the two big safety valves you have imo are the full refund date and now the MPP. of course, if they do a BK you'll probably never see these guarantees materialize. but as i pointed out, they do have several funding options prior to that scenario.
Well I think this is a positive development, whether you or I choose to believe the promises is another question, but the equivalent policy would be bitfury saying they'll send you 256 bare chips if you don't achieve a ROI on your ($8000) full kit after 90 days. Any ASIC from now, even if delivered on time (Aug or Sept) may not achieve a ROI. This announcement is a good thing for miners and hopefully other vendors match it.
This. It isn't a slam dunk. You can always lose money but if someone was buying a 400 GH/s rig from bitfury and bitfury announced that at no additional cost if you didn't break even in 90 days they would give you 256 chips that you could
a) have bitfury assemble at an additional cost
b) have a third party assemble at an additional cost
c) simply sell the excess chips to reduce your purchase price
would anyone say "no I would rather pay full price with no option of additional chips if/when I don't break even"?
Now ultimately what matters is
what is the value of the extra chips? Obviously if when you get them if the chips are only worth 1% of your purchase price it doesn't really matter but lets say they are worth 20%. One way of looking at it, it is like the purchase price was 20% lower. Buy rig for $5,600 worse case scenario gets chips worth $1,120. Sell them and it is the same as if you originally bought the rig for $4,480. Would anyone really complain about paying 20% less that what they originally planned to?
Maybe (in this hypothetical scenario) even with the 20% back (by selling the chips or using them for reduced cost miners) you still lose. Ok well you would lose more without them.