Martinm's rating of ASIC Companies [BitSyncom VS ASICMiner VS BFL]

[martinm]

Hey guys,

I really would like to compare the current 3 major companies based on their total performance. Lets rate following aspects of the companies. During the review I try to give every criteria a score between 1-10.

EDIT:
This topic should not be about who's customer had the best ROI till now, or who delivered first. This is evaluated in "Delivery reliability" and states clearly ASICMiner/BitSyncom as the leading companies in this category. Additionally I will remove the total score as a lot of people see "Delivery reliability" as the aspect that counts most and this leads the discussion in the wrong way

- Public Relations
- Customer Support
- Terms & Conditions
- Price/Performance of Products
- Delivery reliability
- Assets of company

BitSyncom

Introduction:
This company delivered as first a final product to customers and reviewers, the estimated delivered amount of machines would be around 300, or less, as batch 1 was announced with a total volume of 300 machines and some people still not received their machines. The company could not reach their first released shipping dates, but due to the fact their were the first company that ever released an ASIC-Bitcoin Miner, their customers of Batch 1 were still happy. Their efforts in public relations are low, their representative gave some interviews after their release of their product, but in general he stays low profile. The company does not seems to show up at exhibitions or invest into marketing. Their customer support is mainly based on their wiki pages and 3rd party forums as the contribution of customer 2 customer support, there is no hotline and tickets doesn't seems to be processed. Their Terms & Conditions seems to be very customer-hostile, it doesn't seems that refunds are possible at all, payments with fiat money have tight limits of 8hours, support is rejected by default. Additionally their website doesn't show any address of the company, for me its unclear were this company is incorporated. The evaluation of Price/Performance need to be separated for Batch 1/2/3 and their Chips sells. Prices were calculated from Batch 3 on only in BitCoins. The price for Batch 1 & 2 can be seen as fair, also the strategy to just sell in batches seems fair, due to limited production capacities. The price of Batch 3 was increased dramatically because of the introduced link to the BitCoin price, the reason this change was argued was based on a ROI for this product, but it assumes they would know how the market (total hashrate and bitcoin exchange price) is developing or have a very fast delivery time. Additionally we can assume that if the BitCoin would decease to the value of beginning this year (about 13 USD) their price policy would change again. As already mentioned BitSyncom was the first supplier that delivered products to the market (Batch 1), this provided them a big reputation inside the community. The fact that the delivery could not be done at the announced time was easily forgiven. The announced targets for deliveries for Batch 2/3 can now be seen as missed. The final delivery is still unknown, even the most people hope that the delivery will happen till the end of may. The company assets are clearly unknown, due to the fact that nowbody ever visited any production facility of BitSyncom, we can assume that they don't have any own machines. The pictures shown in interviews of the representative of BitSyncom are clearly the same facility were the Icarus boards were already manufactured, and this facility does not belong to BitSyncom.
The blog post of XianFu shows the same facility in April 2012 when he visited this company the first time:  http://www.openmobilefree.net/?p=1361
By a rough calculation of their sales of Batch 1/2/3 + Chips (BTC price of 120USD), we can assume a turnover of about 10,6 Million USD or more.


- Public Relations:  4
- Customer Support: 3
- Terms & Conditions: 3
- Price/Performance of Products: 4.5
- Delivery reliability: 6
- Assets of company: 2


ButterflyLabs

Introduction:
The company recently delivered some work in progress prototypes of their ASIC- Products to a few people, but missed their targets of power consumption. The company puts efforts to public relations, they try to promote business relations and show up on exhibitions. They have dedicated persons for different areas of business like customer support, public relations, key account manager. They provide a hotline and e-mail for support, as lifetime warranty for their products. Customers report that it takes long time to get a reply to an e-mail, in average up to one week or sometimes longer. They release regular news about their progress, even the news are not linked to any fixed schedule but to their progress. The Terms & Conditions are to be considered as normal, also they need to keep up with US Law as this company is a legal incorporated US company. Their prices are to be considered as fair in comparison to the competition, even their increased their price in recent days. However in comparison to others the prices are still to be considered as the lowest on the market. About their delivery is not much positive to be said, they failed many times to keep their announced shipment dates and a reliable delivery date is still not visible. By these delays they they suffer hard critics in the community and a fade of believe, even they proven that they have a product. Clearly the product shown does also not keep their promised technical data, but the company provided refunds to customers who don't accept these products. The assets of this company are properly not very high, even they have some own equipment, a official facility and also accepted visitors. However, it's still the only company that showed to public that they have a real facility. The companies turnover is difficult to estimate, the amount of pre-orders are not public but can be estimated to about 30000, if we take an average of 1400 USD for an order, we can assume a turnover of 42 Million USD.

- Public Relations:  7  
- Customer Support: 5
- Terms & Conditions: 5
- Price/Performance of Products: 6
- Delivery reliability: 1
- Assets of company: 4


ASICMiner

Introduction:
This company can be considered as exception, they followed another path then the BFL and BitSyncom. They started to collect money by selling shares to develop own chips and establish an mining farm. After they reached their goal, they started to sell some of their products to customers. Their public relations were limited to announcements on community boards, their customer support can hardly be evaluated as not enough time passed they started to sell their products. However, they products seems to be customer friendly, and they release information to their investors about their targets and the current state. The Terms and Conditions seems fair, they sales started in an auction, so the price was mostly decided by the bidding. The amount of provided products to the market is very limited and the price in the bidding was extremely high. Their new USB-Minner seems to be overpriced and only available for bulk buys. The delivery time is as fast as possible, they have the products at stock and start the shipping immediately. Their assets are unknown, even the most consider they have an mining farm, pictures of the farm are not known to me, but by observation to announcements and increase of the hash-rate we can assume that this information are true. The structure of the whole company is not clear to me, as far as I know the company is a Shanghai one and their production and farm is in Shenzhen. The main question is hereby how the shares of this company are issued to the share owners, for me it doesn't seems that this company is registered as a Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprise in PRC. So even if it is a incorporated company, the shares would properly just a kind of gentlemen agreement between investors and company owner. However, I'm not a lawyer but the shares of the company can also be seen as a risky investment as long there is no legal basement.

- Public Relations:  2  
- Customer Support: 5
- Terms & Conditions: 5
- Price/Performance of Products: 2
- Delivery reliability: 9
- Assets of company: 5.5



Conclusion:
For me there is no clear winner visible. Different people tend to give different rating on specific aspects, as for most it just counts to have their ASIC's as one of the first. The emotion what leads the decisions is greed. For me it seems that most of the people does not look to much how legit a business is structured, that is the part I'm most concerned about. Everybody should consider about their chances for legal steps in the case of a fraud. It's clear that mostly the money can not be refunded, but at least the guilty one can be cached and punished by law. The worst is that all your money is gone and the fraudsters are spending it in peace on an island! By this everyone should deal with an investment like he would buy a house or anything else of value, that happens mostly without greed, but with a solid contract and caution.

[KS]

dude, are you a BFL pawn or sth? your numbers are way off.

[glendall]

I think your price/performance numbers need a bit of work. Butterfly hasn't been able to meet any of their power/performance goals -- did you go by their [excessive flashy] advertising claims, or what the numbers have shown to be for their production prototypes that they have been shipping?

[Rampion]

Man, your post is a joke.

Are you really saying that the worst ASIC company is THE FIRST ONE in delivering products to final customers, and THE ONLY ONE that delivered some units priced in a way that a very good ROI was possible?

Then:

- how can you say that ASICminer PR is poor? They are handling very good the communications with both their shareholders and the community.
- how can you say that ASICminer customer support is poor? They are providing a lot of help to their blades customers
- how can you say that BFL PR is good? They are just laughing at their customers

And I could continue ad infinitum

[13Charlie]

Looks like these ratings could use a tweak or two.
It may be a good idea to ask forum members to chime in and rate the companies that they have ACTUALLY done business with.
Update the OP with the average scores.

I will not score any of them as I haven't done any business with them.

[Frizz23]

Code:

Name: 			martinm
Posts: 			8
Position: 		Jr. Member
Date Registered: 	April 05, 2013, 04:56:47 AM

8 posts, joined only a month ago, praised BFL to the skies.

Come on BFL! Can you not tell your shills to be a little less obvious?

[martinm]

I think your price/performance numbers need a bit of work. Butterfly hasn't been able to meet any of their power/performance goals -- did you go by their [excessive flashy] advertising claims, or what the numbers have shown to be for their production prototypes that they have been shipping?

Price/Performance is simply USD/GigaHash. The power consumption is important on the long run, for the moment we need to compare the current products and here I don't see that anyone is much better than others.

[stripykitteh]

I think the question you've got to ask yourself about BFL is, how many of the thousands of people they have taken money from are happy with them? What else matters?

[RoadStress]

martinm did you just gave BFL a 7 on their PR? IF you are not retard-inaba then you really don't know about this movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlWrmIqGs3Y&t=2m48s  is this a way to treat your potential customers? also i am sure that you are not aware of the amount of rage and swears that Inaba did on this forum.
"Price/Performance of Products" WHAT PRODUCTS??? 40 or so Jalapenos?

INABA YOU ARE A RETARD that doesn't pay loosing bets! there!

Edit: martinm what is the use of this topic? really! you just created this account and you thought "hey! let's help some random people just because i got nothing else to do". do you think people can't decide for themselves what to buy or what? why would you spend some of your time to help unknown people?

[martinm]

Man, your post is a joke.

Are you really saying that the worst ASIC company is THE FIRST ONE in delivering products to final customers, and THE ONLY ONE that delivered some units priced in a way that a very good ROI was possible?

Then:

- how can you say that ASICminer PR is poor? They are handling very good the communications with both their shareholders and the community.
- how can you say that ASICminer customer support is poor? They are providing a lot of help to their blades customers
- how can you say that BFL PR is good? They are just laughing at their customers

And I could continue ad infinitum

1. How can you say that ASICminer PR is poor? They are handling very good the communications with both their shareholders and the community.

First of all I don't want to mix public relations with customer support, and it seems I need to quote the definition of PR from wiki because this is what we need to know to decide how to rate PR:
Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing the spread of information between an individual or an organization and the public.[1] Public relations may include an organization or individual gaining exposure to their audiences using topics of public interest and news items that do not require direct payment.[2] The aim of public relations by a company often is to persuade the public, investors, partners, employees, and other stakeholders to maintain a certain point of view about it, its leadership, products, or of political decisions. Common activities include speaking at conferences, winning industry awards, working with the press, and employee communication.[3]

So the rating is about managing the spread of information:
- What kind of ways ASIC miner use to spread the way of information to public?
- How much effort they spend to persuade the public, investors, partners and other stakeholders to maintain a certain point of view about their company?
- How often they showed up at exhibitions or events, invited people to report about their facilities, how far they are working with any kind of press together?

2. How can you say that BFL PR is good? They are just laughing at their customers

By definition of PR they doing the most to provide a good image of their company in public (Exhibitions, Advertisement, Co-operations with other BitCoin companies)

3.How can you say that ASICminer customer support is poor? They are providing a lot of help to their blades customers
I wrote " their customer support can hardly be evaluated as not enough time passed they started to sell their products", their is nowhere I wrote that they have poor customer support. However, but if we need to give a score to them we need to see what is Customer support and by what we can rate it...

Again wiki will help us to get a better understanding for the term customer support:
Customer support is a range of customer services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product.[5] It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, trouble shooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product.[5]
- What ways of communication ASIC Miner provides for their customers e.g. Wiki/FAQ/Own Forum/Hotline ?
- What is the response time for a ticket/inquiry, or how to create a ticket?
- Who the customer can contact if the support is not providing help (like key account ...)?

I want to keep the evaluation objective so I appreciate any critics that can help to measure the companies performance in figures.

[k9quaint]

Just by making this thread, the OP lowers BFL PR rating to 1.
Way too transparent.
Please fix the scores.

[tigerfree]

LOL BFL LOL. nothing to say  .

[KS]

Man, your post is a joke.

Are you really saying that the worst ASIC company is THE FIRST ONE in delivering products to final customers, and THE ONLY ONE that delivered some units priced in a way that a very good ROI was possible?

Then:

- how can you say that ASICminer PR is poor? They are handling very good the communications with both their shareholders and the community.
- how can you say that ASICminer customer support is poor? They are providing a lot of help to their blades customers
- how can you say that BFL PR is good? They are just laughing at their customers

And I could continue ad infinitum

1. How can you say that ASICminer PR is poor? They are handling very good the communications with both their shareholders and the community.

First of all I don't want to mix public relations with customer support, and it seems I need to quote the definition of PR from wiki because this is what we need to know to decide how to rate PR:
Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing the spread of information between an individual or an organization and the public.[1] Public relations may include an organization or individual gaining exposure to their audiences using topics of public interest and news items that do not require direct payment.[2] The aim of public relations by a company often is to persuade the public, investors, partners, employees, and other stakeholders to maintain a certain point of view about it, its leadership, products, or of political decisions. Common activities include speaking at conferences, winning industry awards, working with the press, and employee communication.[3]

So the rating is about managing the spread of information:
- What kind of ways ASIC miner use to spread the way of information to public?
- How much effort they spend to persuade the public, investors, partners and other stakeholders to maintain a certain point of view about their company?
- How often they showed up at exhibitions or events, invited people to report about their facilities, how far they are working with any kind of press together?

2. How can you say that BFL PR is good? They are just laughing at their customers

By definition of PR they doing the most to provide a good image of their company in public (Exhibitions, Advertisement, Co-operations with other BitCoin companies)

3.How can you say that ASICminer customer support is poor? They are providing a lot of help to their blades customers
I wrote " their customer support can hardly be evaluated as not enough time passed they started to sell their products", their is nowhere I wrote that they have poor customer support. However, but if we need to give a score to them we need to see what is Customer support and by what we can rate it...

Again wiki will help us to get a better understanding for the term customer support:
Customer support is a range of customer services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product.[5] It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, trouble shooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product.[5]
- What ways of communication ASIC Miner provides for their customers e.g. Wiki/FAQ/Own Forum/Hotline ?
- What is the response time for a ticket/inquiry, or how to create a ticket?
- Who the customer can contact if the support is not providing help (like key account ...)?

I want to keep the evaluation objective so I appreciate any critics that can help to measure the companies performance in figures.

close the thread and start a poll....

[John (John K.)]

I'm speechless here. I'd thought that it was painfully obvious that ASICMiner => Avalon > BFL at this point. 

[Rampion]

I'm speechless here. I'd thought that it was painfully obvious that ASICMiner => Avalon > BFL at this point. 

That's it, but you know how this "modern" PR strategies work...

[rammy2k2]

is this the funny thread ?

[RoadStress]

i think Inaba is the dominatrix of martinm because i can't explain this thread. AM has 20Thash/s running right now. BFL has 40*5=200Ghash/s running(asic only)

By definition of PR they doing the most to provide a good image of their company in public (Exhibitions, Advertisement, Co-operations with other BitCoin companies)

dude are you really that idiot? Inaba the PR guy from BFL called his customers cocksuckers. is that good PR? i don't think so. you are an idiot. period. go and sell your house to buy BFL stuff!

[k9quaint]

BFL customer support should be 0, since 99.99% of their customers still have not received what they ordered.
Price performance of products should be 0, since 99.99% of their customers are currently getting 0GH/s.

[organofcorti]

I'm speechless here. I'd thought that it was painfully obvious that ASICMiner => Avalon > BFL at this point. 

The OPs mistakes:
 * not weighting scores. Delivery time and price / performance should be given far more emphasis.
 * It's too early to judge customer service yet.
 * PR - who cares? The manufacturers are working it out as they go and can't promise fulfilment of any promise, so why does PR matter at all?
 * Assets - why? These companies have bootstrapped. Avalon and BFL have asked for preorders - they're not yet in a position to have any significant assets
 * 30000 units sold by BFL? I think that's out by an order of magnitude.

The post's a good idea, but the implementation is faulty.

[creativex]

How could "Delivery reliability" and "Public Relations" possibly be of equal import?!? Makes no sense.

If I pay for a product or service and don't receive it on schedule, how long is PR(bs) an acceptable substitute?