How about you not post until it hits $30, that would teach us a lesson.

What the fuck. The bubble has "popped" on a million different things a million times over the last 100 years. Somehow thinking that "look at silver after the bubble popped, that's what bitcoin will do, book it" really makes no sense at all.

It's like saying I popped my girlfriends cherry last night, and she aint geting her hymen back and bitcoin aint getting $266 back. Both situations involved blood so I'm pretty confident.

Agreed. There are real ASIC manufacturers, real companies with experience, unlike Avalon (thought they seem to have done quite well) and BFL (who are sucking). You don't see them right now because it's a fairly big investment and unless you know the Bitcoin community, history, you just don't invest a few million hoping there's a market for it. But as the community grows, you'll see legit companies putting out ASIC miners that might end up being better/cheaper so right now it's just wait and see.

If you think Bitcoin is going to be around for the next 5 years, getting a few ASIC rigs in the fall of 2013 isn't the end of the world.

Which is my point, they should have the cash and coins to pull it off.

No one knows their expenses. How much are they paying the founders? 100k a year? 300k a year? They could be losing money for all we know. You can't look at trading volume and go "Yup, they're profitable". What exactly in their history tells you they're well run and financially sound? Lots of things would point to the fact they're a bumbling cluster fuck.

So they don't have to follow the rules of a real exchange, but they're going to anyway? MtGox can (and has and does) spend the money that's been deposited. You really think they keep 100% cash on hand to cover withdrawals? Really? They never operated at a loss? They have mountains of cash on hand to cover everyone? People really trust them that much?

You're saying that regulated banks spend/gamble clients holdings, but an unregulated bootleg bitcoin exchange in Japan, they'd never dare use clients holdings to cover investment/expenses/costs? Come on now.

He'd go "We thought Bitcoin had a bright future, didn't pan out". You don't go to jail for being bad at business. Companies go bankrupt and lose their ass all the time. MtGox is bootleg as fuck but people seem to think they're all legit and above board. So the biggest reason so far is because MtGox is morally above gambling people's money on Bitcoin's future. Hrm. Yeah.  

They're not an exchange. They're a pretend exchange of a virtual currency. Post a link to the rules/laws/regulations MtGox, as an official "exchange" of Japan has to follow. Do they really report to the JFSA (Japan Financial Services Agency)? Come on now.

If Bitcoins go to $0, do they really care? There's no more exchanges in that case. They declare bankruptcy. Liquidate the assets. Companies go broke all the time. If losing millions was a crime, we wouldn't have any corporations left. MtGox is tied to BTC, sink or swim. They might think this gives Bitcoin the backing/stability it needs to go to the next level.

There isn't a bank in America that has the cash on hand to handle everyone withdrawing their balances. The banking industry is legalized gambling, but MtGox wouldn't stoop to that? I don't know.

*lol*

Are you kidding me? They're not even regulated. What governing body controls MtGox and what are the rules? They're allowed to shut down the exchange to upgrade a server? Whenever they like? Nothing is insured. There's no oversight. Are we still talking about bitcoins?

Clients funds? Ever heard of banks? They gamble with clients billions on a daily basis. Who's really going to Japan to sue them because they are guaranteeing a $60 bottom price point for BTC? Really?

If MtGox said "$60 is the bottom, done.". I don't see people yelling "GTFO!" after the pump and dump that just went on. Don't people crave stability?

If the entity has the bitcoins and cash to back it up, do people even have to agree?

The price was just at $260. It would take everyone saying "$60? CASH IT ALL OUT CYA!!!!". If MtGox and other exchanges never fall below $60 USD, what will convince people it's not actually worth $60?

The price is just based on supply and demand. It has nothing to do with BTC adoption. The price didn't rise to 266 because Bitcoin was "doing well". People bought it up driving the price up then dumped it. The price was $12 in Feb, the entire community would now reject $60 as the lowest BTC will ever drop?

Run out of cash? With account holdings they have what 10 million? 20 million?

How many million would it take to cover all the people who want to cash out at $60 over the next month? Really think they'd end up with every bitcoin?

I know lots of people who wouldn't sell at $100, let alone $60. What is going to convince people BTC is really worth $30 and go sell everything at $60? And never buy back in? Something would really convince the community that BTC is worth $30 when MtGox will keep buying at $60. There's people who think BTC will hit $500. $1000. What happens when it caps out? Any massive sell off just causes much less supply and they end up slowly selling it right back. They have enough holdings to survive any swing.

People who use BTC as a currency will be loading money and buying daily as they do now.

Yes. 

setting a bottom and top USD value for Bitcoins? They put out a press release saying they were putting an unlimited buy wall of BTC at $60. They were also putting an unlimited sell at $70. Including users holdings, they easily have enough cash and Bitcoins. No one would sell for less than $60 on the other exchanges. No one would ever buy for more then $70 on the other exchanges. What would stop them from doing this?

Maybe they'd run out of Bitcoins. They could always just shift the price point to $70-$80. There's no way they'd run out of cash, they'd always have a steady flow of people buying at the bottom set price. Add in the delay in transferring funds and the ability to dip into account holder’s money (like banks do).

The only risk I see is everyone leaving the exchange. But I doubt people would want the volatility of the last few months and would embrace Mtgox (or a 3rd party) doing this.  They guarantee the price of BTC at $60 and release BTC at $70 as demand requires. It would severely limit pumping/dumping, ddos attacks, manipulation.  If they want more swings to keep the investment/trading side of BTC going they could go $50-$75. And if they did this, could anyone stop them? Would anyone want to?

Cheap isn't the right word. It's more like "mildly retarded". Going around asking why a business charges more for shipping then it actually costs - is mildly retarded. There are costs involved in shipping something. Yes more then just what the shipper charges. Packaging, transporting it to be shipping or scheduling a shipment, getting the tracking information, updating the tracking information into their own system, the little plastic shit they put inside so it doesn't break. Just because you used your trusty measuring tape and got the little dimensions punched into USPS.com doesn't mean that's the true cost of shipping a product to a customer. If you ship 5,000 boxes a month and USPS charges you $50,000, get ready, it's likely to cost you MORE then $50,000 to ship those boxes. Mind. Blown.

And like someone else pointed out, you mark up the shipping to make money. It's a business. The goal is to make money. You shift some of the cost into shipping because then it looks cheaper. Most people say it's $599. It's actually $633. But most people say $599 (or $600). So they shifted $10-$15-$20 into shipping and made it look cheaper. That's the old "business shit" cropping up again. When your goal is to make money, you do shit like this. Don't worry, when you're a freshmen at highschool this fall you'll learn all kinds of stuff like this. In the meantime, I was happy to explain it for you.

Agreed. I doubt there's much gamble. I'm sure they are making a profit. If you forecast Bitcoin, along with mining, along with making money, even the most optimistic would hesitate to predict anything beyond 2 years. Things change so quickly no one really knows what will happen. No one is going to start a business just to get market share when the market might not even exist in a year. I'm pretty confident they're not selling at a loss.

If they put up pre-orders for a new board, they'd get a ton of orders assuming they produce/deliver on the current batch of Singles. I've seen quite a few "I've ordered X amount", factor in people who haven't posted, I'm sure the number of Singles ordered/pending right now is above 100, that's 60K up front. When people will pay and then wait for the product that's a great situation to be in.

I'd guess they can switch gears pretty quick. Assuming they deliver the 100s of orders pending, getting money up front in the future shouldn't be a problem. They managed to double the performance for the same purchase price, I'd lean towards them knowing what they are doing vs getting lucky.

No clue. Maybe they're just selling the more chips on a unit for less. However they're doing it, 1.38 mhash/1$ is really impressive.

What's your numbers for Icarus? Based on your numbers for Single, Icarus runs about 14+ months payback period. So the Single is only twice as good, instead of 3-4x as good? I mean sure he was wrong, but it doesn't really change what the better option is.

One of those people claims to have seen their operator with "tons" of singles all over the place. If they can really produce 20-40-80 a week, they're going to sell like hot cakes. The fact Icarus uses 50% less power isn't going to win a lot of people over. Power is cheap, power for FPGAs is very minor. Unless you're spending $15k-$50k the power savings isn't worth the farm being 50% slower. No one is going to pay the same amount of money to get something half as fast. People are running 500-800-1200 watt monsters, some people multiple gpu rigs, 80watts a pop per butterfly single is a fraction of what they likely use right now.

So I'd argue $600 for 832mhash for 80 watts does blow the other FPGAs out of the water. Now that we know they're at least shipping units, we're more pictures/proof coming over the next week I'm sure, they're going to get a lot of orders.

But it's likely they won't be able to keep up with demand and the other FPGAs will get bought and supported. But there's going to be quite a few disappearing because they just can't match the price/performance. Hopefully they keep pushing the improve but these butterfly singles are really impressive.

If the butterfly, X6500, ztex, icarus are all available to order, people are going to buy the butterfly single. The saving grace is the butterfly singles likely aren't available in a timely manner, but that can change. The other guys aren't likely to get twice as fast in the same time span it takes butterfly to get up to speed.

That's cool.

Are you going to add 8? 9? 10? I thought I read the issue with 8+ is the linux ati drivers? Anyway this is freaking badass, please let us know how it goes adding more.