Crypto Mining Blog

Some of the new Scrypt ASIC manufacturers that are starting to ship or may soon start to ship are apparently suffering from the same problems that some of the Bitcoin ASIC companies had when they started launching their products. We are talking about the two of the most important factors – shipping quickly and on time and be able to communicate on time with the customers, below are some examples ready.

Zeus has started shipping their Scrypt ASIC miners from Batch 1 on May 20th, however they are a bit slow in fulfilling orders… last week on May 28th they were at just order number 1100. Our test order is #2054 and is still being processed, so they are clearly not close to sending it and this was made about two weeks before the Batch 1 ordering has been closed. They have already has announced that they plan on starting to ship Batch 2 orders around 6/15/2014, so by the time our Blizzard miner arrives in our hands it will be pretty much quite outdated and the total payment we have made of a little over $250 USD for the miner and the shipment is already quite high price (and there will be some VAT and custom taxes when the miner arrives). So even though the Batch two price for the ZeusMiner Blizzard is lowered at $179 USD without the shipping cost, it will be pointless to order it now and get it probably sometime in July. The bigger Scrypt ASIC miners from Zeus and their partners that are selling custom solutions based on their chips such as GAW Miners or Hashra are still attractive though, but these partners are partly responsible for the slower shipments to customers that did order directly form Zeus as they had to get some units as well.

Alpha Technology has recently started to request the full payment from customers that have pre-ordered their Scrypt ASIC hardware, however things did not seem very attractive for customers to do their final payment. The sign for that was the announcement from Alpha Technology that they will after all increase the hashrate of their miners, a good move if they can actually deliver the higher hashrate miners for the same price. The problem with Alpha Technology is the total lack of communication with customers, they are just sending invoices, but are not replying to customers over email for days and you apparently cannot reach them by phone. So let us say that you have pre-ordered 5 Scrypt ASIC miners and want to cancel some of them and pay for the other, but want to confirm with Alpha Technology you actually cannot get in touch with them. That does not make you confident enough to pay the rest of the amount for any of the miners you have actually pre-ordered. So if you are busy with a lot of orders from customers, you just hire more people to talk with the customers that are willing to pay for your products and not drive them away by not communicating with them at all.