A handful were pre-ordered but they never took deposits.
From what I remember, a lot of what they had to offer was being surpassed by other companies(and fast). Butterfly labs at the time was working on a smaller miner that would hash nearly 60 Ghs (for only $1299) and they had proof of this unlike Largecoin.
$1299 Butterfly Labs Bitforce SC at 60GH/sWell we all know how that went!
This was slightly before the craziness that is BFL. When things were more transparent. As you can see on their site, they actually had a great plan and even great buy back. It was all downhill after.
Another major factor at a very large sum of $30k for only 20Gh/s would mean a very un-reasonable ROI at around 600 days or so. It was unfeasible for people who had multiple cards hashing at around 800Mh/s to invest in that kind of miner when they could easily pick up a few more cards. (This on top of cheaper and faster miners.)
Ah, well that sounds insanely low then.
It's quite strange to see that a company which claimed to have the technical finesse to launch an ASIC in 2011 would fall behind the competition so quickly.
Very true. Mining with three video cards would net a easy 3.5 Gh/s and to pick up some others to make 20 Gh/s would save you a good 25k and to be honest this made up for the higher cost of mining.
Another major issues was the way that it mined. How it would rely on Largecoin infrastructure to make mining possible while others would allow you to do all the setting yourself. This made people like myself scared as how could we be 100% sure that my hashes wouldn't be redirected or hacked even.
Didn't realize this part. What was the reason for this exactly? Seems like a very odd design choice.
The lack of on board control panel like we see on current miners and the lack of connection to the computer. Making it connect to a online control panel hosted by them was their design. This was a feasible option and not that bad(at the time) if trust and hacking hadnt been such an issue and the idea that we could even check on things by not even being home sparked a lot of interest since people planned off or out of home mining.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ksimpsonDirector
Untitled Bitcoin Company
2011 December 2012 (1 year)
Explored the concept of creating a Bitcoin mining ASIC. We incorporated, lined up investment, but canceled the project because we just couldn't quite get enough funds across the line to make the chip. Too bad we missed out on a $1B opportunity, but it was too early in the Bitcoin cycle to make this idea happen.
30k is so much money to charge for a miner. They could have created a prototype and offered much more along the lines of proof for investment. They did in fact have pre-orders, so the price was inline with some people pocket books but they just never got charged for pre-order. Im not sure how much they were really trying to get out of it all, but the fact that the funds were not there seems a bit far fetched as the people with pre-order were to be required to pay some where in the amount of 5k deposit