Remember the question is why sell 100 bitforce units in "pre-sales" and have relatively long waiting period for them. Earlier you said something along the lines of "either they have 1000 chips or they have none" (sorry if I misquote, going by memory). This is one reason why you might expect to see that. They simply dont have 1000 chips yet, and may not have them for some time.


I guess that might be true. More used to getting processed, uncut and untested wafers from the fab, but with hardcopy you might actually get tested and packaged chips. Of course that changes little about lead time, no matter who does the work, it has to be done and you cant process a wafer in a week. So assuming BFL is just done testing their prototypes and happy with the results today, the next delivery of chips is not likely to happen before February.


Well, youd typically not want to build even 100 units before being able to test the first. So the first boards are likely "handwork" anyway. Also, AFAIK BFL have yet to announce they sold out their presales, for all I know they only have orders for two dozen. Dont have experience here, but I doubt its worth outsourcing that kind of volume.

Anyway, I have no idea who is doing what, Im just trying to show there are perfectly logical explanations for what we are seeing.

Obviously. But I dont think assembly is the issue here. Contrary to D&T, Im convinced no matter if you have to order 1000+ or 10k s-asics that you will first receive a single wafer, or at most a single wafer run (usually 4 wafers) for testing, characterization, to validate your PCB etc. The biggest cost is the mask set; once you have that, you'd pretty much pay standard wafer price, but that still isnt cheap for 100+ wafers, so it doesnt make sense to bake 100s of wafers before being able to test and validate your first chip. Particularly since you wouldnt be ready to sell your product; thats not specific to BFL, anyone would have to test and debug their prototypes first. Its not good business to sit on 1000 processed wafers for all that time.

In short; my guess is BFL have ~100 chips now from a test run, possibly they are assembling them on boards themselves, and it will take at least 8 or so weeks from the green light before they receive the first of the volume production wafers (then there is wafer and/or chip testing, cutting, packaging, mounting etc) which they would probably have someone assemble on the PCBs elsewhere.

As for financing; Im sure they have had to pay Altera (or whomever) a considerable amount already, but you usually dont pay 100% up front either. It probably boils down to them having paid for the mask set and the test wafers, but not the volume production yet. Either way, they will have bills to pay and its good to be able to show investors initial revenue sooner rather than later.

But no one would be stealing anything. Its up to newegg to charge restocking fees or not.

I did a 20 min test of the bitminter beta. No problems here, performance seems smooth and I was slightly surprised to see it outperform cgminer (even if marginally) on my 5850s.

Im still sticking to cgminer for manageability (easy ssh access, even from my android phone, pool failover, fan and temperature control etc) but impressive stuff nonetheless DrHaribo.

Any idea what that is about? What is chugalug?

Not at all, thank you.
Now, can someone explain exactly how do I initiate a paypal chargeback :evilgrin:

I can think of no good reason for this. If they are sitting on 100s (or 1000s) of chips, they already have the PCBs, you have the equipment and personnel, you might as well assemble the boards. The only thing that might be produced on call is the alu housing, but even that doesnt seem very likely and wouldnt make much sense if their plan is to sell 100s or more of these.

Not enough results yet to draw firm conclusions. Also botnets arent voting I think

Im sure he will accept bets in $ too Goat.

There are many other plausible explanations; like simply not having updated that part yet of the site yet and not having much reason to, until they finish the software and are ready to ship their first board so they could give a more accurate estimate; although that estimate Im sure would also depend on the amount of preorders they are getting.  

In short, even if they could ship in 2 weeks after receiving the order now, it doesnt exactly hurt to have "4-8" weeks on their website. Particularly not with the holiday weeks almost upon us.

I was talking about the bet on "bets of bitcoin" which leaves BFL no margin whatsoever for missing their promises. That bet I might lose. Im not too concerned about my bet with you, but should point out its only 2-1 odds and not 24-1 as you claim is your assessments of the odds of BFL being legit. Quite a good deal you got there.

Same concern here. In general you would expect delays; looking at the startup I used to work for, our first standard product was almost 12 months late and still performed a whole lot worse than projected.

Then again, what BFL is doing ought to be much less risky with far less unknowns. If its Altera Fast path, then Altera guarantees you it will work if it works on FPGA, and they must have had working FPGAs for a long time. The photos on their site show multiple PCBs, so they probably have working silicon and Inaba is apparently testing one now (meaning the software would work on some level at least) so Im optimistic they can ship at least a few units this year.

But like you, Im more concerned about losing this bet due to a minor slip like buggy software, than losing the bets for being fundamentally wrong.

Everything Ive seen is consistent with a small high tech startup. Thats why we bet opposite. We'll find out who got it right soon enough.

If its s-asic, clearly. You think thats much? Even double that is small change for a high tech startup. The image sensor company I worked for started with just over 1 million euro, and that was considered (too) low by our VCs.

Nonsense. You might need that to get a contract to supply the military with leather boots or toilet paper. You dont need anything like that if you have a product they want and no one else sells.

Im not saying they already have a contract, just that if 3 letter agencies or US military or military contractors have an interest in SHA hashing and they dont have access to a product with similar performance /$ and /W they will be knocking on their doors without BFL so much as placing a phone call.  


80% they ported an FPGA implementation to a structured ASIC like Altera Fast Path. That would make it pretty easy achieve those performance and performance /W numbers with costs, from what I read, being on the order of $150K for the first 1000 chips (that includes NRE). The next 10.000 chips would be a lot cheaper even. Turn around time is on the order of 3 months. Its really not difficult. Hobbyists here have made working FPGAs, from there to a structured ASIC is trivial. It just costs money. The performance and efficiency gains are automatic, simply a result of the process. They are also quite predictable.

Now the fact this is so easy and relatively affordable does cast doubts on any future three letter US agencies business. I strongly suspect these already have done that, if not even full custom ASICs. Those costs are closer to millions of $, but Im sure the NSA can afford that. There are plenty of other parties that could be interested in this that are not called NSA/CIA however, particularly if BFLs product is flexible enough to be used in very different applications than SHA hashing as seems to be the case.

it does. Three letter agencies have little issues buying stuff from startups if that stuff is leading edge. Having worked for a 20 people startup that sold CMOS image sensors to NASA and DARPA I can tell you that much. Its 100x harder to get a contract to sell boots or truck tires.
-And yes I realize those arent 3 letter agencies

But you have to compare it to selling. You are suggesting they would do better not selling but mining themselves. Then your comparison point is $599 and how long it takes to make more money mining than selling.


many other failings? Ive not seen any so far. To date they have kept every promise, every deadline and delivered on every claim (even if thats not much to date, let check back tomorrow) and they have acted quite professionally in their communication. I dont see "failings".

On the contrary, the price (and performance) strongly suggests they do have something "special". Either they had some brilliant idea to make off the shelve FPGAs vastly more efficient, in which case, someone else is going to be able to do that too,  or they have a custom chip. Custom chip means very low per unit cost compared to FPGAs, but a fairly high fixed cost. That means you want to sell truckloads. In either scenario you want to sell as many as can as soon as you can, and not wait 12 months hoping to still be king of the hill so you can just break even.


Their website suggests there are other applications for their product. Code breaking would be one obvious candidate, but they mention medical imaging, finger print processing and I read somewhere monte carlo simulations too. If true, that suggests their chip is more general purpose than SHA hashing alone, but we will shall see how that pans out.


Its actually 9 months at that cost, only to break even on per unit cost, ignoring R&D, overhead etc costs, the need for a large and secure datacenter, electricity etc etc.

But thats not even the real comparison, its how long it takes (and at what risk) to be more profitable than selling. Even assuming your BOM estimate, and the $599 list price, its still > 12 months before they would make more money mining than by selling the hardware. And at a huge risk. It could easily be 24 months or never.  No sane investor would accept that risk when there is such an easy and almost risk free way to get a nice positive ROI way sooner.

Moreover, there is no reason to assume development will stop after the single board and that will be the best and only ever product in the market for 12 months. Even if BFL themselves have no plans for something better in 12 months, there are other companies claiming to work on full custom asics to be launched in 2012. If thats true, BFL had better made back its investment with a nice profit before that hits the market, as it would crush the single board and make it unsellable for btc mining.

This is the risk you want to offload to miners that invest in these devices. Its the reason I am not going to buy a BFL single board even if they achieve all their promises. IN 6 months its entirely possible it will prove a cost I can never recover. And at best in 12 months Im only just breaking even.  If Im not willing to risk $600 on that, its hard to see how a company and its investors would be willing to gamble their existence on it.

Just an idea; one of the problems retailers have with bitcoin is its volatility; its almost impossible to price something in bitcoins without adjusting prices on the fly. Heck, even on this forum people usually denominate in dollar or euro when selling hardware.

Why dont we create a currency basket that consists of equal amounts of traditional currencies (say,  Euro, Dollar and Yen) on the one hand, and bitcoins on the other (or even a mix of various crypto currencies, one could add small amounts of litecoin and namecoin to the basket) ? The price of this basket can easily be calculated automatically and listed on a website.

The point is not so much trading directly in this currency basket -though if a trusted party would offer it, why not-, for starters the point is just being able to denominate prices that can remain reasonably stable, particularly if one believes a demise of the dollar or euro will result in a spike of bitcoin prices. Upon purchase, the price of this basket is simply converted in to whatever currency the customer wants to pay in. The idea is similar to the "ECU" that preceded the Euro.

Thats just plain dumb. Bitcoin is lightyears away from hurting banks. Bitcoin could grow 1000x and it would barely register with banks. If you really think bitcoin is about to grow 1000x or more, youd have to be an idiot to short banks rather than buy bitcoins.

Thats not to say I think shorting banks currently is such a terrible idea, but the problems they are facing is not crypto currency.