Topic: BFL is shipping - page 4. (Read 25073 times)

I think he was talking about mining Bitcoin with a GPU. Buddy, it's progression of hardware. 1 year ago the only way to get Bitcoins was via buying a GPU. Now you have to buy ASICs. And ASICs are cheaper than GPU rigs anyways.

how come? someone announce ASIC-scrypt miners?

Wow, they must be flying through production now. Less than 24 hours after it went into production, I have my shipment email with tracking.  My day just got a whole lot better.

Even though one might argue that the ASIC mining companies produced too many Gh too quick, doesn't that help secure the network and make a 51% attack from a government or such, less likely?
Just trying to find something positive in it all.

I ordered my Jalapeno, quite recently, knowing I wouldn't break even (since it will probably arrive at near years end) but I wanted to do my part to help support the network. And when one considers I can run it with low energy consumption using a Rasberry PI, it seemed like a good thing to do, especially since the Jalapeno uses a small amount of energy compared to a currently shipping competitors unit. But, I guess I'd then be able to pay for the unit if I had it now! 

IAS

I see what you mean, but I'm thinking that difficulty is going into an exponential curve right now. It will not last for a long time, and there will be a new plateau. What that plateau will be, we will see some time late summer/fall. After that, I think difficulty-increases might become lower than the "regular" 10-15%

Remember that those who are switching from CPU's to ASIC are likely to increase their hashing-power by a factor of 10.

The ASIC hash rate war is proving to be a drama. What I see happening is the ASIC vendors released their units with two much hash power, this will cost them sales and profits in the near future with BFL being the worst offender.

Instead of introducing the TH/s to the network spread around to thousands of miners in small chunks, they told everyone about the Minirig. People with deep pockets have ordered hundreds so when they finally ship, the TH/s will explode overnight. This will drive the smaller miners away from BTC and buying BFL product as the smaller units wont be able to compete, and the average miner wont be able to afford competitive rigs any longer, the gap is too large. So the mining will be concentrated into a smaller and smaller group of players with deep pockets. They will be able to dominate at a far cheaper cost than otherwise would have been possible for two reasons. Firstly BFL sold the Minirig too cheap, per GH/s compared to all other products on the market including their own lesser models. Secondly the instant concentration of hashing power will reduce the other miners revenue far more abruptly than if the whole net rose gradually, that will cause shock and awe not unlike a market crash.

Of course BFL are not alone, the Avalon 66GH/s unit was too big, they should have started with a 22 GH/s unit or smaller, and shipped 3 times as many of them.

Kncminer are talking about a 175GH/s an 350GH/s which are once again too much hash power.

Up until now everyone added hashing power in small increments adding a GPU or two, the crazies built racks of the things, but overall there were no big jumps. That's all about to change and I think for the worse. BTC was all about decentralization, these unnecessarily large ASIC sizes that are coming, screws up that concept.

It's going to be very hard soon to mine anything.

Here is past difficulty level data... make your own predictions for future changes.

Remember to take into account the quantity of ASIC chips in production by Avalon and others.

Date          Increase %   Difficulty level     

05-Feb   10.33%   3,651,012
18-Feb   11.47%   4,367,876
01-Mar   19.63%   4,847,647
14-Mar   10.98%   6,695,826
24-Mar   38.13%   7,673,000
05-Apr   14.59%   8,974,296
17-Apr   12.28%   10,076,293
30-Apr   12.28%   11,187,257
12-May   11.03%   11,187,257
25-May   8.64%   12,153,412
05-Jun   28.41%   15,605,633

Yes, but not monthly.

The difficulty increase in percentage staying the same means that the average increase has been the same.


Lets illustrate this:

Difficulty 10m. For illustration, lets say it is 10th/s (I know that is wrong.)

Hashrate increase of 10%, increase 1m. 1th/s
Same hashrate comes up: 11m, Hashrate 11/th/s with a 1th/s increase. After 2016 blocks, difficulty is increased by 9,09%.
If you suggest a cumulativ increase of additional percentages, you need to think about the costs. 360 million is RIDICULOUS. I have written about this before.

You would have to add the total hashrate of June to accomodate October increases. Just think about that. Then you would do it again, and again. Adding the current total network hashrate several times over, with increasing the increase absolute number every time.

I think you should rather use 25-30% in your calculations. ASICS are coming fast now, and will skyrocket the difficulty.

The last difficulty level showed a 28.4% jump in difficulty.  If difficulty levels were to continue at an 18% increase each two weeks thereafter the expected future difficulty levels would look as follows:

date     change     difficulty
----------------------------------
05-Jun   28.41%   15,605,633
16-Jun   18.00%   18,414,647
27-Jun   18.00%   21,729,283
08-Jul    18.00%   25,640,554
19-Jul           18.00%   30,255,854
30-Jul           18.00%   35,701,908
10-Aug   18.00%   42,128,251
21-Aug   18.00%   49,711,337
01-Sep   18.00%   58,659,377
12-Sep   18.00%   69,218,065
23-Sep   18.00%   81,677,317
04-Oct   18.00%   96,379,234
15-Oct   18.00%   113,727,496
26-Oct   18.00%   134,198,445
06-Nov   18.00%   158,354,165
17-Nov   18.00%   186,857,915
28-Nov   18.00%   220,492,340
09-Dec   18.00%   260,180,961
20-Dec   18.00%   307,013,534
31-Dec   18.00%   362,275,970

At a bitcoin price of $120 and the above difficulty levels a BFL rig customer may double their money or better if they received equipment by mid-Sept 2013.  They would break even if received by mid-Nov and unfortunately lose money on their investment if receive end-November.  

What must make most BFL pre-order, but undelivered, customers rather unhappy is that a 5GHs machine would make around $2,000 profit and a 50 GHs machine around $20,000 profit if started today and mined 24/7 to end 2014.

If I had an order for a minirig, I would rather have it converted into a bunch of jalapenos than get the order cancelled.

But now that the jalapenos are going out the door, they are quite likely to have figured out some larger models aswell, but maybe they are waiting for part or are doing some final testing. It's really not easy to know if they will start shipping other units any day or if it's gonna be severely delayed.

Would not be surprised if buyers of miniriggs might end up with the same hashing power spread over several units.

If BFL had shipped even one minirig, BFL_Jody would be all over the blog telling the world about it, being the one that sends the orders to production!

5 MR ?  = 15  X 500 GH Boxes ?   = 7.5 TH  yike! --- lights will dim - hash rate spike!

I think you are forgetting something. They have been shipping for real only a week or two, and in that time they have cleared the backlog from some of the days when they are likely to have received a lot of orders compared to a few weeks later.

It takes a little time to get production ramped up, and the workers will spend less time per unit they put together and pack until they reach a plateau where efficiency falls back a little.
There are new systems to be set up, best way of item-flow, some experimenting with different setups etc. And offcourse some errors have to be made etc.

When they have gotten trough the first few weeks of orders, thew will probably churn trough the days pretty fast, at least until they get to around april/may 2013 where I suspect there is a new rise in orders.

If they can get the hardware parts in fast enough, the natural thing would be to hire more staff that will then come to a company focused on shipping orders. Also as they have gotten used to shipping and have a system set up, the new workers will slip into the routine faster than the existing workers who have been used to a company focusing on bugtracking, putting out fires, waiting for suppliers and backpedling.

Request a refund, move on, let the people behind the moaners move up...

That is great for you but I still dont get why people's jaws arent dropping open.  July 2012.  Shipping June 2013.   How could anyone (me) ever HOPE to receive their 50 Gh/s unit before 2014?  I mean seriously.  thats a ONE YEAR shipping delay.  One year is like 20 years in the tech world.  A whole year!  Yet still they tell me my unit may ship in a month or two.  How?   even if hardware is pouring in .... a backlog of a *YEAR* ?

So last week they said they were shipping all orders through June 26.   And 7 days later its all orders thru July 3.  Guess what that means?   They're only shipping at a day - to - day rate.  In 7 days they shipped 7 days worth of orders.  At that rate, it will be 1 year before they're shipping todays orders....

When i start seeing 1 week pass and the "ship thru" date is a month later than the previous ... then i'll start having some hope.

Until then ... there is no increase in shipping speed.  Except that its occurring versus not...

-Burger-

The small models seem to be coming along fine.

I think BFL should refund the minirig pre-orders, apologize publicly, and launch a new high end model not so ambitious, which is actually possible to build with the chip technology they have. Obviously letting the people who ordered the minirig to be first in line if they want it. It should also be realistically priced, the minirig was way too cheap for the massive amount of ASIC chips it would have needed, and 8,000-10,000 watts worth of power supplies, think 3 phase with all the approvals, country specific issues etc. I was not going to happen.

If I had a minirig order I would have cancelled it months ago, at least when they stopped allowing new orders for it back in April, that would have been a warning bell. I guess some people are just so rich they don't care.

They have lots of orders, and now that hardware is pouring in, I guess they are ramping up production/shipping.
Also I guess they have a lot of new orders coming in, now that people see that it's no longer vaporware.

The faster they can make them, the more they can sell etc. Also the race is now on to be the first company to have ASICs on stock and ready to ship to individual consumers.

I don't have a problem here, I just made a point. What are you a rep for them? Defending them and giving me advice? I don't want your advice and I wasn't looking to start trouble.

And I'm not saying to see everything, something reasonable so that the firestorm of people who think BFL is stealing their money. Is that fair? There are a lot of scams going on as money is to be made. There is nothing wrong with giving the customers security. I realize they are shipping, maybe 100 orders have been delivered that were ordered 1 year ago. I don't think some customer security is out of line.