The women should give you 50%...why?  You're not the first person to set up a cam service which takes Bitcoins.  Hell, people have even gone to camgirl forums before and tried to convince the women there to take Bitcoins and I've yet to see anyone mount a convincing argument about why a middleman who takes 50% is either needed or desirable.  

Paid cam services already have to compete with the free-cam market.  Unless you can offer absolutely exceptional marketing which is going to translate into a lot more people buying the product, what motivation do the camgirls have to pay you 50% of what customers are being charged?

I think you've misunderstood what they're looking for.  They're just making chips and won't be supplying anything to end users.  They're looking for companies who want to get into the ASIC market without having to develop their own chips - how each company utilises those chips will determine which company's products offer the best value for end users.  There'll basically be 3 or 4 companies designing their product around the same chip - just like many companies use Intel's chips for their products.

The advantage to the companies is that they're starting off with a 28 nm chip which will be improved upon over time and not having to pay the chip development costs.  Smaller chips are one of the things which will inevitably happen with other ASIC developers, but not until they've recovered their R&D costs on their first generation and made a considerable profit to boot.  

It's unlikely this is going to be the only B2B chip producer to enter the ASIC market.  If these guys are for real, it signals the beginning of real competition in the ASIC market.

I've always hoped that there were a couple of organisations developing ASICs under the radar.  Let's hope this one is legitimate.  Sounds like they're doing what Avalon originally hoped to do.

The information flow at BFL is terrible.  Once is a mistake, twice is a choice.  

Josh's question about whether they've pulled dates out of thin air is an interesting one.  In a sense, they have.  Even if their estimates of how long the chips will take to package and how long it will take to assemble the boards are accurate, they're clearly not allowing for the fact that their order is going to have to be fitted in around other work being done by those facilities.  

The actual packaging may take < 24 hours, but there's no guarantee that the packaging facility will be able to start work on BFL's order the moment the chips arrive there because they're not being paid to sit around idle doing no other work while they wait for BFL's chips.  They can't really book a specific time for packaging or for board assembly because they don't know when the chips will arrive at the packaging facility or at the assembly house.

While it's annoying that customers latch onto their best case scenario estimates as though they were set in concrete, it's obvious that even their "worst case scenario" estimates bear no resemblance to reality.  They need to review why they're coming up with wrong estimates and take measures to make their estimates more accurate - because this issue isn't going to disappear once their first batch starts shipping, it's going to continue for as long as they have unfulfilled back orders.

"But it's hard" doesn't really wash as an excuse when you're still taking pre-orders for a product which has yet to be delivered.  Not having a relatively accurate delivery date wouldn't matter if people hadn't paid for this product 8 months ago.  It does matter when you're still taking pre-orders, though.

Edit.  Nasser's online in BFL shoutbox at the moment - here's your chance to ask him questions directly.

Sorry Micon, but I'm not seeing "pro-BFL" involved here.  I criticise BFL all the time.

There are so many legitimate grounds on which the company and individual staff members can be criticised that I don't understand why you feel the need to play the pedo card.  If you're going to do that, then you do so at your own peril and by god you'd better provide some compelling evidence because you're essentially begging for people to dismiss your other accusations if you can't prove that one. 

Cocaine is insanely expensive here in Australia so there's not really a market for cocaine which has been cheaply free-based.  Those who can afford coke - which ranges from $300 - $600 per gram here - can afford to pay for coke which has been free-based properly.  Crystal methamphetamine is a lot cheaper.

So kano's really just saying that the maximum number of additional boards which could be added to the mini-rig is 5 (which would take it up to 1800 at advertised performance levels)?

Is this a real problem.  Josh has mentioned that that their specs are based on 40% of theoretical hashing capacity, so would it be possible for then to over-clock to reach the advertised 1.5 TH with less boards.  

Does anyone even know how many chips are going to be on their standard board  - I presume either 4 or 8?

You can also write a generic email for certain types of common queries and mail merge it - so you can literally reply to 100s of emails with the same type of query at the same time (the program fills in user-specific data).  This allows you plenty of time to write individual responses to the few emails which actually need them.

I hope they don't do that on the customs documentation for Australia.  Computers and computer parts are declarable items here and a 33 lb package isn't exactly inconspicuous.

Has kano left the building yet?

Right next to where you input you sig it says in bold

If Satoshi came back, half the board would tell him he didn't understand what "Bitcoin was meant to be" and that he was doing it all wrong.

Sort of.  It's got some elements of hawala and some elements of LETS.  It allows existing trust networks like LETS and hawala to link together and create and access a much larger network.

There's no 29 February this year - you'd better check when the first draft is actually due.

Given how small the Bitcoin economy is, how would it really benefit them?  How many of you would hoard your BTC, buy BTC or continue mining if China took control of the network?  

Please do this.

The "ASIC team" is "expecting" 40 chips for testing on Friday.  But there's a sticky on the shoutbox about how 21 - 30 cm of snow will "paralyse BFL's location" and BFL StevenM said that half the staff are working remotely today.  It looks like BFL will literally be able to blame the weather for the next delay they're going to inevitably announce.

Avalon previously said that they were assembling around 12 units a day.  They said that they had shipped a batch of 53 before CNY but it likely didn't clear customs before then - it might be those units which have now reached end users.  If Avalon is smart, they've continued assembling units over CNY and should have quite a few ready to ship now the holiday period is over.

I think what people want from friedcat is a timeline for bringing the rest of the 12 TH online.  I understand his reluctance to give one.  We've already seen how people take "we hope to" statements as if they were set in concrete, and it probably is best to not get sucked into that game.

There's often a fair amount of nepotism in small companies with many of the staff being employed because they're relatives or friends of the owners rather than because they're the most competent person for a particular position.  Somebody external coming into such an environment doesn't have a lot of power to insist that the people who's jobs aren't tied to actual performance lift their games.  

It's also an easy environment in which to regard your customers as a nuisance, as there are often close personal relationships between employees and there's a reluctance to acknowledge that someone you like who's "doing their best" might not be objectively competent.

When a company with 22 employees has a CEO, a COO and a General Manager, there's some serious job title inflation going on and the job titles likely don't reflect experience or competence.

Even BFL Steven (engineer) has no update on where the bumping is up to.  Who the fuck is leading this project and why are they unable to give Josh relevant, timely updates?