BFL announces 28nm 600GH/S blade for $4680

[San1ty]

OMG... I was away for the weekend and missed this.

BFL... Seriously... LMAO...

I love these guys, best laugh I had in ages!

[Bitcoinorama]

In all honesty, from their standpoint, it's not a bad way to clear some of the disgruntled backlog and avert the rest of the discontent from delayed products a few months.

 I'm curious, and apologies for sounding confrontational, but are you high right now ?

 This assumes that the world can trust Butterfly Labs to keep their word that they will ship on their stated schedule.

 History has clearly shown, repeatedly, that accurate scheduling is not one of Butterfly Labs' favorable qualities.

Why be confrontational? I said from 'their' standpoint, not mine.

I was trying to ascertain via speculation what the hell is going on in their scatty little minds to provide such comedic entertainment for us all.

Would kind of like to see them attempt it though at least. Certainly an innovative solution.

[Phinnaeus Gage]

There is a company selling apple pies.  I ordered my pie in august 2012.  When this pie gets to me, whenever that maybe, it will be no good.  It will have spoiled and I won't be able to eat it.  I am in the overwhelming majority of the customers who share this same predicament.  

There are the rare customers who did get their pie and did indeed eat it.  There are those that also got the pie within the time limit to still eat it and not get sick.  We know you people exist and we can only imagine how good the pie tasted.

If you are one of these people, it is usually poor form to talk about how great the pie tasted and how you'd get another, when most of who you address are still starving.  We blame the company for our malnutrition and will probably never give them our business again.  You bringing us news of your unique instances do nothing to enlighten us, it only makes us angry, and more hungry.

wow... I am so hungry...

Lesson learnt: Never buy your food from a guy convicted of rippin' off the elderly to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars 15 years runnin' with his lottery scam, and was only slapped with a $100 and had to promise to never do it again, even if it has been proven that he's been doing such again 3 years runnin' and countin', no matter if he's delivered in the past, shipped 10% of the current backlog, and the food look delicious. Unless you're a fuckin' idiot and clipped a coupon from the Sunday paper to get a discount then, by all means, order your food from him and pay for it with bitcoins. What could possibly go awry from the grads of Devry?

Rumor has it that BFL has taken a page from Google and installed a Turkish bath for all their employees to enjoy.


Stacking 200 boxes a day on the dock is HARD!

[Phinnaeus Gage]

I am almost willing to bet money that they will completely outsource the production of the monarch product. If they had done that with their other products they wouldn't be in the mess they are in now.

I showed that 45s video to my brother who has set up production lines for P&G, and he said that's it's virtually impossible to run two different lines at the same time in the same production area.

One thing he pointed out to me in that video is that no way there should be a fan running moving air (read dust) over those components. Brand new cardboard boxes are notorious for being loaded with fine dust. And no way, he said, would the assembly plant be soooooo close to the dock, for the same reason--DUST.

My take is that they might as well assemble the stuff in the sole bathroom that's not designed to accommodate 45 employees.

[lucasjkr]

Apple had first mover advantage for refined gui desktop OS'. Heck, it had first mover advantage for desktop pcs as well. Netscape had first mover advantage for commercial web browsers. Ford had first mover advantage for mass produced cars. And apple again had first mover advantage for tablets, full screen smartphones. They all lost out.

Bitcoin has first mover advantage, yes.

Those are pretty bad examples because they generally don't have a network effect (except to a minor extent phones and tablets although the ease of cross platform development has diminished that).

Some examples of early first mover products with network effect would be:
ebay - sure ebay sucks but competitors really couldn't break in because more users = more value and that is hard to beat.
paypal - same thing.  people love to bash paypal but surprisingly there is no paypal killer (not talking about Bitcoin just some "better" or less sucky centralized alternative.
gold - picked as commodity money for its properties (divisibility, inert, malliable, etc) however among commodities it is far from the most rare but it lasted due to inertia.
TCP/IP - what a clunked together protocol.  horribly ill suited for modern networks (the overhead of small packets of gigabit speed WAN links is insane) but it remains because it would be disruptive to change.
POTS (plain old telephone) - ancient, insanely expensive, low tech and although it is dying (slowly) it lasted decades despite the possibility of something superior replacing it.

All of these benefit from a network effect.  The more people using it, the more valuable the system becomes.  Bitcoin isn't software, it isn't even a service. Bitcoin is a protocol.  There is software than runs the Bitcoin protocol, and there is services which use that software but as a protocol Bitcoin simply needs to be useful enough to lay the foundation.
 
As far as Bitcoin being nothing but mining.  I would point to things like bitpay.  bitpay is one of those behind the scenes "boring" companies which unlock value.  It allows people to accept Bitcoins easily.   That adds to the network effect.  If a company can use bitpay to accept Bitcoins easily and other alternatives are harder and almost every potential customer who has "a" cryptocurrency has "the" cryptocurrency then there is little value in accepting alternatives.  It reinforces that compounding network effect.

I often get misquoted so to be clear.  I am not saying Bitcoin can't be replaced.  It certain can.  The network effect is a barrier to entry it isn't a force field.

The network effect of eBay, Paypal, Gold, TCP/IP and POTS are all MUCH more significant than what Bitcoin has. The biggest hurdle for Bitcoin adoption is getting vendors to accept Bitcoin. That's the biggest hurdle, asking vendors to accept these coins that they can't see or touch, and which has no backing authority. BUT, if they can do get over that hurdle, the challenge to get them to accept a different type of crypto would likely be negligible. If they trust one blockchain, it won't be terribly difficult for them to have trust in another. They just need to be assured that there is community interest in it, that it's not just a pump and dump hatched by a single person who therefore has nearly all the currency.

As far as the services associated with Bitcoin, bitpay, etc. They've done the tough work already, building the service. Adding support for another blockchain is a trivial task at that point. With Bitpay, you send BTC's, it receives them and posts a sale on MtGox, and forwards the funds on to their clients bank account. To have it look up a price for a different coin is trivial, and its just as trivial to post those coins for sale on an exchange. Bitpay's biggest concern would therefore be that if the altcoin they chose has a deep enough market to absorb sales of whichever coin they accept. That's not trivial, but not difficult either. Just the act of announcing support for another cryptocoin would create a lot of interest in that coin and deepen the market just by virtue of the fact that people would know others will be transacting in it.

To me, Bitcoins first mover advantage is therefore close to nil. Every feature, every service that has been or could be created for bitcoin would take only a couple of hours to implement for any other coin. I feel like Bitcoin is a great proof of concept, a nice version 1.0 product. But all it would take would be for an Amazon, a Newegg, TigerDirect or even several of eBay's bigger vendors to say "we now accept BBQCoin" (to just throw out an example), and that coin gains instant credibility, and likely, a much deeper market than Bitcoin does.

[xzempt]

They just posted on facebook,  no monarchs will ship until all current generation units are shipped.   This makes it obvious they are out of money and must presale a future item in order to fulfill the current order queue...  This is by definition a Ponzi....

[lucasjkr]

No, it means that they understand that there will be uproar if they start shipping generation 2 products to people before they've finished their generation 1 backlog

[nexus99]

No, it means that they understand that there will be uproar if they start shipping generation 2 products to people before they've finished their generation 1 backlog

+1

[HorseRider]

we feel our timeline to begin shipments towards the end of the year is solid.

I hope I am the first one who find above sentence joking.

[xzempt]

Given their past history, no one should be giving these guys any money at all - no matter how good their promises may seem.. 

sad but there is not a shortage of people that are  happily lining up to be screwed...

[Phinnaeus Gage]

Given their past history, no one should be giving these guys any money at all - no matter how good their promises may seem..  

sad but there is not a shortage of people that are  happily lining up to be screwed...

True that!


Here, honey. See if you can order one online. Make it two, there'll small.

[DPoS]

Just wait, they'll claim it can hash 14 different alt coins and also create your own custom coins on the fly for the hugh money round!!

what's the huge money round you say?

just you wait!!  and pre-order now!!!

[xzempt]

for an extra $500 upgrade you'll be able to Mine Litecoins at the same time at 500mh\s without interfering with the 600ghs Bitcoin hashrates..

[DeathAndTaxes]

for an extra $500 upgrade you'll be able to Mine Litecoins at the same time at 500mh\s without interfering with the 600ghs Bitcoin hashrates..

That is nothing for an additional $1000 $999.95 you can mine 50 BTC blocks and double your coins.

[tbcoin]

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/announcements/4414-monarch-information.html

Late November/Early to Mid December
Initial group orders start to ship to the very first orders placed. Keep in mind, these orders will be from the chips that were acquired through the bullet run, so there will be a limited number of chips/boards available.

Late December/Early January
Chips from the fab, going through the standard process, start to arrive at the slice/bump/packaging facility. See step 2, but you can skip step 3 at this point.

Late January/Early February
We begin shipping much larger quantities of orders on a first come first served basis.

https://m.facebook.com/ButterflyLabs/posts/622244797807330

Pre-orders for the next generation Bitcoin miners. Not scheduled to ship until long after current 65nm generation is shipped in full. http://www.butterflylabs.com/monarch/

[DeathAndTaxes]

Wow thats even "better".  So only a small number of the orders even have a chance of December delivery (if their timeline holds).  
I am sure in full disclosure they will promptly update the pre-order website to Febuary once they sell more units than they have in the bullet run so as to not mislead customers.

Also as if a extremely high power density in a small package and PCIe interface wasn't challenging enough, the module can also connect by USB.

The Monarch will have a USB connector to use as a standard mining device, or you can use the PCIe 1x connector to place it in any standard motherboard, just like your current GPU.

[ScaryHash]

So, they will be a tape-out in August? or the beginning of August? Or the end of August?

Which is it?  

28 nm tape-outs are expensive. That means they've blown most of their money, and need the pre-order money to pay the vendor.

If no pre-orders...no more money.

[DeathAndTaxes]

So, they will be a tape-out in August? or the beginning of August? Or the end of August?

Which is it?  

28 nm tape-outs are expensive. That means they've blown most of their money, and need the pre-order money to pay the vendor.

If no pre-orders...no more money.

Well reading between the lines it is more like late September.

Late August/Early September Tape Out
There are two processes with this step that we are using. The initial process is what is called a bullet run, it will allow us to get a finished set of wafers in approximately 24 days from the date we tape out. This will result in a limited number of chips available.

Middle/Late October
Chips are out of the fab and sent to the slice, bump and packaging facility. This process usually takes two to three weeks. We have developed a strong relationship with several bumping and packaging houses from our 65nm product, so this process should be much smoother and quicker than our previous generation.

so
a) 24 days from tape out date to date bullet run should leave the fab.
b) bullet run is estimated to leave fab mid to late October.
b - a = tape out date

To put a number on it lets say "mid to late Oct" is 15 OCT at earliest and 31 OCT at the latest.  Backtracking 24 days from that it would mean tape out date of 21 SEPT at the earliest and 6 OCT at the latest.

"August tape out" = late September (or later) using non-BFL calender.  Sounds about right.

[MrHempstock]

This is a prime example of 'robbing Peter to pay Paul'

[millsdmb]