It didn't say it alters you genome, I was just trolling.

But much like the hair on an arctic fox changes white when it gets cold and turns brown when it gets warm, our environment can alter your genes.

To your point of diversity, I agree that is the cause of economic success, but I don't believe it is genetic. (That thinking was surpassed with predetermined birth classes ) My heritage is one of pioneers and innovators (dowers), but when I look around I don't see many dowers anymore, just mainly a society of coffee servers and managers.  (Douglass Adams comes to mind - so I will throw in hairdressers as well)

I found this info in their site: http://www.butterflylabs.com/landing/landing-aw.php

However, I'm curious about if they will start shipping in the expected date...

I'm sure you can find alot of videos of Bernie Madoff saying things along the lines of "We wanna get the ASICs in as many people's hands as possibly can to secure the network ..." or "We want to make everyone a rich man like myself".


Latest update from BFL for those of you that invested
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/showthread.php/104-Shipping-in-2-3-weeks

So for an update on shipping times... As you might imagine, we get this question a lot. It seems like it would be a simple question to answer, but it's not. Let me describe the process so people can better understand why.


If you look at the current FPGA board in a Single or MiniRig, you'll see lots of capacitors, resistors, etc... about 350 little tiny parts attached to the board. Contrary to some of the conspiracy theories out there, all our boards are completely custom made, they aren't purchased from another manufacturer, etc... they are designed by us and made for us and us alone. As such, we are required to volume source every single part that goes on the board.


The ASICs are similar in so far as they also have nearly 350 components on each board. With the FPGAs, we sourced parts in the hundreds or low thousands at a time. For some of the ASIC parts, we are sourcing hundreds of thousands at a time which requires direct ordering & lead time dependancy from the respective manufacturers. However, for this first batch, we're mostly able to depend on available distribution stock from places like Mouser and DigiKey. Shortly after we get the first batch of everything in, we'll have our larger mega stockpiles arrive from other vendors and/or direct from the distributors, it's just the first batch that's going to be rough.


So, we've got he myriad distributors shipping thousands of little pieces to us, the PCB manufacturer sending us the bare PCBs, the HSF manufacturer sending the HSFs to us, the PSU manufacturer sending the PSU's to us, the case manufacturer sending the cases to us and most importantly, the fab sending the ASIC chips to us. All of these must arrive on time and as expected for everything to go off without a hitch. So far, so good.


When we made our announcement for shipping dates, we padded in some extra weeks in case of delays, and as we try to herd all these cats into one corral, our padding is slowly eaten up with mostly minor problems, but they all add up. With the bump in specs, we spent some time ensuring the power subsystem is over powered to accommodate the new and future power requirements - our chips are capable of higher speeds than what we initially intended to send out in the first batch, and they still have quite a bit of headroom; We decided to go ahead design the power subsystem to handle the maximum theoretical load of the chips. This means we can now crank the board up with some minor tweaking. Each chip is theoretically capable of operating at 1 GHz, we are running them at 500 MHz with the new specs... we will likely never see 1 GHz operations, simply because of heat density issues and a few other factors, but we have at least another 25% of headroom we can play with, if not more. Again, we built in a lot of padding into the specs, just in case something went wrong. We have basically padded everything we could in terms of estimates and that padding is what has allowed us to bump specs on short notice and keep our shipping times in line even in the face of delays.


Ok, so we have the cats herded, the specs staked out, now we have to actually build these things. As many of you know, we've purchased SMT machines to allow us to manufacture our own boards - and I have mentioned this before, but many have not heard it - we will not be using the SMT equipment to process our first batch of boards; we will be using the same house that did the pick and place for our previous generation products, which means we're still at the mercy of someone else for our first batch shipments. There has been some delays at that stage, but we have the padding, so it's not been a critical issue. There has also been some delays at the foundry, but again, we have padding, so it's not been a critical issue. We are also paying for an expedited run at the foundry (which does not come cheap) to keep our timeline up. All these things have to work out perfectly and our timeline is still looking good. However, if something does not work out perfectly, our timeline is going to slip, plain and simple. We've used up most of our padding at this point and we are still ironing out a few little wrinkles here and there. This has been a long explanation for a simple answer: I would like to tell you we are still on time or pretty close to it, because we are. However, I would also like to tell you that we are going to slip a couple weeks or so if anything goes wrong, and given the complexity of the issues facing us, I would say it's almost inevitable something will crop up between now and the beginning of November that we are not expecting; What that is, I don't know yet, but I would rather error on the side of caution, say the timeline is going to slip a little bit and then surprise everyone with an early delivery than promise an early delivery and not meet that promise. So that's what I'm doing and there's your answer. When I have more information, I'll let people know as soon as I can.

Guys, consider the same thing made with ASIC 

They said they wouldn't do it. I'll believe until proven that otherwise.

Mining with them does ruin future revenue. If they want to continue to sell hardware, then they need to be taken seriously and be honest and open.

No one uses wifi anymore.  Everyone has 4g.

So what you are saying is the FPGA product were brought out in order to get credibility for the scam?
Mind you when BFL first started they claimed their FPGA line contained "custom hardware" as well. Some amoung my self used the same reasoning that the thing is a scam.
What it actually turned out to be was something differnt, with vastly worse specs than the initial promised product.

So that is what I am betting on (not literary). The best explanation would be some FPGA conversion chips in those devices. Like Altera Hardcopy or something.
It fits the time margin and what they demonstrated to be capable of, and given the attiude of their customers they will get away with it if they lets say deliver half of the promised performance/second (30 GH/s instead of 60) and one tenth of the promised performance/watt (100MH/Jule instead of 1GH/Jule).

Damn Inaba - don't ever get tired smacking down haters?

FPGAs are a completely different category -- you basically sacrifice raw performance potential and use off the shelf programmable chip arrays in place of doing a custom ASIC. Note that while FPGAs are more efficient than GPUs, their performance and cost is such that it's not worlds better. 800 Mh/s at 40W compared to 650 Mh/s at 350W means they're about an order of magnitude faster. GPUs on the other hand are about 30X faster than CPUs for hashing, and ASICs have the potential to be 30-50X faster than GPUs (and possibly use less power at the same time). FPGAs are real and people are using them, but FPGA vs. ASIC is like comparing a Visual BASIC prototype (that's missing a bunch of features) to a final C++ program.

As far as pricing goes, if ASICs begin shipping, pricing will tank. People will want to recover the cost of their ASIC hardware, and while not all of them are going to be interested in selling every coin mined, plenty will. Difficulty will shoot up, and if you can actually get 60 Gh/s at 60W you would have a system capable of mining about .7% of all BTC ($300 USD/day at the current rates) while drawing only about $0.20 in power per day. You could sell BTC at $0.01 UDS each and break even, so anything above that is profit (after recovering the cost of the $1300 hardware, of course). Personally, the day people confirm they're running ASICs (and we see the associated spike in block generation with difficulty following), I sell all my coins and wait to buy back in until we stabilize -- probably in the low single digits.

I'd agree with you if it weren't that there are several people on this forums who reported mining with their FPGA Singles. So in order for it to be a scam they have to somehow be in on it.
That wouldn't be the strangest thing to happen, but still it gives them some credibility.
Do you think that these are genuine products or just empty boxes?

On the price: Almost certainly down, this would be a massive blow to the credibility of bitcoin businesses.

The term is full custom, not fully custom.  Putting neon lights in your computer case makes it "fully custom".  Writing your own software to draw the transistors -- like Intel and AMD do -- makes your chip "full custom".

BFL has not announced a full custom chip.

...but Butterfly managed to skip structured ASIC entirely and create a solution that is built using the full custom approach.

Why don't you just sell $12, $22, and $52 flash drives? Put $10 worth of BTC on the $12 drive, etc.... That's what prepaid CC's are basically doing. Then you have a physical product as well.