I'd suggest you politely ask Josh for a tour then.

Odd, I got a PM from PG stating he was alive and well in Sandwich, IL.  Is that where the Hungarian Volcano dumps it's refuse?

Then you can enjoy your pennies from heaven.

Bitcoin mining is far from dead.  Bitcoin profitability is in the toilet, but hey, it started out that way.

The get rich quick seekers will soon sell off their mining equipment to the altruistic who will keep the network alive.  Look at the people still mining DEVcoin.

How does that $15 phone compare to an $1100 i7 4930 processor?  It doesn't.  Neither does it compare to 28nm mining chips.  You're talking a drop in pricing by over a factor of 100 in less than a year.  AM's overpriced toys have only come down by a factor of 20, but he started out so overpriced PT Barnum is bowing in his grave.

1 Exahash = 2 million 500GH chips.  That's only 2x what Avalon had 'on order'.  780BTC for 10,000 chips = .078BTC per chip... and these were 110nm chips.  I'm sorry, but I cannot see a more than 4x reduction in size for ~3x cost in that short a time. 

True, but I still would not pay more than .01 for one of them.  AM has apportioned supply to regulate demand and milked every penny out of his victims err customers.  Obviously he is still making a fairly decent profit if he is able to sell them at the prices he is.  .1 BTC per chip still works out to $42 per GH as of today's prices.

You don't do any research and call ME retarded?   It was a day 1 order.   

If I could get it in hand today, yes, I could make .1 BTC.  If it took 1 week to get it in hand, then it's looking shaky.  At 111M difficulty, it's estimated .05 after 1 month if difficulty doesn't go up.  I see .0015 per day for 10 days, .0012 for 10 days, .001 for 10 days, .0008 for 10 days, .0006 for 10 days, .0005 for 10 days.  .056 after 2 months, .066 after 3 months, .074 after 4 months .08 after 5 months and .085 after 6 months.  At 1Bil diff you're getting .000167 per day.  389 more days to .15 with no more increases, 90 more days to .1

Why not?  There's multiple BFL hate threads mainly due to the fact RoI is vanishing.  People keep saying if BFL had shipped on time and made mining unprofitable that they would be criminal for doing so.  Yet now we got to just get over it? 

At the moment... BTC.01 or less.

Triple was the estimate used before, I'm saying it looks to be more like 5-6x from Josh's answer to me.  I didn't ask about Singles unfortunately.

I do think you are fairly correct on the mini-rig build speed.  I know the one assembler was starting one when we left to goto lunch and a little over an hour later had finished that one and was about 1/2 way through the second.

I think the big thing to consider is that it takes 8 times as much to build a mini as it does to build a single.  I've thought about this a lot and something came to me today... when Josh was saying they could produce 400 units, what if he meant 400 boards?  When I think about the amount the binning place is supposed to send to Chicago each day, 5000 chips, if you only made 16 chip boards that would make 312.5 boards.  Since the LS only take 8 chips and the Jala 2, you could easily get up to 400 or more.

Another thing to consider, only chips with all 16 engines working go into the long boards.  Generally 60-70% of chips fall into this category.  If 30% fail at least 1 engine on 5000 chips, thats 1500 chips and that would potentially make 750 Jalapenos.  That number seems awfully high to me compared to the Jala's estimated numbers.  Maybe they've only been using the Grade B chips for Jalas, but that would mean there are a lot of unused C and D graded chips.  The other possibility is they are getting more Grade A chips than normal. 

I'm waiting for next weeks' shipping reports, after the new assemblers come online.  That should give us the best picture to date.  By Wed or Thurs we'll know.

The bumping facility cuts the wafers into chips.  The binning process may or may not test the chips(I honestly don't know) but they are graded A,B,C and D.  Whether the bumping and binning are done in the same physical location or not I do not know. 

After the chips have been binned, they are sent to Chicago and the chips are attached to the boards.  The PCB boards are made elsewhere and I believe there is no backlog of boards.  AFAICK, Chicago only populates the ASIC to the board.  Since Chicago is able to use all the chips currently coming in, the binning process is the slowdown.  Chicago sends boards to BFL, and they assemble the units.  By my understanding they also currently use up all available boards daily.

So, no, only assembly.

I saw ~10 in customer service, ~8 in the burnin rooms, ~10 assemblers, 7 or 8 in a room I never entered, 4 or 5 that put post-it on finished units and like 6 in the shipping area.  Add in josh, sonny, maybe a couple managers... It was lunch time, so some could have been out.

Josh did tell PG and I that the Jala's are being outsourced.  This other company will build them and send them to BFL to be burnt in before shipping. 

To be honest, daily volume was hard to estimate, I was told all of the wafers have been fabricated, but it sounds like there is a supply line issue from the bumping facility to the binning processor to the place in Chicago that populates the PCB boards.  IIRC, the binning facility is supposed to ship 5k chips a day, but had not come close to hitting that mark yet.  Maybe they are getting close as I saw 8-10 assemblers and Dave mentioned an additional 8 starting next week, Josh mentioned that they were farming out the Jalapenos to a subcontractor and if enough boards from Chicago arrive it sounded like Will might win his 2BTC bet.  It'll be close.

The building there is about 110 feet or so from front to back.  I was in the parking lot out front when the FedEx truck showed up.  When I had gotten to the back of the building I was looking through a space about a foot wide between the burn-in semi and the back of the building and could only see the driver carrying packages into the truck.  As it was 102 degrees and no shade, I only watched for a minute or so before heading back to the front where there were trees to stand under while waiting for PG.  As to USPS shipping, there were several of the 'cages' the post office uses there.  Josh said they fill the cages and that way the driver can just wheel them into the truck instead of making piles at the back door.  Saves time for all involved.

In the one thread, I mentioned that using bfl.ptz.ro you could see that a minimum of 938 Jalapenos listed from Jun 23 to the end of Jan along with where the other lines were.  I felt we could triple the total and get a good lowball figure for their shipping to date.  That would be ~3000 Jalapenos which was kind of scoffed at as too high.  I then commented that I felt the true number of Jalas was closer to 7000(my gut said 10k, but I went with 7k) than the less than 3000 the others believed.  I straight up asked Josh if I was right about it being closer to 7000 and his response was yes, much much closer.  I would have to take that as meaning they shipped somewhere between 5k and 7k Jala's, which is the closest I got to actual numbers.

I did see a timeline on a VAP board for gen 2, but as Josh told me it was not set in stone, I feel repeating anything I saw there would just cause more flaming.  I will say that I feel confident that they will have all 65nm product caught up before the Monarch is supposed to debut the end of the year, but that is merely my opinion after seeing them at work.

At the meet-up Tuesday evening, Sonny was there.  PG and I talked to him quite a bit and I found it interesting that they were originally working on the FPGAs for an entirely different purpose when someone brought the idea of using them for Bitcoin mining.  PG  was curious about the name Butterfly Labs and Sonny explained how the work they were doing before had something called a butterfly effect.  When you graphed the results, you had a fairly distinct butterfly shape.  It was an enjoyable get together and I personally found them very forthcoming on all of my questions, even the embarrassing ones I did not relate in full here due to my own discretion.

All got drunk?!?!?  You were sitting next to me watching me drink water all night   Just cause I like the sinus burn from Wasabi doesn't mean I was drunk!

I just saw your post, I also live in Iowa, but if you are travelling I-80 you'd miss my hometown.  I live about 1/2 hour north of the Interstate in roughly the center of the state.  I know from one of the in-person exchange sites that there is someone in the town to the west of me who sells BTC, but I'm not sure about any businesses as yet.  Good luck on your travels!

If you hadn't ignored me, you may have learned something.  <shrug> oh well.

Something PG mentioned while we were in KC made me think about this post.  It's something he and I went through but I doubt anyone under 25 would ever be able to fully understand.

When we were children, you used to have things advertised on cereal boxes that you could send away for once you had 6 box tops.  PG was came from a family with 6 kids, but for me if was just my brother and I.  We both usually wanted whatever it was and then we'd have to amass 12 boxtops to send in.  12 boxtops usually meant a good 6-8 weeks cause we were only allowed to take them from empty boxes.  Once we had the box tops, we'd fill out the order forms and might have to add a doller or so for shipping and then you'd mail it in and wait.  The normal shipping time on these was "Allows 8-12 weeks for delivery".  So, from seeing the product advertised to receipt was a minimum of 4 months, and this was for something they had IN STOCK.

The first deployment I made to Japan, I would call home once a month, a 30 minute call could cost around $100.  Imagine trying to hold a converstaion with someone where you have to wait 3-6 seconds for a response due to the time lag from going 1/2 way around the world.  We've made great strides since then, years later I could call from halfway around the world and there was no perceptible delay and it sounded like you were calling someone right next door.

"Instant gratification" seems to be the keyword.  You've got the commercials with people yelling out windows "It's MY MONEY and I want it NOW!!!".  Everyone's advertising "NEXT DAY DELIVERY!" and people regularly pay the premium to get it.  I recently ordered an old shop manual off Ebay and I could have gone with next day service for something like $25-30, but I selected the Economy shipping.  I placed the order on a Friday and it was in my mailbox Monday.  I guess that $25-30 would have been money well spent! (<-- yes, that was sarcasm)

My background gives me a better insight into the workings behind these companies than most people have.  I know well how theory seldom equals reality.  I've helped test new equipment many times over my career, and engineers don't often stop to think what people will do.  I remember one of the first touch screens we got in and they were showing us how it worked.  The person who brought it was carefully explaining how to bring this amd that.  Then one of the people who would be operating it sat down and asked "But what happens if I do this?" and he pushed 3 buttons at once.  The screen locked up and they had to completely power down the system and reboot it.  The people who create and build things never think to add safeguardslike this, cause they'd never hit all 3 of those buttons at once.

Patience truly is a virtue.

I honestly don't remember much being said about the Monarch... Having spent 20 years in electronics, I was more interested in the assembly area.  If Josh had let me, I'd have sat down and started building one

I already stated elsewhere that when I got there around Noon I saw the Fed Ex truck pull up and when I walked back and looked he was loading packages(wasn't going to crawl into the truck and count).  I also already stated that Josh told us that USPS, UPS, DHL and Fed Ex normally pick up in the morning and when we got to the shipping area there wasn't the 4 day stack of packages PL thought they'd roll out for the 'dog and pony show'.  They did have 3 burn-in areas and a 4th was under construction.  It was very neat to see the over-sized semi-trailer they use for one of the burn-in areas... Josh mentioned it used to be a military command and control bunker complete with generator and HVAC.  I didn't get a chance to count, but they had quite a bit burning in that I could see.