I gotta wonder, did Pirate shut down before or after he learned the SEC was investigating him? He's obviously known for some time now.

They didn't, hence why the agent told the OP to contact the FTC and his state AG.

http://business.ftc.gov/documents/alt051-selling-internet-prompt-delivery-rules

"By law, you must have a reasonable basis for stating that a product can be shipped within a certain time. If your advertising doesn't clearly and prominently state the shipment period, you must have a reasonable basis for believing that you can ship within 30 days.

If you can't ship within the promised time (or within 30 days if you made no promise), you must notify the customer of the delay, provide a revised shipment date and explain his right to cancel and get a full and prompt refund.

For definite delays of up to 30 days, you may treat the customer's silence as agreeing to the delay. But for longer or indefinite delays - and second and subsequent delays - you must get the customer's written, electronic or verbal consent to the delay. If the customer doesn't give you his okay, you must promptly refund all the money the customer paid you without being asked by the customer.

Finally, you have the right to cancel orders that you can't fill in a timely manner, but you must promptly notify the customer of your decision and make a prompt refund."

Whoever's smart enough to bring their first-to-market private ASICS online right after a difficulty change is gonna be raking in the dough.

Your ROI isn't taking into account lots of other people having the same equipment or your order not shipping in the first batch.

Assuming they meet their target GH/s, you still won't be profitable long enough before there are too many units out there raising the difficulty up to astronomical levels.

There's more BFL ASIC hardware on pre-order then FPGA stuff that has already sold. You're also not taking into account other ASIC manufacturers (public and private) bringing their products to market around the same time. The current worst case scenario from the amount of $ in pre-order sales for SC miners (assuming they've only sold Jalapenos) is "only" 28TH/s of ASIC's being in the hands of miners shortly. That's doubling plus a 1/3 the current network hashing rate. SC miners alone (let's magically pretend no other hardware will be added to the network between now and then) are going to bring the difficulty rate up to 7,500,000. Assuming 20 watts and 3.5gh/s and 15 cent electricity, $20 bitcoin price, and half reward rate and the standard profitibility decline...you are correct, you'd break even within 2 months easily (assuming not many ASICS are being brought online in that time period).

However, I figure on the difficulty being somewhere around 10 million by the time the first batch of orders has started finally being shipped out (1 month after, and lets say you get yours after a month). So if we use 3.0 actual GH/s being delivered, $30 Bitcoin price,  half reward rate, and assuming a possible 5,000% profit decline in the first year (being retarded and saying something like 2000 TH/s being brought online) if everyone releases their goodies...OK, still within 2 months.

I was wrong.

Well, due to the current state of world government affairs anyway...

I cannot think of a viable situation that would pay a retarded amount of interest that someone would accept BTC for that wasn't illegal in some way. Either through selling illegal merchandise, services, evading taxation and regulation (hello SEC), or straight up fraud (Ponzi scheme or some kind of scam run by the operator in the outside world). So the person/entity operating the HYIP has every reason to be anonymous. Now, you can be anonymous too so that you reduce your exposure to any possible legal consequences...but then this just encourages the operator to run off with your money at some point.

And to even possibly work, the amount of BTC you invest *must* be converted into the equivalent amount of fiat with interest payments being made in that denomination.  Basing your interest payments in BTC has a high likely of eventually fucking you over due to market fluctuations.

So far, I have only seen anonymous operators taking in and paying out in BTC from anonymous people.

I hate government...but you're probably making a bad decision if the operator doesn't share their identity, doesn't tell you how they make their money, and has no evidence of being licensed and filing taxes.

tl;dr: If you keep thinking with the greedy part of your brain, you're going to get hurt.

Unfortunately, your idea is just going to encourage people to come up with fraudulent schemes for you to invest in. Don't kid yourself that they're going to allow you to actually withdraw.

Due to release delays, I wouldn't be surprised if the only people who are going to ever see a positive ROI on their BFL ASIC orders are those who are wisely trying to sell them before they ship to folks who haven't sat down and done the math.

Their pre-order pool is going to be so big that it will be self-destructive to the very miners who thought they were going to have an edge.

I'm not sure why pool operators would choose to use up so much bandwidth. You would think they could automatically detect your hashing power and adjust things accordingly.

Has nobody mentioned the tax liabilities you now expose yourself to for accepting PayPal?

https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=marketing_us/IRS6050W

Universal singularity:

I hope my tx got in block #200k.

Considering that the difficulty is going to go up to astronomical levels as soon as someone actually delivers an ASIC product, it won't.

Even now, it would take over 8 months for a BFL Single at list price to pay for itself.

A 20% fee is worth waiting a week to get your money (even Pirate didn't pay that much), so it's sort of silly to market your product to people who already are cashing out with Dwolla to their bank accounts. Instead, go for those who for whatever reason need to remain anonymous to the banking system.

Several other companies are also working on similar chips. I wouldn't personally invest in mining at this point, unless I had a shit ton of money to contract out my own ASIC design and manufacture them for my internal use. Like a Ponzi scheme, only the very first people who get their hands on off-the-shelf ASIC devices are going to have any kind of advantage that would ensure profitability.

Glad to hear both packages arrived OK and you enjoy them.

We are either animals who spend our lives making excuses for ourselves not to act like one, or we just need to learn to be able to love and be loved by others. I'd like to believe at least some of us who have made mistakes that have hurt others are finally able to make peace with ourselves.

Since TOR is used by our own government so it can get away with whatever fucked up shit they do anonymously over the internet, I don't see that happening. Sites on TOR even survive DDoS'ing.

Silk Road coin tumbling most likely.

Oh, I've said something similar here already. Can't disagree one bit. I wouldn't give Bitcoins for an unreleased product...

I think it just costs to much to try and track down people who are sending mail anonymously. Street pharmacists are pretty easy to trap and confiscate property from to support LE efforts.