Topic: BFL buyers - Damned if you do, Damned if you don't? (Read 2401 times)

Or just damned?

Correct. guess on the # of orders, also that spreadsheet thats out that has people orders. Not entirely accurate since people haven't addded themselves(or removed themselves).

How does anyone know the hashrate?

I emailed Butterfly a couple of weeks back and was given the following response:

I apologize. We do not share the number of TH that has been sold.

So I anything else is a best guesstimate, is it not?

Thats only because asics are delayed. They calculated in all the hash * orders.

The network hashrate hasn't gone up anywhere near what most people thought. GPU mining is still proftiable; of course BFL rig mining will be profitable; they'll get the hardware and mine with it!

I like your attitude.

Life goes on, for most of us, no matter what... until it doesn't.

Noisy thread.

I thought I clarified that as saying that the only "losses" are emotional ones. But yes, that's the point I was trying to make.

There is no "cut their losses".  Maybe "cut their opportunity costs".  But everyone gets a full refund, so no losses...

Yup, this has nothing to do with anybody being damned. Those who stay in are choosing to ride the speculation wave on their investment. Those who don't are choosing to cut their losses. Pre-orders are always a speculative buy.

The idea of "Sunk Cost" in game theory is the only thing that fools people into thinking they're damned if they don't. They've got a lot of emotional investment, but they'll walk away with exactly the same amount of money they invested, if they chose to walk away.

If they chose to stay, they're still riding the speculation wave. Whether they win on it is another matter. And many people will continue to play the "what if" game, whether they choose to stick it out, or not.

No matter what people decide, some of them will be kicking themselves, and others will be patting themselves on the back...

Or more last time i need 4 Weeks to Clearify a simple Question ...
Which Payment date i got ?
The answer was #20** Number ( Payed via Bitinstant )

There is currently a waiting time of 2 weeks for email responses and therefore....for refunds.

Here is what you do,

You have a  BFL pre-order. Hopefully for a Jally or Single or something. Check? Good.

1) Sell it on Ebay, for 60k, the prices over there are crazy for Mining devices.

With that money, if it's not held by Paypal. You are responsible and on the hook for delivery instead of BFL. Great.

2) When they fail to deliver your order, simply panic and refund 60K as well as have your Paypal card revoked. Sucks right?

3) Sell a non-existent pre-order on "a wing and a prayer" and get your customer to pay you in BTC. That way you can join in on the "scam" of (yet to be built) Pre-Orders.

You will be like a BFL Mini-me.

Sounds great right?

---------------------------

Alot of people in the near future are going to lose either:

A) Their Paypal Privileges and cards/Accounts.

B) Their shirts and shoes when they spend that money initially and have to then give it back because they couldn't take delivery.

C) Turn into BTC black holes as people demand their money back when the deliveries aren't shipped on time.

D) Immigrate to Jamaica or Cuba.

Right but barely profitable at that point, the opportunity cost of money better spent on anything else(bonds and eww- bank interest). People would stop ading more asics, unless they are thinking like amazon.com make up the low profit margin with HUGE volume. So hash rate would stop rising inversely to btc price.

Sure is. But when there are a lot of units doing 5GH at 40W, and those units have no other function, I don't see them beeing turned off.
With a difficulty of 300 millions and a BTC price of 2USD, they still make a produce more money than the cost of the electricity they consume.

Not to mention that you can sell the unit to someone who think the price might rise to $4, $10 or even (gasp) $15.

I'd be actually quite interested in historical market data and difficulty data.

I'd love to do some analysis on it after i am finished with my current research project.
Taking all the cryptocoins and running statistics on them like crazy might be interesting.

Not too worthwhile, but enough to see what is going on.

But if it drops to $2, we will see one thing especially: ASICs sales on ebay. I know i will be buying...

Very hard to say whats profitable since no one can forecast the exchange rate. Hash rate i think is contingent on exchange rate. If btc drops to $2, still think there's a quintuple in hash rate?  there's some correlation there. Forgot who posted it , but saw someone else chart this.

Keep going. Avalon is still taking orders for chips. Asicminer will be building more blades. BFL will start shipping in volume. If you believe BFL (why would you order if you didn't?), they can ship 300 TH/s in a single month.

Avalon is sending out 1200 units and 490.000 chips, am i correct? That would come to somewhere around 240th/s if about 80% of the units are 85gh/s ones...

Hm, might work. We could also consider a quintupling of hash rate. Still profitable... still way more than 10% on an investment in twelve months...

The network is going to be way higher than that. Avalon alone will bring that much power online in the next few months.

Some of the risks that you ignore with ASIC mining:

When you quote returns in dollars, you imply a stable BTC to USD exchange rate. That is masking one of the largest risk factors in mining BTC which would be a collapse in the exchange rate.

Also, people may not be using Bitcoin 1.0 at some point in the future but some alternate virtual currency (perhaps Bitcoin 2.0) that solved unforeseen issues that cropped up and rendered Bitcoin obsolete. This new currency may not be compatible with current ASICs.

Bitcoin mining is a zero sum game. A new competitor that enters the mining hardware market with a 5-10x improvement in price/performance would render existing ASIC hardware (which is really first generation stuff and can be improved upon) as obsolete as GPUs are now.

More entrants with first generation ASIC hardware flood the market and the Bitcoin network hashrate spikes even higher. This in combination with a short term exchange rate crash could render large rigs unprofitable for an extended period.

ASIC hardware could have a short operational lifetime due to hardware failures. A MTBF of 500 hours would crush everyone's anticipated returns.

If you bought a windmill rig, you could rely on long term contracts with your local utility. It is also a reasonable assumption that people will still be using electricity over the next 2 years. Windmills are designed and manufactured by firms with lots of experience and mature product lines (like GE), so we can rely on them to operate for extended periods of time. Thus buying a windmill rig is much less risky that mining Bitcoins, and it's return reflects this.