Do you trust BFL? (Butterfly Labs)

[gollum]

Theory: BFL long takes long time to deliver mining equipment because they want to mine with the FPGA and ASIC before they deliver it to the customers while this equipment offers an advantage in mining and while mining gives 50/block before the halfing in dec 2012.

What do you think about that theory, dont you think its tempting to hold the ordered FPGAs and ASICs til december 2012 before the bitcoin gets halfed?
If the market were perfect the hashrate would go down with the price, not up.
But the hashrate is going up instead - it means lots of computation power is added every day even though the ASCIS has not been delivered and GPU mining is less profitable at 8-9 than at 10-15.

This is not an accusation - just a theory of what a reseller of mining equipment might do to maximize profit.

[1715427925]

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[1715427925]

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[Stephen Gornick]

This is not an accusation - just a theory of what a reseller of mining equipment might do to maximize profit.

Did they ever promise to not "burn in" their equipment against the live network?

If they are first, they possibly will have the technical ability to perform a 51% attack.  If they are in it for the long haul, they know that faith in bitcoin as a currency outweighs any short term advantage to mining where they reach 51% themselves.  So that is your upper bound.  At least starting out -- so they might mine using a dozen SC mini rigs until that difficulty adjustment rise is reached and then ship them out and work on the next batch.  That way they've never exceeded 51% themselves, the network is stronger when they are done, yet they made some nice revenue from the testing.

They may not be the first and/or only ASIC to be producing from a working design.

[BFL_Josh]

I know that I am obviously biased, but I hope my rep in the community at least carries some weight.

BFL absolutely does not hold on to units any longer than it takes to burn them in and make sure they aren't going to fail.  We ship them out as soon as they have been assembled and tested.

Any testing beyond a burn in will be public on these forums and I will make a page to show the current stats of the unit(s) being demo'd.  There's no plans for this currently, though, other than maybe a brief demo as we get closer to the ship date.  I'm thinking a live web cam and a page to look at the hashrate.

[f4ntasy]

The company, which doesn't ship it's product to its client(or does it after exceeding time limit 4 times) is definitely not worth any trust. Period.

[ovoon7]

I trust BFL as a legit company, but whether or not they can deliver on time is what worries me.  Heck, I know they wont deliver on time... it's how much the products are going to be delayed for that worries me.

[Graet]

I know that I am obviously biased, but I hope my rep in the community at least carries some weight.

BFL absolutely does not hold on to units any longer than it takes to burn them in and make sure they aren't going to fail.  We ship them out as soon as they have been assembled and tested.

Any testing beyond a burn in will be public on these forums and I will make a page to show the current stats of the unit(s) being demo'd.  There's no plans for this currently, though, other than maybe a brief demo as we get closer to the ship date.  I'm thinking a live web cam and a page to look at the hashrate.

ok cool
but was I mistaken? I thought the 1st shipment was meant to be going out as a "batch" rather than 1 by 1 as tested and quality assured - we are talking ASIC right?
thanks for the info

[gollum]

How hard can it be to let some random chinese factory assemble your ASIC-machines?
I suspect BFL are waiting to ship the ASICs since they earn a lot of money to "test" the machines for weeks instead of days.

If BFL keeps the Bitforce SC Single for a week and sell the bitcoins on the market they will receive 2151$ instead of the price of 1300$
The only economical incentive BFL got to ship the ASICs is if
a) bitcoin drops 90% to 5$
b) competitors start to ship ASICs so the total hashrate becomes 10 times today (30,000 GHash) and reaching 300,000 GHash.

[Zooey]

A recent interview with BFL customers should provide the OP with necessary insight into this affair:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ERE4uiufqE&yt:cc=on

[txronin]

I'm still waiting for my asic.