Quote from: aerobatic on November 09, 2013, 03:08:50 PM

Quote from: monkee on November 09, 2013, 12:44:01 PM

Quote from: aerobatic on November 09, 2013, 10:57:27 AM

Quote from: DPoS on November 08, 2013, 08:22:47 PM

Quote from: Epoch on November 08, 2013, 07:55:29 PM

Sure, I like what I've seen of the Cointerra system, but until it's out of the vaporware stage I don't plan to do anything other than watch. My choice; YMMV.

I completely believe that Cointerra are satisfied with their customers taking all the risk and if they 'get it right' so be it.. their main design focus has always been the business model not the specs

Agree with Korbman... theres no difference between Cointerras use of pre-orders and any other companies use of pre-orders. The only companies that can afford not to need pre-orders are the ones who didn't do 28nm silicon, which has very high NRE cost and requires taking pre-orders to get a big enough cash pile together to fund the NREs to enter production.

And of the chips that aren't 28nm, the only good one is BitFury... and that was painstakingly designed by hand in full custom. and was very lucky it worked... it could've easily not! And it ran at best, at half its intended speed. And its supposedly difficult to keep running and requires a lot of hands on maintenance.

Anyway, going back to Cointerras model... if there was a mature investor market, then an asic company could raise finance from private investors and fund the multi-million production cost of making high performance bitcoin mining asics... but since there isn't such an appetite for investment from private investors, the only model that can raise the cash required is the pre-order model... effectively crowdsourcing the funds required to enter production. As stated many times before, if the pre-order model wasn't done, and the asic companies did have a way of funding their multimillion dollar production of asics, do you think they would sell them as cheaply as they do right now... when they could mine with them instead ? (or sell them for a lot, as in-stock boxes, like avalon/asicminer did?)

The pre-order system requires that said asic company needs to establish its credentials and provide its specs and target delivery date... and then raise cash from its customers via pre-orders to crowd-source the funds needed to go into production (some estimated it was between $5-7m for a 28nm asic system). In exchange the customers get the asics for a better price, and get them earlier than they would've otherwise got. And its a free market, with many asic providers so customers have complete choice of who they're going to back.

Dont like the model? then don't buy. or wait til you can buy from stock, but expect to pay more per GH for an in-stock miner than a pre-order miner. Or why not avoid any risk entirely and buy gigahashes from someone who's selling them hassle-free in the form of mining contracts (like cloudhashing or cex.io). there you're paying $10-20-30 per GH for something that if you buy direct from a pre-order asic company might only be $3/gh plus 50% more in hosting costs that you pay yourself if you host it at home or pay someone else to host in a professional datacenter.

umm, yeah ok. except that cointerra has repeatedly stated that they did NOT use customer money for NRE and that they DID have private funding.

since when have they said that? no recent asic mining company - as far as I'm aware - has ever entered mass scale production without taking customer funds in the form of pre-orders. (and don't say bitfury because they only make the chips, not boxes and boards... )

cointerra said they raised $1.5m, which covers the engineer cost of designing the asic. but in order to go into production they would've paid the fab several million, plus their partners would require a million or two... plus they need to order parts to build the boxes... so, the total cash requirement to enter production is $5-7m... and they would've needed to take customer pre-orders before production could start.

They have been saying it all along, as far as I know. I've seen it several times. One is below in the interview with CoinTerras CEO, Ravi Iyengar:

Q: What level of pre-orders are estimated before CoinTerra is able to ramp up production? It has been listed in the media that a number of pre-orders are needed before final manufacturing can take place.

A: When we started looking for investment, it took two months to raise $1.5m from both Bitcoin users and the tech industry at this point in time there is no need to ask for more investment. In terms of pre-orders, within 24hrs of our website going live we had 150 pre-orders. Our production is not hampered by sales in any way.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7246/the-rush-to-bitcoin-asics-ravi-iyengar-launches-cointerra