Bitcoin Forum

I sense a strong intensity of this community against Butterfly labs. I'm not quite sure why I'm I'm thinking about purchasing a low end mining rig from them what can I expect? and how long will it take for it to arrive?

I won't try to tell you what you spend your money on, but I wouldn't buy anything from BFL, for many a reasons.

Simple reasons, I don't like working with any company that happily charges you upfront, makes you wait 3-4 months before delivering you a product.
I much rather work with a company that only charges you when it's ready for delivery aka 2-3 days away.
I like Enterpoint for that reason, also their local for me (England). I put my order in 1-2 months ago I think so they got it ready quicker due to being a more mature company, since they've worked with FPGA for many many years in other industries. I've got the tracking details for my order with them, it's on route now.

BFL have already shown with their first products, that they kinda exaggerate the numbers they state they can do, performance, energy, price etc. They speculate and take guess' about what something can do, without having a prototype, so they are selling your something they don't yet have working, it's why they are always way off. So I expect with the numbers they launched the ASIC with, will be the same (exaggerated). Especially since their numbers don't really add up either.

You won't be the only one if you choose the believe them, but if something doesn't smell right, I'm not going near it. That is my opinion.

Thank you for the informative feed back, I think i can relate to businesses exaggerating to stir up hype so ill take your word on that. I think you mentioned a repuatable alternative where do i find em?

Sure, Enterpoint is the company, username Yohan is your main point of contact in this forum.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=78239.0

All the details are in the first post, it's pretty update and he's very responsive either on this forum and via email.
The delivery time is averaging at 2 months right now for his FPGA.

Some of those who are against BFL are quite vocal about it, which might make it seem like there are more against them than there really are. But in any case there are very many willing to order BFL ASICs regardless of whatever grumblings they have about it. Even if you ordered on the first day of the presale, its almost impossible to say what you should expect, both in terms of profit and shipping times. It is much more so for anyone considering an order now. But if you want to buy some gear for mining BTC right now, I don't know what you can do. As dicey as it might seem to order BFL ASICs, I think it is much more so to order anything else. That's just my opinion of course, and is based on the assumptions that 1) BFL will deliver ASICs in quantity within 6 months or so, and 2) the actual specs will be close enough to predicted specs that the profitability of GPU/FPGA will quickly fall towards zero. I'm certainly hanging onto my GPU rigs until I actually see BFL deliver, though, so I'm by no means rabidly convinced they will.   

While I understand these points and personally can agree, however one strikes me as being incorrect.

"without having a prototype, so they are selling you something they don't have working yet"

That is not what happened with BFL's first line of FPGAs. They had a prototype, they had a product they were going to sell, but when it came time for production - there was a flaw that required them to retool the wafers. The result of this was a 200 Mh/s difference. Honestly not that much, and they did infact have reason to say they could do their original quoted hash rates. It wasn't speculation. At least, that is what I read somewhere around here in a thread where BFL had posted.

I cannot say the same for ASIC, you may be right about speculation, but that's a hell of a speculation for 40 Gh/s

NO

just NO

According to what i read throughout the forum; all they had was a software emulation/simulation of a miner based on the FPGA chip they wanted to use.... And I'm pretty shure that are doing the same thing again :D

Believe what you want to hear from BFL and their supporters, they also were massively out on how much power it consumed as well. When multiple things are wrong about those first numbers, it's not a case of it being based on a prototype, instead it's based on estimation, on a formula they did not understand.

The whole retooling the wafers thing is a laugh, it was already proven incorrect when someone cracked one open and found out what the chip really was.

I have BFL Single, I like it because it is plug and play, I waited 78 days for it to arrive, it is now hashing at 815MH average. It has already made over $80, in just few weeks.
I also like the fact that BFL will buy it back at full value when I order the ASIC Single that does 40GHs, while new customers will have to pay the full $1299 price.

It also looks very nice and presentable in a metal box, unlike all the other FPGA boards that hang outside, meaning you can't have them in a house where there might be kids.

Did I mention BFL hardware is the cheapest for the speed it has ?

If you made $80 in just a few weeks, imagine what you could have made over the full 78 days! That's why other miners are so expensive compared to BFL: You're not going to wait 3 months to get them, so you're mining (and making more money) sooner.

No, they didnt' have a prototype.  It was quite apparent they didn't know what the hell they were doing when they announced their first product.  They did not even realize that in a SHA256 brute forcer, each pass would flip approximately 50% of the bits.  Their numbers were _WAY_ off, to the point where the power supplies they had for their first chips couldn't supply enough power.  Then when they got that worked out, they realized their design would basically melt so their solution was to tack another fan under the board. To say they had a working prototype is like  saying you have a working car that's missing its engine.

I actually wish BFL the best in their endeavors, I think they making steps towards getting better and improving customer relations.

That said, I'm concerned about the people buying their products, because they don't seem to understand what they are getting into. The fact is, someone has to be the first to do ASIC, and the way BFL is going about it is along the lines of how a company has to do it. The problem is with implementation of that strategy. We don't know which of their three products went to RTL first, for example. We don't know when they are doing logic synthesis. We don't know what will happen when they do their first run, or how much power they will need for their products. There are a WHOLE lot of unknowns, all of which can have an effect on their final product.

That said, they seem to have confidence in their ability to deliver within 20% of their prices/hashrates. I don't have the same level of confidence, and I think most of the older miners here, especially those of us mining with FPGAs, have similar confidence concerns, which is why they are not jumping in. Since those of us doing FPGA mining are seeing our ROI dropping considerably as the price increases, I guess we've made the better decision with respect to time. Upon ASIC release, we can always use our present profits to move to ASIC when these unknowns are, in fact, known.

Wafers? Their FPGAs they didn't specially manufacturer them. They just have/had a cheap source and it wasn't just MH/s but the total wattage power requirement was off by x4. Pretty obvious they did a napkin calculation and then went looking for pre-orders.

Credit to them for actually delivering SOMETHING, eventually, but ignoring their past behavior skews the market. I'm impressed that so far other custom mining hardware people haven't given in to the BS and released over-hyped future product roadmaps.

What are your feelings now in 2014?

Now THAT's how you necro!!!!!!!!!  ;D ;D  Sadly I WAS a supporter back then,I was SO delusional,I've grown a lot since then!!!!  :D  Thanks BFL!!!!!!!!

bfl:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bfl

Xenland has been missing for a couple of months.  A user was desperately looking for him.

There is a big difference between exaggerating and outright "horse shit"

BFL has never EVER released anything on time, or made their estimates anywhere near close to their original predictions.

The current product line people were expecting delivery in December, not a single item has been delivered,

The previous product line was delayed somewhere between 9 months and a year!

No.....EXAGGERATION.

Look at the date please.

Whoops... watch the necro please.

But it clearly points out where we are now with BFL vs 2012 doesn't?

Anyone supporting a BFL product run now is merely ignorant of the facts or paid to push product.