LargeCoin Pricing Announced; Taking Pre-Orders

[Raoul Duke]

The escrow will be with a Canadian law firm based in Vancouver, British Columbia; escrow funds will be held in a lawyer's trust account in accordance with stringent trust account rules of the BC Law Society. I will be happy to share the escrow agreement with the forum when it's ready for release.

Thank you!

Just one more question: Why don't you use a well known escrow service, like escrow.com?
I'm guessing it will be because of the non-conventional payment methods(Bitcoin), but just want to be sure.

And yes, I may be interested in buying. I'm not asking just to rattle the cage. I know I usually do that, but that's not the case

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[ttul]

Just one more question: Why don't you use a well known escrow service, like escrow.com?
I'm guessing it will be because of the non-conventional payment methods(Bitcoin), but just want to be sure.

And yes, I may be interested in buying. I'm not asking just to rattle the cage. I know I usually do that, but that's not the case

I actually didn't know that escrow.com exists.

[nedbert9]

Why do that when you can get the Rig Box

Rig Box

30k 50 ghash/s reputation so MH/$ ratio is 1.6

LargeCon

15k 20 ghash/s no reputation so MH/$ ratio is 1.3

Maybe less power but it still does not amortize over the long run enough to matter so what is the point even at 15k ?

Do you just not take into account that the c200 is ten times more efficient than the rig box?

Yay, first unrestricted post.  

Of course, IMO.

LargeCoin's MH/W efficiency is impressive.  Though, even a vast reduction in W usage does not overpower LC's low MH/$ at current market conditions and low cost kWH areas.

Equating to ROI at 19 mo, quite optimistic figure considering volatile BTC, is passing a boundary that most mining investors are uncomfortable with.

Even still LargeCoin may be getting some pre-order interest.  Good for them.  Attempting to recoup their investment is important.

My feeling is that if LC's ROI is reduced by even 3-4 months that many more will jump on it.

[Brian DeLoach]

My feeling is that if LC's ROI is reduced by even 3-4 months that many more will jump on it.

If they offered them for $10K I bet LargeCoin would have 1000 orders by the end of this month. At that price point, they would be undercutting Butterflylabs, wipe out GPU mining thus providing 90%+ of the overall mining capacity by years end, all while recovering their initial investment^* and making a good profit.

*An uninformed assumption

[nmat]

My feeling is that if LC's ROI is reduced by even 3-4 months that many more will jump on it.

If they offered them for $10K I bet LargeCoin would have 1000 orders by the end of this month.

The thing is: they will only produce 25 devices. After July we'll see what happens.

[CubedRoot]

We all remember BFL claiming 1 ghash/s at 20 W and it turns out to be 800 mhash/s at 80 W

They are at least offering an escrow and promising the specs within reason or they will refund. As soon as I get the escrow agreement I'll post it here. I do wonder about the hosting requirement. I would much rather run the unit interdependently.

This is great feedback. By "hosting" we're not meaning that the devices need to be plugged in or online 24x7 to access a site hosted by LargeCoin. We issue you a token, and the token permits a certain number of blocks to be mined. For out-right purchases, the token will permit unlimited mining, whether the device is plugged in or not. And yes, the token is tied to crypto on the processor. As I mentioned earlier, the purpose of this mechanism is to support a leasing model.

LOLOLOLLOLOLOLOLLLOOOOOLLOLOLOLOLOLOL.

I hope this isn't serious. If I drop 30g's on something with a 90 day warranty, I don't want to worry about having to have my "token"  stop working for whatever reason.  As promising as the rig --SOUNDS-- its something I would suggest staying way the hell away from.

Heres a video of what I think about this whole complete "leasing model"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaqC5FnvAEc

Have fun picking this POS apart everyone. Im out.

[coblee]

15k is much more reasonable; also license file non time liked with out remote drm. I like the escrow in fact it's essential; why not 5k up front and then 1k per month with each payment you send a license file until 15k is paid. You could also come up with a formulae on price by incorporating the difficulty ratio at the time.

As others have mentioned with delivery in late July and block rewarding halving in Jan it does not leave much room for a decent payback period if btw does not substantially appreciate in early 2013

I know there is probably endless speculation regarding what will happen to the BTC exchange rate when the block reward is cut in half, but my own opinion is that the halving of the block reward will reduce supply therefore increasing the price - probably by enough to recoup the lost "revenue" from the cut in mining reward. Another consideration is that if the exchange rate fails to increase to recoup the halving of the mining reward, people mining inefficiently will leave the market, and those operating FPGA and ASIC based systems will reap a larger share of the mining rewards -- halved as they may be.

When I do these kind of calculations, I try not to take price into consideration by comparing this miner with buying bitcoins. With $30k now, I can buy 6000 bitcoins today at the $5/btc price right now. According to http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php at current difficulty (1496978.59503), 20 GHash/s earns you ฿408.51. Let's also assume difficulty stays constant. So from July to December, you will earn ฿2043 (5 * ฿408.51), then mining reward halves and you only make ฿204.25 a month. So it will take an additional 19+ months (19 * ฿204.25) to make back the remaining ฿3957. So at least 24 months to breakeven.

If I had ฿6000 bitcoins today, would I use that to buy this miner? ROI is 24 months at the optimistic low end (where difficulty stays constant, 0% pool fees, and free electricity). If difficulty increases 1% a month, ROI increases to 30 months. At 2%, 39 months. At 3%, 64 months. At 4%, you would never make back your initial investment. The answer is an easy no. Warranty is only 90 days, yet you need at least 2 years to make back the money. If the hardware breaks down after a year, you are SOL.

[DeepBit]

Wow.

(Sorry for offtopic, but I really had to leave some ambiguous comment here)

[Syke]

What puzzles me is: why are they only selling 25 units? Does this mean that later on they will sell them cheaper?

We only have enough chips in our first run to build 25 units.

That's what I don't understand. The vast majority of ASIC cost is in the design. Whether you produce 25 or 250 chips, the cost is nearly the same.

[DeathAndTaxes]

What puzzles me is: why are they only selling 25 units? Does this mean that later on they will sell them cheaper?

We only have enough chips in our first run to build 25 units.

That's what I don't understand. The vast majority of ASIC cost is in the design. Whether you produce 25 or 250 chips, the cost is nearly the same.

Yeah I don't get it either although I doubt they have a 20 GH/s chip.  More like 10? to 20? chips per "rig".  So 25 units might be 500 chips.  Still it doesn't seem to make any sense.    25 units @ $30K ea = $750K.   100 units @ $12K ea = $1.2 mil?  Since incremental cost is small why would they want to limit themselves to 25 units and thus have to price them so high as to be inferior to other offerings?

[Inspector 2211]

What puzzles me is: why are they only selling 25 units? Does this mean that later on they will sell them cheaper?

We only have enough chips in our first run to build 25 units.

That's what I don't understand. The vast majority of ASIC cost is in the design. Whether you produce 25 or 250 chips, the cost is nearly the same.

Yeah I don't get it either although I doubt they have a 20 GH/s chip.  More like 10? to 20? chips per "rig".  So 25 units might be 500 chips.  Still it doesn't seem to make any sense.    25 units @ $30K ea = $750K.   100 units @ $12K ea = $1.2 mil?  Since incremental cost is small why would they want to limit themselves to 25 units and thus have to price them so high as to be inferior to other offerings?

It may be a production run on a multi-chip wafer, i.e. they literally have only 250 ASICs.
All they could finance is a multi-chip wafer run.
The "deposit" will finance the PCBs, passives, power supplies and assembly.

[casascius]

I am surprised that as a legitimate offering, this would even be offered for sale.

If I were in a position where I thought I'd be able to have a head start on manufacturing ASICs that blew all other miners out of the water, I'd be highly motivated to just keep it all to myself as I pretty much dominated mining.  I'd score 7200 BTC a day (with it halving soon, of course).

Or perhaps I could have my cake and eat it too.  I could sell rigs for a healthy $30k, knowing that I alone had the upper hand in deciding how productive those rigs were going to be.  If for every 10 rigs I made I ran nine and sold one, I'd effectively guarantee that all my customers were competing for 720 (360) BTC and nothing more.  The customers I sold it to would have 10x the expectations - in the end, 9x of their expected yield I'd be keeping to myself with my supply of "unsold" rigs that I was running for, um, "extensive burn-in testing" before being sold.  (What, you think I'd let them sit idle on a shelf in a warehouse?)

If this product results in centralization of mining, I bet there will be cries for Bitcoin to switch to a CPU-based algorithm!

[Brian DeLoach]

The "deposit" will finance the PCBs, passives, power supplies and assembly.

If the deposit is held in escrow, they will not be able to touch the money until the product is shipped and delivered.

[Transisto]

Too costly, rack-space is not an argument, it is already very small with future BFL rigs.
People with 1.2m to invest for a full rack don't have any problems finding a place to store them. Hint : They can be stored anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

If I was to start a mining operation this size, (5 rack, 6m$) actively choosing the best location based on electricity cost , security and rent cost would be a rather trivial task.

I hope you can significantly lower your prices on the future batches or offer a compelling bulk discount.

/Following/

[Brian DeLoach]

Yeah I don't get it either although I doubt they have a 20 GH/s chip.  More like 10? to 20? chips per "rig".  So 25 units might be 500 chips.  Still it doesn't seem to make any sense.    25 units @ $30K ea = $750K.   100 units @ $12K ea = $1.2 mil?  Since incremental cost is small why would they want to limit themselves to 25 units and thus have to price them so high as to be inferior to other offerings?

If I were in a position where I thought I'd be able to have a head start on manufacturing ASICs that blew all other miners out of the water, I'd be highly motivated to just keep it all to myself as I pretty much dominated mining.

Maybe that is exactly what they are doing. I would assume an ASIC manufacturer would want to proliferate their chips to as wide an audience as possible, any other goal seems counterproductive to maximizing their profit. If they were looking to mine themselves, they would want the opposite. Just enough sales to pay the NRE costs, while still keeping the competition low to maximize mining profits.

Official explanation...

We only have enough chips in our first run to build 25 units. We don't want to run more than this off the presses until we know that there's enough demand for these ASICs. Once the first batch is out, it will be relatively easy and quick to produce more. Yes, future prices will probably be lower, given Moore's law.

How much would it cost to produce 25 more units? Or 100?

[TheSeven]

This is based on some kind of sASIC chips, right?

May I ask, just out of curiosity, how many chips are built into one of those rigs, or the other way round, how many MH/s you managed to cram into a single chip?

[nedbert9]

I am surprised that as a legitimate offering, this would even be offered for sale.

If I were in a position where I thought I'd be able to have a head start on manufacturing ASICs that blew all other miners out of the water, I'd be highly motivated to just keep it all to myself as I pretty much dominated mining.  I'd score 7200 BTC a day (with it halving soon, of course).

Or perhaps I could have my cake and eat it too.  I could sell rigs for a healthy $30k, knowing that I alone had the upper hand in deciding how productive those rigs were going to be.  If for every 10 rigs I made I ran nine and sold one, I'd effectively guarantee that all my customers were competing for 720 (360) BTC and nothing more.  The customers I sold it to would have 10x the expectations - in the end, 9x of their expected yield I'd be keeping to myself with my supply of "unsold" rigs that I was running for, um, "extensive burn-in testing" before being sold.  (What, you think I'd let them sit idle on a shelf in a warehouse?)

If this product results in centralization of mining, I bet there will be cries for Bitcoin to switch to a CPU-based algorithm!

Truly devious and very true.

...I like it. jk

A wildly unbalanced power of any kind goes against the p2p currency philosophy, doesn't it.  I would hope hard-liner p2p people would amass to shut this sort of imbalance down.

[rjk]

Too costly, rack-space is not an argument, it is already very small with future BFL rigs.
People with 1.2m to invest for a full rack don't have any problems finding a place to store them. Hint : They can be stored anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

If I was to start a mining operation this size, (5 rack, 6m$) actively choosing the best location based on electricity cost , security and rent cost would be a rather trivial task.

I hope you can significantly lower your prices on the future batches or offer a compelling bulk discount.

/Following/

On the contrary, rack space is expensive and it is imperative that it be used efficiently. Consider that the expected power consumption is 100 watts - whereas a BFL single is close to 85-90. Sure you could pack several singles into a rack space and cool them with forced air, but there goes your 40 amp power budget, poof like that.

Now whether the LC device is actually 100 watts, that I doubt. I hope you LC guys have significantly oversized the power regulation chips on these things, because it would suck to have to redesign them when you found out that mining actually uses a lot of power by activating many gates simultaneously.

[markm]

With an initial shared-wafer run it seems unlikely one would get enough units to be able to aim immediately at replacing everyone's household furnaces with ASIC bitcoin-miners or including a miner unit into every rack everywhere to help offset the high operating costs of secure, controlled-environment rack-hosting or just selling one units each to every bitcoin miner who can swing a lease or loan.

You lot maybe shouldn't be trying to discourage select clientele from snapping up premium-priced units but, rather, be urging them on while looking forward to the full wafer or multiple wafer runs the wonderful early adopter angels will be enabling by their magnanimous gesture of taking the initial run's produce so the world can move on to some real production scales that might maybe show us before too long just how cheap ASIC based appliances can be once they start pouring out at full production into a ready market able to absorb almost any number of them.

Of course if these are not the full blown type of ASIC but the structured ones or something hopefully there will also be R&D overhead for a full blown implementation also to take into account once the R&D that went into this one is accounted for.

So yes, buy these quick, be the first on your block to have the latest and greatest thing in bitcoin mining! Snap up this six month or less window during which you'll be among the few in operation and the block reward is still unhalved! Have months of amortisation already under your belt when everyone and their dog has one and GPU mining becomes just a toy for the litecoin folk to play with!

-MarkM-

[runeks]

ttul, has your company considered delivering chips to OEMs in order to maximize your profits? Since the initial costs to develop ASICs is rather high, to me it makes sense if you were to sell the chips you produced to other companies that would then design a small board (like the FPGA boards that exist already (including Butterfly Labs' "Single")) into which they would integrate your chip. These companies would then either directly sell these devices to consumers, or let a retailer do this (to avoid the aforementioned obligatory 2 year warranty that's present in at least the EU).

Does this make any sense for a company like yours to do? This assumes at least that:

1. The initial cost is your primary expense (ie. spitting out more chips would only marginally raise your costs).
2. You are able to release specifications to the OEM that doesn't reveal anything about your chip that might be taken advantage of by a competitor.