Same question has been asked several times in this thread (also by me), it was ignored.

Here is a funny thing, while everyone here loves to hate the government, sec and regulation, for a security to be registered, it really only requires some basic disclosures about the issuer and business. Arguably the procedure has become overly complicated and expensive for small offerings, but the idea is plain common sense, and this "IPO" wasnt so small. Investors at the very least should ask the same questions the SEC does or a bank would before forking over millions of dollars to an anonymous person being represented by an anonymous spokesperson.

Id begin by asking who theswede really is.

For argument's sake, lets assume for a second this isnt a scam and that Theswede really only is a "spokesperson" who lives at the other side of the planet from the engineers. He would have no clue about the real project status, other than what "sam" would tell him. He might make the mistake of believing and relaying sam's projections ad verbatim once or twice. Maybe three times. But at some point he would have to start wondering. He would begin qualifying his statements, if nothing else by adding "I have been told that" rather than making positive statements as if they are known facts to him. But he isnt doing that, he doesnt seem to question the info he is getting, he doesn't seem to be asking any questions, he doesnt apologize for the fact he has been fed (and has fed others) falsehoods, he doesnt seem to care one yota about his own reputation.  If Theswede was just a spokesperson, wouldnt he wonder about the same things as everyone else in this thread?

It makes no sense.

I can only conclude the swede is making up these statements himself, its not being fed to him. And if that is the case, one has to wonder how those statements could possibly contain any truth.

Moore's law states that transistor density doubles every 18 months (he actually said 24 months, but whatever). Thats what has given rise to exponential increases in computing power. Its not up for debate that this will stop, it will stop due to fundamental laws of physics, the only question is when. Once it does stop, you can not maintain exponential growth with parallelism, parallelism is linear. 

Thanks to smaller transistors, which also means  lower power consumption and higher clockspeeds, In the past 5 decades, we have roughly seen a billion fold increase in computing power per $. To maintain that through parallellism would mean in 5 decades, your PC would cost a billion times more,  have to use a billion chips and consume a billion times more electricity. Not gonna happen

You realize it will only cost .00011 BTC to make sure one wins that bet?

IM saying 202M

its also fair to say current designs and the selected process nodes are more likely geared for performance/mm² (per $)  than power efficiency. Not that I expect an order of magnitude difference, but more than doubling efficiency at the expense of performance per mm² or $ might not be out of reach with downclocking/volting and a LP process Maybe even a redesign if that would be worth it.

Theswede is supposedly a US resident selling or publicly promoting the sale of unregistered securities to other US citizens. Yeah, thats well within the SEC's authority.  Even a Swede or Chinese would have to comply with US laws when doing business in the US. That the securities relate to nigerian oil or hashing power in asia is of no consequence, the law doesnt care what the securities are about.

For those that truly worry, best I can tell,  trading these securities is not illegal and the fact they are unregistered securities doesnt mean they are invalid or worthless (Im sure there is a million other reason why they are worthless though). So as a shareholder, afaik you are not violating any law nor giving up any of your rights.

However issuing these unregistered securities and offering them for sale publicly clearly is illegal in most countries, including the US, as is providing "substantial assistance", "knowingly or recklessly". There is no doubt in my mind that Theswede could be held liable under US law. And thats even if Labcoin were legit and were to put 1000TH online tomorrow.

Of course Ytterbium, Ytterbium & Associates says its all perfectly legal. If in doubt, I suggest you make up your own mind. This is some human readable info from the sec on the subject:
http://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/preipo.htm
(dont think that the SEC will consider an IPO on BTCT as a real IPO)

Here is the act:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/securities_act_of_1933

To be fair, what nVidia and intel produce is infinitely more complicated than a bitcoin asic. I too have my reservations about all those promised deadlines, but comparisons to GPUs and CPu's are simply not valid.
Also, they sell by the millions. That alone makes it a different story.

Nice of you to show just how little you care about upset customers, and that you feel sarcasm and further insults are ok instead of humility and apologies. One would almost say you are gloating

For those unfamiliar with BFL, here is a video of inaba aka Josh exactly one year ago:

http://youtu.be/bT-smMzg54k

one snippet on the asics: 'when you order it overnight, you will get it the next day. Not the next week, not in three months, the next day".

One should note, statements like that are not promises. Its only a promise if josh holds his two pinkies. YOu can clearly see he is not doing that, so its just a fable.
the "Not the next week, not in three months"  turned out to be accurate. It took more than a year.

You would think that based on what facts exactly?

It could mean anything.  Since they werent going to do any chip level testing until after board assembly, its entirely possible they still have no clue if the thing actually works or not.
If you want to be pessimistic, next week perhaps they will produce one blue puff of smoke after the other as they turn on each assembled machine.

TL;DR sit back and wait.

I think we all appreciate the NRE for a 28nm maskset is fairly massive. But its a sunk cost. Once recovered or If/when difficulty goes up too high, so that miners no longer buy, the choice between not selling anything and selling well above marginal (/variable/production) cost (so excluding NRE) seems obvious to me.

So in the long run NRE wont matter in the pricing (it will matter a whole lot to determine whether or not you make a profit). No one expects you to sell anywhere near that marginal cost today, but ultimately, thats were we are headed for. Hence my question. 2TH @ $1000 seems well above marginal cost. Im just curious roughly how far above and what the biggest, non recurring production costs are.

I got such an email too, originating from a tor exit node:
Time: 2013-09-24 08:53:37
IP Address: 162.213.223.139
User Agent: Python-urllib/2.7

Here is the thing; I dont have an alias, or not that I know off.

Im not overly worried since I use blockchain only for viewing (no private keys for anything with btcs) but Im curious.

IM not asking for exact numbers specific to black arrow, Im just curious in a general sense. Some general ballpark notions would be appreciated, particularly the cost of the PCBs is something I have no idea about. Is it on the same order as the asic's ? But if you dont want to share, thats fine too.

Additional question: who is theswede? Who is "sam" ?

"just" being the promoter makes him  "jointly and severally" liable to the same extent as the guys behind labcoin. Section 15.

And if you keep it up, who knows, maybe some investors might even try to sue you and the rest of the labcoin fanclub:

any person that knowingly or recklessly provides substantial assistance to another person in violation of a provision of this subchapter, or of any rule or regulation issued under this subchapter, shall be deemed to be in violation of such provision to the same extent as the person to whom such assistance is provided.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/77o

its not a warcrime, but this is no game either.

So what side of the road should I drive in HK, left and right?

HK law is immaterial. These securities were offered here as well. So this is not:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/securities_act_of_1933

Take special note of section 15.

Thats just the recourse investors may have.
The selling of these unregistered securities is illegal by itself, and that applies to pretty much every bitcoin denominated security.

But dont take my word for that, ask burnside why he urged every US citizen involved in issuing these securities to get legal counsel.