Just as an interesting aside, I write for a major hardware enthusiast web site. I won't say which one, but traffic is in the millions of pages per day on average. I emailed BFL a few weeks back to ask about the possibility of buying a Jalepeno for review, pointing out that we have hundreds of thousands of readers. No response. None. Based on that alone, I'm not buying anything from them. Why? Because if they're not interested in talking with press, it means they have so many orders that they can't possibly fill them all any time soon. Actually, a response saying something to that effect would have been more encouraging, as it would mean they at least know they're a ways out. My guess is that the "Jalapenos shipping!" announcement gave them a huge influx of cash, but based on previous delays it will be half a year before they can use that money to have more wafers fabricated and shipped back, plus more delays for assembly. At this stage, they should just start buying Avalon chips and working with those, and customers would be likely to get hardware in hand much sooner.
Put another way:
$1250 for a 30GHash/s rig would be an absolute steal right now. In fact, $275 for a 5GH/s Jalapeno would be an absolute steal. You would more than pay for the hardware within two weeks...if it was legit. If BFL had any real quantity of hardware, they should be mining like crazy while they "delay", and then ship all at once "to be fair" or something like that. But there's no massive surge in hash rates going on -- 10% every two weeks is nothing! LTC by comparison just shot up 25% in 2.5 days. It's now to the point where BTC is once more the more profitable mining option for GPUs, which wouldn't make sense if there were a lot of ASICs coming online. A couple months from now, I expect a much larger ASIC boom, and while BFL units would still be profitable, by the time thousands of BFL units are actually out in the wild I suspect the ROI will be in the realm of four or more months -- never mind the 18+ months you've been waiting by then.
Now this post appears to have a lot less fluff than any BFL announcement. Meaning there is hard truth in this post.
Large VCs/Investors looking to have a sizeable mining footprint will not touch BFL until they have successfully been reviewed by notable news outlets thoroughly. And no not the 1 jally review. i'm talking a review with many duplicate devices of BFL and getting average hash power consumption rates etc. Flaws or errors etc.
BFL customers/investors you can thank the founder as well as INABA/Josh for all the BFL has produced....VAPORWARE essentially.
