Topic: BFL ASIC worth the risk for pre-order? - page 3. (Read 5046 times)

Wow. And I just stumbled upon a post from BFL_Nasser on the butterfly labs forum from yesterday:


I don't know who "Nasser" is, but this indicates that the chip design is still being tweaked and tested *after* the expected release date. How can you have a projected shipment date before you have gotten test chip samples and finalized the design? This sounds like R&D to me. How long will it take to iterate through their testing? Another 2 weeks to get the next batch of chips; if there's another problem, how much longer will it be delayed?

Even if the next batch is perfect, they must be ordering in very small quantities until they are sure it is correct; this could be millions of dollars as stake. How many products is BFL promising to ship in their first wave?

It's hard for me to see how they could work through this and have products in customers' hands in less than 2 months. If I were BFL, I would not want to accept any pre-orders until I had a finalized chip design; why risk having people question your credibility when your product can speak for itself? Sitting on a pile of pre-order money is a dangerous thing.

How many people here would sit on thousands (millions?) of dollars in pre-orders and not misappropriate even a fraction of those funds? Look at what happens to pension funds, social security, etc. In my book, you don't want to expose yourself to temptation; there are many people who have started out legitimately and been trapped by the Sirens' call.

So here's a question looking from the outside in. Given that it appears the BFL CEO is a convicted felon, and given that no one has seen a working BFL ASIC product, is it really worth the risk of giving BFL pre-order dollars? Are those with pre-orders banking on getting such a large leg-up on the mining competition that they figure it's worth the risk of losing your money?

Let me put it another way. If BFL does have the technology to create ASIC chips dedicated to bitcoin mining, then they should be in a great spot financially. As soon as the first product is shipped and tested by a member of the public, then the products should easily pay for themselves, and tons of people will order the chips.

On the other hand, if BFL is depending on pre-orders to a) finance the development and manufacturing, or b) take the money and run, then I would consider a pre-order to be very risky. Almost any electronics product that people would normally pre-order is from a hugely reputable multi-national company and is for a product that has already been reviewed by dozens or hundreds of different people.

Maybe getting a 3-month lead time over the mining competition is work the risk, but I think this is an interesting thing to watch. Over the last month I have been amazed to read about the number of scams that the bitcoin community attracts, due to the amount of money floating around and the gullibility of people looking to turn a quick buck.

Being a pretty risk averse person myself, I think people should cancel their pre-orders until the ASICs have been bought and tested by other members of the public, unless your investment in mining represents an amount of money you don't mind losing as with a penny stock.

Good luck to everyone in the meantime, but remember that *every* form of investment has its risks, and bitcoin is not immune to that.