OK. OK. I hear you all loud and clear. Nothing will please this skeptical crowd except for an endorsement from a respected member of the community. I understand and am not offended. I'll switch my focus to people like Gavin tonight to assess the business potential and ultimately get a review of our first prototype. If you like what you see then, maybe you'll decide to buy one. Thanks to those who provided constructive posts on this thread.

Thanks for these recent replies as they highlight a benefit that I had not considered. It seems that not only are the electricity costs a factor but the noise and heat pose significant discomfort to the miners. We would strive for a passive heat sink (no noise) but the 60W estimate for the high-end product may require a fan. We'll see.

My impression so far is that if we build this, it would be significant enough that miners would really go for it.

Also, I've learned that you miners are a skeptical group. Therefore, our first order of business would be to have a reputable set of miners evaluate our early prototypes. Is there a short list of people that you recommend we work with to get a review that would satisfy the masses? I heard mention of "Gavin"? Any others?

I apologize if the original post was misleading. When I stated production costs, I was talking about the cost to manufacture the board as opposed to price to sell the board. I realize it wasn't worded well. I will change the original post to be more clear that these are manufacturing costs.

ElectricMucus and RobertRibbeck,

Throughout this thread, I have continually reminded that we have a working proof-of-concept and some good component pricing locked down. We're just trying to decide whether to take this all the way to production. You should know that we would not take a dime from anyone until we had a product to sell. If there was a large-scale miner that was impressed by our demo and was willing to put some skin in the game to get temporary exclusivity, we'd consider it. That arrangement would be useful to mitigate our personal risk, that's all.

My questions on this thread are helping us to understand the potential demand for this solution. We'll use this feedback in our decision to go forward or not. No scam. No money exchanging hands. Thanks nmat for getting it. Just looking for an intelligent discussion regarding the value of such a product. It doesn't do anybody any good to continue doubting our abilities or motives. Just assume that we can prove our targets once we move away from the dev kit and build the first prototype. I know this is hard for some but I'm trying to have a productive conversation on the forum. Treat it like an "academic" conversion if that makes it easier for you.

Again, assuming a 2x markup over costs mentioned, would the typical miner be likely to replace their GPUs with this product. What sort of penetration do you think it could make in the global hash rate? I'm hoping that this is the place where mature BitCoin miners might offer some advice and guidance for us.

Thanks to some of you who took the time to think about the potential market. You all have cited the same risks that I've mulled over. There is the risk that someone else may come up with a better product, the price of bitcoins may drop through the floor, miners might be afraid to purchase something that doesn't have a value beyond mining, etc. In line with one of the earlier posts, the current mining capacity is about 15,000 GH/s. If 5% of that capacity switched to our high-end product, that would be the sale of 250 boards. I wonder how likely that is?

We have enough money to design and build 50 prototype of the high-end board so we really don't need any investment from other partners. However, that doesn't mean that we want to invest all that time and money into something that will leave us holding the bag when the music stops. I don't like to go into something unless I see a reasonable chance of success so I was looking for someone fully plugged into the BitCoin community to assess the potential and ultimately help sell it. If I knew that I would sell 500 high-end boards, I'd start building right now on my own. I understand that all new ventures have risk, so I guess I'd like to get a handle on the level of interest.

In all honesty, how many would YOU buy if it were available today. Also, do you know the names of large scale miners that might be interested in pre-ordering some boards (with cash held in escrow until product delivered) to gain early exclusivity, etc?

P.S. All work on this product has been done on our own time from our own homes. The only things that came from employers are technical and industry knowledge. It's hard to leave that at the door.

Yes, we've seen LargeCoin and they are one of the reasons why we have hesitated. That and the thought that the BitCoin market may dry up has us wondering if we should continue. Since we've already established that many people doubt the characteristics of our target product, let's change the discussion to one of business prospects.

Let's assume that we "magically" build a product as described in the first post and offer it for sale at a price that was maybe 2x the cost to build. What kind of market do you think there would be for such a product? Are we talking the sale of 10's, 100's or 1000's or boards?  Does anyone have an opinion on that? Please include some of your reasonings, too.

Thanks in advance.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say. We have a very promising proof-of-concept, not an actual product to sell. We're looking for a business partner who appreciates the potential the BitCoin market and will help us make a run at this. Do you think there is a better place to look for such a partner than the BitCoin forums? If so, please let me know and I'll check it out. Based on everyone's reaction, it looks like this would sell itself. Maybe we don't need to think so much about how to make a business out if and just go ahead and build it ourselves.

I am glad to see such enthusiasm for our price per performance. However, keep in mind that these are costs to manufacture. The selling price will certainly be higher, depending on the business model that we take. Please stop asking to buy one (or many!) as we only have a proof-of-concept, not an actual product for sale. I would also like to point out that you guys are WAY off on FPGA pricing. I have several direct quotes from FPGA vendors over the years that are far superior to your assumptions. You guys must be looking at pricing from distributors. You have to go direct to get good pricing. Anyway, the point of this post was to look for interested business partners who are willing to work with us to take it to market.

Just a little bit of background on us. We are seasoned designers with long job histories with companies like IBM, Altera and others. It is certainly healthy to doubt technologies that seem a bit beyond the curve of today's solutions. But sometimes the right details line up at the right time. As people contact us for more information, they will get to know who we are and see that we are completely up front. We'll start with a demonstration of the design on the development kit, review the code and resulting FPGA tool output for the target device. We'll share documentation, schedules and actual quotes for component pricing.

You could imagine some interesting go-to-market strategies like self-mining until the difficulty gets too high, then offering the board for sale, etc. We just need someone with the right background and amount of time to take this to market. We're good engineers but we're not ready to take on the full challenges of a new business at this time. I'm sure you can understand that.

I can assure you that there is no scam here. I did manage to get "large company" pricing on these parts because I do so much business with Xilinx. The low pricing is really what made our design so promising. You must know that companies like Xilinx and Altera treat their component pricing as confidential information. While I feel comfortable listing the full BOM costs on this public forum, certain details need to be discussed more discretely. Also, I did spent several months designing and optimizing my own hash algorithm from scratch. I've been designing chips for over 20 years so I really enjoyed the challenge.

I understand that there will be doubters but we have a development kit already running (with a smaller version of the FPGA) and have ISE runs that show the target device will hit the stated performance. I don't mind if there are doubters as that reinforces the advantage this solution offers. If you have a serious interest in making a product out of this, go ahead and email me at teraminer.llc@gmail.com to arrange further talks. You might be surprised that we're just a few normal engineers who don't have the bandwidth to build a company around this cool product.

I do have many years of working with Xilinx in my day job. I have a commitment from them to sell enough chips to build 1.5 TH/s worth of boards. We also have a pretty optimized design that allows us to make the most of the Virtex-6 technology.

You guys might want to take a look at a new thread I started regarding a design that we're looking to sell. We think it is a very competitive offering but we don't have the time or energy to take this to market. Check out the highlights here and let me know what you think of the performance, power and cost numbers.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=44391.0

A couple of engineers with day jobs have been working on an FPGA miner with the intention of creating a product that would change the mining equation. We formed a small company that we call TeraMiner. We've developed a hardware and software solution that raises the bar on mining performance while lowering power significantly. We have a prototype running in our homes today using an off-the-shelf FPGA development kit. As it turns out, we've become very busy in our day jobs and have decided that it would be best for us to see if anyone in the BitCoin community has the time to take this product to market. Here are the highlights of what a "productized" version of our design would look like.

• PCI Express connectivity for high density installation into industry standard servers
• Entry-Level board achieves 750 MH/s @ 15W for $370.
• High-End board achieves 3,000 MH/s @ 60W for $1,050.

 
    
These manufacturing numbers are based on actual pricing we secured from Xilinx for their Virtex-6 product line. Selling prices would certainly be higher, to whatever the market will bear. We have also negotiated future technology improvements and price reductions through 2012. Details of the major components used in this design will be provided to interested parties.

We are prepared to discuss the details with anyone interested in creating their own line of BitCoin mining products. The level of engagement may vary from simply providing the source code of our current IP all the way to the delivery of a production-ready prototype. The details of these deliverables and associated costs will be provided to those who contact us at teraminer.llc@gmail.com.

Keep in mind that we started this business with the intention of going to market with our own set of products. But now that our day jobs have become too demanding, we're just looking to pass our design on to someone prepared to take it to market. Please contact us at teraminer.llc@gmail.com for any further information.

Thanks for reading.

I've been working on custom mining hardware for a few months now and am ready to bring it to the public. Please set me free!

We have developed a custom hardware solution that offers unprecedented performance and power for BitCoin mining. I'd like to show everyone what we've been up to.

Registering on the forums to talk about custom mining hardware.