So a buddy of mine have been talking about BFL and have come to an interesting agreement. (Note: I have one preordered and he preordered but took a refund within 45 days, to ensure his refund).
I'm sure most of the people on this forum have noticed the outstanding difficulty increase. At first, I thought it was because Avalon put out their ASICs but the difficulty went up pretty drastically over the course of several weeks (about 3 mil every diff change) and seems to be averaging out at just under 20 mil. I'm not a mathematician but this seems to be too big of an increase for just 300 60Gh/s ASICs.
We came to agree that that BFL is actually producing the ASICs that they promised but are holding on to them and mining with them until it becomes more profitable to sell. Once profitability per miner drops to a certain level, they will ship. This makes more sense to me than anything else because I also noticed that NMC has been jumping in difficulty.
Using just the 3 crypto-currencies that are on allchains.info, I assumed that BTC GPU miners would jump ship to LTC (because they're much more profitable than NMC and BTC, according to dustcoin.com). While LTC difficulty has jumped up a good amount, NMC and BTC has jumped up a lot more (a 3mil+ projected difficulty increase for NMC and ~500k for BTC at the time of this post). So LTC going up was expected, but what wasn't expected (in my opinion) was the massive increases for LTC and BTC (and who knows about the other SHA-256 based coins).
Currently, only Jalapeños have been shipped, no singles or little singles and to my knowledge, no singles/little singles have been shipped to anyone for any kind of testing (as they did with the Jalapeños) one single HAS shipped, but it's the 50Gh/s one, not the 60Gh/s (which was the original hash rate). The Jalapeños they did ship are only from august 24th (according to the latest update from BFL_Jody on the BFL website).
So what does everyone think about this theory???
U never mentioned ASICMINER? They now run 25% of the total network hashrate using their own ASICs, up from 10% to 15% a few months plus they have started selling mining hardware to individuals (blades + USB disruptors). Some stats here:
http://www.deepfriedcat.com/ - note these are just for their own ASIC, not hardware they sell.
BFL is insignificant really. You can't "dilly dally" for 9 months when the total network hashrate keeps doubling every month or two. If they were hooking up dozens of ASIC machines to the network themselves and trying to keep it a secret, it wouldn't have worked. They just aren't that competent either. They would have messed it up