Observing the freaking-out of miners driven by under-supply of ASIC mining rig (peaking in lucky lottery winners selling their $1.5k device for $20k), and based on the fact that ASICMINER developed their chips with NRE of less than $200k, one might conclude that developing ones own Bitcoin ASIC is the most obvious next step.

At least I concluded recently, but after discussing with some experienced insiders, it only supposedly sounds easy. The two core issues are

Time to Market
There is an absolute minimum development time of ~6 months to be considered. That is, no matter which expertise you hire and how hard you try to negotiate with fabs - starting our mining ASIC today we would have chips in our hands for Christmas. Quite some time for numerous 'what ifs' and surprises in the Bitcoin world.

Expertise and Luck
Having only two successful ASIC manufacturers out of four taking the challenge indicates that designing a mining chip is far from being trivial. There are rants over BFL all over the forum for being incompetent idiots failing to provide what they promised long ago. Being more objective, there is no doubt they had the highest skilled experts available money can buy (and they had tons of money) - and yet they failed to meet expectations. That's because luck is an immanent component with the development of such uncommon ASICs. Those engineers in this forum believing to work error free, go cast the first stone.


tl;dr: starting a new mining ASIC from scratch is already too late and overall maybe not the best idea.

Avalon initially planned to develop only the chips and let others do the productizing. Taking the opportunity to monetize the current shortage of mining rig supply to dictate prices and recover NRE fast is a legitimate approach. But as soon as a second manufacturer enters the competition, they will gradually be forced to concentrate on their core business - and that's where we should build on top of. There are only two manufacturers of CPUs for desktop PCs worldwide, that's enough for everybody to have a computer at home, as it is enough to keep up a healthy competition with continuous technologal advances.


I expect this scenario to be reached in Bitcoin world not later than by the end of this year. Avalon might still have one or two successful batches to sell, but then things will go to normal again. That is, to what we had at the beginning with CPUs/GPUs: whoever likes to support the Bitcoin network buys and attaches rig right away. No pre-order limbo and no pre-sale lotteries.

At least thats the plan

I do not care if someone will produce 1000 broads or just one. But i care if i want to produce just a few boards for me to be able to access same docs and technical details like the guy who is making business out of it. And i do care for the docs update also - When i found something wrong even with my single board i will report it. I will expect same to happen with the guy making 1000 boards. We all are obliged to contribute to the open source no matter if it is a business or hobby project

best

PS: the approach was similar with NG Icarus and Lancelot - All is published in github schematics, docs components, bitstream. And no one except NG as far as i know made a mass production just because two reasons - No guts/money to invest and the price of spartan itself.

Let us take our project to the end like Icarus, lancelot git with pcb design, git, docs, software and every one to decide which route to take

As far as I'm aware, BFL is waiting until a hardware revision is done to improve power usage before delivering any more.
I want the rest of my order just as much as anyone else 

Are you people OK with being cuckoo ? 

They toss a prototype around like dough and say they deliver pizza

Random thread necro...

Anyway, it did not happen because I do not have the capabilities to make it happen, and no one else seemed interested in making it happen.  If I had the capabilities, I would have most certainly made it happen. 

I would commit funds to this.

BFL will deliver ASIC devices before April 1st

Butterfly Labs aka BFL will deliver ASIC Bitcoin mining devices to their customers before 1st of April 2013. Devices must be in scope of +-10% of advertised performance in order to be accepted as valid.

welching  present participle of welsh
Verb
Fail to honor (a debt or obligation incurred through a promise or agreement).

@kano: Your error is that you do not properly consider the effect of round length on how much shares are worth.

In a proportional pool, shares in a short round are worth more than in a long round. If you look at the intra-round level then yes, hoppers get per share the same as anyone else in the round. But the trick is that hoppers get more of their shares in short rounds than normal miners, thus profit more per share.

So to be fair in a proportional system you need not only for all shares in a round to be rewarded equally, you also need each share to have the same chance to go into a short round as other shares. And this simply doesn't hold true for hoppers, so it's unfair.

To give an analogy: At a soup kitchen people are randomly assigned to a line where potatoes are handed out or a line where meat (which is superior) is handed out. Suppose someone sneaks into the meat line although he was assigned to the potato line. He gets the same food as everyone else in the line - but it's unfair because he cheated his way into the better line. (Though this example will only make sense to people who understand that true randomness is fair).

In DGM the concept of rounds isn't rigidly defined. If a hopper tries to hop a DGM pool as if it was proportional then yes, in every "round" he'd get per share on average less than normal miners. But this is only because the artificial division to rounds is flawed. What matters is the reward per share on the global level. If you must, you can say that hoppers get more of their shares in the shorter, more lucrative rounds, but in those rounds get less per share than other shares in the round. The two effects cancel each other to result in average payout per share equal to (1-f)pB, no matter the mining pattern.


And I disagree vehemently with your sentiment that "maths wins logic loses". If a mathematical result seems illogical the art did not fail you, it is you who failed the art.