To get more money from people.

They figured out that selling chips takes no effort on their part except shipping and reaping.

Or, /donsconspiracyhat, to keep them out of bankruptcy^_~

Other investments aren't this risky. The unknowns are huge and that's why the returns must be equally large. These things could have a decent first month, sucky second month, and terrible third month, possibly doubling your money but little more. Or they could be operated profitably for a year. Who knows. Beyond that there's the risks of holding bitcoin itself and the risk of can the company deliver at all.

Possibly, but I'll be surprised if they haven't shipped everything by the end of July, except their chip orders.

Break-even (in terms of bitcoin) in 37.9 days at today's difficulty (4-unit). And these will ship, it seems, within the month.

Meh, there's plenty of room for people to simply be enthusiastic, fan-style, and defending. Bitcoinorama is the polar opposite of KS in this respect, but I'm not about to diss KS as being a paid critic.

When dealing with unknowns, everyone is dealing not in the realm of deductions but inductions, of what is likely. Bitcoin falls on one side of that spectrum--and I happen to agree with him--and KS on the other. Both are healthy and productive voices to add to the conversation.

I've seen nothing from either to indicate anything other than that each simply has different levels of concerns about the company.

And BFL has done a lot to earn everyone's ire. It's not like anyone needs to be paid to diss BFL these days.

There is a news section, it's just kinda hard to find! And there they both announced the drawing and that the drawing had ended, but no winner yet (haven't checked lately tho).

United States. Apparently if you use EMS in the US it'll arrive to you using USPS, which is the government cut-rate carrier >_>

Orsoc open cores initiative is nothing new.

I think the installation of the SMT line was the holdup. With that complete, I expect to see serious shipping activity soon.

I'm not sure I understand your meaning. ASICs are much faster and more efficient than FPGAs. Nothing they've claimed is outside the realm of reality for a non-structured ASIC such as they claim to be using. It's just a real ASIC.

And how many months do you think they've been planning and working on this? Reveal of work =/= start of work.

I'd never heard of EMS, so opted for DHL. That was my deciding factor here anyway.

Lol, where do you get this idea o_O The Jupiter miner would still make a marginal profit if the difficulty were 1 billion.

Suuuuuure, email I received:

https://i.imgur.com/j9qMdi4.png

Can't you just modularize the unit and plan to have a certain break-down on average? I mean, ASICs like this Jupiter device are already going to have a looot of chips in it anyway. That creates a certain arbitrage opportunity of sorts. Say you can reasonably expect a 70% yield, then you promise a device with 70% of X number of chips theoretical capacity. That way you're virtually guaranteed to get the device you want.

This is not like trying to create an Intel CPU where the end-user wants one damn good chip and only really one and high yield is especially important.

Then, as I said, you modularize the chip, building it in units such that if a unit fails you simply turn it off and route around it so that the entire chip itself isn't sour. Sony did this with the PS3 Cell-chip, built in 8 units and assuming that 1 would be failed typically, meaning an 87.5% yield expected. Some chips with 8 units working still deactivated one unit just to remain consistent! But with an ASIC you wouldn't bother with that, you'd just take the extra performance. And the result is their promise +/- 10% was it, or 5%? Anyway, that's my uneducated guess of how things are going to go.

We had word on monday, actually. New SMT line is up and running, production is full steam ahead, expect shipment soon.

You really think Orsoc is going to make rookie mistakes like that, like BFL made? Come on.

They are -not- using a structured ASIC:

Apparently the chips are in production right now. We know the design has been finalized. They then ship the chips to their PCB assembler and have lets say a few weeks to organize shipping. Seems doable. We're thinking in a time-frame that's likely much shorter than what these guys put together. They might've been working on this for a year and have long-range time commitments long-since setup, whereas we're only aware of the effort last few months tops, so it seems incredible that they're essentially pulling these out of a hat, but that may not be the case at all.