The Custom Hardware section is starting to remind me of another section of these forums where some guy found a way to get tons of people to throw coins at him. Then other people saw what he was doing, and decided to do the same thing, so they could get coins thrown at them. Look how that worked out.
FUD. All 3 instances have been well known and highly established members of the Bitcoin community. BFL has a very consistent track record for delivery excellent products, tho not without their fair share of faults. Tom and his MMQ have been very successful in selling FPGAs, and that is expected to translate well into the bASIC. And finally Deepbit is one of the largest pools, and got that way for a reason. I dare you to pick a better set of 3 companies to pre-sell ASICs.
I have no objections to the claim that what I said is FUD.
I am absolutely afraid to give someone who isn't publicly identified and does not have a working product or prototype they're willing to share thousands of dollars.
I am absolutely uncertain that all these companies will not only have the technical expertise to design and implement such a complex device, but will do so in a timely manner.
I completely doubt that these companies have my best interests at heart while they're holding onto thousands of dollars of my money with no strings attached.
As far as companies I'd trust more - any company that would be willing to take pre-orders, and not require me to give them thousands of dollars to sit in an imaginary line waiting for imaginary hardware. Enterpoint comes to mind, the way they handled the Cairnsmore1 development and release was magnificent compared to most other developers of similar hardware. I don't want anyone to stop offering this hardware, I would love to have an ASIC device for mining. What I want to stop are these poor and greedy business practices of taking money up front to (hopefully - with no transparency how can we know?) fund development costs.
