Mid last year the superior option for buying BFL devices was to use US dollars, not bitcoins.  As the price of bitcoins appreciated the number of bitcoins that must be generated by the ASIC device to achieve ROI decreased.  I took the US dollar option and have BFL units mining away.  ROI within four weeks because I chose not to pay with bitcoins.  

Would I order an ASIC now?  Not sure, but if I would, I would use dollars again.  Many people believe the value of bitcoins will go up, and the difficulty rate will also inevitably be much higher.  In both scenarios the only way to pay is with anything but bitcoins.  Paying with bitcoins for an ASIC devices makes ROI much more difficult versus just buying bitcoins, when ROI is compared BTC used to BTC generated.

Back when PirateAt40's inevitable scam collapsed I mentioned the collapse to a friend.  He had heard about bitcoins before and said 'see, I told you that bitcoin thing was just a scam'.  I had to carefully explain PirateAt40 used bitcoin to commit a scam.  It was just a tool. 

In the short term the SEC action means the general public hears about bitcoin and another scam, which is definately not good.  Longer term the news may be better as the US government is interested in chasing people setting up obvious scams, even when it comes to things the US government doesn't recognise as money.

A Zero Hedge link to the main article claimed Mr Shavers had already spent a large chunk of the bitcoins by carefully investing in his own personal lifestyle.  Don't expect a seizure and large amounts of bitcoins to be handed back to mathematically challenged victims.  1% returns per day, who would honestly believe that?  Seems like quite a few did.

Ever watched the Finance section of the nightly news where some stock broker accurately describes the day's market behaviour?  Hindsight is 20/20 as they say and the talking head always give a very detailed description about why the market moved the way it did and exactly what the traders were thinking.  The presenter never sits there and says 'well, it was pretty irrational today and I don't have a good explanation about what people were drinking'.  I feel the bubble of 2013 was very much the same.  Chances are we may never know whether it was Cyprus or a bunch of traders buying because other like minded traders believed it would go higher still.

A real estate agent once told me he 'sells the sizzle, not the sausage'.  He was a salesman selling hopes and dreams and couldn't care less about the item he was selling.  Maybe Cyprus added a bit of sizzle to the market with bitcoin holders' dreams of Cypriots rushing to bitcoin dealers to get money out of the country.  A bit of old fashioned buy the rumour and sell the news.

I remember looking at the exponential growth past $100, $150, and then $200 and thinking at the $100 stage it was all going to end in tears.  Those lucky souls who bought at $250+ must be feeling mighty pleased right now as the greatest fools we could find.  It could be viewed as a metaphor for the way some people extract money from modern Western economies too.  Buy value, but damn well try and find a sucker really quickly who will pay more still.  Don't want to be the last chump holding the bag when it all collapses.

Indeed, I could have purchased a lot more bitcoins for the same USD mid last year than I can now and overall had more money, but I guess the question is would I have?  For me the answer is no.  Woulda, coulda, shoulda is a prime enemy for any trader.  I preferred to buy mining hardware rather than speculate on the bitcoin price itself.  Even the most enthusiastic hyper bull did not predict this year's $266 bubble in mid 2012.  In hindsight BFL's many delays cost a lot of people considerable profit.  But hindsight is 20/20 as they say and there's nothing that can be done about it now.  If anyone can confirm that a bitcoin will be worth $2k this time next year however please feel free to drop me a line  

Ultimately for me bitcoin is a way to make USD and then convert them to my home currency to actually use.  Pretty much any commodity is the same, whether it's gold, silver, platinum, oil, etc.  The value has to be measured against the currency of the realm.  I can't go into my local supermarket with 1/20oz of gold and buy groceries, and neither can I spend a bitcoin there.

126k btc for Satoshi Dice?  Well done, nice sale.

I remember visiting Satoshi Dice around two years ago when it was still a pretty plain site.  Now... "The Ghost of Satoshi will roll the dice".  LOL!  Well done to whoever wrote that gem.  Anyone who is influenced by that into parting with their bitcoins deserves to gamble them away.

I purchased my Jalapenos with USD, not bitcoins.  ROI for me with postage and 2Gh cost included was about three weeks.  I guess you could say I won the speculation game by paying with dollars as bitcoins went up in value during the time it took BFL to deliver.  Had it been the other way around the people paying with bitcoins would be cheering now.  All my costs, from electricity to the mortgage I pay for the place where the Jalapenos sit is paid in anything but bitcoins.

Bitcoin is a very high risk, high reward tool.  We all understand that and accept the inherent risks.

If MtGox collapsed (with the risk of taking all the bitcoins and money with it) it would severely depress bitcoin's price.  I wouldn't be surprised to see 80 to 90% falls within hours as speculators panic and try to withdraw money from the bitcoin system while they still can.

ASIC companies don't mind having to ship product without mining with it first.  Why?  The sooner they ship the sooner difficulty goes up, and the sooner their first ASIC customers return seeking more ASICs to keep profitability up.  Selling gear is guaranteed instant profit.  Even better when customers prepay and you have money in the bank before shipping.  Using the units to mine always carries risk as bitcoin could crater and be worth $1 tomorrow with the company left with a lot of useless gear no one would want.

New BTC are only anonymous if you cannot be linked in any way to a particular IP address when signing up for a pool account with an email address (another vector), logging in to check your mining stats, doing the mining or collecting the mining reward.  It can be done but it requires careful planning and no mistakes.  Solo mining when done right is safer but far more costly in terms of equipment required.

I have just joined 50btc and encountered this issue as well.  BFL units hashing and being accepted but suddenly 50BTC stats state both are offline and my hashing rate drops to zero.  Just where are my hashes going to in that case?  I restarted cgminer and instantly all units came back online in the stats.

Just noticed another moment where it claims I'm offline but miners are working well.  Came back by itself this time. 

I think my quote for express postage on 2x Jalapenos was US$300 extra or something silly like that.  ~$35 for normal post that took exactly a week to Australia.  Paying $300 more would have shaved 2 days off at the very best.

I have two Jalapenos here hashing away, generating about $25/day income for me.  By the above assertion, why did BFL ship these highly profitable units to me and not keep them until mining wasn't profitable?  BFL has stated they do not mine with the units they produce before shipping them.  Whether people choose to believe this or not is up to them.

BFL and other ASIC producers are not stupid by selling highly profitable units instead of keeping them for themselves.  Have a look at BFL's preorder queue.  It would not have built up to such an extent if people didn't believe they could get a profitable unit.  Whether BFL can ship in a timely manner is another question, but anyone is free to use a difficulty calculator to estimate whether their unit will be profitable by the time it ships.

Here is the ASIC business model:  sell ASIC miners to the general public.  Once everyone has an ASIC they'll naturally want another, and then another, to keep profitability up as everyone else has caught up.  It's like the situation with the transition from CPU to GPU mining.  Once everyone was sitting with a GPU no one was better off than in the CPU mining days.  People went out and bought more GPUs, and more again.  That moment will come with ASICs, where 5Gh/s will be producing 50c a day and the only way to get more money is to... buy another miner.

If China dumps US Treasuries it would cripple the US economy.  Destroying the economy of your second largest trading partner (largest is the entire EU combined) is economic suicide.

No, it's definately not worth buying GPUs now to mine.  Consider that my two Jalapenos are processing 15Gh/s while consuming 83 watts (including laptop).  With current difficulty my mining break even point is with the BTC price sitting on $2.  More are joining the ASIC ranks every month.  Mining with GPUs now is like mining with CPUs in 2011.

Got it.  Cgminer working.  Will take a little while for the hash rate to settle down and see how many errors I get with cgminer vs bfgminer.  cgminer is reporting some HW nonce errors, with unit 1 having approx 3x more errors than unit 0.

Unit 0 (few errors) is running about 3.45 to 3.55v,  Unit 1 (many more errors) always has a higher voltage by about 0.05v to 0.1v.

Just noticed in my Slush pool stats that my Jalapenos have found a block.  Not bad after only a week.  Pity I have to share it with the rest of the pool 

cgminer-nogpu still crashes at start up after reporting it cannot init the USB devices.  I tried downloading the newer USB drivers from BFL's Driver page and installing them, but the installer reported I already have the updated drivers on my laptop.

Edit: I haven't switched to WinUSB so will try that and see how it goes.

I'm using bfgminer 3.1.1.  I tried to use cgminer but it didn't work.  Just crashed on start up (basic Asus laptop, Win8).  I have restarted both units several times and apart from a 5% or so speed difference at start up, one unit always reports far more errors than the other.

I have noticed hardware errors are almost zero when bfgminer starts with difficulty 1, and only when it switches to 4 do the vast bulk of errors appear.  I'm mining on Slush's pool.

It doesn't look like bfgminer reports voltages.  Here are the other stats from the main screen.

ST: 2  NB:603  E:43.53  GF:2  AS:0  U:51.4/m  BS:2.39M

Interesting overclocking results and great thread.

My two recently received Jalapenos are quite different beasts, with one performing much better than the other.

Both upgraded to 5+2Gh/s, 37 celsius operation.  Unmodified firmware straight from BFL.

7.6Gh/s, A: 120,291,  HW: 1701
7.1Gh/s, A: 112,529,  HW: 8528

Mining is occurring at difficulty 4 but I understand the hardware error check is run at difficulty 1, so the error rate isn't as terrible as it looks.

Overclocking usually comes with the risk of ruining the product in the long term due to effects such as electromigration, but with my Jalapenos I'm a little concerned the higher error rate from the second unit suggests it's already running at the upper boundary of overclocking.  Thoughts?

Australian Customs will take the "value" of the item being the value plus the shipping cost.  Years ago when I received a package from Hong Kong that was sold on eBay the Customs guy actually went online to check the item's price and added on the shipping costs before calculating GST.  Then added around $60 in Customs duty on top.

Australia has a $1000 tax free threshold on imports (local retail sector is screaming for it to be lowered to, lol, $20) so I was careful to order just enough upgraded Jalapenos to not breach the limit.

From my point of view its always been the cost of production plus some value associated with usefulness for buying goods and value as a highly speculative asset.  Right now we're seeing GPU miners being squeezed out by the cost of electricity.  Only those with very cheap or 'free' electricity can afford to mine.  If the price of bitcoins exceeds the electricity price to generate them it makes sense to buy and not mine.  This also pushes the price up.  Actual commerce in bitcoins is still small.  Name one major online retailer that gives a discount for using bitcoins or favours their use in preference to other forms of payment.

The speculative value of bitcoins right now has popped.  Cyprus' bank troubles are long gone in the minds of the mainstream media and those speculators burned by the $250+ bubble might be wary of venturing in again.

Enter ASICs.  These little devices make a bitcoin price of $2 still profitable with current difficulty.  In the short term there will be pressure downwards on the price as ASIC miners basically do not care about costs.  A BFL Jalapeno at 5Gh/s with laptop costs as little as US$0.10c/day to run.  It's a rounding error in anyone's daily budget.  These miners will never give up and continue to place pressure on the price to recoup their investments.