Re: Black Arrow 28nm 100Ghash Bitcoin ASIC from $0.49/GH/s

[DebitMe]

Also I would like clarification on what the 25% bonus hashing refers to.  People keep saying its 500 GHs for an X-3, but since the chip runs at 120 GHs now, or 2.4 THs per X-3, shouldn't we all be receiving  600GHs per X-3 ordered?  this I believe has never been answered, and I would like clarification, because 2 months from now, BA could come out and say they are using the original specifications for this calculation and base it off of the, I believe it was 80 GHs per chip (don't quote me on that), and give us under 500 GHs per X-3 purchased. So some clarification would be nice.

[notbatman]

I have some questions:

1. Was BA telling the truth when they stated that they were ahead of schedule in mid January?

2. Did BA tape out 28nm in November?

2. Is BA currently hashing with batch 1 customers 28nm chips?

3. Is BA planning on shipping batch 1 customers 20nm chips in May?

4. When BA asked customers on ecointalk if they would accept a two month delay so they could produce a 20nm chip with better power efficiency and 95% said no why did they go ahead with the delay?

5. How is losing $13,000 in revenue over two months to save $10/mo in electricity in the customers best interest?

6. Who is Alex Berk?

[DebitMe]

That article was written today? It seems that everything they said in that article is not true.  Who is this guy and how reliable is that website?

[goozman96]

No. It was written last year, as evidenced by david's post:
https://ecointalk.net/topic/242-assurances/?p=310

Oct 4, 2013 to be exact.

[DebitMe]

No. It was written last year, as evidenced by david's post:
https://ecointalk.net/topic/242-assurances/?p=310

Oct 4, 2013 to be exact.

Ahh ok, couldn't find a date on the article and mistook the upper left Today's date as the date it was written.

[DebitMe]

Hey PH could you please give me the cliff notes on your latest findings. I can tell your very excited but to me it just looks like rambling. I am glad that you have toned it down a bit though, thanks.

It's a bit of rambling. At one point the company is owned by one of our resellers. The latest was that the company is owned by someone named Alex Berk named after Berkshire which is where he lives. I'm having a hard time keeping up and it seems to me like he's saying because people fly, people must have wings. Some of the stuff even I find interesting. Some of the stuff is like fitting a square peg into a round hole.

He's shotgunning out ideas and predictions and when one of them end up being true he's very proud. He's said that Bobsag and I were the same person (wrong). He said that Bobsag was a liar and a thief because he moved around and leased a few buildings. He said that two people contacted him because Black Arrow wouldn't refund them - that turned out to be false information.

I've stopped debating with him.

I'm also working on pinning down more information. Sorry for the delay. I was hoping Bobsag had more information since he met with everyone. I'll see what I can find.

I think instead of more information, we need some information to begin with, we really haven't been told anything besides being shown a couple more renders of a product that looked very unfinal.

[goozman96]

All messages from Phinnaeus Gage will be deleted due to numerous reports of trolling.

Since you're here, why don't you provide us with an update. What progress has been made in the last week?

[goozman96]

Since you're here, why don't you provide us with an update. What progress has been made in the last week?

Last week was Chinese New Year, most of the company was off work.
Anyway, we have completed the pinout of the chip, made some progress on the case but has not been completed.

Okay, thanks Alex.

[DebitMe]

Since you're here, why don't you provide us with an update. What progress has been made in the last week?

Last week was Chinese New Year, most of the company was off work.
Anyway, we have completed the pinout of the chip, made some progress on the case but has not been completed.

I remember post after post about how you guys would not be affected by the CNY, care to comment why "most of the staff" had off when you previously said it wouldn't affect you guys?

Also since a yes or no answer was never given, will minersource be giving refunds, yes or no?

[goozman96]

Since you're here, why don't you provide us with an update. What progress has been made in the last week?

Last week was Chinese New Year, most of the company was off work.
Anyway, we have completed the pinout of the chip, made some progress on the case but has not been completed.

I remember post after post about how you guys would not be affected by the CNY, care to comment why "most of the staff" had off when you previously said it wouldn't affect you guys?

Also since a yes or no answer was never given, will minersource be giving refunds, yes or no?

Need an answer to this as well, blackarrow.

[DebitMe]

thanks for getting rid of that clown phin.


now, WHAT IS THE STATUS OF TAPEOUT? WHAT HAPPENED TO A WEEKLY UPDATE?

Tapeout is on 20 Feb 2014.

Weekly update will be on Wednesday / Thursday when our new "press officer" arrives here.

Who was blackarrow matt? I thought he was supposed to deliver us updates? Will this new position actually be in the same building as the people working on the product?

[goozman96]

Since you're here, why don't you provide us with an update. What progress has been made in the last week?

Last week was Chinese New Year, most of the company was off work.
Anyway, we have completed the pinout of the chip, made some progress on the case but has not been completed.

I remember post after post about how you guys would not be affected by the CNY, care to comment why "most of the staff" had off when you previously said it wouldn't affect you guys?

Also since a yes or no answer was never given, will minersource be giving refunds, yes or no?

Need an answer to this as well, blackarrow.

Ask minesource they are not black arrow, they are just resellers.

That's the part I'm curious about.

[DebitMe]

Since you're here, why don't you provide us with an update. What progress has been made in the last week?

Last week was Chinese New Year, most of the company was off work.
Anyway, we have completed the pinout of the chip, made some progress on the case but has not been completed.

I remember post after post about how you guys would not be affected by the CNY, care to comment why "most of the staff" had off when you previously said it wouldn't affect you guys?

Also since a yes or no answer was never given, will minersource be giving refunds, yes or no?

Need an answer to this as well, blackarrow.

Ask minesource they are not black arrow, they are just resellers.

This is where the official record seems to be, not that anything is ever official, it does matter here as the way bobsag will get money is if BA gives it to him to give to us. So I think this thread is very appropriate place to pose the question, which has been asked numerous times, not only by myself, and never answered with a definitive yes or no

[Pentax]

Yeah, Everything is calm at my end. No great panic was reported at the meeting last week.  Quite the contrary in fact.
Then I come on here, and it's all panic from a few individuals, like in OleOle's avatar.

The X1 & X3 are going to be fantastic.  And that's just the beginning.  I have a warehouse near Heathrow lined up for UK & EU distribution.  I think we are going to see some great things from Black Arrow.

This isn't about panic, at least not from me, who has been one of those individuals, it's about getting some answers and accountability for people that have pumped thousands of dollars into pre-orders that were supposedly due two weeks from today, and now are delayed, resulting in thousands of dollars in losses.   


A company that sells people a product that ends up losing money for them because the company itself blew it's deadlines is not a company that is going to survive, much less do great things. 

Now we're seeing comments to the effect that no-one should have expected ROI and/or profit, as this isn't a financial services company.  That's ludicrous.  BA knew that ROI was part of people's calculation.  Of course it was, no-one buys a product that ends up losing them thousands of dollars, just cause they love Bitcoin so much.  Give me a break.   

I don't care how pretty their products are, I don't care how much tap dancing and rah-rahing their people do, if their customers end up in the hole because BA screwed up, while they're walking off with profit and their competitors are bending over backwards to cover their customers, this company blows.  Period.

[goozman96]

I remember post after post about how you guys would not be affected by the CNY, care to comment why "most of the staff" had off when you previously said it wouldn't affect you guys?

Also since a yes or no answer was never given, will minersource be giving refunds, yes or no?

Minersource cannot issue refunds as they have paid us for your miners.

We're currently making a list with the refund requests to see if we can refund from our margin. Note that our margin is quite low as we have charged our customers $4000 on a miner while others have charged $16000 on the same hardware during the same period.

As we've announced, we've put the ASICs into production and they've been paid in full. Canceling the ASIC now is not possible as we will incur around 85 to 95% penalty so we're left in refunding only from our margin.

You didn't answer the part about how you claimed CNY wouldn't affect you guys, but it very well did.

[DebitMe]

Which miner can you order today and have delivered next week?

AntMiners, and that is currently it.

[DebitMe]

Just a simple question about the delay: If you've ordered from Minersource will you still be compensated?

Yes, BA and Bobsag have said that orders through MinerSource will also receive the 25% compensation package.

[Pentax]

I don't know but i get the feeling ASIC mining is not going to be around for long (or not appealing to the general public), especially in regards to SHA256 coins. Now if they bring forward the ASIC miners for scrypt that may be an entirely different story. ASIC is killing off the joy of mining though: Makes technology available to us at high costs and nearly before the technology has become obsolete (they probably mine the hell out of them before the miners reach us). I may be wrong and comments are welcome.

Hurricanes, earthquakes, armageddon.  None of them have the ability to kill the joy of mining.

Losing thousands to fund a company that's dancing in your money and feeding you a river of bullshit while they're doing it.

THAT kills the joy of mining.

[goozman96]

Just a simple question about the delay: If you've ordered from Minersource will you still be compensated?

Yes, BA and Bobsag have said that orders through MinerSource will also receive the 25% compensation package.

Thanks, do you have a source? I ask because I've emailed both companies but got no reply (yet) from MS and BA couldn't tell me and told me to mail MS.

I'm not looking for a refund just want to make sure we got compensation for the lost money not mining 2 months, seeing difficulty still rises on all SHA-256 coins. Still I would be really happy seeing those little X1's mining away in my house.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=294197.msg4851331#msg4851331

[Pentax]

I don't know but i get the feeling ASIC mining is not going to be around for long (or not appealing to the general public), especially in regards to SHA256 coins. Now if they bring forward the ASIC miners for scrypt that may be an entirely different story. ASIC is killing off the joy of mining though: Makes technology available to us at high costs and nearly before the technology has become obsolete (they probably mine the hell out of them before the miners reach us). I may be wrong and comments are welcome.

Hurricanes, earthquakes, armageddon.  None of them have the ability to kill the joy of mining.

Losing thousands to fund a company that's dancing in your money and feeding you a river of bullshit while they're doing it.

THAT kills the joy of mining.

I do not know if it was not for ASICS we could still be mining Bitcoin with our gpu instead of spending 1 k for obsolete and shitty 60gh/s and 180s machines while waiting for 300 and 600 that will be as crap (as profitable that is) as the 60s we have by the time they reach us. Butterflies and the like are prolly already milking them and by the time we have them we will be left with some crust. The way I see it they sell the technology of tomorrow yesterday; only bad thing is that it gets delivered the day after tomorrow (if you are lucky). BUtterfly has been accepting orders from Septemeber, they were supposed to release January and if you are lucky you will have the fucker by March.I have not ordered any of these I just say...

I'd rather still be using GPU's as well.  I was perfectly happy churning out a reasonable amount of coins with a couple of rigs.  With GPU's at least you can decide in small increments what you'd like to spend and add a card here and there if you so desire.  That was more fun, with less potential downside and the situation was under your control. 

the model that has developed for the ASICs and this pre-order BS allows manufacturers to screw the hell out of their customers and make a profit whether they deliver something on time or not, whether it is useless by the time it gets to you or not. 

At this point these debacles by manufacturers are commonplace unfortunately.  However, some of them have figured out that it is not sustainable to screw your customers and try to sell sob stories of paltry margins when anyone with a calculator knows it's baloney.  Competitive forces will sort the market out over time as people figure out who they can and cannot trust with their money. 

What the means for current customers is pretty much nothing, of course, as in the near term if BA has your money for Batch 1 you're pretty much screwed, the way it seems to be playing out, although I guess we'll see.  Hopefully they'll surprise everyone by getting their shit together and pulling this mess out of the fire.