Topic: [BFL splat from] Swedish ASIC miner company kncminer.com (Read 1565 times)

A 65nm wafer wouldnt cost much more than $2000 at the fab. Add some margin if they are going through intermediaries. A single 300mm wafer would yield over 1000 potential asics. Subtract yield and you get somewhere between $2.5-$5 per die in wafer cost,  maybe a few dollar in packaging and handling etc.. really, those fans may cost more. Its all peanuts compared to keeping up a charade and paying their employees if they really were nearly bankrupt; dont forgot they are not generating any meaningful revenue right now.  If they were somehow headed for any kind of financial trouble, they would have closed shop a long time ago.



No disagreement there.

By parts I meant the ASIC's mainly.

I do agree there's always been some level of oversight/management failure. You couldn't fail this hard if you planned on it without some special skills.

The cost of their non asic components is so laughably low compared to their revenue stream, money being tight is  not a credible explanation. if they cant pay for the solder, capacitors, fans and PCBs, why on earth would they keep trying? Just close shop, its not like a lot of money is still flowing in from their 65nm asics.

Nah, its either utter incompetence or carelessness (literally "who cares") or a combination of both.

There could be money laundering bleeding out their coffers. At least one of the manager/owners has done this in the past for another crowd-funded money project.

They also should be rolling in the dough, but if that were the case, why are they having issues receiving parts when the parts are plentiful in the wild and other distributors are having no problems? At the same time, they're pumping folks for cash, and all deliverables have slowed to a crawl.

I dont buy the "BFL going broke" thing. Really, they should have enough money in the bank to buy Manhattan. Well, at least a building there

65nm asics arent that expensive to develop, even with their monumental screw ups, Id be surprised they burned more than a few million dollar on that, money they would have had at hand from their FPGAs. Production of asics is even cheaper, these chips essentially cost nothing a piece, PCBs, cases etc dont add up to all that much either when compared to their retail prices. Margins on those miners is phenomenal.

Now lets have a look at just how much money they made. Going by this alone:
http://bfl.ptz.ro/

Im too lazy to look up historical prices, so Im just going by todays equivalent prices in dollar (they took shitloads of bitcoins, that if they didnt sell them all immediately, would have made a small fortune too):

3575 Jalapeno x 275 = $983,125
1230 Little single x 1300? =  $1,599,000
2678 single x 2500 = $6,695,000
185 minirig x 22500 = $4,162,500

total in 65nm asics alone: $13,439,625

Now thats a very incomplete tally, it amounts to 7668 devices, where Josh claims BFL already shipped over 10K asic devices, which cant be more than 1/3 of their backorder as they are still only shipping october 2012 orders. If you believe Josh's claim their real sales could easily be ~4-5x higher. Even if you dont believe a word Josh says, the real revenue is going to be  a lot higher than this estimate.

I just cant see how they could possibly have burnt through that kind of money. If you wonder why they behave cocky as hell with zero respect for their customers, well, believe me, its not because they are on the verge of bankruptcy.

I imagine there's a likelihood the folks doing the assembly are not miners, and may not even be into much knowledge of the hobby. They're probably shielded from the negativity as much as possible to keep up morale.

Probably wouldn't want miners doing the assembly, too much temptation for them to possibly skim parts out to sell/use themselves. To keep overhead low, probably using folks with no-to-basic knowledge of electrical components, and thus paying them as little as possible. Also possibly EE interns or something from local Vocational colleges.

I don't get why people get angry at BFL_Jody. Just let her post whatever the results are. Be angry at management. Not Jody, not the assemblers.

Can't imagine what it's like to be working there right now.
I kinda feel for the average BFL employee that probably had no idea what they were getting themselves into when they signed up.

Dealing with all that customer negativity and hatred - emotions that arose in paid customers that were entirely self-inflicted by the mfg. - on a daily basis is definitely NOT Chicken Soup for the Soul.    

Lol, this is one of the points I brought up on the BFL forums. My points got deleted, and I was told there were no complaints and no refund requests.

Basically, Heil BFL! Heil BFL_Josh!, HEIL, HEIL!

That seems to be their attitude over there.

 As someone still waiting for their March 2013 order (paying the lower price), I can tell you I'm fine just getting a refund. At this stage, even if they shipped it, I wouldn't be able to make any money back from it. I just claimed a refund with Paypal yesterday. They told me they have hundreds of refund requests for BF Labs Inc, and that they will credit me back the amount immediately, and that BFL has 40 days to dispute the charges by showing that they've already sent the item.

Could be. Another idea is they have some magic plan which will unfold and make the whole queue from all products go away within days. Two weeks^TM maybe. I guess we'll see. For sure, it's never a good sign when officials of the company are deleting folks' inquiries about matters, without providing feedback. Or when they deny complaints have been filed and that nothing is going wrong.

Some posts claim they ship products to those who ask for a refund.  Since they said in April 2013 that all unpaid orders were going to be canceled and paid orders jumped while at the same time they raised the price on their products, maybe they're trying to get the owners of cheaper pre-orders to demand a refund (hoping to jump the line and get their orders right away) then refund those and ship to those who paid the higher prices forestalling those cancelations.

They were stopped longer than that.. prior to Saturday, they were dead in the water for 2 weeks. Now they've stopped again. When I brought it up, they deleted my posts. When I mentioned how the BBB is investigating them, they deleted my thread. They're deleting other folks' comments about the situation also. Sounds like they're running in deep financial issues right now honestly. They're having frequent work stoppages, won't tell folks why.. they put out a massive call to preorder the Monarch which they haven't even got in the foundry yet (sounds like a cash pump doesn't it?), they had strict guidelines for GB's of the Monarch at first but recently tossed those rules to the wind (desperation).

Yeah, short of either some miraculous plan which they're trying to keep under wraps until the last second (two weeks), it's likely they're headed toward the brick wall of default/bankruptcy. They've gone from sounding like a scam to visible flags of extreme financial failure. Wouldn't be the first time either, with the folks they have leading the company having been involved in previous crowd-funded failures.

On the upside, I liked the aesthetics of their designs. Maybe one day I'll get one for dirt cheap on ebay when they aren't worth anything. Would be a great coffee table piece.

Thanks, found it. I skipped that post twice somehow)

The BFL product line furthest along in production of pre-orders is the Jalapeno which as of yesterday was up to Feb. 14, Valentine's Day, where it's been for 5 work days.  Bitcoin went for ~$20 then in Feb. and was taking off in value on its way to $254, triggering a huge increase in sales.  If the BFL production rate moving by date is slow now, without some change it will move even more slowly in a big way as they get into their major pre-order sales days/months.