It is the same deal for April batches.  They have a new board revision that will apparently bring the hashrate up, but this would be for the May batch at the earliest.

http://cointerra.com/engineering-update-terraminer-iv-hashing-2-ths/

Hi Seal.  I'm inclined to believe you that Hodor / larin has gamed the system, however I cannot decipher your post.  Forgive my ignorance of your system, but I can't think of a way to abuse a stop loss order with my stock broker - if my broker later tried to claw back my trades I would definitely go to a lawyer to draft a strongly worded letter. 

So in the interest of letting the community fairly judge your operation could you explain like I was 5 years old what each line in the spreadsheets you linked means and why that would be an exploit of the trading system?

Interesting, but seems like a stretch. 

It does seem suspicious that such a huge percentage of cold storage could be drained without notice, there could be some merit to that line of inquiry, but I don't think it is at the hidden behest of the US Government.

these things are completely different.  The growth opportunities of these companies are completely different. 

Not to mention buying a bitcoin exchange would be like buying an elephant.  Sure it might have a steady stream of revenue from visitors who want to see but if your business isn't in the animal business then feeding, housing, and all the other issues an elephant brings on won't make it worth it for the peanuts.  Unless you are a zoo or circus of course, then you might do okay.

So no, facebook, google, or any other big name company outside of finance, and a narrow niche at that, don't make sense.

actually on second, thought instead of questioning your logic my new advice is, you better lawyer up

If you read the sales agreement I believe it specifies the remedy in the case of late delivery beyond 30-days (plus time for excusable delays):

You may cancel your order for a refund (USD) - given that cointerrra are already allowing that ... what is your beef?

According to the general sales agreement if they are late you are entitled to request a refund ... they already are letting you request a refund with a January order.  So while they may not admit to being late - you are already enjoying all the benefits as if they did.

I'm not sure how the cooling makes 150 GH/s mine faster than 150 GH/s.  At current difficulty (2,193,847,870.17) mining rate should be around 0.000229 BTC per day for each GH/s (based on Eligius pool) so with 150 GH/s you would be clearing €0.016 per minute before power TODAY.  Maybe you haven't re-calculated in a few months.

As for your question on what hardware cost to use - naturally hardware that can be purchased right now isn't such a great deal (or everyone would purchase it until it wasn't available).  The recent bitmain usb chips are priced at $50 for 2 GH/s (overclocked) and cooling would need to be applied and the bitmain S1 is $1700 for 180 GH/s

I don't think using those prices ($10/GH + electricty) are fair for your analysis.  You can find cheaper options with a high chance of delivery if you are willing to wait until April / May - but no one knows what difficulty will be then.  If you were going to buy mining equipment today I think you'd need to get in line on one of this and gamble on the difficulty or continually monitor for the next generation (more efficient) pre-order and again gamble.

I'm interested in how this chapter will fit in - what is the real thesis topic?


In any case for the chapter you should consider doing a review of bitcoin mining profitability in the past since it greatly influenced the current state of the bitcoin economy - especially since it widely distributed coins to those that were willing to turn their cpu and then later gpu cycles to it.  You could discuss the current state where it requires dedicated ASIC (application-specific integrated circuits) to have profitability and the hardware that is profitable generally requires a pre-order gamble to acquire in a timely manner.  Then I suggest you turn an eye towards the future.  The total computational power of the network has grown exponentially - fueled in my opinion somewhat by increased bitcoin value and somewhat by technology that is more efficient - can this continue for the long term?  While moore's law has stunned some by holding true with exponential growth in computing power over more than 40 years - the limited pool of resources for bitcoin (the remaining coins to be minted + transaction fees) will likely mean mining power growth will likely become linear and logarithmic after a time.  But you certainly shouldn't try to predict that timeframe too accurately - the error bars are probably measured in tens of months.  Not to mention the exit of the home miner - soon typical household electric circuits will be sufficient to host the required juice to keep relevant miners powered.

You could look at the cost of such a large bitcoin computation network.  Both the social cost in current electric consumption which has some environmental implications and in terms of how much investment at current prices would be required to increase difficulty.  If everyone adding computation to the network is paying the pre-order retail price of $3 per GH/s how much capital was spent acquiring minng hardware last month?  Is that sustainable?

Lots of great avenues for topics, I hope you've carved out a good one.  I also encourage you to use analogies to relate the at times tediously technical details of bitcoin operation.  Things like What is difficulty?  What is one bitcoin?  Why is it secure?  Analogy is a technique often leaned upon by the great physicists to translate the technical into the everyday - think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat

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Do you have multiple u1's?

try starting cgminer with just one u1 - if that works, start it with one and then physically add them one at a time with cgminer running.

nonce timeout makes me think at least one isn't working.

Nope, not a shill, just a customer.  I'm glad you understand it, but your posts suggest otherwise.  Since we're throwing shill accusations at anyone that disagrees with us I think you're a shill for a competitor.

You ordered a device that was still being developed.  Expecting it to be done and shipped without any schedule slack is laughable.  Have you ever ordered something that had to go through customs?  It is a similar deal, you don't know how long it takes - did you get mad when it took more than 3 days to get to you?

How long does developing an ASIC take?  Exactly X days.  No it depends what issues are discovered along the way.  The marketing department gave you the earliest target and the contract gave them a whole extra month of slack (until you can request a USD refund).  So they haven't triggered the late clause of the contract yet (and could always blame a third party to extend it).  I expected some chance of being on time, but a larger chance of being delayed a few weeks, and a small chance of being delayed a few months.  

Surprise, as a customer myself I don't share your anger.  I am always suspicious of marketing people and what they say - they are trying to sell something.  Which is why I read the contract and understood it before spending large sums of money.  Do you get surprised when your cell phone company charges you an early termination fee?  It is in the contract, but not often mentioned by the salespeople.  

An electronics development doesn't take exactly X days and you might say well add more people if you start to drift late - but it is commonly understood that doing so ends up making the project even later as the new people have to be brought up to speed by people who would otherwise be doing the actual work.  The marketing department at cointerra could have built these expectations better for what appears to be a bunch of non-technical early adapters, but they probably weighed that against the other players in the market and decided to go with the more "traditional" (for btc mining co) way with a target date conveyed as the expected ship date.

A few points.
1.)  "here guys" - let's just knock the fourth wall down because this forum is just a place to hang out with your pals.
2.)  I'm not a lawyer, I am not giving legal advice.  I went to the trouble to retrieve my password so I could knock down on some serious whining over one's great foresight to preorder.
3.)  You assume they will ship at that rate of 1.6 TH/s.  I think they'll find some more knobs to turn on that engineering test unit.  Seriously, would you rather they just throw it over the wall when they are done and leave you in the dark until then?
4.)  I think one month is reasonable, which is why I said start of Feb as two months late on a "late December" wouldn't be until March 1.  From the start of development one month is a small enough change as percent of total development time, 10-20%.
5.)  If they ship under powered, it is covered under the terms of sale (http://cointerra.com/consumer-sales-agreement/) ... which is to say if they wanted to be dicks about it you'd have to battle it out over their claim of no warranty for efficiency of cryptocurrency mining and the 2 TH/s listed on the invoice.  I think you'd win, in which case you'd have the privilege to return the product for a full USD refund.  Oh great, I'm sure you'll do that right away instead of just keeping it and making more money than the refund by mining.

As for sole value relying on time - well of course a completed mining rig's value decreases everyday.  It is easy to see the lost potential of a few weeks now that the delivery date is upon us, but my point is that if you placed a pre-order you had to guess at three things - btc to fiat, network difficulty, and development time (could be infinite for a scam).  None of these were completely known, they all had error bars.  If one didn't include error bars in their original calculation (stupid) or didn't get the right terms to insure against error bars they were uncomfortable with (ignorant) then I don't want to hear them whine about it now.  I guess I'm just baffled how when everything so far has worked out very much in the favor of someone who preordered (compared to how it possibly could have gone) they would find reason to complain.  The risk looks like it will pay off pretty well still.

I don't know what your expertise is in, but it certainly isn't in ASIC design and I'm guessing it isn't in any branch of engineering.  Delays occur at all phases of a project.

Everyone with a preorder entered into a contract.  The terms of the contract dictate what is late and the penalty for being late.  If you cared so much about it being a few weeks late X number of months ago, you should have insisted on a better contract or not taken the deal.  But you didn't, you accepted the offered terms.  And somehow I doubt your estimates for future bitcoin value and future network difficulty that you made at the time of purchase have hit the nail on the head.  There is a range to all future predictions and anyone with bitcoin experience should know this range is pretty wide - whether it is miner development time, or difficulty, or USD conversion rate.  I would say the development time is still in a range that is pretty reasonable.  If it hits Feb without shipping, that starts to stretch the reasonableness.

This doesn't make any sense.  You've surely had ample evidence even within the bitcoin mining community that hardware development is difficult to predict in duration, and hardly ever over predicted.  What part of a mid December timeframe predicted months ago did you take for absolute truth?  Delivering two weeks later than predicted - sounds awesome to me.  Anyone with a December batch unit should have known it was a gamble and for this case they lost.  No reason to be bitter over it.  Win some, lose some - and really in this case sounds like a draw.

Cointerra has been selling April batches for awhile now either sells have slowed due to uncertainty that far out or they are planning to ramp up production...

This isn't specific to bitcoin, this is a more general idea.  If it is too good to be true, it probably is.

Until I can explain something to myself why it is not unbelievable then I don't touch anything.  But for someone looking to get into business, sometimes you need to learn things the hard way.  Now as for bitcoin mining ... the explanation most people here would come up with is the massive upswing in bitcoin value coupled with the massive decrease in $ per GH/s has mining capacity out of whack for the next little while.  As more capacity comes online and blocks become harder to mine, the value produced by mining should trend towards some combination of the price volatility and marginal power costs.

For you, I would try to make as many small moves as you can.  Instead of saving for months to make one big move.

I would be very pessimistic about the future value you can extract from any mining rig, even an ASIC one - you can't just linearly extrapolate.

Given that you want a father-son project I recommend building a computer with a GPU that can be used for gaming and mining with it when it is not gaming.  It won't make you rich, in fact it could end up costing you after power, but unlike an asic miner it has alternative utility.  Join a mining pool and you will start collecting a small pile of btc.