Where are the new Custom Hardware vendors?

[Inaba]

There are no orders being shipped that were ordered a year ago, please stop spreading false information.  Our failure rate on hardware is less than 1%, much better than industry average, so again, your argument is invalid. 

Sorry, but if you consider 400 - 1000+ units shipped per day in this industry to be "few devices" you need to have your head examined.

For somebody who purports to ignore the prattle on bitcointalk you responded very quickly.  Please read carefully.  I said almost a year, not over 1 year.  If you're going to nitpick (which you do play semantics all the time) get it right.  My order was shipped with over a 1 year delay BTW.  I ordered in June 2012 and it shipped a few days short of 13 months.  Minirig owners did not see their full purchased hashing power for almost 14 months.

I doubt your failure rate is less than 1%.  Most computer hardware has rates exceeding that failure rate and admittedly no ASIC vendor would make such ridiculous claims.  I'm sure those ASICminer USB sticks are close to 2-3% and BFL is probably closer to 5% judging by what is said on the forums.  I can't fault the company or it's employees for having something break since we are human and the devices were assembled by human hands.  I can justly rail all I want for not getting a reply for 8 days for my RMA - the downtime cost me over 10BTC which is roughly $2k right now.  That is inexcusable.

I did choose to purchase from BFL willingly - it was my choice.  I choose to stick with the company and by the time I decided to ask for a refund your company redacted their refund offering.  I do like your product, but I have lost quite a bit of BTC (I paid in BTC) by buying it seeing as how I was suckered in believing the devices would ship sometime in October.....2012.   I believe you are currently the face of the company - if you can sleep with that at night...

I never said I ignore the prattle on Bitcointalk, where did you hear that?  I rather enjoy watching the abject stupidity that people come up with on here.  It's a recreational activity for me... when I'm busy or my attention is otherwise engaged, I don't bother much with this forum.  That said, again, you post false information.  Your order, if you ordered in June 2012 was scheduled to ship in November of 2012 at best.  Your device was never a year or even "almost a year" late.

You can doubt the failure rate is less than 1% all you want, it doesn't change reality.  "Judging by the forums" are you serious?  Do you think the majority of our orders are from these forums?  Hahaha you are more delusional than I thought.   Why do you think I don't take this forum seriously?  The people on here are a tiny fraction of our order base.  We've shipped more than 20k units and had far less than 200 come back for RMA (I think we are somewhere around ~100 - 125 units at last count).  Contrary to what you'd have other believe with your misinformation, our products are rock solid, unlike some other products out there. 

I sleep just fine at night (when I'm not on an airplane anyway).  BFL has and is delivering a quality product.  Our only fault at this point is the fact that we are delayed.  Yes, we missed our power targets and we offered full refunds because of that.  We also offered a free 50% hashrate bump.  Yes, it's a big fault, missing the shipping date and I have apologized for it numerous times.  There's a lot of things we would have done differently had we known what we know now.  But the simple fact of the matter is, we were the first into this space and because we had the most advanced technology, it cost us a lot of time dealing with the consequences of that.  In retrospect, it was not the way to go, but what's done is done and there you have it.  You can keep harping on the past, if it makes you feel better.  Don't order from us in the future if you don't like us or trust us, that's what I would do in your shoes if I was as bent out of shape as some of the people here.  Other than that, there's not much else to say.

[donch]

Endless, repetitious, unsubstantiated bullshit...

Straight question: why did you send me my November 2012 Single order in September 2013, a week after I received a Paypal refund for that item? Brandon admitted he knew it had been refunded and told me to reverse the refund. Just interested. Seems like a strange tactic for a trustworthy company.

[donch]

So for an update on shipping times... As you might imagine, we get this question a lot. It seems like it would be a simple question to answer, but it's not. Let me describe the process so people can better understand why.


If you look at the current FPGA board in a Single or MiniRig, you'll see lots of capacitors, resistors, etc... about 350 little tiny parts attached to the board. Contrary to some of the conspiracy theories out there, all our boards are completely custom made, they aren't purchased from another manufacturer, etc... they are designed by us and made for us and us alone. As such, we are required to volume source every single part that goes on the board.


The ASICs are similar in so far as they also have nearly 350 components on each board. With the FPGAs, we sourced parts in the hundreds or low thousands at a time. For some of the ASIC parts, we are sourcing hundreds of thousands at a time which requires direct ordering & lead time dependancy from the respective manufacturers. However, for this first batch, we're mostly able to depend on available distribution stock from places like Mouser and DigiKey. Shortly after we get the first batch of everything in, we'll have our larger mega stockpiles arrive from other vendors and/or direct from the distributors, it's just the first batch that's going to be rough.


So, we've got he myriad distributors shipping thousands of little pieces to us, the PCB manufacturer sending us the bare PCBs, the HSF manufacturer sending the HSFs to us, the PSU manufacturer sending the PSU's to us, the case manufacturer sending the cases to us and most importantly, the fab sending the ASIC chips to us. All of these must arrive on time and as expected for everything to go off without a hitch. So far, so good.


When we made our announcement for shipping dates, we padded in some extra weeks in case of delays, and as we try to herd all these cats into one corral, our padding is slowly eaten up with mostly minor problems, but they all add up. With the bump in specs, we spent some time ensuring the power subsystem is over powered to accommodate the new and future power requirements - our chips are capable of higher speeds than what we initially intended to send out in the first batch, and they still have quite a bit of headroom; We decided to go ahead design the power subsystem to handle the maximum theoretical load of the chips. This means we can now crank the board up with some minor tweaking. Each chip is theoretically capable of operating at 1 GHz, we are running them at 500 MHz with the new specs... we will likely never see 1 GHz operations, simply because of heat density issues and a few other factors, but we have at least another 25% of headroom we can play with, if not more. Again, we built in a lot of padding into the specs, just in case something went wrong. We have basically padded everything we could in terms of estimates and that padding is what has allowed us to bump specs on short notice and keep our shipping times in line even in the face of delays.


Ok, so we have the cats herded, the specs staked out, now we have to actually build these things. As many of you know, we've purchased SMT machines to allow us to manufacture our own boards - and I have mentioned this before, but many have not heard it - we will not be using the SMT equipment to process our first batch of boards; we will be using the same house that did the pick and place for our previous generation products, which means we're still at the mercy of someone else for our first batch shipments. There has been some delays at that stage, but we have the padding, so it's not been a critical issue. There has also been some delays at the foundry, but again, we have padding, so it's not been a critical issue. We are also paying for an expedited run at the foundry (which does not come cheap) to keep our timeline up. All these things have to work out perfectly and our timeline is still looking good. However, if something does not work out perfectly, our timeline is going to slip, plain and simple. We've used up most of our padding at this point and we are still ironing out a few little wrinkles here and there. This has been a long explanation for a simple answer: I would like to tell you we are still on time or pretty close to it, because we are. However, I would also like to tell you that we are going to slip a couple weeks or so if anything goes wrong, and given the complexity of the issues facing us, I would say it's almost inevitable something will crop up between now and the beginning of November that we are not expecting; What that is, I don't know yet, but I would rather error on the side of caution, say the timeline is going to slip a little bit and then surprise everyone with an early delivery than promise an early delivery and not meet that promise. So that's what I'm doing and there's your answer. When I have more information, I'll let people know as soon as I can.

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/pre-sales-questions/104-shipping-2-3-weeks-2.html#post1461

Historic fantasy bullshit from November 2012. Why did I believe this verbose crap? Why do you think long-suffering customers will ever order from you again? I wouldn't worry about the constituents of this forum, I'd be more worried about the people you've sold to. They aren't going to be coming back.

And please stop advertising here, if you don't get any orders from this forum. The fact that you spent 25 big fat coins on your last round makes me think it matters more than you'd care to admit. Go feed off your Adwords victims.

[fractal02]

This thread starting good....and BAM !

Trolls come back again with BFL rage 

Come on...

[donch]

This thread starting good....and BAM !

Trolls come back again with BFL rage  

Come on...

What can I say, a monumental asshole visited this thread (and I don't mean me  ).

I don't regard myself as a troll; just a burnt out customer who visited a stupid forum (not this one) for a year hoping for some good news. It never happened. Now, I don't want any newcomer to this forum to get the distorted picture that MA tries to paint with his plays on words, refutations, denials and delusions of grandeur. What goes around comes around, when chickens come home to roost ....

[reactor]

Um... yeah.  So this turned into a bit of a hate-fest.  Serious replies still appreciated, curious why the vendor pool, if mining is such a good investment, has basically dried up after early next year?

[xstr8guy]

Um... yeah.  So this turned into a bit of a hate-fest.  Serious replies still appreciated, curious why the vendor pool, if mining is such a good investment, has basically dried up after early next year?

I'm really sorry I resurrected this thread.  I thought the OP had a very good question but it went ignored.  Now I really regret my decision, lol.

[donch]

Um... yeah.  So this turned into a bit of a hate-fest.  Serious replies still appreciated, curious why the vendor pool, if mining is such a good investment, has basically dried up after early next year?

Sorry for the derailment.

Without either a rise in the exchange rate or the sudden mass adoption of reasonable transaction fees or an increase in the volume of transactions (with fees), mining isn't a good investment. The spring/summer rush of preorders was based on a lack of awareness of how much hashrate had been bought by everyone else and hearing good news stories from the lucky early Avalon miners. Now the reality has hit home, I doubt KNC, Hashfast, Cointerra, Bitfury and the dreaded BFL are getting many new orders today. I guess the delay between the preorder date and the delivery date of most of these devices means the feedback loop informing people with spare cash that this a sensible investment was too long and thus, people have made irrational and unsound decisions.

Why aren't there more vendors? Perhaps the people with the correct skills and experience are getting paid more working for Intel, AMD, ARM, Samsung or Apple and don't feel that attracted to working in this kind of insane environment.

Philosophically, I don't really see any real advantage to the mining difficulty getting any higher. Back in the CPU days, more people mined and therefore the market was more accessible and the network more distributed and therefore safer. GPU and now ASIC mining reduces the pool size with no real advantage unless you have a larger share of the pie. I think this is where Litecoin has the better balance, but unfortunately it was derivative and second to the race.

[Bicknellski]

People are finding out it's not as easy to create a brand new product as they would have you believe, that's what's happening.

Some even drag it out unnecessarily long and refuse to give refunds. Amazing right? (Need to get my dig in the guy deserves it)


When you ask where are the new Custom Hardware vendors... do you mean chips and rigs or would those producing units with others chips count?

I think there a plenty of people keen on developing "new" systems but given that the cost of developing a chip is pretty substantial and time consuming has probably put a huge damper on newer vendors because of difficulty rising sharply and the actual demand for miners will taper off if it hasn't already. What doesn't help are companies like BFL and Avalon that have pretty much soured the market and thrown up huge hurdles even for the most well intentioned company but I would say the economics are not there. Look at Black Arrow and their chip rig combo "pre-selling" at the lowest rate $/gh but given their time to market it will likely not be oversold like an Avalon or BFL offering because their really is no guarantees now to earn back your investment.

To be honest there are quite a few people at the margins as well looking to revive the DIY push that BKKCoins, Alten, Burnin all started with their DIY Avalons unfortunately Avalon failed to deliver and that I think has left many questioning the trust of chip fabricators. I suspect that DIY will push through and continue developing units even with exponential difficulty some people are keen on this as a hobby, even though it is an expensive hobby. There are plenty of people willing to keep even pushing the Avalon Gen I Klondikes just get those boards going. If you are looking for newer vendors I don't see where simply designing ASICs is going to be profitable for anyone for the foreseeable future. I suspect several companies will collapse and fail to produce a second or third generation of miner at this stage. Some of these companies really should disappear as they are literally dragging the marketplace down with their ineffectual shipping and refusal to follow fair and reasonable trade practices. With them gone it might put some needed trust back in the community and free up space for better companies in the future.

I would ask you what is wrong with KnC, HashFast, Cointerra, and Black Arrow? Are they not new enough? Different in their offerings? Better at customer services and shipping on time in the case of KnC, are they not?

[johnyj]

Difficulty just jumped 46% up, few hardware vendor can chart the market with such fast diminishing return, unless they have already ROIed. I think Avalon is working on something big

[shapemaker]

I think Avalon is working on something big

YiFuck's ego chi, maybe?

Anyway, I'm having the same thoughts that the next few months will decide which ASIC companies will be left standing. The race to the bottom has already started and soon we'll see how low $/GH will go.

Maybe we won't see so much "next gen" ASICs but just more energy-efficient respins of older designs. There seems to be a sweet spot between the 130-110 nm and 20-28 nm designs that is efficient enough, and cheap enough to make... just stick more of the chips on the same PCB, and they might still be cheaper to churn out en masse than the ones made with 20-28 nm process.

The next half year should prove to be interesting.

[johnyj]

I think Avalon is working on something big

YiFuck's ego chi, maybe?

Anyway, I'm having the same thoughts that the next few months will decide which ASIC companies will be left standing. The race to the bottom has already started and soon we'll see how low $/GH will go.

Maybe we won't see so much "next gen" ASICs but just more energy-efficient respins of older designs. There seems to be a sweet spot between the 130-110 nm and 20-28 nm designs that is efficient enough, and cheap enough to make... just stick more of the chips on the same PCB, and they might still be cheaper to churn out en masse than the ones made with 20-28 nm process.

The next half year should prove to be interesting.

Actually the chip design is not a very difficult task and soon there will even be open sourced chip design. So you can anticipate many cheap Chinese made miners showing up in the coming months

The manufacturing node currently is not a big concern, since the mining rig's cost and delivery time is the main factor. 4 Avalons delivered today are much more useful than a knc saturn delivered one month later, and the earning difference is more than enough to pay for months of electricity cost

[Tehfiend]

People are finding out it's not as easy to create a brand new product as they would have you believe, that's what's happening.  Even the people using others IP can't bring products to market (Look at Bicknellski's failed ventures) with all of the parts already laid out for them, much less create anything from scratch.

Surprise!  It actually requires skill, commitment and dedication to create a new product and bring it to market.

It's definitely a lot easier than you have made it look as KNC brought a 28nm ASIC miner to market in a little over 4 months.

Oh really?  As one of the few shipping ASIC vendors, I think that makes me qualified to speak on the subject, unlike you.  What have you done to bring a new product to the market from scratch?  Oh that's right... nothing at all.

Yes you are right, you are living proof of the risks people face when making pre-orders as the VAST majority of your customers experienced insane delays and extremely negative ROI if they managed to receive their product. We can now say "be careful you don't get BFL'ed when pre-ordering" and pretty much everybody will know exactly what that means.

Can you point to a vendor that's doing number 3 now?  Are you seriously complaining that because demand is exceeding supply, it is somehow the vendors fault?

As for 4, I have no idea what you are talking about. BFL doesn't have any 110nm products and again, are you seriously complaining about the fact that people are paying money for a given product and the vendor charges what people will pay... but it's "overpriced" even though people are paying it?  If it was overpriced, people wouldn't buy it - that is simple economics.  If you think it's over priced, don't buy it.  The majority of the market disagrees with you, so that makes you the one that is incorrect.  

So basically points 3 and 4 are invalid and you have proven my point.

Yes actually it is the vendors vault when they sell more pre-orders than they could possibly ever ship in their advertised time-frame such as BFL has done. Both Bitsyncom and KNC (and most others really) sold limited numbers in their batches unlike BFL who pretty much took money from anybody willing to get in their line with no idea that your advertised shipping times were complete lies which would slip time and time and time and time and time again.

Huh, Avalon, really?  Last I checked, they had imploded.

Check again. A few weeks ago I purchased 3 Avalon mini's that shipped in less than 72 hours after I ordered them. They are due to ship their gen2 hardware OFF THE SHELF any time now...

There are no orders being shipped that were ordered a year ago, please stop spreading false information.  Our failure rate on hardware is less than 1%, much better than industry average, so again, your argument is invalid.  

Sorry, but if you consider 400 - 1000+ units shipped per day in this industry to be "few devices" you need to have your head examined.

Josh everybody knows you're smart enough to understand that in "this industry", volume means nothing and hashrate means everything. It's like comparing the number of 300MH block eruptors with the number of 500GH Jupiters that have shipped. By repeating this over and over it is only revealing the deception you are constantly hiding behind.

The fact is BFL has been a disaster. Sure not a COMPLETE disaster like bASIC but still a disaster. While waiting for my 60GH Feb BFL pre-order to arrive:
- I've pre-ordered Avalon batch #2 units in Feb which arrived in JUNE for a total of 190GH
- I've pre-ordered raw Avalon chips from Zephir in April which arrived in July, had them sent to Germany where Burnin used a custom board to ship me functioning BitBurner miners in August all from scratch!
- I pre-ordered from a BRAND NEW company KNC back in June which shipped a 525GH miner to me THREE WEEKS AGO!
- I've ordered 3 Avalon Mini's on Oct 15th which shipped within 72 hours which had three times the hashrate for less than my BFL pre-order cost which has still not shipped

What has BFL been doing during these 8+ months since others have produced miners FROM SCRATCH in much less time? It's 100% obvious that BFL sold MANY MANY MANY more orders than they could possible ever ship and all of the lies that have been spewed by you during this past year amount to fraud in my opinion.

/school

[donch]

Well schooled, Tehfiend. Excellent point by point refutation and good real world examples.

Expect to be labelled a troll by the boy in a bubble.

[Tehfiend]

Well schooled, Tehfiend. Excellent point by point refutation and good real world examples.

Expect to be labelled a troll by the boy in a bubble.

I would expect no less and assume he will find a few minor errors in my statements that he will use to post more FUD to confuse the basic facts which show without a doubt that BFL has purposely misled their customers almost from day 1 and continue to do so.

[DyslexicZombei]

For those looking to buy hardware off the shelf, Black Arrow was contracted to do a Bullet Run by bobsag3 and a custom hardware mfg. that sells his miners on the GB forum. bobsag3 is the exclusive official US Reseller for Black Arrow and has put a lot of money down to get hardware in miners hands sooner rather than later.

I was offered exclusive pricing on this by bobsag3, a DZ MC co-op member/leader/admin/vetted miner host and GB Coordinator.

BA is guaranteeing shipping by November 1 or we get our money back.Thomas S. and I are holding onto the GB funds to make sure that refund funds are available, if necessary. In fact, we have an update from the factory that they expect to be shipping tomorrow night and bobsag3 expects delivery in Missouri by Wednesday/Thursday. If they fail to meet this Nov. 1 deadline we all get refunds but get to keep the hashrate.    

These boards will be considered to be on the shelf and available for immediate sale/shipping by Wednesday/Thursday. I should have some more recent pictures to share on this shortly.

===

I'm offering fractional ownership of these boards to be hosted at a pro colo facility by bobsag3. There is also a sales outlet if you just wanted to buy boards outright, but I'm not involved with that deal.

I'm just the GB Coordinator for this deal and I'm truly hardware neutral as a longtime IT vet (except for BFL/Avalon; they're permabanned from our co-op). I'm not officially affiliated with BA, but they have stopped by to confirm that they're working with bobsag3.

To summarize: 15TH/s Black Arrow Bullet Run with Bitfury chips now instead of BA Minion chips in February.

$123 = 8.34 - 10GH/s + 1 month free hosting in Missouri + World's Lowest Hosting/Management fees at 2.75% every 2 weeks + UPS / Gas Generator backup protection + 3 remote admins + 1 local admin (all IT pros, including 2 Network Engineers and an EE) + custom built cabinet with extra Air Conditioner just for our co-op. This facility was designed by bosag3 and myself, a pro network engineer who's designed 4 different Research Lab server rooms.

Miners guaranteed to be shipping by November 1 or your money/BTC back.

Please see the 11th GB link in my sig for more details.

[Tehfiend]

For those looking to buy hardware off the shelf, Black Arrow was contracted to do a Bullet Run by bobsag3 and a custom hardware mfg. that sells his miners on the GB forum. bobsag3 is the exclusive official US Reseller for Black Arrow and has put a lot of money down to get hardware in miners hands sooner rather than later.

I was offered exclusive pricing on this by bobsag3, a DZ MC co-op member/leader/admin/vetted miner host and GB Coordinator.

BA is guaranteeing shipping by November 1 or we get our money back.Thomas S. and I are holding onto the GB funds to make sure that refund funds are available, if necessary. In fact, we have an update from the factory that they expect to be shipping tomorrow night and bobsag3 expects delivery in Missouri by Wednesday/Thursday. If they fail to meet this Nov. 1 deadline we all get refunds but get to keep the hashrate.    

These boards will be considered to be on the shelf and available for immediate sale/shipping by Wednesday/Thursday. I should have some more recent pictures to share on this shortly.

===

I'm offering fractional ownership of these boards to be hosted at a pro colo facility by bobsag3. I'm just the GB Coordinator and I'm truly hardware neutral as a longtime IT vet (except for BFL/Avalon; they're permabanned from our co-op). I'm not officially affiliated with BA, but they have stopped by to confirm that they're working with bobsag3.

To summarize: 15TH/s Black Arrow Bullet Run with Bitfury chips now instead of BA Minion chips in February.

$123 = 8.34 - 10GH/s + 1 month free hosting in Missouri + World's Lowest Hosting/Management fees at 2.75% every 2 weeks + UPS / Gas Generator backup protection + 3 remote admins + 1 local admin (all IT pros, including 2 Network Engineers and an EE) + custom built cabinet with extra Air Conditioner just for our co-op. This facility was designed by bosag3 and myself, a pro network engineer who's designed 4 different Research Lab server rooms.

Miners guaranteed to be shipping by November 1 or your money/BTC back.

Please see the 11th GB link in my sig for more details.

I keep seeing this spammed everywhere and have one question that keeps me from participating. Why would you sell these if they are profitable?

[bobsag3]

For those looking to buy hardware off the shelf, Black Arrow was contracted to do a Bullet Run by bobsag3 and a custom hardware mfg. that sells his miners on the GB forum. bobsag3 is the exclusive official US Reseller for Black Arrow and has put a lot of money down to get hardware in miners hands sooner rather than later.

I was offered exclusive pricing on this by bobsag3, a DZ MC co-op member/leader/admin/vetted miner host and GB Coordinator.

BA is guaranteeing shipping by November 1 or we get our money back.Thomas S. and I are holding onto the GB funds to make sure that refund funds are available, if necessary. In fact, we have an update from the factory that they expect to be shipping tomorrow night and bobsag3 expects delivery in Missouri by Wednesday/Thursday. If they fail to meet this Nov. 1 deadline we all get refunds but get to keep the hashrate.    

These boards will be considered to be on the shelf and available for immediate sale/shipping by Wednesday/Thursday. I should have some more recent pictures to share on this shortly.

===

I'm offering fractional ownership of these boards to be hosted at a pro colo facility by bobsag3. I'm just the GB Coordinator and I'm truly hardware neutral as a longtime IT vet (except for BFL/Avalon; they're permabanned from our co-op). I'm not officially affiliated with BA, but they have stopped by to confirm that they're working with bobsag3.

To summarize: 15TH/s Black Arrow Bullet Run with Bitfury chips now instead of BA Minion chips in February.

$123 = 8.34 - 10GH/s + 1 month free hosting in Missouri + World's Lowest Hosting/Management fees at 2.75% every 2 weeks + UPS / Gas Generator backup protection + 3 remote admins + 1 local admin (all IT pros, including 2 Network Engineers and an EE) + custom built cabinet with extra Air Conditioner just for our co-op. This facility was designed by bosag3 and myself, a pro network engineer who's designed 4 different Research Lab server rooms.

Miners guaranteed to be shipping by November 1 or your money/BTC back.

Please see the 11th GB link in my sig for more details.

I keep seeing this spammed everywhere and have one question that keeps me from participating. Why would you sell these if they are profitable?

Because I have more than enough for myself to make a tidy profit, and I still make money on having all the boards hosted with me. Just because I am not as greedy as others does not mean I am doing this at a loss

[DyslexicZombei]

I was just replying to the question.

He was looking for a new Custom Hardware vendor, and we have one in our midst: a miner just like us that put his money where his mouth is and paid to get 15TH/s made to be delivered sooner, rather than later.

These are always at-cost or even below-cost deals I structure for GBs. I don't make a single satoshi from immediate GB share sales as the extra funds go into UPS protection and co-op facility improvements. I'm trying to pool buying power so us little guys can get Institutional Pricing and exclusive deals like this.

I was once scammed by ASX Project (see the #4 sidebar FAQ at: http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinmining ) and I fell for BFL's BS when I was a noob. I'm here to help others have better experiences than I did when I started.

For me: personally, I eventually receive 0.25-0.37% of the 2.75% hosting/management fees once the miners arrive and are running, for coordinating all this and running the co-op. I would definitely say that is a very modest fee for the value of my work. I actually have no skin in these particular Rounds myself as far as shares but that's just because I have so many pre-orders in already, all over the place.

[Tehfiend]

I was just replying to the question.

He was looking for a new Custom Hardware vendor, and we have one in our midst: a miner just like us that put his money where his mouth is and paid to get 15TH/s made to be delivered sooner, rather than later.

These are always at-cost or even below-cost deals I structure for GBs. I don't make a single satoshi from immediate GB share sales as the extra funds go into UPS protection and co-op facility improvements. I'm trying to pool buying power so us little guys can get Institutional Pricing and exclusive deals like this.

I was once scammed by ASX Project (see the #4 sidebar FAQ at: http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinmining ) and I fell for BFL's BS when I was a noob. I'm here to help others have better experiences than I did when I started.

For me: personally, I eventually receive 0.25-0.37% of the 2.75% hosting/management fees once the miners arrive and are running, for coordinating all this and running the co-op. I would definitely say that is a very modest fee for the value of my work. I actually have no skin in these particular Rounds myself as far as shares but that's just because I have so many pre-orders in already, all over the place.

Yeah and I was asking a genuine question . I'm looking for the catch and can't find one which of course most people would find alarming. I'm not saying "true believers" don't exist but they are very rare and the number #1 choice of clothing for wolves .

Because I have more than enough for myself to make a tidy profit, and I still make money on having all the boards hosted with me. Just because I am not as greedy as others does not mean I am doing this at a loss

This just raises my alarm but I think I will look into this more and maybe throw a few BTC in to see how it pans out since you guys have been pretty tenacious in defending any accusations or concerns...