Phinnaeus Gage]

***SHORTENED VERSION***

Dear all,

We got totally busted & lost our bottle.

Dammit.

I don't think so. But most people do I bet.

Definitely not Joshua Zipkin of AMT and Miner Technologies, for this person didn't attend Penn State for seven years to obtain a business degree like Josh Zipkin, son of Harrison Zachariah Zipkin, has.

[Bicknellski]

Did everyone get refunded?

That be my follow up.

[Slaine]

It's a shame, regardless of whether peeps thought this was all above board or not, most of what I've read has just  been bitching.

At least this project included something for the hobby miners, not the usual elitist BS. Most asic units out there are just plain overpriced for what they are, especially when import tax's are involved.

There isn't really anything out there for the BTC hobby miner anymore, a single S1 just wont have enough grunt to make it entertaining soon and current range of 1th units apart from being pricey, are just too damn big n noisy for home use.

Hopefully one of the other manufacturers might take heed, but I'm not holding my breath.

Just my 0.2p  

[TheRealSteve]

Did everyone get refunded?

That be my follow up.

I would guess not - a Google CSE entry for https://www.google.com/search?q=novello+technologies popped up a new result that claims to be an e-mail sent from novello, but it's unverified?  http://pastebin.ca/2807363

[raskul]

It's a shame, regardless of whether peeps thought this was all above board or not, most of what I've read has just  been bitching.

At least this project included something for the hobby miners, not the usual elitist BS. Most asic units out there are just plain overpriced for what they are, especially when import tax's are involved.

There isn't really anything out there for the BTC hobby miner anymore, a single S1 just wont have enough grunt to make it entertaining soon and current range of 1th units apart from being pricey, are just too damn big n noisy for home use.

Hopefully one of the other manufacturers might take heed, but I'm not holding my breath.

Just my 0.2p  

At-home mining began to fade away at the end of last year, there is now no point whatsoever in building small rigs for home use; difficulty dictates what we can and cannot mine - there will always be business ideas which are good-at-heart but completely clueless-in-reality.

The Novello chip specs were great and if this endeavour had been genuine, the company would have had no problem whatsoever in getting funds to T/O, and also could have brought it all to market in a very short space of time.

Sometimes it's just not meant to be, eh Olivia?

 

[Phinnaeus Gage]

Goodbye, Olivia! You were such a doll.