BFL ASIC worth the risk for pre-order?

[bitCooper]

So here's a question looking from the outside in. Given that it appears the BFL CEO is a convicted felon, and given that no one has seen a working BFL ASIC product, is it really worth the risk of giving BFL pre-order dollars? Are those with pre-orders banking on getting such a large leg-up on the mining competition that they figure it's worth the risk of losing your money?

Let me put it another way. If BFL does have the technology to create ASIC chips dedicated to bitcoin mining, then they should be in a great spot financially. As soon as the first product is shipped and tested by a member of the public, then the products should easily pay for themselves, and tons of people will order the chips.

On the other hand, if BFL is depending on pre-orders to a) finance the development and manufacturing, or b) take the money and run, then I would consider a pre-order to be very risky. Almost any electronics product that people would normally pre-order is from a hugely reputable multi-national company and is for a product that has already been reviewed by dozens or hundreds of different people.

Maybe getting a 3-month lead time over the mining competition is work the risk, but I think this is an interesting thing to watch. Over the last month I have been amazed to read about the number of scams that the bitcoin community attracts, due to the amount of money floating around and the gullibility of people looking to turn a quick buck.

Being a pretty risk averse person myself, I think people should cancel their pre-orders until the ASICs have been bought and tested by other members of the public, unless your investment in mining represents an amount of money you don't mind losing as with a penny stock.

Good luck to everyone in the meantime, but remember that *every* form of investment has its risks, and bitcoin is not immune to that.

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[bitCooper]

Wow. And I just stumbled upon a post from BFL_Nasser on the butterfly labs forum from yesterday:

Hi Everyone,

 We've been very busy recently, unfortunately I couldn't catch up with the forums. There is a correction to be made: Chips are not and were not flawed. We decided to add certain clock buffers to improve noise-resistance and possibly increase frequency even further. The improve in noise resistance was our real goal (average frequency increase across a full wafer can be a bi-product). The decision was made to increase the near 100% chance of success even more. We'll keep you posted. If you had any questions, please let us know.


 Best Regards,
 Nasser

I don't know who "Nasser" is, but this indicates that the chip design is still being tweaked and tested *after* the expected release date. How can you have a projected shipment date before you have gotten test chip samples and finalized the design? This sounds like R&D to me. How long will it take to iterate through their testing? Another 2 weeks to get the next batch of chips; if there's another problem, how much longer will it be delayed?

Even if the next batch is perfect, they must be ordering in very small quantities until they are sure it is correct; this could be millions of dollars as stake. How many products is BFL promising to ship in their first wave?

It's hard for me to see how they could work through this and have products in customers' hands in less than 2 months. If I were BFL, I would not want to accept any pre-orders until I had a finalized chip design; why risk having people question your credibility when your product can speak for itself? Sitting on a pile of pre-order money is a dangerous thing.

How many people here would sit on thousands (millions?) of dollars in pre-orders and not misappropriate even a fraction of those funds? Look at what happens to pension funds, social security, etc. In my book, you don't want to expose yourself to temptation; there are many people who have started out legitimately and been trapped by the Sirens' call.

[crazyates]

When BFL announced their ASICs, they announced that they were funded by a 3rd party. I'm sure the cash flow helps, but their R&D was not funded by pre-order sales.

They have a history of selling large amount of high-quality FPGA miners, long before all of this stuff about their employee's questionable past came into light. Is this stuff important? Yes. Should this affect the company as a whole? No. Are they still capable of delivering? Yes.

As it stands right now, they are scheduled to deliver almost an entire month before their competitors. If you ordered an Avalon, then you knew this would happen. If you ordered a bASIC, then I'm sorry for your recent (yet severe) delays. And I'm not just talking about initial shipments, either; BFL has said they can still fulfill all current orders before the end of the new year (or at least close to it), which is well before the current bASIC shipment time.

It's also been said 100x before: if you don't feel comfortable giving them your coins, then don't pre-order from them. You're more than welcome to wait until there's more proof. The last I'd heard, they were well over 100TH of pre-orders, which is quite a lot of people putting quite a lot of coin where their mouth is, betting that BFL really is who they say they are. (Discalimer: I'm one of them).

[bitCooper]

...
As it stands right now, they are scheduled to deliver almost an entire month before their competitors. If you ordered an Avalon, then you knew this would happen. If you ordered a bASIC, then I'm sorry for your recent (yet severe) delays. And I'm not just talking about initial shipments, either; BFL has said they can still fulfill all current orders before the end of the new year (or at least close to it), which is well before the current bASIC shipment time.
...

So you believe that they can deliver *all* products within one month, when they are still tweaking the chip design in the wafer after their initial shipment date? I am no chip maker, but doesn't it take weeks or months to make changes to wafer designs?

[crazyates]

...
As it stands right now, they are scheduled to deliver almost an entire month before their competitors. If you ordered an Avalon, then you knew this would happen. If you ordered a bASIC, then I'm sorry for your recent (yet severe) delays. And I'm not just talking about initial shipments, either; BFL has said they can still fulfill all current orders before the end of the new year (or at least close to it), which is well before the current bASIC shipment time.
...

So you believe that they can deliver *all* products within one month, when they are still tweaking the chip design in the wafer after their initial shipment date? I am no chip maker, but doesn't it take weeks or months to make changes to wafer designs?

I'm no expert either, but "The week of the 11th" was what Josh said. And yes, they have said that they have ordered enough chips to fulfill all current pre-orders.

[MooC Tals]

Wow. And I just stumbled upon a post from BFL_Nasser on the butterfly labs forum from yesterday:

Hi Everyone,

 We've been very busy recently, unfortunately I couldn't catch up with the forums. There is a correction to be made: Chips are not and were not flawed. We decided to add certain clock buffers to improve noise-resistance and possibly increase frequency even further. The improve in noise resistance was our real goal (average frequency increase across a full wafer can be a bi-product). The decision was made to increase the near 100% chance of success even more. We'll keep you posted. If you had any questions, please let us know.


 Best Regards,
 Nasser

I don't know who "Nasser" is, but this indicates that the chip design is still being tweaked and tested *after* the expected release date. How can you have a projected shipment date before you have gotten test chip samples and finalized the design? This sounds like R&D to me. How long will it take to iterate through their testing? Another 2 weeks to get the next batch of chips; if there's another problem, how much longer will it be delayed?

Even if the next batch is perfect, they must be ordering in very small quantities until they are sure it is correct; this could be millions of dollars as stake. How many products is BFL promising to ship in their first wave?

It's hard for me to see how they could work through this and have products in customers' hands in less than 2 months. If I were BFL, I would not want to accept any pre-orders until I had a finalized chip design; why risk having people question your credibility when your product can speak for itself? Sitting on a pile of pre-order money is a dangerous thing.

How many people here would sit on thousands (millions?) of dollars in pre-orders and not misappropriate even a fraction of those funds? Look at what happens to pension funds, social security, etc. In my book, you don't want to expose yourself to temptation; there are many people who have started out legitimately and been trapped by the Sirens' call.

Oh well thats just fucken lovely! I have said this in my other posts on here and in the bfl forum as of Jan 1 I'm cancelling my order and just going to forget this whole mining bull shit.

I might not be the only one either. I'm not angry about delays, I'm not angry about difficulty rising daily, I'm not even angry about performance issues or anything else other than being lied to.

If you said in OCTOBER that we wont be getting any shipments until March of 2013 I would of been ok with that but to bullshit me on a week by week bases is just fucked up and makes me look like an ass.

When the waves of cancellations start pouring in they can tweek their nipples and knobs all they fucken want after.

Personally I smell collusion between the 3 manufacturers. This would be my first attempt in actually purchasing equipment and to be honest I feel like a IDIOT every day I hear of another fucken delay.


Jan 01 = Cancellation

I suggest you stop playing around and get the fucken work done. Play time is over Fuckers

BFL Big Fucken Liers  imo

[gbx]

I've resisted posting to all the speculative bullshit surrounding the ASICs.  Simply because 99 percent of what's said here is speculative bullshit and I didn't feel like stinking the thread up with more of it.

I will say this.

1.  I asked for a refund from BFL and received it promptly, in full in less than 24 hours.

2.  I do think it's odd that "Presales" of this product require upfront cash.  Most presales I've been involved with are not charged until the order ships.  For instance, I preorder my favorite artist's limited edition music CD.  Login, give them my CC.  They do a preauth on the card, but do not charge until it ships.  So taking the money well before a product is produced seemed odd to me, especially since they have VC funding?  If anything, all that should be in a trust account with a 3rd party trustee.  I'll stop there with speculative bullshit.

-gb

[bcpokey]

I've resisted posting to all the speculative bullshit surrounding the ASICs.  Simply because 99 percent of what's said here is speculative bullshit and I didn't feel like stinking the thread up with more of it.

I will say this.

1.  I asked for a refund from BFL and received it promptly, in full in less than 24 hours.

2.  I do think it's odd that "Presales" of this product require upfront cash.  Most presales I've been involved with are not charged until the order ships.  For instance, I preorder my favorite artist's limited edition music CD.  Login, give them my CC.  They do a preauth on the card, but do not charge until it ships.  So taking the money well before a product is produced seemed odd to me, especially since they have VC funding?  If anything, all that should be in a trust account with a 3rd party trustee.  I'll stop there with speculative bullshit.

-gb

Well there is a whole subforum for speculation, admittedly this wasn't posted there but it's obviously not unwarranted. With the drama of block-halving come and gone (to really very little effect), there is little else to do but speculate on ASICs now anyway.

...
As it stands right now, they are scheduled to deliver almost an entire month before their competitors. If you ordered an Avalon, then you knew this would happen. If you ordered a bASIC, then I'm sorry for your recent (yet severe) delays. And I'm not just talking about initial shipments, either; BFL has said they can still fulfill all current orders before the end of the new year (or at least close to it), which is well before the current bASIC shipment time.
...

So you believe that they can deliver *all* products within one month, when they are still tweaking the chip design in the wafer after their initial shipment date? I am no chip maker, but doesn't it take weeks or months to make changes to wafer designs?

I'm no expert either, but "The week of the 11th" was what Josh said. And yes, they have said that they have ordered enough chips to fulfill all current pre-orders.

Josh said that the week of the 11th (the 11th is a Tuesday(?), meaning it could be anywhere between the 11th and the 15th, and Josh has stated that it is likely to be towards the end of the week, here) is the "fuzzy date" when the first batch of re-vamped chips will arrive, not when they will be shipping. They have said they are still going to be doing the 1/3rd plan batch first, so assuming they are really committed to putting out a significant quantity of orders, that could/would take a week+ to generate (I believe there was some talk of building each rig and testing for 8-24 hours before declaring it "ready for shipping", this requires many man-hours).

As it stands right now, they are scheduled to deliver almost an entire month before their competitors. If you ordered an Avalon, then you knew this would happen. If you ordered a bASIC, then I'm sorry for your recent (yet severe) delays. And I'm not just talking about initial shipments, either; BFL has said they can still fulfill all current orders before the end of the new year (or at least close to it), which is well before the current bASIC shipment time.

Whether they will begin shipping before the end of the year I do not know, but they certainly will only be able to get a paltry amount of orders out before the end of the year. A poster asked on 11-20, if he ordered that day, when would his order ship, to which Josh replied "End of Jan or Beginning of Feb", this was of course, before the delay was announced.

These are all company statements, not my own speculation.


Now for fun, I will do some speculation:

20k Chips were enough for all pre-orders until 10-31 (and more). So for fun I will say that 150THash (the full chip amount) = pre-orders 7-1 to 10-31 (4 months), or 37.5 THash/month. Tack on 20 days for 11-20, that's 25 more Thash, for 175THash in orders by 11-20. Expected time of arrival of chips being ~25days from 10-31, is ~11-25. So...

11-25 -> 1-25 = ~2months to create and ship 175THash/sec of orders, giving us a production capacity of 87.5Thash/sec per month, or roughly 21Thash / week, so they can take weekends off and stuff (best case scenario).

With the new arrival date being considered, likely to be ~12-14, if they want to do a 1/3 shipping plan first batch of 21THash (seems reasonable, approx equiv to current hashing power), giving an extra few days for testing (the first week of production will need a slight additive for testing that will later be rolled into the consecutive weeks of prod), they can under the best circumstances be expected to have out the door about 21THash/sec by the 26th of december, juuuust beating the new year (but they have to work through Christmas ).

Once things get rolling I expect 21/week sustained becomes easier to manage, so assuming demand picks up (once people see an actual product in hand, they will be less wary of buying), so how long to whip through the rest of those 100k chips?
Well 100k chips = 750THash, at 21Thash per week that is 35ish (rounded to 36) weeks, or about 8.3 months to whip through the whole batch.

Interesting that if Tom begins shipping Mid Jan (say ~1-14) and he produces half of what BFL does, and Avalon ships end of Jan (~1-31 say) and they produce half of what Tom does (based on first pre-order batch sizes), by end of August we will potentially see a network of > 1.25Peta hash  

Or they could all be significantly delayed again. Time will tell.

EOF (end of fun).

EDIT: Looks like so far so good on my above estimates. Avalon recently said that they would try to finish their 300 preorder batch by end of feb, which means about 20 THash/month, roughly 1/4 the rate of 21THash/week. Damn I'm good!

[Korbman]

For me, I'm only buying from BFL because of two reasons: 1) Power Specs and 2) Earlier shipping.
As other ASIC companies start to come closer to equal power specifications with BFL, the defining factor becomes shipping. I've got a $10,000 order ready to be placed...the first company that has a solid, working, prototype and set shipping date gets it. BFL was the ringer for a while, but they're clearly falling by the wayside as problems mount and competition steps up.

[midnightmagic]

You forgot Reclaimer (Tycho's small-run ASIC) and AsicMiner (who are using their own customers' money to compete against them.)

[strider007]

...given that no one has seen a working BFL ASIC product.

That's all I would need to hear. No way in hell I would put down cash on a phantom product, might as well buy snake oil. They may indeed be able to deliver a product that works as advertised in the time frame as advertised but they may not as well. And any company that would charge my card or demand cash up front months before they intend to order is not a company I'd ever want to work with. A company should never charge your card or demand the cash until the product is in stock and ready to deliver. A down payment to reserve a spot in line for one, that's fine...but payment in full before they manufacture, or hell in this case, before they even finished conceptualizing the gizmo? That's crazy.

And what if you go conservative, throw down $1200, it works great, mines like a champ and then three months down the road you have problems with it. How does anyone know that this company won't sell a bunch of product with known reliability issues, cash out, close up shop and disappear?

[modcom]

@Bitware - I really like what you've said. I have been reading the naysayers speculative pessimism for so long, without my hopes being dashed. Its nice to see the same optimism that I feel. And you're right, this is fun. Geeky, nerdy where's my pocket protector FUN....

[superfastkyle]

When BFL announced their ASICs, they announced that they were funded by a 3rd party. I'm sure the cash flow helps, but their R&D was not funded by pre-order sales.

Which was announced by a promoted yahoo article. They paid for it so true or not, it should be taken with a grain of salt

They have a history of selling large amount of high-quality FPGA miners, long before all of this stuff about their employee's questionable past came into light. Is this stuff important? Yes. Should this affect the company as a whole? No. Are they still capable of delivering? Yes.

Their products seem to number in the hundreds, you call that a large amount? When BFL did their show off your devices youtube video contest, it was the same 20-30 people making several videos. Just not that many people own BFL products.

As it stands right now, they are scheduled to deliver almost an entire month before their competitors. If you ordered an Avalon, then you knew this would happen. If you ordered a bASIC, then I'm sorry for your recent (yet severe) delays. And I'm not just talking about initial shipments, either; BFL has said they can still fulfill all current orders before the end of the new year (or at least close to it), which is well before the current bASIC shipment time.

It's also been said 100x before: if you don't feel comfortable giving them your coins, then don't pre-order from them. You're more than welcome to wait until there's more proof. The last I'd heard, they were well over 100TH of pre-orders, which is quite a lot of people putting quite a lot of coin where their mouth is, betting that BFL really is who they say they are. (Discalimer: I'm one of them).

Now you think this new "fuzzy date" is the right one and that they will still ship before their competitors. Even if they promised the date I wouldn't believe them (after missing how many dates already) but you believe their fuzzy one?

As far as not sending them coins I'll agree with you there, but realize that you sending them your coins before any evidence of a product is a very risky investment, and it may or may not pay off for you.

[Frequency]

All i can say about this subject is

A) i do think Asic will come but not this year

B) i find it hard to believe and Strange that not ONE of five companies who all claim using there own fabricage has an working chip in hands IF they all had the same fabricage then i would understand but NON does ..so they are all liars or the lie to be in front off each other getting the most pre money regardless of there past gained trust it just sounds wrong to me either way.

This is also why lots of people got sick of it keeping everybody satisfide with pictuers and drawings week in week out coming up with stories over and over again

So i am not saying it s a compleet fraud but the marketing really sucks i also think if they just work hard deliver good solid divices they WILL make money in a better and faster way then just screaming around like they do now...

[mentalove]

If your worried, maybe just wait until people have received them and decide then. it shouldn't be too much longer, you would be at the end of the pre-order list anyway if you order now.
I ordered in october when there was little info to go by, and i thought it was worth the risk. people seem to be happy with previous BFL products.

[mem]

Wow. And I just stumbled upon a post from BFL_Nasser on the butterfly labs forum from yesterday:

Hi Everyone,

 We've been very busy recently, unfortunately I couldn't catch up with the forums. There is a correction to be made: Chips are not and were not flawed. We decided to add certain clock buffers to improve noise-resistance and possibly increase frequency even further. The improve in noise resistance was our real goal (average frequency increase across a full wafer can be a bi-product). The decision was made to increase the near 100% chance of success even more. We'll keep you posted. If you had any questions, please let us know.


 Best Regards,
 Nasser

I don't know who "Nasser" is, but this indicates that the chip design is still being tweaked and tested *after* the expected release date. How can you have a projected shipment date before you have gotten test chip samples and finalized the design? This sounds like R&D to me. How long will it take to iterate through their testing? Another 2 weeks to get the next batch of chips; if there's another problem, how much longer will it be delayed?

Even if the next batch is perfect, they must be ordering in very small quantities until they are sure it is correct; this could be millions of dollars as stake. How many products is BFL promising to ship in their first wave?

It's hard for me to see how they could work through this and have products in customers' hands in less than 2 months. If I were BFL, I would not want to accept any pre-orders until I had a finalized chip design; why risk having people question your credibility when your product can speak for itself? Sitting on a pile of pre-order money is a dangerous thing.

How many people here would sit on thousands (millions?) of dollars in pre-orders and not misappropriate even a fraction of those funds? Look at what happens to pension funds, social security, etc. In my book, you don't want to expose yourself to temptation; there are many people who have started out legitimately and been trapped by the Sirens' call.

Nasser had to step in as CEO of BFL because Sonny was in breach of his bail.

oh and Inaba looooooooves da cock.

[monkee]

if bfl produces & ships units as fast as they say they're going to, i think people will quickly buy them up until it becomes unprofitable for everyone :/  ordering now, i'm not sure is worth it or not though. only time will tell. if you're a gambler, go for it. at least you'll have some new hardware and a conversation piece!

[Elxiliath]

I've at this point considered the same, mining with just one ASIC, like the jalapeño might not be profitable anymore.  It might be like trying to mine now with just a basic quad core cpu or a low end nvidia card...  from what I've seen a lot of people plan on buying the higher end devices.

[mem]

I've at this point considered the same, mining with just one ASIC, like the jalapeño might not be profitable anymore.  It might be like trying to mine now with just a basic quad core cpu or a low end nvidia card...  from what I've seen a lot of people plan on buying the higher end devices.

Pre Ordering

[Elxiliath]

Ah, yes. Thanks for the correction.