I'm wanting to buy a few coins so I can offer them on diceoncrack.com and taabl.net

Will you offer any discount for quantities larger than 4? Say I want 10, 25 or even 50 if the price is right, what would those quantities cost me, including shipping to Europe?

Lower speed for first batch then upgrade those later on.
People would be more than happy with 'reduced ASIC performance' then 'no ASIC at all performance' which they get at the moment...
I don't think the dates were realistical in the first place because of how they suddenly decided to redesign the board after the original shipping date.
They didn't have a final product at that october date and you cannot set a shipping date if you haven't even seen your final working product.
That, combined with several more delays pretty much means their dates are meaningless as such and their primary goal was, i assume, to get people exited so they get the funding.

Since BFL claims that the FPGA run gave them heaps of experience in handling delays and Josh has stated that these delays are because they want a perfect chip it is impossible for BFL to ever have taken their dates seriously. There must have been, like, a 90% chance that the first date would never happen. This next date i'd say there is a   40% chance they will deliver. I think that the likelyhood of them shipping increases as we approach March.
 
BFL must fully understand that they are still in the design stage of their project and that the likelyhood for errors is high.
No responsible company could have set these dates in such a situation. The fact that the date has been moved several time shows that BFL lost control of the process several times.
They should have said from the beginning that they will ship propably early 2013 and not set a hard date at all unless they are sure.

Simple. If they can't control currency exchange risk, they shouldn't have accepted payments in BTC in the first place!

Well, they should have protected themselves against a BTC price rise as well? It is not my fault if they've speculated and didn't do that!

yes, You are right, only inexperienced company can order 100 000 chips without a prototype and testing, without sure if these chips will work, hoping for a miracle.

@Bitsyncom/ngzhang
What kind of package are your chips using?
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/content/129-13-jan-13-asic-update.html

Don't be an asshole. It may backfire and if BFL really is a scam people will come back to your posts and tell you "We told you so".

Going bankrupt before being able to deliver its first product happens in a LOT of startup companies. Managers going nuts and attempting to fuck shareholders over happens in a LOT of startup companies too. Why does it seem so unbelievable to you? Has it never occured to you that we might be right?

I remember people saying the very same thing about Pirate. He managed to keep his business running flawlessly for about 8 months. People kept asking : if he's a scammer, why hasn't he run with our money yet? Well because a good scammer never runs with his first money. He builds trust over time. He wants to get as many faithful clients as possible and he only runs with their money if the scam is no longer sustainable. Why? Because it's more profitable than to run away with the first few bucks he gets.

They give only partial refunds! My pre-order is paid in BTC and now they do not honor full BTC refunds!

Because they think they can have perfectly legal profit without doing anything!

Pirate gave "refunds" right up until he shut down. If BFL was running a scam, they would continue accepting preorders and giving refunds until the rate of refunds exceeded the rate of preorders.

If that were true, they would have working sample chips and be able to demo them. No demo, therefore no chips, therefore they are still just spewing lies.

Your disk analogy is flawed.  A more accurate example would be if a back in the days of 360KB floppies, someone coined one DU (disk unit) to be 1/360th of a disk.  So with today's 1TB hard drives, the minimum addressable size (1 DU) is 2.7GB.

Looking at the way things are now, I think anyone with reasonable intelligence could conclude that BFL is probably some kind of scam.

Of course the obvious exception are those with significant pre-orders, who are putting their fingers in their ears and saying "I'm not listening!" They can't afford for it to be a scam, so therefore it must not be one.

And of course anyone who points out the scam warning signs is abused.

It's Pirateat40 all over again, just a different type of scam. The CEO is a convicted fraudster for fucks sake, how dumb do you need to be?

If not ASICs... then what 8 chips???

I don't think you understand.  When the ASICs come out, no one will be running GPU miners anymore, since they will have a very very small fraction of the mining power they have today.  There will be no difference between your mining program, and a program designed to destroy video cards.   

Why would you and a team waste time programming this?   

I have seen it already a month ago, 2 months ago, 3 months ago, 4 months ago... How many times should I watch this movies again and again?

From now until we ship our new ASICs, this thread will be sticky and closed. All ASIC status updates will appear here as a new post. If you want to bookmark this thread and/or RSS subscribe to it, it will only be updated with new posts when there's a new update. Each post will include a discussion thread link for discussing the update.

13 January 2013 BFL ASIC UPDATE

Hello everyone. It's been about a month since our last update and it's high time we had another, since we have lots of information to share this time around.

To start off with, our chip production is going well. I am traveling to our packaging facility in California on Wednesday the 16th of January to do a walk through with the lead developer on our ASIC team as well as speak with some of the engineers to make sure everyone is on the same page. We have confirmed with the fab directly (not through any intermediaries) that our chips will be done no later than the 31st of January and ready for delivery. I will be at the foundry prior to that date to speak with some of the engineers and accept delivery of a portion of the chips to hand deliver to our packaging facility. This means our delivery date is expected the week of the 10th of February. We know it's not the end of October and we want to deeply apologize for the delays. However, I think that once you get to the end of this post many people will understand why we've been delayed and hopefully how it will ultimately benefit all of our customers a great deal. So please, read on!

So, I know the question first and foremost on everyone's mind (besides when we are shipping) is "Why are we delayed so long?"

Several things have happened to push us out from our target date... most things have been minor, but they have added up and I have detailed many of them in previous updates and on various threads throughout the forums. However, the biggest delay we've incurred has been twofold:

We absolutely, positively want to ship a chip that works perfectly. We don't want to send a chip that has problem or limitations. To that end, we have made some optimizations to the final layers of silicon that we feel will benefit everyone going forward due to point two:
The biggest single reason for the delay is due to a package change.



When we announced the delay last month, we decided to go back and switch from our QFN package to a flip chip BGA (FCBGA) package.

This necessitated a lot of changes with regards to the PCB and packaging (obviously) and caused us to really scramble to make things happen in a reasonable time frame. We did this for a number of reasons, but primarily it was due to heat concerns. Our chips would have functioned as currently spec'd within our thermal tolerances, but we would have very little thermal headroom to really crank things up. With an eye towards the future, we decided to bite the bullet and release a product that is ready for the long haul as opposed to releasing something now that would require exotic cooling to be pushed past 80 GH/s or so.

When redesigning things, we have made some various internal changes that may cause our power usage to potentially rise slightly beyond our original spec, and we are still tweaking things from other angles to bring power usage back down. Originally, we were at about .8w per GH (Yes, we built 20% into our announcements) and we are estimating that it's possible that a worst case scenario would lead to a bit under 1.2w per GH. If that ends up being the case, then yes we will have missed our power targets and yes we will gladly pay out the bounty. However, at less than 72 watts for 60 GH/s, it's still more than 5x better than any other product. However, we still believe that our .8w / GH target is what we will ship, but we like to prepare for the worst case scenario.

I will post more information once I have a better handle on our power usage.

I am sure many people may wonder why a flip chip BGA package is better than a QFN package (and are likely wondering what exactly is the difference, but that is a discussion for another thread). In a nutshell, our QFN package has plastic on top of it. Plastic is a terrible conductor of heat, so the heat stays trapped in the chip and shed out through vias on the bottom of the board. In extreme situations, where there's lots of heat and the vias can't handle the load you end up with heat migration to places you really don't want it to be, such as the ground plane, etc... and this affects surrounding components. With a flip chip BGA package, the chip is essentially flipped over and filled with silicon on top. Silicon is an excellent thermal conductor, so the heat has no problems being shunted away from the rest of the system. With our top mounted HSF, this makes a huge impact. Originally we had potentially planned on doing a bottom mounted HSF and using the vias. It turned out that the vias could not handle the thermal load and heat would migrate all along our thermal and ground planes and had the potential to overheat a number of other components. At 60 GH/s, heat was still within thermal tolerances, but only barely. If you were in an unusually hot environment, it could potentially cross the thermal threshold and the unit would start to fail and/or throttle. Switching to this new package essentially completely eliminates this, as almost all of the heat can be wicked away through the top of the chip, leaving the board and surrounding components completely cool.

If you are wondering what a flip chip package looks like, many (most) laptop or otherwise permanently mounted CPUs are Flip Chip BGA packaging (FCBGA). In retrospect, of course this is the route we should have gone, but we believed at the time that the QFN package was adequate for our needs. Hindsight is great for making predictions and if we knew then what we knew now... but that aside, we are almost to the end of the right track now. The QFN package is not suitable for dense, high speed bitcoin mining applications. Much like the toggle rate issue in the FPGA era, issues that are not normally a problem for traditional ASIC applications become monster issues when the bitcoin beast sinks it's teeth into them, surprising and biting engineers in the butt. The only way to find some of these things out is to get bitten by them, since this is new territory for everyone.


In other news, we are implementing a queuing system in the MCU of our units, to allow multiple jobs to be queued up. This should prevent any communication latency bottlenecks. It was an often requested feature, so we are happy to say that we will be headed in that direction. With the announcement of our new Android based mining application, I want to confirm that we are in contact with developers of the other major mining applications, BFGMiner, CGminer and Bitminter. We will be sending development units to them for integration and testing as soon as we can and we are confident all three mining applications, in addition to our own Easyminer and Android miner will be ready for our units when we ship.


I have often fielded the question as to if Chinese New Year will affect our shipping. No, Chinese New Year it will not affect us. We have all of our parts needed to build the units in stock, with the exception of the chips. We have taken delivery of all of our Chinese made components at this time and they are filling up our warehouse and the assembly plant warehouse. Our fab is not located in China and our chips will be done before CNY in any event. Our packaging plant is located in California and obviously not affected by CNY, our assembly house is located in the US and thus also not affected.

With regards to upgrading your shipping, our new system should be online this week. Once we are comfortable with it, you should be able to email or phone us to upgrade your shipping to DHL, EMS, FedEx or UPS as your convenience. Email is best of course, and probably the fastest way to start the process. We have been working with Bitpay to get the ability to send non-time dependent invoices to customers and we are now able to do that, so if you want to pay in BTC, we can send you an invoice which can be paid any time as opposed with within 15 minutes. This will make upgrading your shipping or products much easier on everyone.

Our new manufacturing facility is almost complete. We will be posting a video walk through hopefully by the end of the week so that you can see the facility and all the parts we have, ready and waiting for the chips to finish baking (Mmmm delicious chips). We will accept visitors, but please call before you decide to drop by so that we know when to expect you and can make time to show you around. We are (understandably) very busy right now and I do not want to turn anyone away because everyone is already engaged with other tasks. I will be traveling a lot, as will several other members of our team, so make sure we are there if you want to talk to us about anything.

I have been in contact with both Yochdog and Kano and have a tentative date scheduled for their visit. I will be confirming dates with both of them later this week and arranging the travel plans as soon as we have everything nailed down.

I am often asked the question "If I order now, when do you expect my order to ship." This is a hard question to answer, since we don't know exactly how long it takes to assemble a unit. However, the best estimate we have for this is that if you order today, 13 January 2013, you would likely receive your order around the middle of March or possibly sooner if you're ordering a Jalapeno or a Single. Minirigs take much more time to build than the other product lines, so they will take longer to deliver. However, without actually going through a bulk assembly process, we aren't sure what the major bottle necks will be. We can do estimates and we have strived for simplicity in everything related to the SC line. To that end, it requires 4 screws per Jalapeno and 6 screws per Single. Assembly of these units should take less than 5 minutes (probably around 3 minutes) per unit, so working through our pre-order backlog should be very quick. It will take more time to box and label them than it will to assemble them. The March ship date is a worst case scenario and it's entirely possible you would get your unit much sooner than that.

Here is the currently estimated timeline, and while this is subject to change of course, it's pretty solid at this time:


Week of January 13th
Travel to packaging facility for final prep and walkthrough
Confirm travel plans and trip details with lead ASIC engineer for trip to fab

Week of January 20th
Final assembly facility prep
Leave for fab at the end of the week

Week of January 26th
Final chips roll off the line
Grab suitcase, a BMW or a Peugeot and make a break for the airport, Ronin style (You can see Tom about 6 minutes, 20 seconds into the video)
Arrive California at chip packaging plant
KC facility starts assembly process of units to drop PCB into

Week of February 3rd
Chips packaged
Packaged chips sent to assembly house
Assembled PCB is set for final testing and MCU programming
Notify users to start sending their FPGA units or BTC for trade in participants
Bulk assembled PCBs arrive in KC, we start dropping PCBs into waiting units
Boxing/labeling for shipment

Week of February 10th
We implement the 1/3 shipping plan en mass
1/3 of our assembled units will go to new orders in FIFO
1/3 of our assembled units will go to upgrade orders
1/3 will be randomly selected from both groups

We descend upon the Post Office, DHL, UPS and FedEx like a horde of angry locust

You are talkng out of your ass.
Before ANY production runs (of ANY electronic device) are made the design is already completely prototyped and working.
No person in the world will run a production batch of an untested unprototyped design.
It would be a complete waste of money because it is almost 100% sure there will be some form of design error.
You can only start making predictions about the time it takes for one batch IF you have a working prototype and your product is quite finished.
THEN and only then do you invest money in an actual production run.
The BFL delivery dates don't add up. They must know fully well that their 'dates' were unresponsibly optimistic. Furthermore it appears they are fully depending on some 3rd party for their product since they say they will deliver soon but still have no prototype. This propably also means that the 3rd party they take the product from still has to do all the testing phases etc before they can produce a batch.
If their claim that BFL designed the chip themselfs is true then i don't think it is financially possible to run a batch without first going through several revisions which implies several more or less working prototypes.
Since BFL doesn't have a working prototype (or at least are unable or unwilling to show it) you can SAFELY assume they are not ready for a real batch of any size.

So for now BFL has given no reason whatsoever to trust that they will deliver anytime soon.
In any case, BFL claims they have extra special super experience with delays from the FPGA batches and have therefore claimed that they will, for sure, deliver in october 2012.
It is now January 2013, BFL showed an empty case on CES and they still haven't got a clue when exactly they will deliver.
This just means they have no control whatsoever about the process. They have shown that the dates they mentioned were meaningless.
One could even say their shipment dates are outright lies because they were never realistic in the first place given the fact that there is no prototype.

Except the onus is on him to prove he has in fact contacted his PO and he has in fact obtained (written) permission. Not on "anybody" to show that he "hasn't". Seriously, logic. Let's all use it.

Err... You quite sure about that? Was anyone ever in touch?


From what I can tell, the probation period is over. (September, 15 2010 + 26 months = November 2012.)

Sonny is now a free man who has repaid his debts to society.

While being in clear violation of his SPECIAL CONDITIONS FOR PROBATION AND SUPERVISED RELEASE for most of the 26 month duration of that supervised release.

In addition to the rocks, every other booth was practically E-cigarettes or Wireless Speakers.  Seriously... how many of these things does the planet need?  If CES is any judge, the only people without these two necessities of life will be the dead (although I suspect there is a movement to include wireless speakers in coffins with an iPod dock on the headstone so can rock out with your dearly departed) and those born without mouths. 

Heh I was amused by that video also
Josh basically told him to get lost and that was it.

Certainly avoided a situation that I expect could have been much worse (by the description of the previous day)

I do wonder which orifice people have pulled $25million out of though ...
If it is true, then yep looks like difficulty is gonna go up massively coz at a (very) rough estimate $25m worth of $1200 60GH/s is 1446TH/a
Difficulty is currently ~3million, with 1500TH/s it will be ~210million