Do you have a source for that? Not saying its not true, I just never heard it. For the record, a respin means redoing one or more of the masks in the maskset.
what I read was that they had issues mostly with the chip packaging,  but you can change packaging without redoing the mask, you can even do it with wafers that are already produced (but not yet packaged).

Until recently BFL were the main provider of mining hardware. Arguably even today they are still the biggest provider. Had they mined with their sold but unshipped supposedly delayed hardware, two things would have happened:
- Difficulty would have shot up before they began shipping. We didnt see anything of the kind
- They would have shot themselves in the foot. One of the main reasons BFL did so well is that they started accepting preorders in august 2012 and didnt ship (or deploy) a single asic until, what was it, may 2013? Thats almost 10 months during which difficulty was low and mostly flat and prospective customers who used a mining calculator were willing to almost pay the weight of these machines in gold. Self mining would have dramatically reduced the perceived value of these machines. Even if they had the hardware, it would have been smarter to turn it off.

Now today you might argue it "makes sense" because BFL's impact on difficulty is dwindling, but then so is the profit potential of 65nm hardware. They claim to be shipping 1000 units per day now, even if its only half that, just how many days worth of production do you think fits in their datacenter? Its just not worth the bother if you can make fortunes selling vaporware and $250 worth of hardware for $2500. There is a reason Avalon, Bitfury, asicminer are all mainly selling gear, its simply more profitable than mining (and their margins arent even close to BFL's margins).

And by 2016/2017 the mining market will be saturated and with razor thin margins, so it would be very hard for any vendor to recover the NRE. Unless they could achieve a rather dramatic improvement in GH/W, it doesnt make sense to even start. I dont think we will ever see 20nm bitcoin asics. Maybe 14nm at some point in the very far future.

Not a scam in the sense that you may think. They will deliver the hashrate, and they are closely affiliated with bitfury.
That doesnt mean its financially even remotely interesting, because at their current prices, its absolutely not.

I dont understand why people draw such conclusions. The reason it takes 6+ months for them to ship your order is not because they have no orders, nor because they would self mine in any meaningful way. Simple evidence for that is the network speed, and the fact it doesnt make a lot of sense in the first place. Self mining is no where near as profitable as selling these devices.

The ridiculous long delays is just a combination of incompetence, unwillingness (slow shipping=low network difficulty=high perceived profitability=more preorders) and the sheer amount of orders they did get. Any other company would have stopped taking orders ages ago if they could not ship them in a reasonable time, but BFL keeps advertising and raking in orders they know they will never have to ship, since next year the import tax and electricity alone would make it silly for most customers to accept their 65nm product, and most of them will be switched to "mining by the GH".

BFL are devious, deceitful/dishonest, but they are not stupid, not bankrupt, not selfmining and not short on orders.

Thing is, if you know unpredictable things not only can, but will happen (read the quote carefully), then you try to account for them. That still means a schedule can change, but it should be able to change in both direction. For obvious reason, in the bitcoin mining realm the only schedule changes are delays, nothing ever happens ahead of schedule because the schedules they publish are the best case scenario's that could only theoretically pan out if absolutely nothing goes wrong. Whatever date they publish must therefore be interpreted, not as a real estimate but as a "no sooner than" date.

Stopped mining when it was time to sell my GPU farm. Never got in to asic mining because it was predictable it couldnt be profitable (on average) for miners. May get in to mining again once the current storm has passed and mining becomes a razor thin margin but somewhat predictable venture again. Probably 6-9 months from here.

Since you are not new to mining, and you have to ask such a question, the obvious answer is: yes, you should buy one, heck, buy 10,   and you will fully deserve the outcome.

difficulty is bitcoins equivalent of Einsteins cosmological constant

IM no ripple expert, but afaik, yes to all, but with the following caveats:
- the transaction costs some XRP. But with 100 billion XRP that exist and are being handed out for nothing, that is as close to free as you will get.
- there is 100% counter party risk. This is unavoidable IMO if you want a system that guarantees bitcoin but is not bitcoin, whoever makes that guarantee will become a counter party risk. In ripple you can chose who to trust for how much, with inputs.io or coinbase its the respective companies. Bitcoin is designed the way it is to eliminate the counter party risk, and as a result you have the drawbacks you want to circumvent, like confirmation delays. I dont see how you can have your cake and eat it too.

edit: think of it this way; if you could eliminate the counter party risk (bitcoins single most impressive achievement) and achieve instant confirmations, you are smarter than satoshi and you just devised a system thats inherently superior to bitcoin. So why base it on bitcoin? Release it as a new protocol and in time it should replace bitcoin.

In the bitcoin realm, there is no difference between a working prototype and a shipping product.
BFL claims the hot lot takes 25 days, and that sounds about right for the asics themselves. Packaging, testing, binning, assembly etc if done right with a proper supply chain in place should only add a few days to that. KnC did it in less than a week, so its not impossible, but with BFL who knows.

Who (or what mechanism) would provide the guarantee? Think long and hard before answering.

As for the desired features of your new currency, they can be, and have been implemented with bitcoin. Eg:

https://inputs.io/

Of course, like any such scheme, you get an authority that you have to trust. In your case it would be the issuer of this new redundant currency, or in the above example its input.io.

If you want to decentralize the issuing/trust,  then you just reinvented ripple:

https://ripple.com/

Monarch is delayed (shocking!, lol), but this may raise some eyebrows:
"we should be able to product more than 1000 Monarchs per day. "
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/announcements/4414-monarch-information.html#post63779

Thats 12PH worth of 600GH monarchs (the 300GH model was only added later) per month.
Of course this says nothing about how much they actually sold, theoretically its possible they only sold 2 weeks worth of production and may not produce and sell more than that ever, but I kind of doubt that.

I guess they did not. from a previous announcement:

Late August/Early September Tape Out
There are two processes with this step that we are using. The initial process is what is called a bullet run, it will allow us to get a finished set of wafers in approximately 24 days from the date we tape out. This will result in a limited number of chips available.
The second process is the standard run, which takes between 75 and 90 days on average, and this is where the bulk of our chips will come from

If they had taped out, by their own schedule they should be getting their hot lot by the end of November and they would not claim shipping only one month later. Also note that  by their own schedule, the bulk shipment can only start 50-65 days later. End of december +~60 means early March instead of the "January/February" the are advertising. Of course on BFL's calender,  January has 65 days.

Thats ~12PH per month for BFL alone. Damned if they ship, damned if they dont.

I have to say thats pretty hilarious and intriguing. WHile everyone is trying their damnest to keep miners cool, KnC owners are disabling and blocking fans.
This thread is too long to keep up with, so sorry if this has been asked or answered before, but 3 questions spring to mind

1) has anyone tried testing if its the asic or the VRMs that cause it run better at higher temps? See, I might understand it if its the VRMs, I dont understand it if its the asic.
2) has anyone figured out a way to read clockspeeds, and if so, does the warmer asic run at higher clockspeeds?
3) has KnC commented on this weird phenomena?

So even the scammers are upping their (non existent) volume lol.

Because its a completely different kind of product, wafers vs chip packaging. Packaging is (usually) low tech, extremely diverse and very low margin. Its almost the exact opposite of wafer production.

Such charade may convince JohnyBigs, its not going to hold any water if any shareholder decides to take this to court or regulators decide to investigate and prosecute. There may not be a law against bad management, but materially misrepresenting key facts in a prospectus, and later to shareholders, misappropriating company funds for personal gain, heck even soliciting funds for an unregistered security..  those are all illegal in any country that matters. "oops sorry we tried" aint gonna cut it. Not that Im holding my breath for any labcoin investor to take legal action.

Like we didnt know that of Pirate. And its not like Alberto wanted you to know. Here are a few clues for you:
- Alberto never used his own name, his involvement was explicitly denied
- AFAIK Alberto has always been using tor, except for the time he mistakenly didnt. Yep even scammers make mistakes, even though he is apparently a good enough scammer to fool most of you 4x now and you are still not convinced he is a scammer. Ill let you decide if that means he is a worldclass pro or if people who still believe, are just idiots. Or both.
- SO far, Im not aware of any bitcoin scam were the loot was returned and the scammer brought to justice based on either IP address or identity. The only scammer that is in trouble is Pirate and even then its only because the government stepped in because the bitcoin community could do jack shit about it other than scream bloody murder and harassing his parents.