Historically, it appears the contrarian approach was generally correct:
First, BFL announces their project and everyone falls in love with it. Avalon announces later and people were told, "Don't waste your time with avalon. BFL will outproduce them and beat them to market: it will never be worth it." At that point, in hindsight, Avalon was actually the better deal.
As the months tacked on, the advice became, "BFL is such a scam, or at least so incompetent, that batch 2/3 Avalons are the only good investment. Even now when Avalons cost significantly more than batch 1. Everyone with BFL orders should get their refund before the ship sinks." Now in hindsight, it appears that BFL is shipping a couple hundred 5 GH/s miners per week based on http://bfl.ptz.ro/, so if the trend continues and accelerates, it's possible Avalon 3s will sink (Avalon 2s may be ok). Those that kept their BFL preorders, or even made new orders, look likely to come out ahead over avalon batch 3.
Now prices have changed for everyone, BTC/$ has changed, and community based Avalon and BFL chip projects are showing up. At this point, the only question is "Who can ship to me first? If both will arrive at the same time, who has less power?" Since there is no Avalon batch 4 (yet), and the the avalon 3rd party systems are in the pre-prototype stage, the only thing left to do is the calculation of whether the USB ASIC miners (blades for high $/GH) are a better deal than placing a bet on a BFL order.
There was also the, "The sky is falling! 100 TH/s added to the network in August! Don't buy any ASIC miner!" based on the amount of money Avalon's chip sales account raised. That has yet to be seen whether to be true, but based on past warnings - the opposite may be more likely.
First, BFL announces their project and everyone falls in love with it. Avalon announces later and people were told, "Don't waste your time with avalon. BFL will outproduce them and beat them to market: it will never be worth it." At that point, in hindsight, Avalon was actually the better deal.
As the months tacked on, the advice became, "BFL is such a scam, or at least so incompetent, that batch 2/3 Avalons are the only good investment. Even now when Avalons cost significantly more than batch 1. Everyone with BFL orders should get their refund before the ship sinks." Now in hindsight, it appears that BFL is shipping a couple hundred 5 GH/s miners per week based on http://bfl.ptz.ro/, so if the trend continues and accelerates, it's possible Avalon 3s will sink (Avalon 2s may be ok). Those that kept their BFL preorders, or even made new orders, look likely to come out ahead over avalon batch 3.
Now prices have changed for everyone, BTC/$ has changed, and community based Avalon and BFL chip projects are showing up. At this point, the only question is "Who can ship to me first? If both will arrive at the same time, who has less power?" Since there is no Avalon batch 4 (yet), and the the avalon 3rd party systems are in the pre-prototype stage, the only thing left to do is the calculation of whether the USB ASIC miners (blades for high $/GH) are a better deal than placing a bet on a BFL order.
There was also the, "The sky is falling! 100 TH/s added to the network in August! Don't buy any ASIC miner!" based on the amount of money Avalon's chip sales account raised. That has yet to be seen whether to be true, but based on past warnings - the opposite may be more likely.
Agreed
Nice post .. well thought out.
look who decided to show up.
