You may already be aware, but DO NOT BUY from Innosilicon. As many of you know, they missed the ship date for the Grin miners. I have a long email thread from them on this topic. They first offered refunds and now are not honoring that. I have reported this to my bank as well as theirs. I’m sure there will be many opinions and comments about the entire process of paying first. My only point here is to try help someone considering ordering from Innosilicon. DO NOT BUY FROM INNOSILICON. You have been warned.
thats unfortunate. I had looked into buying some of their hardware but these chinese companies are sketchy as fuck.
it doesnt really make any sense if you think about it.
You’re selling a piece of hardware that is in theory worth more than its value in parts. So why sell it? you could simply run it and get the build cost in 6months and then every day after you’d be in profit.
i guess there is something to be said for profit turn arounds and margins but yea.
hopefully your bank will assist you in recouping funds.
Because there is a huge amount more risk involved if you have to mine for 6 months before you even ROI on a whole batch of Asics. When you can sell the majority off straight away and guarantee a reasonable profit.
They probably don’t have the funds available to cover the number of refunds that have been requested- No doubt many more than they anticipated, because, Grin’s price has been constantly declining. killing the potential of profit for pre-purchased Asics.
Are they still promising to send out what you ordered?
Innosilcon says they will ship “sometime in early 2020”. I’ve contacted my bank, Chase, who protects wire transfers against fraud for 180 days. They have recognized this as a scam and are reversing the wire. Had this been a bitcoin transaction, I would most certainly be screwed. It looks like I’ll lose about 40 bucks each way for the wire. Innosilicon still has the product for sell on their website. Which helped with my case to label this as a scam and fraud.
That’s not how it works. ASIC companies like Bitmain, Innosilicon, etc (chinese mostly) are known for immoral practices but they can get away with it given the wild west that China is in general, and the wild west the crypto is in general. They DO mine with them before either announcing them or putting them up for sale – this has been shown time and time again (see Monero, and others, including Grin itself showing a massive drop at fork time). You then get sales, you pay, and then you incur delays while they are still mining until close to the tipping point of profitability vs risk of losing customers (like the OP) when they decide to actually ship out.
That’s the ASIC mining world for the average Joe. The only ones who make profits from ASICs are the ASIC manufacturers and their friends … and maybe the illegal miners mining on 0 electricity (still happens in China and elsewhere).
While ASIC mining is in theory a good idea, in practice it’s been and continues to be a massive failure which is hurting the ecosystem and coins who promote asic mining (even for the right theoretical reasons) only end up perpetuating and exacerbating the problems: bad actors, ripoffs, centralization (you know, that core reason for crypto). Grin is no exception I’m afraid.
p.s. No offense to Grin devs, but the decision for 90%/10% gpu/asic at first to become 0/100% in a few years was not really taken by the community but by a small group of folks, executive style. Fine by me, but let’s not call Grin a community run coin or a decentralized coin, it really isn’t (it relies on 3-4 individuals, if that, some who rely on donations to work full time on Grin). The MW tech is nice, don’t confuse Grin with MW though.
As far as I know, there is no way to guarantee that an algorithm remains profitable to mine for GPUs (i.e. not overtaken by ASICs eventually). The only option would be to have periodic hard-forks like Monero, but hard-forks are inherently centralized. Grin is definitely not sufficiently decentralized, but neither is any other cryptocurrency project out there.
thank you for this reply. this has more knowledge and wisdom then a lot of the posts ive seen here put together and has given me a lot to think about.
thanks.
Never happened with Grin( Not to our knowledge), Monero/ Raven are totally different because they try so hard to stay ‘Asic resistant’, so “secret” ASICS get made and mined on because 1) There’s a big efficiency gap between GPU and Asics 2) Not many would buy them if they tried to sell on market, because, anyone who mines these coins knows that once Asics are public there will most likely be
a hardfork( or emergency hardfork ) to a new algo.
Most Asics manufacturers lose money and go out of business. What large scale miners are paying 0 in electric?
Look up all the ASIC products for Monero, Sia, Verge, ETH, etc. All used by manufacturers to mine, then sold to folks who purchased.
Tell that to Bitmain and Innosilicon. Go to China to see farms (and I mean farms, not cottages) mining on 0 cost electricity with local authorities in on it, flipping switches on and off when higher authorities scoff. Or read about it.
This inaccuracy was bound to come up - no offense. Fine if you like the vast majority of BTC hashrate being Chinese.
And once again we have this dated and inaccurate PDF of a personal view that is largely missing the point, plastered by everyone who likes ASICs as if it was some sort of bible or law. This one and the Sia guy’s one which is even more spectacular. I respect Poelstra, but here he’s off. There is no efficiency, sustainability or environment-friendliness advantage of asics (it doesn’t take long to understand why, but it’s tiresome every time to point it out … in short: there would be an advantage if GPUs were still a large share, but in your idealized asic world where there would be only asics, the same amount of energy would be consumed, diff would simply be higher with no security or other tangible advantages; but with tangible downsides, one being centralization, allowing the possibility of corporate/govt control and/or influence)
Let’s play along with your assumption that Chinese mining farms are mining for free. Then where do you think the majority of GPU farms would be located? Exactly the same places. Miners seek profit, so they want low energy costs and economies of scale- Thus you still end up with a “centralization” of GPU mining regardless of how good it might sound in theory. Look at Grin’s C29 “ASIC resistant” hash rate- Circa 75% of it is on Chinese pools. GPU mining has very small profit margins to the point now where you can’t really profit off standard electric rates, it’s a specialist game.
The vast majority of all PoW hashrate is Chinese. Sounds like your whole argument is more anti-PoW than anti-Asic.
The reality is there is no such thing as an ASIC proof PoW. If the incentives are there, then ASICs will always be developed, because, dedicated hardware will always be more efficient(outperform) GPUs/CPUs (In terms of hash per Kw). The only way to stay “ASIC resistant” is to continuously change the algo to brick any ASICs on the network, it’s a game of cat and mouse which in turn creates more centralization, i.e who decides these changes? What 3rd parties do these changes benefit? And if you have this “ASIC resistance” stance and deliberately make it difficult to develop ASICs, you end up with a centralized production of “secret” ASICs trying to ROI before they get bricked.
GPU’s are arguably better for initial distribution, because, it takes time for a competitive ASIC market to develop and a competitive ASIC market is only going to develop providing you have an easily ASICable algo and take an ASIC friendly approach. Otherwise, you’re prone to “secret ASICs” that plague other PoW coins- Most hobbyist GPU miners have a bad perception of ASICs because if this( I was once one of them).
At the end of the day, ASICs have the potential to create a more secure network because their incentives are more aligned with the PoW( coin) they’re designed for( They’re tied to the network) Whereas GPU’s are multiple purpose hardware, so if price drops/ profits drop then GPU’s can switch to mining a different coin/ PoW. GPU network= illusion of distribution & security.
Refunds or revenge! --Have people given up on this discussion? Has anyone who bought from any of the so-called “Trusted Vendors” listed on the “www.asicminervalue” website gotten what they ordered, or gotten a refund for any pre-payment? Isn’t there an international fraud prevention agency that could launch an action against Innocilicon or Obelisk? What about a class action lawsuit? Has global finance been paying these companies to slow-walk production? Not hard to speculate that any government/bankster agency who saw the profitability graphs of these machines could have said, “This has got to be stopped!” We all know now that regulators and Wall Street have been manipulating BTC at least since December 2017. --Any thoughts? Positive or negative…
its china dude. what are you gonna do? send a subpoena to some random rice farmer whose name is listed on the company directors list?
most of the front men for these “businesses” are literally illiterate patsies who are put upfront to obscure who is in control of the business.
this is a pretty good break down of how chinese businesses are often profitable “on paper” and in reality don’t do shit.
Some factories get “turned on” while investors visit in a bus tour and then when they leave they shut it down and wait for the next van of idiots with money to dump.
pretty shitty that “big name” manufacturers have burned their customers like this tho.
The guy who explained how they pump and dump their hardware on buyers is pretty eye opening.
I wonder how decentralized Grin will be once ASICs hit this network. I feel that Innosilicon’s ASICs are strategically priced to insure that ‘ROI = never’ and fear that Innsolicon will be mostly solo mining Grin, as planned (Innosilicon to be their own best customer in employing their ASICs, see Bitmain). Lets glimpse how distributed Grin will be in a post-ASIC era. http://www.strawpoll.me/18860003
If ASICs really are a must, perhaps a better solution of distribution would be a fixed and locked split of:
C31/C32+ for ASICs = 50% block reward
C29 for GPUs with biannual forks (tweak algo to brick ASICs/FPGAs) = 50% block reward
The security of a global currency shouldn’t depend on the actions of a few hardware manufacturers. Whether Innosilicon is honest or not matters very little. With the degree of PoW-centralization today, no cryptocurrency is safe for adoption. Honesty isn’t a permanent guarantee, and even if it were there is always a constant incentive for hostile takeovers.
Good resource for sure, but theoretically, if any company that you sent a pre-payment to, who then sent your money to a Chinese company without first receiving a “certificate of verification” or authenticity, such as shown on this page: https://www.chinacheckup.com/pages/chinese-certificate-verification-reports --Then theoretically the company who you sent funds to is libel for the loss of your funds. Can we all come together to present a united front to these companies whether they are original equipment manufactures located in China, or retailers in USA or Europe. If they did not secure the safety of our deposits then they can and should be sued.
