I still think some type of co-operative can work to at least provide reasonable competition and possibly get devices into more people's hands.

Maybe even just focusing on 10 GH/s devices and selling thousands of them. If you could make those available for around $100 I'm not sure people would care if they ever really made their money back. If the ASIC production after initial development cost is really extremely low, maybe these devices can be manufactured for $50. If you sell 10,000, well you've got $500,000 to pay off the development cost.

The co-op could simply put up money as a bond possibly to fund the development and then get a payback of their initial bond investment + maybe 5% interest like a municipal bond. If the organization is a non-profit and incorporates as one, this would be no problem.

I'm sure there are plenty of great minds involved in bitcoin who would donate their services/skills to development and administration. I would certainly be willing to help with administration and any business aspects for no payment.

The idea wouldn't be to screw any private vendors, just simply ensure there is some competition and preserve the decentralization of mining for the health of the network.

We might even find some pretty heavy private donors in the tech sector if members of the community have the right connections. We could then pay an annual membership fee as suggested to explore other projects which could help bitcoin's growth and development like funding bitcoin business start-ups, etc.

Well if you can allow the community to invest and find a way for initial purchasers to not be slaughtered by lower prices down the road, you will be doing the community a great service.

If you beat BFL to market then you will have done the community a GREAT service. I also believe you will need to put some thought into how they will be distributed once they are completed. Sending them out in drips and drabs will seriously effect those who get their devices down the road if they are paying the same price as those who get the first devices.

Again, I am willing to assist in any way I can and I believe you will find there are many in the community who would be willing to help as well, even other vendors.

Best of luck.

Brunic nailed it, this is the first time that the price of the mining equipment is tied to bitcoin price/difficulty.

THIS is the problem. ASIC is great for bitcoin if done right, otherwise we play this dangerous game stated above and let's not kid ourselves, the companies selling will win and the miners will lose. This will reduce overall interest and stall the network hashrate which is bad for everyone.

My farm is gone, so I don't give a shet about myself unlike the rest of you. My concern is bitcoin because I believe in its potential to create freedom from the banking cartels.

I make plenty of money running my company, I didn't get into mining thinking I would make a killing, I just like screwing around with hardware so I built a farm.

I made some money which is a bonus.

My point in all of this was simply to get people to stop and think, this is not the same old cpu-gpu-fpga argument.

I'd prefer to see a thread without trolling made up of those in the community who actually have an expert knowledge of all of these technologies, plus some solid economic thinkers. A sort of bitcoin mining think tank that the rest of us could follow and make appropriate decisions from SOLID info.

Well the best hope for BFL ASIC customers is that since BFL already has their money, they wait until they have nearly ALL the units ready to ship for those who pre-ordered and they ship them all at the same time.

Incremental shipping is what will kill those who get their units weeks or months after the first units are shipped, like they did with the singles.

If BFL gave a shit, they would announce pre-orders over a specific time period based on their estimated production time. Tell people to pre-order over a specific window, say 30 or 60 days and tell them ALL units will be shipped at the same time, doesn't matter of you are first or last to order during the window.

So say they can produce 200 small units, 100 medium units and 50 large units.

Take those 350 orders as pre-orders and ship all 350 within say 2-3 days. This gives everyone an even chance to see if they can make this work as an investment.

People will then be able to easily estimate how much hashing power is coming online and go from there.

There are several people already jockeying for position, you can probably guess who they are.

I know of 4-5 at least who have regular contact with BFL.

This is not going to end well for the majority unless BFL does an about face and really sits down and starts doing some calculations involving network capacity, difficulty, price, 1st gen asic price and then so on.

P4Man brings up a lot of valiant points and I wish the community were really listening to him.

@P4Man, can you at least bring up a solution? or do you think there really isn't any except to let clueless miners just buy up BFL shit, etc. and let them go at it?

For the record, I am out of mining very shortly and my goal is to simply help the rest of the community who are trying to stay in the game because I understand the importance of securing the network in a DECENTRALIZED manner.

My focus will be on developing bitcoin businesses from now on or supporting valuable bitcoin related projects in mining, commerce, etc.

This is why i posted over a week ago that this BFL ASIC thing is going to kill everyone. Yes, ASIC's are good for bitcoin, but they have to be implemented properly as it looks like they have come to market too quickly and cause a double leap. This is NOT CPU to GPU, this is GPU to ASIC, since they have come to market before FPGA's have had any chance to be implemented and mature.

The ASIUC is a different beast because once it is programmed, there is NO secondary market. High initial development cost, then extremely low production cost. Considering that mining is based on difficulty, this causes a HUGE monetary conflict.

Jesus this has been so ridiculous to see people not understand this and fall on half truths and past bullshit to frame their retorts.

THIS IS A NEW BEAST AND IS UNLIKE ANYTHING THAT HAS EVER HIT MINING BEFORE.

It requires a new type of analysis in order to preserve any sense of decentralization in mining.

If miners actually gave a shit about bitcoin they would all stop buying BFL's bullshit and tell them to screw.

Let's all get behind a legit openASIC program and do this OURSELVES in the right way.

Let everyone in the community have a chance to invest on the front end and distribute the mining appliances evenly so people can assess their prospective investment properly and only have to speculate on how much the coins might be worth. Rather than wondering if they will be left in the dust in the blink of an eye.

Get behind companies like enterpoint, nzhang, modminer quad, ztek, and the rest who have shown professionalism and consistency.

Let's just hope the open ASIC thing gains momentum and everyone can be happy, or at least almost everyone.

Okay I was wrong. If they release the coffee cup warmers first, then those buyers will be fine. Unfortunately, their 1 TH people will be pissed if they sell enough coffee warmers.

Agreed, I am happy to do anything possible to accelerate this and put BFL out of business. It disgusts me as a business owner that greedy/ignorant miners have allowed them to flourish with completely unethical business practices.

The purpose behind bitcoin was freedom from a centralized financial system. Let's not give in to a system ruled by a few or possibly one hardware manufacturer.

ASIC is great for bitcoin, let's just try to do it in a way that serves as many people's interests as possible with a goal of large scale mining decentralization.

We finally have a real world scenario and multiple threads saying the same thing I was saying. ASIC is different than any other mining technology because it is a much larger leap and there is NO secondary market or primary market beyond BTC mining.

All other mining technologies used thus far had these qualities and therefore created a reasonable market where risk could be reasonably quantified outside of BTC price.

There is NO business model that works for both miners and the hardware vendor when it comes to ASICS if you use only free market principles. EITHER THE MINERS GET BURNED OR THE VENDOR GETS BURNED.

In this case we have maybe the most inconsistent vendor in the BTC community leading the charge...what a fucking disaster. Since no one will be able to truly quantify when they can expect to get their hardware, many people will willfully hand over interest free loans to these clowns in exchange for, hopefully, being one of the first to get a device.

After the first 10 1TH units hit the market, everyone else is screwed unless BFL lowers their price ten fold. Now the early buyers are screwed.

An ASIC development co-operative was/is the only way to avoid this, but if the BFL scheme hits the market in October then there is no hope for that possibility.

Enjoy your $150 coffee warmers because using them for mining will be useless.

Scenario 1 - Someone has a pre-order for a mini rig at $15,000 and has yet to receive it. Let's say they actually get on by July 1st. Great, now they start mining.

Butterfly has said themselves they expect to ship ASIC hardware by october, so mini rig buyer has three months to mine with before hardware which is 10-20x more powerful hits the market.

So per bitcoin x profitability calculator mining at 4 months, at .10 per kwh they would be at a  $4,314 loss with absolutely ZERO resale value considering people would much prefer an ASIC unit to an outdated piece of hardware.

Mind you, I threw in an extra month of mining and if you want to simply follow logic, we can't factor in shipping delays, etc. because this is what BFL has told us will happen.

So I think a mini-rig buyer - as one example, would like to know what to expect as trade in value for their 15k investment, since if even 2 of those 1 TH units get shipped in October, difficulty will change by at least 15-20% right away.

So why the hell would anyone want a mini rig if the ASIC is imminent ? Oh yeah, you think they will give you a dollar for dollar trade in. Then what are they going to go with all those useless mini rigs ? give them away to charity ?

This just gets more ridiculous by the moment.

The fact that anyone gave these guys their money upfront is ridiculous on its face. How greedy for the newest tech do you have to be to act as a funding bank for a start-up and not receive interest or an equity position.

Good business sense there bitcoin miners. Now people wonder why these guys don't give a shit about shipping times or any customer service whatsoever.

They would start caring very quickly if everyone stopped ordering from them, yet greedy miners trying to get an edge don't give a shit.

Awesome, looking forward top investing as soon as possible.

Is anyone getting public work? Can you only get it by undershooting everyone else's price?

This sucks if this is the case.

It seems to be some form of the model I proposed benefits everyone and would have considerable interest. If we could put something together quickly I believe we could also beat BFL to the punch given their previous track record. We would also likely take tremendous market share from them as most people in spite of their ability to do so, cannot be happy acting as BFL's creditor while they wait for their products.

With some more input and time, I could put together a very professional outline of how we could get this done, but I have yet to hear from the original developers of this thread/venture.

If anyone else has the contacts/technical expertise to pull this off, I am more than willing to develop the business side of it and believe we could get this off the ground very rapidly. The community really needs this and if BFL saturates the market first this project will become increasingly more difficult to pull off and any miners who buy from them initially are going to get screwed bigtime.

A co-operative, decentralized business model which engages as many members/supporters of bitcoin as possible will not only make the ASIC leap viable for everyone, but will also align itself with bitcoin's philosophy of decentralization. I also believe it does not have to marginalize the FPGA miners and producers if we proceed in a co-operative and well thought out manner.

Anyone who is interested in making this happen, please feel free to PM me.

Yep, and people got all pissy about my posts regarding the concerns involved with ASIC technology.

Sure, we've been through this before blah blah blah. No we have not, as P4Man stated, all other tehcnologies previously used for mining were NOT price dependent on the bitcoin network or difficulty.

This is why ASIC is a problem. If you consider mining to be charitable work then this is great. if you expect a return for your investment, this is the end of that model of incentivizing mining.

I don't like to rely on the kindness model to secure a network. Profit is much more motivating to people.

I believe Enterpoint is providing top notch customer service in the development of Cainsmore so far. There are other FPGA vendors who have also provided excellent service and Enterpoint is at least up to or exceeding that standard.

It was made CLEAR that these first issue boards would not be shipped in a fully optimized condition. Therefore the $640 price point. Obviously those of us who are purchasing these will participate in the process of optimizing these boards. This is similar to receiving a beta version of a video game for free and providing feedback about bugs,etc.

Enterpoint DID NOT make you pay up front like some other vendors in the community. They asked for payment when the boards were ready to ship.

Enterpoint DID NOT suggest these boards would have a bitstream ready to go upon first batch of shipments.

Enterpoint DID make good on their development and delivery schedules within a reasonable margin of error.

Enterpoint DID keep all of us informed as to each point of progress during the manufacturing phase.

Enterpoint HAS continued to be open and honest in their communication about any problems/developments in the software/firmware.

I would hope the bitcoin community would be capable of showing a reciprocal respect by providing professional feedback as to what needs to be improved and continue to support this new vendor in a courteous manner.

Thanks for the response. It's a shame that we would all undercut each other like that. Seems it would be better to just have a gentleman's agreement to not do that and we all benefit.