Now that is an ASIC that mines.

Yep. Fortunately FPGAs are pricey and make up a very small portion of the hashrate. The current generation of ASICs cannot be easily re-purposed to crack passwords. As you say though, one could design an ASIC to crack password hashes pretty easily.

Actually, that is one week's worth of dust on my equipment if I leave my back garage door open for ventilation during the day. I go through a can of compressed air a month trying to keep my rigs clean (dust makes them run hotter).

They are not in a rock quarry. They are someplace much worse.


Air quality in China is notoriously poor.

BFL said they have all of their customer's pre-order funds segregated from their operational cash flow. They have asserted that anyone and everyone who wants one can get a refund. It is very possible, even likely, given all of their delays that they are running low on cash for operations and the raw materials for production.

@puertolibre: Thanks for the corrections on the Avalon Batch pricing. I am only figuring specs from BFL units that have left their labs. Who knows what the units on their drawing boards will actually be capable of (if anything).

They don't use 5 time as much power. They use 1.5-2x as much. (13 x 50w ars technica @ 5GH/s vs 600W) https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Avalon#Power.
The first batch was $1500 per 66GH/s and they made money off it. The second batch is roughly $8000 but that was an anomalous result because Avalon explicitly said they were building into the cost of the unit the cost of upgrading their production line. If BFL ships, they could conceivably lower their cost back to $1500 and still make money and have a better price point than BFL. Presuming of course they don't have to buy a new factory every time they do a new run.

Since the ASICMiner mining operation holds roughly 25% of the total bitcoin network hashrate, any buyer of BFL is competing with them. They have the capacity to expand this more but they don't want to hold too large of a percentage of the overall network because it could destabilize bitcoin itself. Every addition to the network by someone else allows ASICMiner to bring more capacity online. The higher the network hashrate, the lower the ROI is on a BFL unit. Therefore it does not matter whether an ASICMiner chip is running in the ASICMiner facility or in someone's home because they bought it retail. In either case each ASICMiner chip lowers the overall ROI of BFL units.


First they mine for some period of time (1 day or 1 week or 1 month), then they clean off the unit with compressed air, box it up, and ship it. As I have said numerous times, BFL does not have the capacity at the moment (perhaps ever) to be visible in the network hash rate. They could easily add 500GH/s and nobody would notice if they used multiple pools.

 My assertion is that if they had 200ish chips (~500GH/s) it would make far more sense to mine with it than to ship out the units. They cannot clear their order book with 100 Jalapenos (or get anywhere close to it). They could easily disguise the addition of 500GH/s (0.5% of the total network). If they did that for a month it would earn $80K at current prices. That would be a powerful temptation to a company that is in a cash crunch.

I have no evidence that BFL is actually mining, I am only asserting that it would make economic sense for them to do so.
In fact, I doubt they have anywhere near 100 units operational at this time (also conjecture on my part).

1 Avalon unit is 66GH/s, more than 10x the performance of 1 BFL Jalapeno (the only BFL unit that has left their facility). Each Avalon unit has 3x88 chips in it (IIRC) so that is (300 batch 1 units + 300 batch 2 units ) x (3 x 88) = 158,400 chips. That is volume. Also, they have sold another 400,000+ chips to the DIY and group buy crowd. That is shipping ASICs in volume. BFL by contrast has moved maybe 3 dozen ASIC chips.

BFL miners compete with both ASICMiner retail and ASICMiner mining operation. So the ROI on BFL units does not distinguish between ASICMiner chips.


The facts do not bear out your statement. $2700 per day per 500GH/s for mining in the short term vs $5000 to $10000 profit per 500GH/s selling. It makes more sense to mine first, then ship. Only after the difficulty rises or the price of USD/BTC falls will the tide shift. Don't forget, BFL can mine and ship, they do not have to choose one or the other.

The assumptions are not really valid and therefore it does hold up to business logic because they cannot raise their prices 15x nor can they ship in bulk. Also, they need to clear all the orders at the original prices before they can sell ones at 15x. So it makes more sense to mine with a few units than to ship them at this point.

Or SHA-512. But yeah, bitcoin FPGAs usually take getwork/stratum data as input and give as output a 32-bit nonce. They do not transmit the hashes outside the chip because 300Million x 256bit per second is 76.8Gbits of bandwidth. So no, they can't really be used to crack passwords.
I would imagine that ASICs use the same sort of paradigm.

Sure, assuming they could price their product 15x and ship in bulk right now, then they would be better off shipping product. However, I don't believe they can do either.

The ASICMiner product is not really competitive. Even so, it and the Avalon chip sails have already sucked up a lot of capital that would have otherwise gone to BFL. Also, both products are being sold at inflated prices. If BFL actually enters the market, Avalon and ASICMiner could revise their prices down to compete.

1.) Avalon does not have a history of setting shipping dates in the near future and then missing them by months

2.) Avalon does not have a history of calling people who disagree with them on these boards "trolls", "douches", and "retards".

3.) The guy actually got his Avalon unit

4.) There is only this instance of this sort of thing that I am aware of. That could mean they shipped units that were used for testing. If everyone who got one noticed that it had been run for some time, that would be different.

6.) Avalon's communication with their customers could be a lot better, but their communication is not substituting for their product like BFL's is. Avalon's product works and was well received by the marketplace. There is also a language barrier.

7.) There is not much dust in those pictures. You should see my rig if I run it in my garage with the case lid off. It gets dusty really fast. It is impossible to tell from those pictures for how long the unit has been run. With good filters and a dust free environment, maybe a month? In some converted warehouse in China with poor air quality, maybe a week.

8.) The damage to the unit is way more disturbing, but that is a QA issue and it might be pervasive and it might be an isolated incident. With just 1 complaint of this nature out of 300 units it is hard to tell (the other complaints were shipping damage or loss AFAIK). We will know more with batch 2.

Right now, you can make far more money mining than you can shipping product.
According to dustcoin, 500GH/s will get you $2779.88 per day. Assuming that is 100 Jalapenos, that would consist of 200 BFL chips. BFL raised the price of the Jalapeno by $100 after they realized it would have 2 chips instead of 1. They are doing small runs of chips which implies an MPW process at small production runs (a few hundred chips). If correct, then it implies a COGs of $50-100 cost per chip. That would leave roughly 50% margin on their Jalapenos which means roughly $150 of profit per device sold. They will earn that in a week or two by mining. If they "burn in" each unit for a week, they would double their margins.

That is exactly the sort of temptation I would expect that BFL could not resist. They are already way behind in the marketplace to Avalon, and ASICMiner is adding a large amount of hashrate to their operation (their retail product is not competitive). Avalon batch 2 is shipping, and the secondary market for Avalon boards+chips is due to mature by the end of summer. However, there is no indication that BFL has added any significant hash rate so I don't think they are mining to any great degree.

500 GH/s will get your roughly 0.6% of the bitcoin network. The Bitcoin network is dominated by Avalon and ASICMiner. Their devices together could easily account for over 50% of the hash rate now that Avalon is shipping batch 2.

Also, BFL had to include twice as many chips as planned in order to get their advertised hash rate. If they are doing small batches of chips (100 or so) on an MPW prototype run, their chips are quite expensive ($50-100) and that would eat their margins (thus explaining their price hike on Jalapenos). If they are only making $50 per device, then $2700 a day looks good. Especially if they are in a cash crunch.

Personally, I don't think BFL has enough units working to make that much.

True. But my point was mostly that wrenchmonkey got here a month ago, and declared his purchase of BFL product while still in the newbie forum. He routinely calls people who criticize BFL "trolls", "douches" and "retards". Wrenchmonkey is not a voice of reason about BFL. He is a combination of confirmation bias run wild and a sociopath's take on treatment of customers.


Right. He was skeptical of BFL (for 1 post) until BFL shipped a couple of dozen Jalapeno's to media and developers. Then he bought their product. All while still in the newbie forum.

I don't need to provoke him, he reached Amy's Baking Service level rage some time ago.

In case you missed out on the rest of the discussion:
wrenchmonkey showed up on the forums a month ago.
He bought BFL product.
He has been defending BFL like Josh is his lover.

Maybe he will get bumped to the top of the ship queue? Who knows. I do know that he thinks its ok to abuse customers.

You are not contradicting my statement that "Wrenchmonkey was even posting in BFL threads in the newbies forum."
Nor are you contradicting my statement that "36 out of last 40 posts are defending BFL."
Finally, you are not contradicting my statement that his account was registered April 16th.

Perhaps you could be more specific about your criticism of my post? It sounds like you are disagreeing with me, but I am not sure how.

I am glad that you finally agree with me that you have been promoting BFL since the newbies forum.

Glad you finally agree with me that you have been promoting BFL since the Newbies forum.
You just got here last month.
You call people trolls, douches, and retards.

Nice try, but you can't erase your post history.

That was a post in a thread about buying BFL pre-orders off of Ebay, not ordering from BFL in general.
And yes, you did mention that BFL was vaporware until it shipped. Then 3 posts later you bought one.

@ThatDGuy: you should read the thread he posted that in, and then read his next 3 posts and the threads he posted them in. If only you had taken more than 1 minute...

Name:   wrenchmonkey
Posts:   283
Position:   Sr. Member
Date Registered:   April 16, 2013, 01:09:04 AM
36 out of last 40 posts are defending BFL.

Here is you in the newbie forum talking about your order with BFL.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=114329.msg1932676#msg1932676

Wrenchmonkey was even posting in BFL threads in the newbies forum.