It's a shame the 1000 BTC donation to charity is if they miss their power targets, not their shipping date.

It sounds like they do know which bumping facility is involved, though, as they made the choice to switch from one in North Carolina to one in California.  While it sounds like there's a hell of a communication breakdown, it also sounds like BFL "didn't know what they didn't know".

There's not really any reason for the packaging facility to assume their client has never heard of a blank alignment wafer and won't be supplying one.  It's possible that the first either the packaging facility or the bumping facility learned about that was when the wafers arrived at the bumping facility.  It's like trying to hurry up the printers when you failed to supply them with the artwork for your job.  Now is the time to make sure that they know exactly what is needed for the remaining steps so they're not delayed by something BFL didn't take into account.

From what Josh has posted, it's the packaging facility which is dealing with the bumping facility.  Changing the bumping facility quite late in the game might have created issues, too.  It's not like all these facilities sit around doing nothing all week just hoping for piddly little rush orders to come in.  BFL might be a large vendor in a very small pond but they're a tiny little fish in the massive customer ocean.

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/announcements/692-bfl-asic-status-2.html#post16043

New estimated shipping date.

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/bfl-forum-miscellaneous/1163-february-25th-2012-update-discussion-thread-2.html#post16081

I honestly doubt that very many Batch 1 customers will cancel, no matter how bad the next estimate is.  I do think that unless they can regain some credibility and prove that they're capable of giving estimates which are at least within the ballpark, they're at risk of losing a lot of later orders, though.  

You'd have to be crazy to have any faith in their delivery estimates for Batch 2 and beyond right now when they can't give reliable estimates for how long the few remaining steps for Batch 1 will take to complete.  Ensuring this kind of clusterfuck doesn't happen again with the next 6 wafers or the 63 following wafers will require pro-active measures on BFL's behalf and if they want people to stick with them until May, June or even later, then they need to be telling people what they're going to do to ensure that their customers don't become stuck in the land of never-ending back-orders.  

BFL is not going to remain the only mass producer of ASICs forever - sooner or later someone will come along who doesn't require pre-orders and who can ship orders within a week of them being placed.  BFL expected to be the first company able to do that, but as the back-orders keep piling up and delivery schedules keep slipping, it seems less and less likely they'll be able to accomplish that before someone else.

If BFL has enough funds to offer the bumping facility a "blank cheque", then they have enough funds to engage someone to troubleshoot this project.  Josh is clearly out of his depth in terms of managing customer expectations - it's time to hand that job over to someone else because this isn't going to end when Batch 1 ships.  

People want credible reassurances that the schedule for the second 6,000 chips is going to be better managed, and especially that the batch of 75,000 chips is going to be made into actual units and shipped some time this year.  Someone needs to get this project back on track and they need to explain to existing and potential customers how that's going to happen.

Deflecting blame to the bumping facility is unacceptable.  It's up to whoever's in charge of the project to ensure that contractors are chosen wisely, that contracts are locked down, and that contractors are provided with what they need to do their job (if your chip is so dense that creating the mask will take extra time at the fab or that the absence of an alignment wafer will slow down bumping, it's your responsibility to know that).

Even if the bumping facility burns down with the chips, there should be enough insurance on the project to refund customers whose orders are affected.

BFL should cease taking any further pre-orders until this project is back on track and they can offer delivery in a reasonable time-frame.

Edit.  What in the hell is going on that Josh feels it would be inappropriate to disclose publicly?  People with pre-orders are undoubtedly stakeholders, but they're not necessarily entitled to the same level of detail as investors or board members.  Seriously, if you can't provide enough information publicly to reassure your existing customers, then why on earth should they trust you for another day instead of cancelling their orders right now?  And why should any potential customer take a chance on ordering with you?

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/bfl-forum-miscellaneous/1034-february-14th-2012-update-discussion-thread-12.html#post16015

Reassurance needs to be as public as possible right now. 

I was under the impression that the exact arrangements vary by province in Canada.

Also, here in Australia we have both single payer (medical costs) and universal (hospital costs) healthcare but there are circumstances under which you might choose to go private and incur additional costs - either because you want to use a particular doctor and that doctor charges more than the government pays for a specific service or because you can get a particular procedure done faster by using the private system.

Again, the best way to get an idea of actual out of pocket costs is to talk to parents who've trodden this path before.  For things not covered by the government, cancer organisations often subsidise the cost to some extent.  The worst possible time to find out the cost of something isn't covered by the government is when you need it right now.

It's great to say that the bumping facility can't wrap their heads around urgency.  In fact the problem seems to be BFL being unable to wrap their heads around the fact that you can't leave organising these steps until your chips are ready to roll out of the fab because these facilities book slots many months in advance.

And "blank cheque" my ass.  They may have offered to pay over the going rate for urgent orders, but let's not pretend that they're willing or able to pay 10 or 20 million hurry up the bumping.

I'm not sure that there's any reason to believe that bumping, packaging and board assembly of the second 6000 chips is going to happen any more quickly than the first.  Batch 2 is also going to be a small order which facilities are going to fit in around other work and the likelihood of all the facilities having open slots so the process flows seamlessly is small.

He did ask people to keep the private sales reasonably large so abbeytim might need to wait for the trading platform.

Hopefully they've learned something from the other vendors and will unveil their product when they already have their supply chain in order and can offer a rapid turnaround time on orders.

Someone has to break the whole pre-order thing sooner or later and start offering ASICs with less than a week's turnaround time - it might as well be one of the new players because BFL is so hopelessly backlogged now that the only way they're going to be able to offer a reasonable turnaround time on orders this year is if they stop taking new orders for a while, and Avalon is likely to continue producing their ASICs in small batches for the foreseeable future.

I wonder whether BFL even considered this possibility in their risk management assessments.  This might not even be the only company which has developed chips which are near ready for release to the B2B market.  For all we know, there's another company out there we haven't yet heard of which has end user units almost ready for release, too.

This could force BFL to go to a smaller process sooner than they'd originally planned, or to drop the prices of their current units earlier than they'd hoped.  It's definitely going to be interesting as more and more players enter the ASIC market.

It will be interesting to see how quickly they can get it back over 4.5 TH.  Perhaps they're testing that themselves.  It'd be nice to see it just keep climbing now, all the way up to 12 TH.

4   67117   123.77 GH/s

Has there been a big drop in overall network hashrate or just BTC Guild hashrate?   It will be interesting to see if their hash power turns up somewhere else.

People have been photographing snowflakes since the 19th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_Bentley

Some of them really are that intricate and that perfect (they also come in less impressive shapes).  NatGeo ran a special on snowflakes when I was in high school.  Someone had perfected a technique of encasing them in plastic before they melted and the whole thing was so fascinating that I remember it 40 years later.

Banks don't normally accept your word for any assets and income you list - they usually require proof.  If you're lucky, they'll just decline the loan if you can't provide proof that you have "foreign currency holdings" or an "offshore trust" to the value claimed.  If you're less lucky, they'll regard it as attempted fraud.

I think they'll deliver and their units will probably perform better than advertised specs - their customers will likely get more than they paid for in that respect.

What's not clear - and what affects the company and its investors more than its customers - is whether they'll be able to remain competitive in an environment where their first generation products are hitting the market at the same time as other vendors are working on their gen 2 products and new players are also entering the retail ASIC market. By the time they've caught up with their back orders around June, there's no guarantee that theirs will be the superior products available at a retail level.

If their projections were based on having a dominant market share for a prolonged period of time, then further delays could have a serious impact on their bottom line.  

It would be a great thing from an end-user point of view, given that BFL is really the only company whose objective from the outset was to develop an ASIC unit for retail sale.  Avalon originally intended to manufacture chips and not complete units and ASICMiner intended to make their boards available for sale rather than complete units.  One or more companies wholesaling chips alone will likely lead to more options for those seeking to buy complete units at a retail level as well as for those who want to buy/develop complete boards only.

That someone would enter this market is something current ASIC vendors should definitely have foreseen, and it will be interesting to see how their business models accommodate an increasing amount of competition so soon after launch.

Until there's some move against Bitcoin per se, it doesn't.  To date, any potential or actual legal battles involving Bitcoin have basically been contractual disputes in which the nature of Bitcoin isn't a central issue or centred on regulatory issues unrelated to Bitcoin.

Even if you could force a test case regarding Bitcoin, it doesn't mean it would be a good idea and you really need to consider whether a court ruling on the nature of Bitcoin while it's so immature would be beneficial or bring with it unintended consequences.

I understand you might not want to talk about it with us, but I strongly recommend you talk about it with other parents who have walked this path already.  Your idea of taking out a second mortgage might not be the best plan of action if you're going to need to take any significant amount of unpaid time off work.  Other parents can also give you an idea of what things it's worth spending extra money on out of pocket and what things it isn't.

There are organisations whose sole purpose for existing is to help parents in your situation access services you probably don't even realise are out there.  The social worker at the medical facility where your son will be receiving treatment should be able to hook you up with all kinds of help, both practical and emotional.

If your employer is a large company, look into whether they allow donation of leave time by other employees.  Some companies allow this and it can be extremely useful for helping people maintain an income when they would otherwise have no choice but to take unpaid leave.  Talk to your company and see what employee welfare programmes they have which might be able to help you.