Topic: Martinm's rating of ASIC Companies [BitSyncom VS ASICMiner VS BFL] - page 3. (Read 3151 times)

Price/Performance is simply USD/GigaHash. The power consumption is important on the long run, for the moment we need to compare the current products and here I don't see that anyone is much better than others.

8 posts, joined only a month ago, praised BFL to the skies.

Come on BFL! Can you not tell your shills to be a little less obvious?

Looks like these ratings could use a tweak or two.
It may be a good idea to ask forum members to chime in and rate the companies that they have ACTUALLY done business with.
Update the OP with the average scores.

I will not score any of them as I haven't done any business with them.

Man, your post is a joke.

Are you really saying that the worst ASIC company is THE FIRST ONE in delivering products to final customers, and THE ONLY ONE that delivered some units priced in a way that a very good ROI was possible?

Then:

- how can you say that ASICminer PR is poor? They are handling very good the communications with both their shareholders and the community.
- how can you say that ASICminer customer support is poor? They are providing a lot of help to their blades customers
- how can you say that BFL PR is good? They are just laughing at their customers

And I could continue ad infinitum

I think your price/performance numbers need a bit of work. Butterfly hasn't been able to meet any of their power/performance goals -- did you go by their [excessive flashy] advertising claims, or what the numbers have shown to be for their production prototypes that they have been shipping?

dude, are you a BFL pawn or sth? your numbers are way off.

Hey guys,

I really would like to compare the current 3 major companies based on their total performance. Lets rate following aspects of the companies. During the review I try to give every criteria a score between 1-10.

EDIT:
This topic should not be about who's customer had the best ROI till now, or who delivered first. This is evaluated in "Delivery reliability" and states clearly ASICMiner/BitSyncom as the leading companies in this category. Additionally I will remove the total score as a lot of people see "Delivery reliability" as the aspect that counts most and this leads the discussion in the wrong way

- Public Relations
- Customer Support
- Terms & Conditions
- Price/Performance of Products
- Delivery reliability
- Assets of company

BitSyncom

Introduction:
This company delivered as first a final product to customers and reviewers, the estimated delivered amount of machines would be around 300, or less, as batch 1 was announced with a total volume of 300 machines and some people still not received their machines. The company could not reach their first released shipping dates, but due to the fact their were the first company that ever released an ASIC-Bitcoin Miner, their customers of Batch 1 were still happy. Their efforts in public relations are low, their representative gave some interviews after their release of their product, but in general he stays low profile. The company does not seems to show up at exhibitions or invest into marketing. Their customer support is mainly based on their wiki pages and 3rd party forums as the contribution of customer 2 customer support, there is no hotline and tickets doesn't seems to be processed. Their Terms & Conditions seems to be very customer-hostile, it doesn't seems that refunds are possible at all, payments with fiat money have tight limits of 8hours, support is rejected by default. Additionally their website doesn't show any address of the company, for me its unclear were this company is incorporated. The evaluation of Price/Performance need to be separated for Batch 1/2/3 and their Chips sells. Prices were calculated from Batch 3 on only in BitCoins. The price for Batch 1 & 2 can be seen as fair, also the strategy to just sell in batches seems fair, due to limited production capacities. The price of Batch 3 was increased dramatically because of the introduced link to the BitCoin price, the reason this change was argued was based on a ROI for this product, but it assumes they would know how the market (total hashrate and bitcoin exchange price) is developing or have a very fast delivery time. Additionally we can assume that if the BitCoin would decease to the value of beginning this year (about 13 USD) their price policy would change again. As already mentioned BitSyncom was the first supplier that delivered products to the market (Batch 1), this provided them a big reputation inside the community. The fact that the delivery could not be done at the announced time was easily forgiven. The announced targets for deliveries for Batch 2/3 can now be seen as missed. The final delivery is still unknown, even the most people hope that the delivery will happen till the end of may. The company assets are clearly unknown, due to the fact that nowbody ever visited any production facility of BitSyncom, we can assume that they don't have any own machines. The pictures shown in interviews of the representative of BitSyncom are clearly the same facility were the Icarus boards were already manufactured, and this facility does not belong to BitSyncom.
The blog post of XianFu shows the same facility in April 2012 when he visited this company the first time:  http://www.openmobilefree.net/?p=1361
By a rough calculation of their sales of Batch 1/2/3 + Chips (BTC price of 120USD), we can assume a turnover of about 10,6 Million USD or more.


- Public Relations:  4
- Customer Support: 3
- Terms & Conditions: 3
- Price/Performance of Products: 4.5
- Delivery reliability: 6
- Assets of company: 2


ButterflyLabs

Introduction:
The company recently delivered some work in progress prototypes of their ASIC- Products to a few people, but missed their targets of power consumption. The company puts efforts to public relations, they try to promote business relations and show up on exhibitions. They have dedicated persons for different areas of business like customer support, public relations, key account manager. They provide a hotline and e-mail for support, as lifetime warranty for their products. Customers report that it takes long time to get a reply to an e-mail, in average up to one week or sometimes longer. They release regular news about their progress, even the news are not linked to any fixed schedule but to their progress. The Terms & Conditions are to be considered as normal, also they need to keep up with US Law as this company is a legal incorporated US company. Their prices are to be considered as fair in comparison to the competition, even their increased their price in recent days. However in comparison to others the prices are still to be considered as the lowest on the market. About their delivery is not much positive to be said, they failed many times to keep their announced shipment dates and a reliable delivery date is still not visible. By these delays they they suffer hard critics in the community and a fade of believe, even they proven that they have a product. Clearly the product shown does also not keep their promised technical data, but the company provided refunds to customers who don't accept these products. The assets of this company are properly not very high, even they have some own equipment, a official facility and also accepted visitors. However, it's still the only company that showed to public that they have a real facility. The companies turnover is difficult to estimate, the amount of pre-orders are not public but can be estimated to about 30000, if we take an average of 1400 USD for an order, we can assume a turnover of 42 Million USD.

- Public Relations:  7  
- Customer Support: 5
- Terms & Conditions: 5
- Price/Performance of Products: 6
- Delivery reliability: 1
- Assets of company: 4


ASICMiner

Introduction:
This company can be considered as exception, they followed another path then the BFL and BitSyncom. They started to collect money by selling shares to develop own chips and establish an mining farm. After they reached their goal, they started to sell some of their products to customers. Their public relations were limited to announcements on community boards, their customer support can hardly be evaluated as not enough time passed they started to sell their products. However, they products seems to be customer friendly, and they release information to their investors about their targets and the current state. The Terms and Conditions seems fair, they sales started in an auction, so the price was mostly decided by the bidding. The amount of provided products to the market is very limited and the price in the bidding was extremely high. Their new USB-Minner seems to be overpriced and only available for bulk buys. The delivery time is as fast as possible, they have the products at stock and start the shipping immediately. Their assets are unknown, even the most consider they have an mining farm, pictures of the farm are not known to me, but by observation to announcements and increase of the hash-rate we can assume that this information are true. The structure of the whole company is not clear to me, as far as I know the company is a Shanghai one and their production and farm is in Shenzhen. The main question is hereby how the shares of this company are issued to the share owners, for me it doesn't seems that this company is registered as a Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprise in PRC. So even if it is a incorporated company, the shares would properly just a kind of gentlemen agreement between investors and company owner. However, I'm not a lawyer but the shares of the company can also be seen as a risky investment as long there is no legal basement.

- Public Relations:  2  
- Customer Support: 5
- Terms & Conditions: 5
- Price/Performance of Products: 2
- Delivery reliability: 9
- Assets of company: 5.5



Conclusion:
For me there is no clear winner visible. Different people tend to give different rating on specific aspects, as for most it just counts to have their ASIC's as one of the first. The emotion what leads the decisions is greed. For me it seems that most of the people does not look to much how legit a business is structured, that is the part I'm most concerned about. Everybody should consider about their chances for legal steps in the case of a fraud. It's clear that mostly the money can not be refunded, but at least the guilty one can be cached and punished by law. The worst is that all your money is gone and the fraudsters are spending it in peace on an island! By this everyone should deal with an investment like he would buy a house or anything else of value, that happens mostly without greed, but with a solid contract and caution.