BFL or Avalon

[hexed]

There is zero speculation involved.

Absolutely wrong.  When people purchased BFL or Avalon, there was no guarantee that they would be receiving a product or when.  It was PURE speculation and a gamble as well.  People decided to take this gamble and base their purchases on speculation.  Speculation that the price would not drop, speculation that they would receive a product, and speculation that that product would be hashing the amount advertised.

Basically you are saying "never buy miners" because so far, none of them are shipping the same day.

[1714961335]

1714961335

[k9quaint]

There is zero speculation involved.

Absolutely wrong.  When people purchased BFL or Avalon, there was no guarantee that they would be receiving a product or when.  It was PURE speculation and a gamble as well.  People decided to take this gamble and base their purchases on speculation.  Speculation that the price would not drop, speculation that they would receive a product, and speculation that that product would be hashing the amount advertised.

Basically you are saying "never buy miners" because so far, none of them are shipping the same day.

Maybe I was not clear, let me try again. When he bought, there was speculation involved as to whether BFL would deliver a product in time to earn the investment back. Now there is no speculation involved on that account. BFL did not deliver him a product in time to make his 200 BTC back.

No, I am not saying "never buy miners". I am saying that one customer gave up 200 BTC for a miner that will (probably) not earn him back that 200 BTC.
That customer will be worse off having ordered that miner. He gambled on BFL delivering and lost. Simple.

[wrenchmonkey]

There is zero speculation involved.

Absolutely wrong.  When people purchased BFL or Avalon, there was no guarantee that they would be receiving a product or when.  It was PURE speculation and a gamble as well.  People decided to take this gamble and base their purchases on speculation.  Speculation that the price would not drop, speculation that they would receive a product, and speculation that that product would be hashing the amount advertised.

Basically you are saying "never buy miners" because so far, none of them are shipping the same day.

No, I am not saying "never buy miners". I am saying that one customer gave up 200 BTC for a miner that will (probably) not earn him back that 200 BTC.
That customer will be worse off having ordered that miner. He gambled on BFL delivering and lost. Simple.

By that same argument, nobody should have bought ANYTHING with Bitcoin, as the value of their goods against bitcoin has only dropped.

[ThatDGuy]

There is zero speculation involved.

Absolutely wrong.  When people purchased BFL or Avalon, there was no guarantee that they would be receiving a product or when.  It was PURE speculation and a gamble as well.  People decided to take this gamble and base their purchases on speculation.  Speculation that the price would not drop, speculation that they would receive a product, and speculation that that product would be hashing the amount advertised.

Basically you are saying "never buy miners" because so far, none of them are shipping the same day.

No, I am not saying "never buy miners". I am saying that one customer gave up 200 BTC for a miner that will (probably) not earn him back that 200 BTC.
That customer will be worse off having ordered that miner. He gambled on BFL delivering and lost. Simple.

You are correct that he gambled and lost, but he gambled on far more factors than just BFL delivering.  This is what Hexed has been attempting to point out, as far as I can tell.

[k9quaint]

There is zero speculation involved.

Absolutely wrong.  When people purchased BFL or Avalon, there was no guarantee that they would be receiving a product or when.  It was PURE speculation and a gamble as well.  People decided to take this gamble and base their purchases on speculation.  Speculation that the price would not drop, speculation that they would receive a product, and speculation that that product would be hashing the amount advertised.

Basically you are saying "never buy miners" because so far, none of them are shipping the same day.

No, I am not saying "never buy miners". I am saying that one customer gave up 200 BTC for a miner that will (probably) not earn him back that 200 BTC.
That customer will be worse off having ordered that miner. He gambled on BFL delivering and lost. Simple.

By that same argument, nobody should have bought ANYTHING with Bitcoin, as the value of their goods against bitcoin has only dropped.

Not entirely true. At this customer's time of purchase, had someone bought ASICMIner shares or Avalon batch 1 or 2, they would be better off than if they kept their BTC.

[k9quaint]

There is zero speculation involved.

Absolutely wrong.  When people purchased BFL or Avalon, there was no guarantee that they would be receiving a product or when.  It was PURE speculation and a gamble as well.  People decided to take this gamble and base their purchases on speculation.  Speculation that the price would not drop, speculation that they would receive a product, and speculation that that product would be hashing the amount advertised.

Basically you are saying "never buy miners" because so far, none of them are shipping the same day.

No, I am not saying "never buy miners". I am saying that one customer gave up 200 BTC for a miner that will (probably) not earn him back that 200 BTC.
That customer will be worse off having ordered that miner. He gambled on BFL delivering and lost. Simple.

You are correct that he gambled and lost, but he gambled on far more factors than just BFL delivering.  This is what Hexed has been attempting to point out, as far as I can tell.

Name those factors?
It is not the exchange rate. The customer traded BTC for a device that creates BTC.
The only way that can make sense is if the device will ultimately produce more BTC than the customer gave up for it.

Now if he could sell that order (or device upon shipment) for 201 BTC, then he would be slightly better off than having done nothing and merely keeping his 200 BTC.

[ThatDGuy]

There is zero speculation involved.

Absolutely wrong.  When people purchased BFL or Avalon, there was no guarantee that they would be receiving a product or when.  It was PURE speculation and a gamble as well.  People decided to take this gamble and base their purchases on speculation.  Speculation that the price would not drop, speculation that they would receive a product, and speculation that that product would be hashing the amount advertised.

Basically you are saying "never buy miners" because so far, none of them are shipping the same day.

No, I am not saying "never buy miners". I am saying that one customer gave up 200 BTC for a miner that will (probably) not earn him back that 200 BTC.
That customer will be worse off having ordered that miner. He gambled on BFL delivering and lost. Simple.

You are correct that he gambled and lost, but he gambled on far more factors than just BFL delivering.  This is what Hexed has been attempting to point out, as far as I can tell.

Name those factors?
It is not the exchange rate. The customer traded BTC for a device that creates BTC.
The only way that can make sense is if the device will ultimately produce more BTC than the customer gave up for it.

Now if he could sell that order (or device upon shipment) for 201 BTC, then he would be slightly better off than having done nothing and merely keeping his 200 BTC.

So you don't believe that the exchange rate and it's drastic increase since then has in any way contributed to the spike in mining difficulty?

[wrenchmonkey]

There is zero speculation involved.

Absolutely wrong.  When people purchased BFL or Avalon, there was no guarantee that they would be receiving a product or when.  It was PURE speculation and a gamble as well.  People decided to take this gamble and base their purchases on speculation.  Speculation that the price would not drop, speculation that they would receive a product, and speculation that that product would be hashing the amount advertised.

Basically you are saying "never buy miners" because so far, none of them are shipping the same day.

No, I am not saying "never buy miners". I am saying that one customer gave up 200 BTC for a miner that will (probably) not earn him back that 200 BTC.
That customer will be worse off having ordered that miner. He gambled on BFL delivering and lost. Simple.

By that same argument, nobody should have bought ANYTHING with Bitcoin, as the value of their goods against bitcoin has only dropped.

Not entirely true. At this customer's time of purchase, had someone bought ASICMIner shares or Avalon batch 1 or 2, they would be better off than if they kept their BTC.

Ahah, so then you recognize that there are winners and losers in the speculation game... 

[Syke]

Ahah, so then you recognize that there are winners and losers in the speculation game... 

Exactly! Every single BFL customer is a loser.

[Syke]

It is not the exchange rate. The customer traded BTC for a device that creates BTC.
The only way that can make sense is if the device will ultimately produce more BTC than the customer gave up for it.

QFT.

Anything else is just self delision to try to soothe the pain of failure.

[Charles999]

I trust avalon a bit more as they have a product.

[k9quaint]

There is zero speculation involved.

Absolutely wrong.  When people purchased BFL or Avalon, there was no guarantee that they would be receiving a product or when.  It was PURE speculation and a gamble as well.  People decided to take this gamble and base their purchases on speculation.  Speculation that the price would not drop, speculation that they would receive a product, and speculation that that product would be hashing the amount advertised.

Basically you are saying "never buy miners" because so far, none of them are shipping the same day.

No, I am not saying "never buy miners". I am saying that one customer gave up 200 BTC for a miner that will (probably) not earn him back that 200 BTC.
That customer will be worse off having ordered that miner. He gambled on BFL delivering and lost. Simple.

You are correct that he gambled and lost, but he gambled on far more factors than just BFL delivering.  This is what Hexed has been attempting to point out, as far as I can tell.

Name those factors?
It is not the exchange rate. The customer traded BTC for a device that creates BTC.
The only way that can make sense is if the device will ultimately produce more BTC than the customer gave up for it.

Now if he could sell that order (or device upon shipment) for 201 BTC, then he would be slightly better off than having done nothing and merely keeping his 200 BTC.

So you don't believe that the exchange rate and it's drastic increase since then has in any way contributed to the spike in mining difficulty?

We do not need to speculate now about what the rise in the exchange rate over the last 3 months did to the difficulty over the last 3 months. We know what it did to the difficulty. There is no more speculation about difficulty or exchange rates involved. We can now determine (baring a freeze in difficulty) that a BFL order for a Single for 200 BTC was a bad investment.

I edited my post, but nobody picked up the edit so I will repost it here:

Maybe I was not clear, let me try again. When he bought, there was speculation involved as to whether BFL would deliver a product in time to earn the investment back. Now there is no speculation involved on that account. BFL did not deliver him a product in time to make his 200 BTC back.

[wrenchmonkey]

Ahah, so then you recognize that there are winners and losers in the speculation game... 

Exactly! Every single BFL customer is a loser.

More baseless sweeping generalizations not even remotely founded in fact... Keep trying though. The more BFL ships, the angrier you idiots get. Why is that?

[Syke]

More baseless sweeping generalizations not even remotely founded in fact... Keep trying though. The more BFL ships, the angrier you idiots get. Why is that?

It's a simple extrapolation of future difficulty increases. No one who has received a BFL unit will mine more BTC than they spent purchasing the unit. They lost.

[Xian01]

More baseless sweeping generalizations not even remotely founded in fact... Keep trying though. The more BFL ships, the angrier you idiots get. Why is that?

It's a simple extrapolation of future difficulty increases. No one who has received a BFL unit will mine more BTC than they spent purchasing the unit. They lost.

 Apologies if I'm late to the party here, or got the memo a bit late, and I thought it was just coincidence in the past, but it's getting very hard not to draw direct links between the wrenchmonkey account and a certain someone we've all grown to love.

 It's just getting uncanny now :|

 

[k9quaint]

More baseless sweeping generalizations not even remotely founded in fact... Keep trying though. The more BFL ships, the angrier you idiots get. Why is that?

It's a simple extrapolation of future difficulty increases. No one who has received a BFL unit will mine more BTC than they spent purchasing the unit. They lost.

Right now, 5GH/s will earn 5 BTC per month according to http://dustcoin.com/mining.
June orders for Jalapenos will have paid roughly 22 BTC for a Jalapeno, that can be made back eventually I think since they have been hashing for a while already.
August and September orders for Jalapenos will have paid 15 BTC. If they get their devices today, they will probably make their BTC back and a little extra.

Single and Mini-rig orders from June are doomed unless the difficulty stops rising.

[ThatDGuy]

There is zero speculation involved.

Absolutely wrong.  When people purchased BFL or Avalon, there was no guarantee that they would be receiving a product or when.  It was PURE speculation and a gamble as well.  People decided to take this gamble and base their purchases on speculation.  Speculation that the price would not drop, speculation that they would receive a product, and speculation that that product would be hashing the amount advertised.

Basically you are saying "never buy miners" because so far, none of them are shipping the same day.

No, I am not saying "never buy miners". I am saying that one customer gave up 200 BTC for a miner that will (probably) not earn him back that 200 BTC.
That customer will be worse off having ordered that miner. He gambled on BFL delivering and lost. Simple.

You are correct that he gambled and lost, but he gambled on far more factors than just BFL delivering.  This is what Hexed has been attempting to point out, as far as I can tell.

Name those factors?
It is not the exchange rate. The customer traded BTC for a device that creates BTC.
The only way that can make sense is if the device will ultimately produce more BTC than the customer gave up for it.

Now if he could sell that order (or device upon shipment) for 201 BTC, then he would be slightly better off than having done nothing and merely keeping his 200 BTC.

So you don't believe that the exchange rate and it's drastic increase since then has in any way contributed to the spike in mining difficulty?

We do not need to speculate now about what the rise in the exchange rate over the last 3 months did to the difficulty over the last 3 months. We know what it did to the difficulty. There is no more speculation about difficulty or exchange rates involved. We can now determine (baring a freeze in difficulty) that a BFL order for a Single for 200 BTC was a bad investment.

I edited my post, but nobody picked up the edit so I will repost it here:

Maybe I was not clear, let me try again. When he bought, there was speculation involved as to whether BFL would deliver a product in time to earn the investment back. Now there is no speculation involved on that account. BFL did not deliver him a product in time to make his 200 BTC back.

I understand that we no longer need to speculate about the past.

I agree that a BFL order for a single at 200 BTC was a bad investment, in hindsight.

In relation to your statement of the following:

No, I am not saying "never buy miners". I am saying that one customer gave up 200 BTC for a miner that will (probably) not earn him back that 200 BTC.
That customer will be worse off having ordered that miner. He gambled on BFL delivering and lost. Simple.

I am asserting that your last sentence is marginalizing other factors.  It isn't really as "Simple" as "He gambled on BFL delivering and lost."  Anyone, even today, who is purchasing a mining device that they don't receive instantly in their possession is gambling on a number of variables and (hopefully) considers the potential difficulty increase, the exchange rate, and how the latter most noticeably drives the former.

Your sentence immediately preceding these two confirms this, in a way:

That customer will be worse off having ordered that miner

The customer would have been worse off literally buying anything at all with BTC. They were also gambling against the exchange rate, and they lost that too.  Big time, unfortunately.

The delays, while extremely unfortunate in cases like these, do not eliminate other variables despite how much emotional energy the distressed customer might allow them (or convince them) to psychologically.

[hexed]

I am asserting that your last sentence is marginalizing other factors.  It isn't really as "Simple" as "He gambled on BFL delivering and lost."  Anyone, even today, who is purchasing a mining device that they don't receive instantly in their possession is gambling on a number of variables and (hopefully) considers the potential difficulty increase, the exchange rate, and how the latter most noticeably drives the former.

Your sentence immediately preceding these two confirms this, in a way:

That customer will be worse off having ordered that miner

The customer would have been worse off literally buying anything at all with BTC. They were also gambling against the exchange rate, and they lost that too.  Big time, unfortunately.

The delays, while extremely unfortunate in cases like these, do not eliminate other variables despite how much emotional energy the distressed customer might allow them (or convince them) to psychologically.

Ok ThatDGuy. 

I think we can see where the disconnect is with these guys.  They are basically saying that the exchange rate has absolutely nothing to do with their investment in BTC.  So yes, I agree that if your sole purpose was to mine BTC and hold on to BTC with no regard to how much they are actually WORTH in USD.. then yes, you will not get back an equal amount of BTC. 

But in an effort to get out of the "only black and white" and into the grey area (which is where most of us miners exist)...

So in their minds, if someone paid ~24BTC today to buy a Single, and they received their miner in September, and let's say the USD price in September (when they receive their Single) of a bitcoin was down to $15 USD.  Lets also say that because of this dramatic price drop that several thousands of people with ASIC and GPU miners left bitcoin mining therefore making the difficulty drop dramatically.  So with the new price and difficulty, let's say it is possible for a person to make 48 BTC in 6 months.  Would you concider it a wise investment?  You originally paid 24 BTC and now within 6 months you have  DOUBLED your BTC!!  So originally you paid 24BTC (at the time worth 2400$) and in September-February you mined 48 BTC (at the time worth $720). But of course since these people don't care about exchange rates, THEY WIN!! right?

..and please don't knit pick about the specifics of this theoretical situation.  This is not to argue what the price/difficulty/ of BTC will be in the future, or to speculate on BFL's shipping schedule.  This is SPECIFICALLY designed to show you the mentality of people like k9quaint and others arguing this point.  The fact is, MOST of us actually care what the exchange rate is on a BTC.  If BTC's exchange rate were to stay the same, I, along with the majority of miners would rather have 20 bitcoins worth 100$ than 200 bitcoins worth 1$.  Obvious there is a small amount of people who don't so there is really no arguing with them.  Either they have an ENTIRELY different way of thinking or they are trolling.  Either way they will not be swayed.

However what I AM saying is that most people (except for the VERY small percentage of people in this thread) care how much return they get back in fiat..  Wells Fargo still doesn't take BTC for my mortgage payment and if it did, it would STILL be based on how much BTC is worth in dollars

[ThatDGuy]

So in their minds, if someone paid ~24BTC today to buy a Single, and they received their miner in September, and let's say the USD price in September (when they receive their Single) of a bitcoin was down to $15 USD.  Lets also say that because of this dramatic price drop that several thousands of people with ASIC and GPU miners left bitcoin mining therefore making the difficulty drop dramatically.  So with the new price and difficulty, let's say it is possible for a person to make 48 BTC in 6 months.  Would you concider it a wise investment?  You originally paid 24 BTC and now within 6 months you have  DOUBLED your BTC!!  So originally you paid 24BTC (at the time worth 2400$) and in September-February you mined 48 BTC (at the time worth $720). But of course since these people don't care about exchange rates, THEY WIN!! right?

Really well-designed scenario that would satisfy the rules of a "good investment" by terms of BTC only which is being suggested above (which I did not create, not support the legitimacy of), while at the same time exemplifying one possible cause and effect relationship of BTC value due to exchange rate.

I agree with your overall assessment - and wish you the best of luck with this:

..and please don't knit pick about the specifics of this theoretical situation.  This is not to argue what the price/difficulty/ of BTC will be in the future, or to speculate on BFL's shipping schedule.  This is SPECIFICALLY designed...

Using the letters "BFL" historically opens the doors for all kinds of other goodies being injected to clearly-established hypothetical or theoretical scenarios    (Your example may be more of a hypothetical than theoretical, in this case, but that's probably just semantics)

[k9quaint]

I am asserting that your last sentence is marginalizing other factors.  It isn't really as "Simple" as "He gambled on BFL delivering and lost."  Anyone, even today, who is purchasing a mining device that they don't receive instantly in their possession is gambling on a number of variables and (hopefully) considers the potential difficulty increase, the exchange rate, and how the latter most noticeably drives the former.

Your sentence immediately preceding these two confirms this, in a way:

If BFL had delivered when they said they would deliver, the investment would have been good. They did not, so the investment was bad.

This discussion has been completely sidetracked on irrelevant statements.
Let us refocus it to what was originally stated by hexed and that I disagreed with:

Those that kept their BFL preorders, or even made new orders, look likely to come out ahead over avalon batch 3.

No! I paid nealry 200 BTC for a Single SC in June 2012. There is almost no chance to get this money back so in the end BFL was a bad investment. The Avalon batch 3 was sold for 80 BTC (?) and nearly the same hashrate. Avalon already delivered this kind of miners while BFL is still in the prototype state with the singles. It's quite realistic that an Avalon batch 3 will reach break-even. For the BFL single I see no chance. Unfortunately I ordered a single (and a bASIC) and not an Avalon so bitcoin mining is history for me before it even started.

This is such a lame bullshit statement and what I call "cherry picking" your circumstances.  No matter what the outcome, you will ALWAYS be right because you are the type of customer that has to complain..

Hexed is wrong, Mezzomix is right.

My reply was:

There is zero speculation involved. We do not need to consider exchange rates. He paid 200BTC for a product that is supposed to create BTC. In October 2012 (according to your stats), the device would produce 300 BTC per month. Unfortunately, due to delay in shipment, it may not generate 200BTC in it's lifetime.  The only reason for this is the difficulty has risen over the intervening period.

We do not need to consider why difficulty rose. We do not need to consider alternative investments like Avalon or ASICMiner shares. We do not need to consider exchange rates. Nobody has yet explained why getting less than 200 BTC back was good for Mezzomix.