There is an invoice # even if not paid.  You haven't explained how you reach the conclusion that 1,800 invoices = 1,800 paid orders.  BFL uses bitpay which generates a unique invoice number for every payment request.  For the record the invoice when checking out now is #100075776.  How many of those are paid orders?  Who knows.  Nobody is doubting you saw the invoice number you did you just seem to be missing the invoice =/= paid invoice link.

None of that is particularly new although I am glad Marco Santori did a review.  There are a lot of issues with FinCEN's guidance and especially the miner portion would indicate a complete lack of understanding by FinCEN on how the network operates and how silly their "guidance is".  To illustrate the point FinCEN provides no exemption for a miner exchanging using a registered MSB.  Thus by the (ludacris) letter of FinCEN guidance a miner selling coins on MtGox would still need to register as a MSB even if MtGox was registered as a MSB.  The silliest part is that as a MSB the miner would need to collect and retain KYC information from their client which would be MtGox.  Can you see MtGox sending certified identity documents to every miner who is registered as a MSB.  If the miner registered and then didn't collect identity documentation it would be a violation of the BSA (a criminal offense).

At this point it is just a big ball of stupidity.  FinCEN opened fire with both barrels without aiming.  Still that is the fun of being on the cutting edge of bureaucracy. 

Updated to include estimates for Cointerra & Monarch.  Given the high efficiency of most devices switched efficiency units to J/GH.

#4 is interesting.  It would logically seem their only options are hashing power in multiples of 500 GH/s as that is the capability of a single chip. 

I might be interested if there was a contract with a black and white hard deadline date and penalty of 25% extra hashing power per week (exactly 7 days late) up to +100%.

Something like
2.0 TH/s if shipped by 31 DEC JAN 2014 or earlier.
2.5 Th/s if shipped before 7 JAN 2014.
3.0 TH/s if sipped  on 14 JAN 2014.
3.5 TH/s if shipped after 22 JAN 2014.
4.0 TH/s if shipped after 28 JAN 2014.

Note for the reading impaired this is NOT Cointerra's protection plan just IMHO what it will take for such a later offering.


Still it does make you wonder what BFL Monarch buyers are thinking.  Cointerra has at least BFL beat in every possible category even if we assume "this time will be different" for BFL.
                           

BFL Monarch is higher cost per GH ($8 per GH vs $6.95 per GH)
BFL is lower efficiency (when you consider entire system "at the wall"  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=281279.msg3008390#msg3008390)
BFL is promising a later delivery (February after the whole rocket run already sold out bait and switch)

This is also assuming BFL will actually delivery on time, on spec so it could be considered a best case scenario for BFL.    Why anyone bought a Monarch I have no idea.

Oh the power of government enforced monopolies.  

Anyone have a good idea on how to figure out ASICMiner sales other than try to look historically for every group buy and direct sale in the past couple months?

If not posting links and totals form various group buys would be a start.  If any reseller wants to help me out that would be awesome.

Something like

Thanks, that is a new one.  I think I will change the OP to break it into deployed in 2013 and deployed in 2014.  The reason is that due to falling revenue per GH/s each month it is more important to get the short term accurate then the long term.  4 PH/s in March really doesn't affect someone who has a current pre-order because honestly if you haven't hit 100% ROI by March you probably aren't going to and if you are profitable you likely will make most (75%, 80%, 90%) of your lifetime revenue.

and at the very least you can expect to be able to buy a 2TB one in 2023 for roughly the same price.

You are better off spending your money on insurance.  As I posted upthread, no surge protector can handle a (near) direct strike and any decent UL rated one should be fine for distance strike causing damaging overcurrent on the distribution lines.  Most default policies have silly low limits on categories like bullion, computers, electronics, etc.  You will need to ask the insurance company to write a "high value personal property" rider.  Electronics are generally pretty cheap.  I insured $10K in GPU rigs (loss, theft, destruction) for year and it I can't remember the premium but it was under $100.

This!
A little insider reference to the man that started it all.

I don't want to speak bad about other companies however Coinabul's issues don't seem to have effected other merchants even other bitcoin bullion merchants.  The fact that they are not an MSB (FinCEN clearly excludes those who sell goods or services for BTC) and has had a history of delivery problems makes me think there may be more going on there.  I am not sure why they would even notify their bank about Bitcoin they could just use a payment processor like coinbase or bitpay.  

As far as banks disliking MSBs, that portion is correct and they let us known with the banking fees we pay.  At our peak before closing we were paying close to $4,000 a month in banking fees.  One bank (which I will not name to protect the guilty) charged us $120 an hour to review our AML plan .... and took 20 hours (or so they say).  They also require the AML plan to be reviewed annually.  Banks .... what a business.  We have also had banks close our accounts in the past without reason or appeal and I have no doubt it will happen in the future.  Banks aren't required to provide a reason for closing accounts and anything which their models perceive as high risk can result in a closure.  We use multiple banks and try to keep them informed but it is always a risk. 

Interesting chart.  IMHO (which doesn't really mean anything don't take it the wrong way) I think it is too aggressive.  I would consider it a worst case scenario.  I find it unlikely the growth would be more aggressive than that.  I added it to the OP.  If you can provide numbers I would like to add that as an alternate viewpoint for the OP.

Some comments in no particular order

KNC: Shows shipping 2.2PH/s in roughly 30 days.  Based on breakdown on known orders, the average unit is ~0.25 TH/s.  That would mean shipping ~8,880 units in 30 days.  While not impossible it seems improbable if for nothing other than a manpower perspective.  To go from zero to ~300 units per day would be impressive.  Also I am interested to know where the 2.2 PH/s.  Based on their probable die size that would be a massive number of wafers and represents about $38 million in sales.  For the record I think other estimates of very small die are inaccurate.  Given the package size and power consumption it would seem to be unlikely.

Avalon:
~1.2 TH/s by end of year is about 3x all known rigs and chips.  Curious why you would think Avalon will sell that many chips?  Especially now given their massive delays, lack of price drop, and poor "rep" in the community.  Since Yifu update, among the major bulk orders a grand total of 3 orders totaling about 24K chips have been shipped.  That works out to about 3.3 TH/week.  To ship another 1000 TH by the end of the year (~18 weeks) would require shipping 20x as fast.  At the current rate it will take two years just to ship the known 275 TH/s of chip orders.  I am not sure what the problem is with Avalon but I don't think they will sell that much capacity nor will they ship it that fast.

ASICMiner:
1TH/s by end of year seems ambitious given they have had difficulty keeping the 50 TH/s existing farm operating anywhere near peak capacity (falling from 47TH/s to 30 TH/s over the course of two weeks and despite recovering in the last week not exceeding 40 TH/s).  BTW I am an ASICMiner shareholder and I believe in Friedcat but I would think 1 TH/s by end of year would be a best case scenario for shareholders (worst case scenario for everyone else) and I wonder how likely that is.  Granted ASICMiner additional capacity is likely a 2nd gen chip and thus should have on the order of 4x (55nm) to 8x (28nm) power efficiency and density (hashpower per square foot of warehouse space).  Still 1TH/s even w/ 2nd gen chips would represent growing the farm's footprint (space & power) 500% to 1000%.  Given the difficulty in maintaining 50 TH/s today I am not confident that will be easy.  A lot could change in the next couple weeks though.

Bitfury & Hashfast:
The growth seems probable but the max capacity seems light (kinda hard to tell with the scale of graph).  For HF they will have to have another 880 TH/s to cover excess chips for MPP.  Either way those chips will be used in January.  Either they 1st batch will make ROI and HF will sell the excess chips or they won't and the excess chips will be given out as part of the MPP.

Cointerra:
Could be the graph but it looks like more than 2 PH/s.  I also think showing delivery starting 1 DEC is at this point impossible; "in Dec" is ASIC code for 31 DEC (and likely 1-2 weeks late but that will be close enough that we don't look that bad).  Similar to KNC I don't think 2 PH/s per month in delivery is likely.  Although based on KNC "rollout" we will have a better idea for Cointerra. 

Still I think it is great, it got me thinking about other options.  It also points a pretty gloomy picture as a worst case scenario.  If it unfolds like that I don't see anyone except the chip producers having a % ROI.  Any chance you could share the raw numbers behind the graph and your rationale?  I am interested more in the thought behind the numbers than the actual numbers.

The first response was more accurate the second one didn't look at the lack of hashing power of your gear and left you with false hope.

CPU mining is dead.  It will take you about $20,000 in electricity and probably a couple decades to mine 1 BTC on a laptop.  There is absolutely no reason to do this unless you like wasting lots of money on electricity and possibly destroying your laptops.

You don't need to poll anything to "bring back" BTC.  In pool mining you give the pool an address and they pay your share of the rewards there.  It can be a wallet anywhere in the world.  There is no need for it to be on the same computer that is doing the mining.  You deliver hashing power to the pool, the pool gives you your fair share of any block rewards found.

Yes miners run all the time.  If you run them half the time they will generate half as much and given the cost of hardware and the fact that they generate less revenue over time that wouldn't make any sense.  All mining hardware is designed for 24/7/365 operation.  You turn it on, and (hopefully) never turn it off until it is obsolete.  To solve a block requires on average (difficulty)*(2^32) hashes. So 65 million * 2^32 = 279,172,874,240,000 hashes per block (that is 25 BTC).

Simple version

You could still mine it and sell it for BTC. 

Sorry I wasn't clear.  I was responding to the OP who stated "Bitcoin Foundation should file a lawsuit against BFL".

I must be getting old.   

This is where it start to get confusing.  Can cointerra produce 2 PH/s without pre-orders.  If not then do they have enough pre-orders to start production.  Given the almost universal negative response I would think not but then it starts to get real subjective.  I guess I will just mark em down for 2 PH/s.

Thanks.

On edit: maybe should indicate if tapeout has been completed.  That is the final large fixed cost.  A company which doesn't complete the tapeout may never produce an ASIC but once taped out it is highly unlikely a company won't be able to sell all of its initial lot.  Maybe not at the price it wants, maybe the company even loses money on the deal but ultimately that hashpower is going to make it to the market.

If someone wants to rise the table to show "status" and anticipated delivery I wouldn't complain. If not I will do it this weekend.

BFL has been making delivery promises for over a year.  I wouldn't trust any timeline they give.  Maybe if you double it and add three months it might be correct.   

Due to the low number of active nodes and the fact that hashing power didn't even meet difficulty (the expected time between blocks was ~30 minutes) blocks from the first year aren't really useful. Anecdotal I remember waiting 2 hours for the 6th confirm (not 6 confirms just one more confirm to make 6) so MtGox would credit my account.

It would be useful if someone pulled the timestamps from the blockchain and put them in table form.  The only problem is that since the network allows such loose timestamps any 1 block distribution is going to have "weird" numbers (like negative block times).  However the results should be cleaner if one looked at multiple bloks.  i.e. the distribution of a 3 block or 6 block interval.  That might be more useful in a lot of circumstances (like seeing how rare my deposit at MtGox frustration was).

A good safe doesn't rely on the hinges, they are just used to make the door swing.  You could cut the hinges off but it would just be a waste of time. 

Any safe can be broken into.  Any safe.  Given enough time.  The purpose of a safe to increase the amount of time it takes for thief to complete the theft.  Alarm system ensures they have a limited time.  If the time to break into (or remove) safe is longer the alarm response time then the safe has done its job.


Yes cash can be insured.  Insurance underwriters limit the amount of cash, jewelry, bullion they will insure by the quality level of the safe.  Nobody insures Bitcoins ... yet.  Someday maybe and it probably would be insured similar to cash or bullion.