Topic: Are BFL Jalapeños worth it? (Read 9423 times)

I would not even dream of buying a Jally right now. Too much risk with BFL and they may not even ever deliver. I would go with a GPU rig atm.

Is jalapeno worth it : NO
you might end up with such a crap device as i have i sure as hell made a huge mistake doing business with bfl
the jalapeno i received looked ok when it started up and showed a 6000 Mh/s initial hash speed
every time i checked i saw bigger hw error numbers and the hashing speed kept going down and still is going down.
after a few hours i had dropped to 4700 Mh on average and today several days later is only makes 4400 Mh

lots of idiots say send it to BFL which most of the time not even respond to emails
they all forget that i live in the netherlands and believe me if they would ever respond normal i would loose another half year or more to get either the same crap back or get a replacement if i would ever get anything back
if i would have lived in the usa i would have sued them the second they did respond the way they did

Second soon the difficulty (about 2 to 3 days) goes up another 2 million at least so the time to get a block will be insane soon as well
So mining on small devices will get you maybe your investment in the device back
But if you want to get some money out of mining you need ASICMINER shares or a huge asic miner which does a big deal more on hash powers then what bfl is selling

We also need to consider that one order may have more than one device. If you have a look at bfl.ptz.ro, you can see that they have 4441 devices spread across about 3000 orders, or almost 1.5 devices per order.

There is some analysis going on over on the BFL forums about the ratio of invoice numbers to orders to cancellation; I think they were estimating about 4 orders for every 10 invoice numbers. Don't have the link but scoot over there to check it out.

If I had to spitball it I'd guess:

60,000 invoice numbers
25,000 paid orders
3,000 cancellations
1.5 devices per order

(25,000 - 3,000) * 1.5 ~= 33,000 devices

I mentioned something about making 50,000 devices over at the BFL forums and Josh responded saying he doubt they even had half that many orders. So they are probably closer to the 15000-25000 range, maybe less.

Unless they can't make enough money per unit to pay cost of goods, salaries, rent, etc. They are getting their chips in low quantities which means they are using what is called a Multi-project wafer (MPW). That means the chips are anywhere from $40 to $80 a piece. They originally planned on putting one chip per Jalapeno, but now they have to put 2 per Jalapeno. The chips are easily the most expensive part of the device.

They have to make 60,000 devices and that will cost them at least $6 million, probably more like $12-18 million just to buy the parts for them.

In 2-3 months the Avalon based Klondike boards arrive and triple the mining difficulty. Can BFL get enough pre-orders in now to make enough product to matter?

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.

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..

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I posted. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/should-i-sell-my-jalapeno-seems-to-be-working-fine-but-218480

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).

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)

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.

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

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.)

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.


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


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.

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

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.