True, always smell a trap for early adopters when you see a PCI-e card selling for thousands of dollars, it's not like the foundry charges any more for ASIC chips than other ones. As you say, the pricing should be similar to a high end video card, even though it's probably got less parts.

Kind of serves them right for handing over thousands of dollars without doing any research first. No sympathy here.

When the investment was a few hundred for a Jalapeno you could be excused for having a gamble, now that we are talking just under $5k a lot of people will borrow for that amount, and pay interest for many months on the loan.

Remember the new BFL chips have not had tape out to the foundry yet, expect a 3-4mth. delay from tape out, for BFL to get the wafers back from the foundry, send them off to the chip packaging company, get them back, build a PCB, and build/debug a working prototype to see if it even meets the design specifications. Then they can start looking into production and shipping. I can't see that happening by Nov/Dec 2013 which their Monarch ad promises.

At 2BTC that's $113 per GH/s which is a total joke.

Even 1BTC you would be lucky to get any ROI by the time it ships. It needs to sell for less than 1BTC if it can't then don't start the project.

If people change their orders, the chances are it will be even longer before they have gear shipped, I don't see the sense in that.

It's been months now, and they still haven't shipped any 2013 orders, and they are supposed to be able to make 400 units a day! At that production claim, they should have been able to knockoff all the Jally pre-orders in a few weeks,  but they didn't, they are still shipping Dec 2012 orders!

Now they are back at square one with a new untested product, a new ASIC design that hasn't even reached tape out, as you know BFL quote 3mths. for bulk chip orders, and that's for first generation chips that were taped out at the start of the year. That means we wont see the Monarch shipping this year for sure, add to that the chip packaging and PCB factories will be shut for Xmas. It also means the people that ordered minirigs and singles in 2012 will have had their money tied up for nearly 2 years, which is kind of insane!

That's because the design engineers don't assemble Jalapenos

The calculators adjust based on historical data, if the difficulty rise slows down, the calculators will adjust to reflect that. The slow down has to actually happen first, so far it has not, the difficulty rise has been accelerating.

Bitfury  55nm 400GH/s 400watt

Imagine how they would look at 28nm.

I think BFL have announced 28nm product to make themselves not look obsolete against the competition.

Currently both KNCminer and Bitfury have way more efficient chips than what BFL are "shipping". We should see the KNCminer prototypes next month, if they live up to their promises, then KNCminer will gain instant customer loyalty, and not many people are going to consider BFL anymore even with this new offering, because KNCminer will be months ahead on difficulty/ROI. If KNCminer disappoint, then Bitfury will take the lead.

It's kind of funny that people are worried about the technicalities of a product that may never ship. There is talk of a boycott of BFL new products, I presume due to their ongoing failure to do more than a token effort at clearing their 14mth backlog as promised. It will be interesting to see what effect that has on the new product pre-orders.

BFL should know by now that you only get one chance to prove you can be trusted with pre-orders. A deposit perhaps, but no longer a 100% up front. If they didn't make enough profit to totally fund the 28nm production from the pre-orders for the existing products, then there is something wrong.

Based on their track record, we wont see a working prototype this year.

This card might ship sometime next year, probably wont hit that power figure,
and might only just cover ROI at that price.

Do you really wish to tie up funds for so long?

There are a lot of ASIC vendors now, and prices are coming down.

I think the era of pre-orders is coming to an end, they need another business model.

Looks like a scam.

I wouldn't run at 2.7GH/s just because someone has managed that on a test setup. That's a serious overclock, the chips are designed to run at around 2GH/s

Have you bothered to read the first post in this thread especially the section called "Introducing the DrillBit System"

It's not designed to specifically run with a Raspberry Pi, but it can certainly be run with one. Instructions would be beyond the topic of this thread.

Buy a Raspberry Pi like everyone else does.

Because their press releases say "partners in mainland China" and that's where the gear is coming from.

Forget about getting money in or out of Gox in a hurry.

You probably need to brush up on the enforcement of contracts in China.

Compared to what?

And there are names for people that buy ASICs that never make an ROI.