15MH at current difficulty equals 0.0021 BTC per day.

In a few months it will be 1/10th of that. Even if you dont care about the environment, how much time are you willing to spend to make a grand total of $5 worth of BTC extra - if that?

The chip you see isnt packaged. Thats why it has a different shape and different ball layout. Maybe this picture clears it up:



The pads you see are the ones in the green area, which are normally not exposed on a packaged chip. Only on a naked die.

It stops at some point. You cant get smaller than atomic level, and we are getting really close. At 14nm, a "wire" is only 30 atoms wide.  And before you reach atomic level, you also get all sorts of weird quantum mechanical effects. Transistors no longer work as you would expect them. As of now, 5nm seems doable at some point in the future, probably using carbon nanotubes,  but there is a brick wall looming.

A 14nm FPGA might be competitive with Avalon, but its probably still at least a year out, and it will be competing with 65nm and probably even 28nm asics. There is no chance in hell it will be competitive with those, not in price, not in power efficiency. Rule of thumb, FPGA's are 10x as big and 10x more power hungry than ASICs on the same process node.

Dont know about SEC, but FTC certainly applies:
http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus02-business-guide-mail-and-telephone-order-merchandise-rule

And BFL are in clear violation of it


unless everyone has not only received these dalay notifications but also responded to them.

This would mean you are the one unable to fulfill his contractual obligations. Whether or not that is actually true, there should be little doubt as to what should happen with the bitcoins people entrusted you with.

What exactly will they test ? You can do non destructive functional testing using a wafer prober, particularly if BFL had a clue and implemented some built-in self tests. And you cant test a bazillion things on a chip thats not packaged, like the integrity of the package, IO, analog signal stuff,  impact of thermal and physical stress,... So I really dont see what the big advantage is of destroying 5000+ chips to be able to test, what exactly ?

Its just Josh learning. Over the past few weeks he learned that "2 days" means "the bumping process takes 2 days, but can only be started in 16 days" and that packaging facilities have their own internal planning and arent going to be bribed for a tiny 5 or 6 wafer order.  Shocking.

So now he learned that testing chips takes longer than 24 hours so they are tossing away ~6000 chip candidates to get a handful of chips in testing a few days earlier than otherwise possible. That is 8 months after they started taking your money.  Does that make sense? No. Unless you planned this completely wrong, started production before testing and are still trying to stick to a ridiculous timetable you shouldnt have ever promised in the first place. And even then it doesnt make a lot of sense, because you can only test so much on wire bonded chips. Among other things, it will tell you nothing about the physical properties of the BGA chip  and its going to be hard to do any board level testing.

But he will learn that too, eventually.

How about he gets off both forums and starts doing what he is being paid for?  Perhaps spend some time trying to learn his new business and find out what many people here already know and predicted. More productive than trying to strongarm suppliers you have no leverage over, or posting daily updates which only consists of ever shifting timetables, self pity and blaming others.

There is a fair chance BFL still has to find that out.  Fully expect a "oops, now we have the wrong equipment" or "oops, those BGA balls crack without underfill" or "we cant chew bubble gum fast enough to underfill our chips"  post by Josh in the next weeks.

Ill give you a payment address after I got home and found the card and confirmed its a ref card. Pretty sure but not 110%.
 if you pm me your address I can already prepare a shipping label here so i can mail it first thing tomorrow.

No offense, I realize its just a metal plate but for 2.5 euro in profit, I am not going to bother to find it, disassemble it, package it, and bring it to the post office.
0.5 BTC shipped.

Q4? Delays are always possible, but dont be indoctrinated by BFL. Keep in mind these guys claim to already have chips, in that sense they are way ahead of BFL. I dont know how long it takes to design and manufacture a custom PCB for something like this, but certainly based on a ref design, those integrators should be ready when these guys get their chips. They will have had some time to have tested the boards and software using the preproduction chips. So if they do get the chips in june, why couldnt they ship in june?  BFL seems to think they can ship mere days after they get their first ever chips.

What I am curious about is when we will see those vendors announce their product and start accepting (pre)orders. BFL has shown the advantage to them of announcing early and since we might see multiple competing vendors with very comparable products soon, I dont think it will be very long.

I might have one (incl screws), or it could be a dead 5870 (are they even different?). Ill check when I get home. What is it worth to you? Looks like shipping will costs 3.5 euro.

Problem is you are expecting a clever electronic etch a sketch to replace word processors. That just isnt going to happen either. Bitcoin is a lot of things, but an viable general alternative to fiat currency, it aint. Ripple otoh, way too early to say, but at least its not unthinkable.

BFL is 65nm correct? So this chip would have (65/28)2= ~5.4x higher density. So all other things being equal, you would expect at least 5x the performance per mm2 or per wafer. Factor in SOI and higher clockspeeds and it might be 6-7-8x?  Ignoring fixed costs, how can this be more expensive per GH than BFL? Is SOI really that expensive?

I am saying your per GH revenue will most likely drop that much over the next months compared to now. Mining revenue per GH is directly and inversely proportional to difficulty which is proportional to the aggregate hashrate of the network. And the latter is about to explode when the various asics finally get to their customers over the next months.

it may not be that black and white. For arguments sake, lets assume BFL gets their 75K chips tomorrow, assembles everything and then  does "burn in tests" of  their hardware for 6 months straight before shipping. Would that make it a scam or just late?

That will take 4 years and wil cut your mining revenue at most by half. 
Other asics coming online will take months and reduce your mining revenue to somewhere between 10% and 1% of what it is now.