One can hope...

Hey Josh, besides sharing your expertise on redesigning cooling solutions,  maybe you can give HF some golden tips on how to improve their asic's power draw simulations and how to optimize their supply chain and assembly line to achieve <12 months delivery times? You're the expert after all.

Thats the ("hot") wallet they got access to first. It was much smaller.

Its called variance and you will always have that, whether the network is growing, shrinking or stable. IF anything,  because of its exponential growith in the past 6 months confirmations have on average been way faster than they were last year and way faster than they likely will be by the end of next year. That doesnt mean you wont sometimes see several hours for 6 blocks, thats just the nature of probability which underpins mining.

Whats the uncertainty?  Those bitcoins belonged to DPR, in all likelihood, in a few years they will belong to someone else. What that person will do with them is just as uncertain as what DPR would have done with them. If anything we gained some certainty, namely that these coins wont hit the market for quite some time, and once they do, anyone rich enough to buy such a pile of bitcoins most likely isnt dumb enough to blindly dump them on the market.

- keylogger installed on his PC
- DPR reused a password from somewhere else (perhaps with a changed number or something that could easily be bruteforced if you know the other pw)
- DPR handed over the key for whatever reason

Note that if this was a cold wallet, stored offline, he might not have been all that concerned with the strength of the wallet pw. Its even conceivable the (offline) wallet was generated with an old version of bitcoinqt that had a flaw that made decrypting it relatively easy. IIRC.

Thats been my firm conviction ever since the first asic was announced. A few lucky exceptions aside, everyone buying rather than selling these asics would go under. OR more accurately perhaps, on average asic buyers would make substantial BTC losses until the network begins to stabilize compared to the btc exchange rate.  The question is only if they get screwed because these vendors ship and maintain exponential growth for long enough, or if they get screwed because they dont ship fast enough.

As for your predictions; Ive obviously seen your thread, and its superb work. But its far from complete. For instance, for BFL monarch you have a grand total of "". Now I dont know the actual number either, but Im pretty confident it will be a very large number, potentially larger than any of the other 28nm providers. Why? simple, undelivered 65nm force fed upgrades. How many of those that still havent received their 65nm BFL miners next month will still want it, rather than upgrade it to 28nm monarchs? Ive guestimated BFLs total 65nm preorders, shipped and unshipped could total as much as $150M, based on their claims of owning half the network hashrate until recently (~1PH) and >20.000 shipped units,  which would both point to ~$50M in shipped units,  and the notion they appear only 1/3 through their backorder. If those numbers are somewhat accurate, and assuming "only" $50M of their remaining backorder is converted in to Monarchs, thats >6 PH without taking any new sales in to account, nor the fact that the pricing is chosen in such a way that most people have to increase their bet.

Of course, knowing BFL, when those will be deployed is another matter entirely. So your may well end up being correct if they only deliver in August, but Im not betting either way; and certainly not against any of those Monarchs to be deployed before HF's MPP units ship.

When was that conference? If anything, $3M is (far) lower than you would expect. Just their public list of B1 babyjets consists of 570 units x $5700 = $3.2M
Thats without any upgrade kits, batch 2 orders, without any MPPs, without any Sierra's. So how could that answer shock you, unless, like me, you are shocked its so low.

From 13PH in january to 28PH in February is barely more than yet another doubling. Will it happen? Maybe, but probably not, bbut Melbustus 16PH sure sounds feasible to me. Especially since the actual "makes sense" (cant use break even here) numbers are likely a lot lower because  your dates are very optimistic. Hashfast may or may not start shipping in 3 weeks, I certainly doubt they will finish the same week nor do I expect them to ship the MPPs within a day of reaching 90 days. They are already hiding behind their December 31 guarantee for B1 delivery, and there is none for the MPP.

BTW, feel free to take it with a large spoon of salt, but friedcat is apparently on record (interview with a chinese journalist, cf asicminer thread) that he would be ready in February to deploy "100s of PH". I find it hard to swallow myself, but even if its just 1/10th of that, may mess up your numbers a little bit.

Let me answer that by another question: if you get a cease and desist letter from the SEC, will you just ignore it? Also if you live in close ally Poland like the exchange operator? If so, you must be braver than most. Besides, its just as illegal in Poland.

BTW, I guess this really answers your question:

http://www.sec.gov/about/offices/oia/oia_crossborder.shtml#secintlcases

I dont know what math you used, but mine is simple: MPP is 4x the GH/$ 3+ months later. If network doubling continues, 3+ months means 8+x the difficulty. So roughly half the ROI of the original order, which would have been a fat loss otherwise you wouldnt get the full MPP upgrade. Now I know thats not entirely correct, but close enough to illustrate my point. And that is assuming they ship after 3 months, and not 4 or 6 or 9 months. I dont see any delivery date promise for the MPP modules.

Sorry Ive discussed this too often. Feel free to search my post history if you want to know why it is beyond a shadow of a doubt illegal.
BTW, you shouldnt worry, buying of unregistered securities isnt illegal anywhere afaik. Its selling and soliciting IPO funds and offering broker/dealer services.

Not this again. Puhleeeze.

Guess what: I can buy on pico stocks, and I dont live on the Marshall Islands. And my guess is neither do you nor more than 0.1% of all investors. So whats legal there is irrelevant, since picostocks through the internet is operating in and targeting US markets, EU markets, Japanese markets and everywhere where running an unlicensed exchange or selling unregistered securities to unsophisticated investors is illegal.

You dont seriously believe thats why they launched MPP in the first place, do you? Its a marketing gimmick to secure more preorders for a few months later at still very attractive (for them) prices. Given that the network currently (more than) doubles every month, those MPP modules will make even less of an ROI than the original order.

Here is a little thought experiment for you; assume HF sold 6PH of preorders so far and lets assume everyone ordered MPP along with that. They ship everything instantly in 3 weeks. Obviously, less than 2 weeks after that 6PH hits the network, all customers that didnt understand it before, will understand the situation they are in. Lets assume as a token of goodwill HF releases all the MPP modules immediately. What will that do for your revenue? Almost nothing. Three words for you: zero sum game. If you want to win, dont play.

Supposedly its a passthrough by the operator who seems to be a cointerra investor, although Im not sure the latter has been confirmed by CT; all you have to back that claim is the scan of that lawyer's letter.
My guess is that its legit in that sense, but I dont have much faith in Leszek; ignoring the fact the exchange itself is a violation of security laws pretty much everywhere, ignoring that the very proof of ownership of the shares state that those shares can not be resold or pledged, all the assets on his exchange seem at least dubious.

ROFL @ that quote.
At least Inaba was correct saying that those 300+W 60GH (BFL) devices are not gonna make a lot of their customers a positive ROI. He predicted that quite accurately, give the man some credit

Mining is a zero sum game. No matter how much or how little the community invests in mining hardware and electricity, the amount of bitcoins they will mine will remain roughly identical. If you invest too much, you will lose money, its as simple as that. OTOH,  If Satoshi was still the only person mining on his own PC, its clear he would be making a fortune with essentially zero cost.

GPU mining was highly profitable for a long time, until finally difficulty caught up and we pretty much achieved an equilibrium. We are past that point now, even if no one can give you firm numbers of how much miners invested in asics, because vendors arent opening their books. Compounding the problem is that you are also affected by future sales that havent happened yet, but you know they will happen because of the extreme low marginal production cost of asics.

Still let me try to gather some ballpark numbers for the past 6-12 months, even ignoring the 28nm investment surge. Until recently, BFL was the biggest supplier of hashrate. Josh recently claimed they were responsible for roughly half the network hashrate. Lets say they are only responsible for 1PH that has actually been shipped since April. Their hardware currently costs ~$50/GH. That would mean  ~$50M worth of 65nm asics have been shipped.  Another way to guestimate this is his claim they shipped 20.000 asic devices. Using a $2500 average of their middle of the road product, that gives you the same number. It wont be correct, but it will be in the ballpark.  Now most estimates will also tell you have they are no further than 1/3 of their total backorder, they are still only shipping orders from March, which if true, means they received a total of ~$150M worth of 65nm preorders, most of which arent even operating yet.

Now for the catch; when most of these people ordered their hardware, a bitcoin was worth less than $20. So you could say they invested something the equivalent of 7.5 million bitcoins. Thats more than half of the bitcoins that exist. And considering less than 1.5M bitcoins where mined in the past year by everyone combined, only 1/3 would of which could be attributed to BFL miners,  I dont think I need to do the math on whether they will break even when denominated in BTC, or how they fared against someone who bought bitcoins at $20.

where are you located?

Mail or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule states you should be able to cancel your order and get a refund at any point before they shipped the product. If you want a refund, you should be able to cancel now, without having to wait until they missed their self imposed deadlines. Of course if you would rather have the product sometime in November, and you are worried you might not get it, then by all means wait, I see no reason yet to believe they will not ship at all.