After a month of silence from Avalon on the status of over 800,000 ASIC chips that had been pre-ordered, there were indications that chips may be arriving soon when two group buys announced they received tracking numbers late last week. Application specific integrated circuits (ASIC) are specialized chips that perform bitcoin mining calculations. Starting in mid-April, Avalon sold bulk orders of ASIC chips in batches of 10,000, with each chip hashing at an estimated 400 MH/s overclocked.
Today Bitmine.ch posted pictures showing the arrival 10,000 Avalon ASIC chips, indicating that thier Batch #1 pre-orders should be expecting delivery soon. Bitmine.ch is the first company to announce the arrival of chips since Avalon re-initiated the shippment of orders. The exif data on the photographs indicate they were taken on 8/26 from an iPhone 4, and contain Bitmine’s logo in the background so there is little reason to think this is not authentic.
Bitmine is a Swiss-based company that sells clones of Avalon’s original mining unit, which contained fully assembled Avalon chips on boards. Each fully assembled unit consists of four 22 GH/s modules that run at an estimated 85 GH/s total. Their units retailed for $5,999 not including a power supply, and were pre-sold in three separate batches. This chip delivery corresponds to their first batch, with the order was placed on May 27th. Batch 2 sold out on June 7th, and batch 3 sold out in mid-July. The three batches consisted of 30, 100 and 100 units, totaling 2.5, 8.3 and 8.3 TH/s each.
This is likely the first Avalon delivery of many reports over the coming weeks as Avalon expects to ship out 40-50,000 chips per day. The network difficulty has more than doubled over the last 30 days and the exponential increase does not appear to be slowing down anytime soon with several hundred TH/s likely to be delivered from Avalon alone.
Bitcoin mining network statistics. Source: mining.thegenesisblock.com
From their post: “we were anyway able to source from third parties a lot of Avalon ICs that is big enough to assemble all of our Batch #1 units”
I’m confused where the chips were coming from? DId someone else manufacture the chips?
That sentence is confusing, but they likely bought someone’s place in line in order to get their chips to customers faster. The alternative would be that someone has been sitting on 2 TH/s of Avalon chips for over a month and never used them – which would have an opportunity cost of over $100,000 in lost mining ability, not to mention the higher resale value 1 month ago.
From their post: “We could have waited for the delivery of our own batch from Avalon, but in order to protect our customer’s investment and ensure their satisfaction, it was our top priority to source the ICs from all available sources, sometimes paying three times the original price.”
So the Chicoms get first crack at the chips… I wonder why??
Note to those wanting to buy hardware. If your pre-order is pending Chinese manufacturer shipment, you’re going to wait a long time.
Nevermind, Im a dumbass.