From:                              Alpha Technology <no-reply@alpha-t.net>

Sent:                               Monday, July 28, 2014 3:58 PM

To:                                  - M

Subject:                          Developmental Update 28/07/2014

 

                       Greetings Miners!

As you know we are nearing the end of July with no shipping date. We have previously said we believe transparency, even in the case of something negative like a delay, is something customers must know and will only help our company’s reputation in the long run. As such we must unfortunately announce that we have had technical issues during tape-out which has caused us to have to do some portion of the ASIC layout one more time thus delaying the chip fabrication. Again, in the interest of transparency, we could have not only started this second tape-out sooner but also fast tracked it and corrected this issue if we were allowed funds from PayPal which they have decided to hold until delivery. We have had to rely on other sources of funding for this which we have achieved, so we are fully funded and tape-out is mid-way now there can be no more delay. In parallel to the tape-out process we have already started our fabrication of the PCB's and enclosures, which we will display in our next update.

In the interest of there being no confusion, July while it was our genuine expectation, is not mentioned in our terms. As a result of this we have decided to announce shipping to be September as per our terms, this is something we have learnt we should have done from the start so we can avoid expectations and hopefully only announce good news. We know this news is unpleasant for all rest assured this includes ourselves, we have always tried to do right by you but may have perhaps over promised when we should have been more conservative all we can do now is learn from this mistake.

We are pleased to announce the WebGUI is complete and will be available at launch providing an intuitive way to fully remote control your miners. Follow this link for the Viper instruction manual. While we wait for shipping we want to continue providing details of our Viper up until launch. The Viper system will consist of three types of PCBs:

1. Power Distribution board for distributing power from SMPS (power supply) to individual Scrypt boards (CAD images below):

2. Scrypt ASIC board – This is where all the chips will be mounted along with their power supplies. In order to complete the Scrypt ASIC board design we have had to wait for the final ballmap information from the foundry.  Here is a signal pin out diagram of the ASIC that we have designed. Scrypt board design uses this information to correctly connect all the signals:

3. Controller board- This is where the CGMiner software and the Webgui will run (Carrier board CAD images below):

We would also like to take this opportunity to clarify a complaint among some customers with regards to our cancellation policy. We have been very clear and open with our terms of order, it was released as a news update, it is easily available on our website and you are urged to view it on the product page before you order. As far as if it contradicts with consumer laws; this is not possible as such regulations only apply to consumer products. We can assure you that our legal matters are dealt with by a leading law firm in the UK and our terms of order are completely legal; they were typed up by solicitors who specialize in this area of law. All sales are legally classed as business purchases for many reasons, one being that the hardware we are selling can only be used for mining cryptocurrencies which is legally a business practice and a taxable activity according to HMRC (http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/briefs/vat/brief0914.htm).

We also want to remind you we have increased the hash rate of these devices from what we were obligated to deliver by 10 fold at our expense, our terms only state minimum 25 Mh/s. We saw we had the capability do it and made a decision to put customers first in order to gain their loyalty for future batches. We must also remind you of the benefits of being a batch 1 customer, you will receive free shipping for batch 2 and a 10% discount off any future batch of your choice (we hope to avoid pre-orders for future batches).

Kind Regards,

Mohammed Akram

Managing Director

 

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