Unfortunately pre-orders have been a necessary evil at this point in time. Non-recurring engineering costs are very large, especially at 28nm. The risks are compounded by the speed at which products can be created for the market that demands their use as soon as feasibly possible due to a finite window of opportunity by which they can realise a return on investment. It's one thing for you, and many other crowd sourced parties to risk your investment, as that risk is evenly distributed (within reason), but for one entity to bare the brunt of all the risk on a make or break endeavour is huge. Which is why venture capital is unlikely unless they get to use the technology for themselves, otherwise their return earned from a cut of the profit between covering NRE and manufacturing, Hashfast's own profit, and the retail price leaves their hands tied as to how effectively they can compete on price in the future. This is aside from whether such VC would be comfortable tolerating such risk, when there are far better and certain returns to be made on other endeavours when we talk of investment of several million dollars. It obviously requires less than that for 40nm+. In any case it's very unlikely Hashfast, or Uniquify will stomach such funding themselves. I don't know their personal circumstances, but such risk requires sharing, I'd imagine pre-orders are a prerequisite, then again they appear to have made some headway, and have afforded staffing already. In any case I don't believe this is a scam, Simon's clearly a smart guy and Uniquify are a legitimate ASIC design team, but everyone owes it to themselves and the companies they choose to support by accepting the role their investment makes in these circumstances, and acknowledge that they are sharing the risk in developing these products at this point in time...
Hi, I agree with what you're saying, but just playing devil's advocate for a minute, is a full pre-order (crowd-funded type) scheme really a "fair" share of risk in the BTC-ASIC world at the moment? If a company was to seek the majority (or all) of its NRE and manufacturing costs from investors in advance of having a product then the investors bear practically all of the risk. The company has the opportunity to realise a profit on their prodcut (which may not even exist) on the basis of its perceved worth at some point in the future. There is no particular incentive to make a product that is profitable for the consumer when it actually ships if the business model assumes that the majority of the profit for the manufacturer is made during the pre-order phase (depending on their refund policy of course). As we all know, it's hard to predict what will hapen in two weeks, let alone three months the way things are going at the moment. Is it worse for one VC individual/company that may be worth many millions to loose a couple of million on a high-risk high-return investment or for lots of average Joe's to loose $10000 (which may be a large chunk of their savings/credit card balance) if things don't work out as expected? I wouldn't have said that one was better than the other actually. In practice any loss is likely to affect your average Joe's life more than the VC, but that depends on the personal stakes of those behind the company etc.
Having said all of this, it seems as though some of the current wave of ASIC manufacturers are funding the chip design and initial fab themselves (e.g. bitfury, not sure about the others) and then taking pre-orders at the PCB manufacturing stage when they have demonstrated working hardware. This seems to fit in well with the notion of shared risk and "fairness". HashFast also seem to have invested in chip design and fab already (I think, based on what's been presented here) before taking orders (or pre-orders), which again would indicate a level of shared risk if they did decide to go down the pre-order route.
I guess that my point is that as a community we should be scrutinising each new offer carefully and if an offer involves a good balance of shared risk (as was your point) then this is a good thing and maybe a pre-order phase is fine/necessary. If an offer shifts all of the risk onto potential consumers then this is presumably a bad thing and should start alarm bells ringing imo. We all know of at least one example where a full pre-order (funding design, fab etc.) hasn't worked out well for consumers. Actually we have quite a lot of power to stop this happening again by not investing in schemes where the consumer bears all of the risk - regardless of how much gold is waved in front of our noses!