Topic: BitForce SC - full custom ASIC - page 18. (Read 52532 times)

There is a huge difference between a deposit and 100% payment.  When I bid on my house I put 1% of the purchase price into escrow as good faith money.  

Regarding cars, this is an excellent example.  A dealer is charged the full price of a car he ordered the exact moment it rolls of the assembly line.  Not a minute before that.  If you want to purchase a custom configured car, you will need to pay a deposit with the dealer, but certainly not the full price.  I considered buying a Tesla a couple years ago and they were asking for less than 10% as a deposit at that time.

Car dealers are required to post a financial bond to help reimburse any customer deposits in case of insolvency.

@SgtSpike,
Clearly Im not getting my point across. Lets try a different approach.

Assume I have 28nm fab in my mothers basement and I just finished my asic miner. I put it up for sale, long before BFL; 100 GH, 1W, delivery in 3-6 weeks. You can order today.

Will you order one if I asked $100K ? $10K? $5K? $1K?

My funds are ready to preorder.

Thanks for asking.  I have a few simple points.

About BFL
1.  You are pre-announcing this product before delivering your previously pre-announced product
2.  This is your second claim of delivering a product with ASIC hashing.  Your first was debunked as an FPGA as soon as product shipped.
3.  You seem to be using customer funds for purchases of product for development and general expenses.  If I am wrong about that please post a notarized statement from your escrow agent and I will apologize.

About business in general
1.  Paying in advance for development is an investment.  It is generally compensated with intellectual property, equity or loan interest.
2. Honest, viable businesses become insolvent all the time for lack of cashflow.  It is the reason for the Chapter 11 bankruptcy procedures.
3. Payments in advance for products become unsecured debts in a bankruptcy proceeding.  Unsecured debtors are among the lowest priority for recovery in these procedures and generally get nothing.  Even if the material is sitting in the shipping bay with a label on it, it isn't yours under bankruptcy.
4.  For reason #3 above it is unethical, and a violation of consumer protection laws in many places to sell product in advance of availability.  For the same reason, Visa and Mastercard require shipment before a sale can be charged.
5. Companies at risk of insolvency often make very generous guarantee offers.  A guarantee has no revenue cost in the present, and has no value in bankruptcy either.

I can't see ever being a customer of yours given your business practices.  And your question has given me the opportunity to  nicely summarize why people should use caution.  So I will leave your thread to your fans and investors.

I won't know.  No one will.  That's why one must make an educated guess.  Your educated guess is different from my educated guess, and that is fine.  Overall though, the market will know when to stop buying ASICs because the ROI is too high for the risk involved.  Individually, some people will step over that line anyway, and take absolutely forever to pay off their miners.

The customer is one and the same.  If the projected ROI is not sufficient or quick enough to mitigate the risk of a price drop (and increased difficulty because of it), then the first miner shouldn't have bought in the first place.  If the projected ROI of the second miner (assuming price of ASIC miners has reached rock-bottom and isn't expected to move downward any further) isn't high enough as opposed to other investments they could be putting their money towards, then they won't invest anyway.

So, what's your point?  Are you just warning us to make smart decisions because future price drops will probably be coming?  If so, then I agree with you - that sort of thinking is smart and should be part of any miner's decision to purchase or not purchase miners.  If not, then what point are you trying to get across?

And how will you know? You expect BFL to tell you how many chips they will sell in what period or at what (future) price? Without that information you can not make an informed decision.

No, you still dont get it. This is not typical at all. I cant honestly think of a market with similar dynamics.


Logical fallacy. You dont make a distinction between customers that already handed a check and have a miner thats yet to break even on its cost,  and potential new customers. The former ones want a low difficulty, and the only way to keep difficulty low is if those asics remain expensive/difficulty. The latter ones only want a good price/difficulty (which will increase difficulty). So you cant please both. It cant be both cheap and expensive for a given difficulty.  Now guess which type of customer BFL will care about most?

Yes, I agree with your assessment and I don't harbor any resentment against BFL.

I received the same email Inspector.  Evidently, they misled us (probably not on purpose) when they said more info was available if an NDA was signed.  More than likely, whoever made the post on the forum didn't realize that the information was only intended for commercial partners.

I did contact [email protected] and, having ordered a mini rig, thought I was well-qualified to be sent an NDA, which I then would have signed, in much the same way as I have already signed another NDA with another Bitcoin mining-related entity.

To my utter surprise, I just received this email (which, by the way, is not subject to an NDA, as it will become clear in just a second):

Hi Inspector 2211, <- I took the liberty to redact my real name

Thank you for your interest in our BitForce SC product. The NDA you've requested to sign is not a customer level document. It's place is for our manufacturing partners and Venture Capital participants. However, the useful period of time the NDA has covered is nearly complete as we're making our full product announcement in June. Performance specifications and shipment availability will be released at that time.

Best Regards,

Jody D.
Customer Service
BF Labs, Inc.

This really only seems to be a huge issue with this community.  The auto industry does this all the time, and people are more than happy to oblige.  If you're building a house, you're often required to put a large payment (percentage wise) up front and deadlines/budgets are missed all of the time.

I realize this is apples and oranges, but IMO, the mining community is pretty unique in their entitlement demands and expectations.  I really don't understand why every BFL thread needs go through 250 posts of bullshit.  If the argument is of morality or philosophy behind ASIC development (by anyone) then it deserves its own thread.  If it's to further hack and bash at BFL's business practices, there's a thread for that in Offtopic.

Again, miners should do what makes the most financial sense to them.  They should be sure to calculate any expected price drops into their equation, and decide when the best point to purchase (if any) is.

What you are describing is ASIC miners being priced high to start with, then as time goes on and competition is introduced, the prices will drop to the equilibrium of supply and demand.  That is typical of any product.  Any miner who does not take this price curve into account has only themselves to blame.

BFL wants to maximize the revenue of the miners, because the miners are their customers.  If they can increase the total revenue of miners, they increase their customer base and potential revenue.  That's why I keep saying they won't do anything that will harm the Bitcoin price, because that reduces their potential sales, as sales will be capped by the difficulty.

For some reason, you seem to assume that all miners are idiots, and won't take difficulty increases and price drops into account.  As the ROI is stretched to longer periods, you WILL see a decrease in the number of purchases, as no one wants to hold on to a risky, volatile asset for a length period of time in the hopes that it will pay off.  But BEFORE it reaches the point of being unable to return on the investment at all, people will stop buying them.

I hold to the position that, as long as BTC price doesn't drop significantly, ALL ASICs that are purchased will eventually pay back.  It might take a while, depending on the price point at which they are purchased and such, but the market can judge at what point the risk outweighs the potential revenue, and at what point the ROI is not worth the investment.

If your think thats such a problem today (I actually dont), just imagine what it will be like when difficulty starts doubling every 6 months, or faster.

nearly all of BFLs problems will go away if they get rid of pre-orders meaning they build as many units as they can, put for sale - customers receive units within days (since units are on hand) and when they run out remove the order button. Build more units and repeat

taking pre-orders and having people wait 3 months to receive them brings a lot negativity

Does that quote really make sense to you? If you truly think any ASIC providers' interest align completely with a miner's interests, and they will "do everything in their power to maximize miners revenue" rather than their own, then you are not the intelligent guy I took you for.

Well, I guess in a way they do have the same interest: their own bottom line.  But after the first asics will begin having an effect on difficulty, the asic provider and the miner will have diametrically opposed interests: one will want to keep selling as many as possible virtually free to produce chips to pay back his NRE, thereby constantly dropping prices to adjust for, and as  a result, increasing difficulty - potentially by orders of magnitude; while the miner would like to achieve an ROI on his investment, and wont be able to do so if difficulty goes up any faster than what he had planned for.

Ive asked the question before: what payback time would you look for to buy an ASIC? And what happens if BFL then sells ASICs twice as fast as you expected?


I got no problems with BFL. The issue is not BFL, its with asics in general; it will be the same with any company that would enter this market first and effectively obtains a dial that can turn up difficulty at will and must turn this dial to make a profit. I can think of some ways they could mitigate the miner risk, but none that wouldnt collide with their own bottom line.

No reason? BFL has provided a plethora of reasons. I'd be happy to provide a long list for you.


It doesn't exist. It won't for many months. They've announced that they'll announce next month that they'll someday do ASICs.

It means he forgot to type "show" somewhere in that highlighted text.

Wot doez thiz meen ?

And that sums up the problem most have with them perfectly.

I am not sure that the critics consider it Vaporware, but rather have doubts over what it will actually be.  Given BFL's track record of half-truths regarding their single, there seems to exist a healthy amount of skepticism regarding their announced future products.

I am of the mind-set that the single is a fantastic product.....but why the many half-truths and outright lies about it?  It would be great if they would run their company to a standard befitting of their end product(s).  The underhanded business ethics they exhibit in certain areas is disappointing.  

You'll still have Mem around for calling them scammers even after they give 100 of us legitimate ASIC units.