I am READY to buy one of these ASIC rigs from butterfly or Avalon but do they even really exist?
If I try to sum up the ASIC situation... from what i could read here on this forum.
you are
gladly invited to correct me if i'm wrong ...
AVALON : 3 batches. Batch one has been processed (not entirely). Batch 3 not begun yet. possible 900 (batch 1 and 2) devices but some customer did not received yet.
horribly expensive except for batch 1 ... no news for batch 4 you can still see some prices but it is out of stock right now
trouble with delivery also .. (custom and batch processing)
BFL : at least one dev and one user received the jalapenos. ~5 GH/s 30 watts. 9 months of pre order before you can get one... now 274$.
probably in the 44k number of orders ... some were not validated, not paid, other canceled. I have read about a 400 shipping /day ...
Many haters here for BFL, I don't know if they truly believe what they say : I respect that, as long as they remain factual. Or they only try to discourage people in buying to get faster delivery (if they have a preorder), or trying to minimise asic chips mining ...(and difficulty going higher)
My point of view on BFL : they do and will produce their products. But they FAILED hard in doing it IN TIME and "giving Estimates"/communicating. We can understand the difficulty but i do believe they lie all the time : "it's gonna be there soon ..."
I did order a 5 GH/s Bitcoin Miner a week ago after i was a working device. I think i'm gonna be surprised when i reveive it for christmas ... (if i do ...)
They need to prove they are processing the order and sending devices in an INDUSTRIAL WAY !
Block Erupter Blade : afaik : 10 were sold in auction that were sold for more than 75 BTC ...
a new Auction is in progress ... see post from pixel75
Didn't look much into ASICMINER shares thingy ... I like to have my device at home :>
Avalon does propose the buy the ASIC chip "alone" (10k minimum order). Some people here believe they can design, produce and sell the board to provide power and data to the chip. GL HF to them.
Probably the best bet right now, but nothing available yet. Hard to tell who is going to be able to design the board and be able to sell in quantity... (maybe you'd have to preorder from all of them to have a chance ...)
The demand is HIGH ... the difficulty is going to EXPLODE (even if you consider GPU players leaving the game, and they didn't yet because the BTC is quite high)
Concerning FPGA, I've seen the Lancelot. I like it. But 350$ for 380 MH/s is still can only be interesting if the ASIC players fail to deliver. (probability remains high ...)
PM me if you considered it but want to group buy ... I'm in France. (10+ devices to have them at 300$ seems to be a minimum)
Comments are welcomed.