I want to invest this money into the Bitcoin world and preferably in my own hardware. I'm not interested in crappie USB sticks or home made rigs. I would consider shares.
Hardware: What can you recommend to a semi novice
Shares: Legit, without being scammed?
I'm an IT engineer and this is fascinating..
In April 2012 I purchased a couple of FPGAs from Butterfly Labs, and they worked great! When I went to order more hardware in July 2012, ASICs were available for pre-order, and they had an upgrade offer for FPGA customers. So, I got the upgrades, thinking "BFL orders take two months to ship, which would make it September if I ordered more FPGAs, and the ASICs are 75x faster than the FPGAs -- what's another month for that much more hashing power?"
My ASICs finally arrived about two weeks ago. The day after they shipped, I got an Email from BFL, advertising pre-orders for the 600 GH/s Monarch 28nm ASIC, with expected shipping date in December. Pfft! I'm with Scotty on Star Trek, "fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Don't get me wrong, my ASICs will pay for themselves in about a month, but they could've paid for themselves in two days if BFL had met their shipping promises, and the last increase in difficulty was 34%--three days after I hooked up my ASICs. I went from earning ~1 BTC/day to 0.67 BTC/day, which is what my FPGAs were earning when I started.
I did some research, and I discovered HashFast. They have a 400 GH/s 28nm ASIC that is supposed to ship in October, and it is backed by their Miner Protection Program, which means if your miners don't pay for themselves in 90 days, they'll ship you the hardware it would've taken, in addition to your original order, up to 2 TH/s. If the difficulty skyrockets, HashFast will cover you for up to 5x the hardware you purchased. None of the other vendors offer that, and the price is competitive with BFL. Plus, you can read about who is behind HashFast on their web-site, unlike BFL & others....
See if you can go in for shares on a HashFast miner. It seems to be the best deal available, right now.
Interesting. Anyone else have some input?
I am an ASIC naysayer myself, disgusted with the way the ASIC manufacturers have screwed their customers, but I must admit, you make HashFast sound prettttty appealing. LOL