Are BFL Jalapeños worth it?

[Biomech]

This whole thing is a clever scam, think about it for a minute it's common sense. If you own the hardware that gives you a 10x advantage over the competition and make tons of money why would you ever sell them for pennies on the dollar and significantly decrease your profit?

Those are simple circuits that can be mass produced at large quantities once the design is done, what's happening is they needed money to get the initial order in so they hang a carrot in front of everyone then used preorder money to fund their orders and use the resulting hardware to make a lot of money themselves. You are essentially funding their profit center with a 0% interest rate, by comparison you make the US government look smart....  To keep the mobs down, they ship a few 5 GH/s only boxes to appear legit, which is nothing but a drop in the bucket.  

They will never mass ship those higher boxes in any large quantity until a time when the difficulty makes them irrelevant.  If they were selling the 5GH for $2000 and 50 GH for $15000 then i would at least give them the benefit of the doubt they are legit and focused on hardware sells.  The price they are asking is just a clever way to fund their own hardware.

We have so many smart people here, cant believe most dont realize this. I guess btc does make you go blind...

I keep seeing this, but I've seen nothing about the network jumping massively, except with ASICMiner, who were out in the open.

Now, I do believe them to be at best a bunch of liars, and at worst the long con, but I don't think it's about mining bitcoins. It's more about selling the promise of shovels. Miners, whether dirt or digital, are always a small minority of the general interested population. More short term money is to be had from SUPPLYING (or fleecing) the miners. The ones who strike it rich don't mind, the rest get stuck. (Full disclosure, I pan gold. Not real good at it, but broke even on my hardware long ago)

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[Pentel]

This whole thing is a clever scam, think about it for a minute it's common sense. If you own the hardware that gives you a 10x advantage over the competition and make tons of money why would you ever sell them for pennies on the dollar and significantly decrease your profit?

Those are simple circuits that can be mass produced at large quantities once the design is done, what's happening is they needed money to get the initial order in so they hang a carrot in front of everyone then used preorder money to fund their orders and use the resulting hardware to make a lot of money themselves. You are essentially funding their profit center with a 0% interest rate, by comparison you make the US government look smart....  To keep the mobs down, they ship a few 5 GH/s only boxes to appear legit, which is nothing but a drop in the bucket.  

They will never mass ship those higher boxes in any large quantity until a time when the difficulty makes them irrelevant.  If they were selling the 5GH for $2000 and 50 GH for $15000 then i would at least give them the benefit of the doubt they are legit and focused on hardware sells.  The price they are asking is just a clever way to fund their own hardware.

We have so many smart people here, cant believe most dont realize this. I guess btc does make you go blind...

This is what I would believe, how ever I don't think this is the case.  BFL are just not very good at doing ASIC as they were FPGA.
They just did not truly understand how hard it would be to deliver true ASIC's.  They have crap chip designers and PCB designers as we know from there updates.

They must be using a sh*t chip maker for there chips because why else is it taking soooo bloody long to get them?

It would be easier for them and quicker just to use ASIC chips that are for sell NOW to club together there miners'.

[tkone]

why in the world would i sell a shovel for $1 if it can make me $100 a day? thats the logic to thinking that BFL will ship.

ofcourse if i am honest then yes i would sell the shovels for $1 as promised. but if i lied over and over for the past year, do you really still think i am honest? if you do, well good for you lol

[Biomech]

why in the world would i sell a shovel for $1 if it can make me $100 a day? thats the logic to thinking that BFL will ship.

ofcourse if i am honest then yes i would sell the shovels for $1 as promised. but if i lied over and over for the past year, do you really still think i am honest? if you do, well good for you lol

depends on what you are good at.

[firefop]

This whole thing is a clever scam, think about it for a minute it's common sense. If you own the hardware that gives you a 10x advantage over the competition and make tons of money why would you ever sell them for pennies on the dollar and significantly decrease your profit?

Those are simple circuits that can be mass produced at large quantities once the design is done, what's happening is they needed money to get the initial order in so they hang a carrot in front of everyone then used preorder money to fund their orders and use the resulting hardware to make a lot of money themselves. You are essentially funding their profit center with a 0% interest rate, by comparison you make the US government look smart....  To keep the mobs down, they ship a few 5 GH/s only boxes to appear legit, which is nothing but a drop in the bucket.  

They will never mass ship those higher boxes in any large quantity until a time when the difficulty makes them irrelevant.  If they were selling the 5GH for $2000 and 50 GH for $15000 then i would at least give them the benefit of the doubt they are legit and focused on hardware sells.  The price they are asking is just a clever way to fund their own hardware.

We have so many smart people here, cant believe most dont realize this. I guess btc does make you go blind...

Pfft. You say bitcoin makes us go blind. I say greed makes you act stupid.

BFL never pretended they had a working asic product. They straight up told us it was in development and offered us a chance to buy it before it was made. The never said they wouldn't use pre-order money to fund development and most of us who pre-ordered assumed that's where the money was going.

So they didn't deliver on time according to estimates... they also aren't very good on keeping us posted on what exactly is happening on the development front... as long as they get it sorted in the near future I'll take the best offering on the block even a year later than I expected it.

The reason you only see the asshats getting refunds is because they don't really have a clue what they're buying. What BFL is selling isn't just a pretty box. It's the most power efficient miner ever made. As long as BFL delivers power consumption in an acceptable range... that's what we're buying.

It doesn't really matter when they arrive. Sure it sucks for people who went small expecting to 'ride the wave' and just ordered a jally or two. But those of us who actually invested larger amounts of money in pre-orders aren't refunding. Because as soon as my ~600 gh of singles arrive... that's when all the avalon customers will start whining about profitability.  They'll be forced to power down and unplug or lay out massive amounts of money later on to stay profitable... while those of us with BFL products will be sitting here mining, making the expected returns - long after lesser offerings are unplugged due to electric costs.

Nobody with real money in bfl pre-orders will refund partly because it would simply be moronic at this (late) stage of the development process and partly because the worst thing that could happen to bitcoin right now would be BFL folding up due to lack of operating costs, and everyone being stuck with inferior product a la avalon.

[Sk1llS]

depends on what you are good at.

You don't have to be good at mining to mine, you start it up and leave it. It's not rocket science and you don't need to be a genius to do it. There is a big difference between his shovel analogy and Crypto mining, but you get the point he's making.

[Zaih]

From what I've gathered, simply stay away from BFL. It's not worth the effort or money what so ever.

[Sk1llS]

The never said they wouldn't use pre-order money to fund development and most of us who pre-ordered assumed that's where the money was going.

Ahhh...They never said they wouldn't use your paid for equipment once it's manufactured to mine either, so you must have assumed that's where your hardware is going.

as long as they get it sorted in the near future I'll take

It doesn't really matter when they arrive.

Which is it? Near future or doesn't it matter when they arrive?

The reason you only see the asshats getting refunds is because they don't really have a clue what they're buying. What BFL is selling isn't just a pretty box. It's the most power efficient miner ever made. As long as BFL delivers power consumption in an acceptable range... that's what we're buying.

I think everyone who ordered knows what they were promised. They paid for and ordered a product a year ago and it has not been delivered. The only asshats I see are those still believing BFL will deliver. Shall we see how many more years they can keep this charade up. If you do stick it out for the long haul, by the time BFL delivers you will be mining crickets. Keep drinking that cool-aid brother.

[ISAWHIM]

They said another 80 were delivered... total now is 30 + 80 = 110 out of ?20,000 orders... only took them a year, and took three weeks to get 80 out, after the 30...

I have not read ONE SINGLE post about these "delivered", "running", boxes. And you KNOW as soon as someone got one, and got it working, they would post a "look what I got" thread, defending BFL.

You would not notice 110 5GHs machines online. That is only 550GHs or 0.55THs, which would look like any 6-card 7970 system online. (There are a lot of those added every day. I know, because that is the majority of the new posts online, and those are the only cards constantly "selling out" on every online and local shop in the world.)

Once they release 80 of the 60/50GHs machines, then you will notice a bigger change. Though, I am sure everyone getting one, will attempt solo-mining for a few days, just because they can, and think they may strike it rich... then realize they are only 0.00001% of the whole hash-rate, and jump back into a pool. That will be a total of 4.8THs, or 4.0THs, but that will be like <1THs per major pool.

When they release all the 1.5THs machines... 80 of those (120THs)... that will instantly knock us down by 5-10% across the board, and another 30% of the lower-end will leave, headed to scrypt-based coins. (That is the only thing stopping the new 7970 guys from loosing more... all the <5xxx guys retire to scrypt-coins. Next will be the 6xxx rigs... and the FPGA guys... (BFL just screwed their previous customers, only gave them a year to live with the purchase of the FPGAs, before pushing them out of the bitcoin market. That is what they are going to do to Jalapenos... You won't even get 6-months, before you are squashed by your own sales-men/creators... Now that is the spirit of "honest sales-men".)

The answer is NO... and the 25/30GHs and 50/60GHs are also not worth it... since they are just a bunch of Jalapenos, with price matched speed. The only saving is in wires to connect them. You don't need 10 wires for 10 jalapenos to equal the one wire of the 50/60GHs machines. You would think that they would offer a slightly lower price per hash, but they are milking the market, and trying to ADD more money to the jalapeno orders, selling you firmware for unlocking the faster speed. LOL, that will be the first thing people do, is give the firmware away free... why pay, it already does 7GHs, once you update it. Don't get tricked into paying for that upgrade that was their mistake, and will be unlocked free once the first person gets the firmware and shows you how to flash it with the USB.)

[Red_Evil]

They said another 80 were delivered... total now is 30 + 80 = 110 out of ?20,000 orders... only took them a year, and took three weeks to get 80 out, after the 30...

80 ?? Source plz

They send 30 units April ... and i get a email for send my "Trade in " last tuesday for 8 Jalapenos and nothing happen ...
they talked about 4 Singele this week and perhaps ( always ) perhaps 200 Jalas on Saturday or something if they get the boards back

[Cluster2k]

It's quite likely that by the time BFL ship orders dating from 2012 other ASIC companies will be releasing products based on Avalon's chips and greatly diminishing the profitability of BFL products.  It's getting to the stage now where I think anyone ordering a BFL product today has to ask themselves whether they will get it shipped before 2014.  BFL's track record in shipping products hasn't been great.  Since beginning shipment of products to end customers in early April 2013 this forum has been surprisingly quiet about customers receiving and reviewing the product.  Apart from a few dev units and units for the media, it seems BFL customers have got nothing or are eerily silent.

[madchance]

With increasing difficulty would purchasing a BFL Jalapeño even be worth it?

No, because BFL are likely mining themselves until the difficulty gets silly. (And that is just a matter of months now, GPU mining will be obsolete in August)

[canton]

I have not read ONE SINGLE post about these "delivered", "running", boxes. And you KNOW as soon as someone got one, and got it working, they would post a "look what I got" thread, defending BFL.

I posted. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=218480.0

However I'm not defending BFL at all... Rather, I'm frustrated to be trying to decide whether to "profit-monger" by selling a Jalapeno for the exact same price as I paid for it in the first place in June 2012 (25 BTC).

[cdog]

It will be worth more the $250, 50 years from now. Yes.

[The 4ner]

Guess I'll have to wait a couple months to see their progress on deliveries and then decide whether to purchase one.

[Xian01]

However I'm not defending BFL at all... Rather, I'm frustrated to be trying to decide whether to "profit-monger" by selling a Jalapeno for the exact same price as I paid for it in the first place in June 2012 (25 BTC).

 ~100 days to pull 25 BTC on your Jalapeño, FWIW (unless my math is wrong, which is quite possible)

[KS]

However I'm not defending BFL at all... Rather, I'm frustrated to be trying to decide whether to "profit-monger" by selling a Jalapeno for the exact same price as I paid for it in the first place in June 2012 (25 BTC).

 ~100 days to pull 25 BTC on your Jalapeño, FWIW (unless my math is wrong, which is quite possible)

That should be about when the klondikes will start shipping en masse...

If you don't already have a jally...

[alexhaj]

I think the real problem is whether BFL will run out of cash before shipping all the devices owed to customers.  It seems they are using pre-order funds for R&D, therefore they may not have enough funds left to ship to all the customers.

[Biomech]

I think the real problem is whether BFL will run out of cash before shipping all the devices owed to customers.  It seems they are using pre-order funds for R&D, therefore they may not have enough funds left to ship to all the customers.

This isn't a real concern. They start shipping at reasonable levels, they will NOT have cash flow problems. They won't have to even begin to clear the backlog. If they shipped 1000 units in a week, enough people would jump on the bandwagon to cover shipping with ease.

of course the odds of them doing that don't look to hot..

[ThatDGuy]

I think the real problem is whether BFL will run out of cash before shipping all the devices owed to customers.  It seems they are using pre-order funds for R&D, therefore they may not have enough funds left to ship to all the customers.

This isn't a real concern. They start shipping at reasonable levels, they will NOT have cash flow problems. They won't have to even begin to clear the backlog. If they shipped 1000 units in a week, enough people would jump on the bandwagon to cover shipping with ease.

of course the odds of them doing that don't look to hot..

This is also the simple reason why they wouldn't be mining on the units right now if they were able to ship at reasonable levels.

People are paying 2 BTC for 300 mh/s USB sticks.  They would certainly pay BFL a lot more than the $275 currently for 5,000+ mh/s.