Topic: NEW info. Everyone is lying about ther ASIC project - page 17. (Read 26629 times)

i sure hope it's not B.S 

Your the customer, he doesn't have to talk you into buying at all.

The website of BFL says it all.

Electrical engineers are not #1 on customer support or business, your hounding a race horse with no harness.... Come on, give them a break and let them release such a product before calling them lies.

I care, because I am scared

They specifically said October, who said anything about January 2013?

Yes that is what I mean. You have proven me wrong on one point, now please prove me wrong on the other points that I mention in the first post, so I you can persuade me to buy some of your ASICs.
Now I am a skeptic so if you manage to persuade me I will probably persuade 1/4 of the Bulgarian Bitcoin forum and u can see from the mining statistics how many we are.

I agree with you, but I think that they are а real but not а serious company based on their PR, support and overall look.
I do think that they will eventually produce some ASICs, but I am willing to bet that:

   BFL won't start shipping before January - February 2013!  

BFL have proved they are a serious company, shipping physical product and not a scam.  the only thing they have been reluctant to reveal is delivery dates etc, probably due to development issues.  When they first started accepting preorders, they probably had not developed the tech, but hopefully by now they have and its a question of asthetics etc?!  After all, they are due to start shipping in 4 weeks!

I think he means about all the point in his OP he made about something being funny about BFL's new ASIC. You proved him wrong on the owner location.

Prove you wrong about what? 

Is that the only thing that you can prove me wrong?   

I don't think we are talking about real hard core R&D here.  Many years ago, I remember CPLD were hot, then FPGA seemingly replaced them overnight when speed requirements went nuts (>100MHz -  it's funny now).  There are folks who sell canned ASIC IP cores.  And shops that will add custom designs to the cores.  Plus, multi chip FPGA simulator boards have been around for a while, ie simulators for ASIC design testing, if they even cared to do that; they might have skipped that step.  It's not special anymore, and something as well known as SHA, I would imagine takes less design work.  It then becomes more about money, operations & timeframes (ie staying on top of the one stop ASIC design shop & the chosen fab).  It's really about timming, did they submit the order to design & fab early enough. 

Let's say it takes 1 ASIC to match the 2.5GH/s on the $150 product; or maybe 2 or 3 to meet the spec, okay, fine.  Once their chosen fab starts & works out the bugs in the prototypes, they should be able to mass produce the chips cheaply, so even if it takes a few chips, they should be profitable.  Anyway, let's say the current FPGA design equivalent runs at 250MH/s, lets say we expect a 5x increase, so 1.25GH/s, so that would mean they need two chips to meet spec. The ASIC will have a much smaller foot print & pin count, so I don't expect a big PCB compared the the BFL singles, even with 2 chips each $150 ASIC product should be small, and cheap to produce. 

A few years ago, I had some involvement with UWB chipsets development.  The lab prototype was made from discrete components which include mixed signal work, which means huge amounts of custom stuff when you put it in to an ASIC.  And yes, there was an FPGA prototype for "compliance" testing.  The total timeframe was little more than a year.  Well more, if you count the amount of time the standards committee took in delaying things.  I don't think BFL has to worry about standard committees, manufacture interoprabilty, or compliance testing.  That big ugly box turned into one chip and a few discrete components, it really was like magic...one day a prototype ASIC magically appeared in a FedEx box, come to think of it I think it was an Intl FedEx box.

When did BFL start?  I don't know the answer.  It may have that fishy smell, if you haven't experienced this kind of development before.  But FPGA's are an intermediate step to ASICs.  If I gave them the benefit of the doubt, and assume they were thinking about ASICs, but made the FPGA product first, because they could get it to market faster.  Then I would work backwards from when the FPGA's were first advertised as being for sale; so give or take Nov/Dec 2011, back up 2 more months of pre-engineering before marketing the FPGA product, I would say a reasonable start would have been Oct or Nov 2011 was when they could have started thinking about the design of the ASIC...about 1 year ago.  It works out for me.  But on the other hand, this is probably a really small outfit, so even if there are only 2 principles, even fairly recent collage grads behind it, I think it would still be reasonable if they work with a design house; as long as the principles have some experience in the FPGA to ASIC route, things will work out...but I would personally be prepared for some delays...engineers are not strong on operations or customer service.

I paid with paypal but received an invoice as well as an order number (four digits). So I highly doubt its the paypal transaction ID, they were probably requesting your transaction ID from paypal so they could bring up your order number.

when u had order number ? what kind of number is it ?
 as in string of numbers like XXXXX ?

BFL has not and does not sell on eBay. 

BFL is not registered in Massachusetts ... not sure where that came from?  We are currently registered in Wyoming.

The two I bought (at different times) had the order number in the email.

i just paid for two "warmer" units via paypal and email support for order number. A person named pegi replied saying the order number is the paypal transaction number . Did anyone get this same reply ?

There is one thing I don't understand:
If I have posted this pool 1 week after their announcement the result would have been probably 100% sayng that they are lying.
Now after 2 months absolutely nothing has changed on the BFLs side, no info no previews, no news nothing at all.

So why is the trust in them growing?


It is called euphoria people starting to get excited and believing, and of course it is the sheep principle - people following the herd.
Even I am thinking about ordering one. 

I'll say this:

BFL acts like a small business (probably because it is one).

That being said, a couple of points:

It doesn't matter if you believe them or not, they have product in the wild.
That implies a customer base who trusts them to deliver a product, maybe not on time - but they are shipping orders.
BFL has chosen to capitalize on their brand by selling pre-orders on ASIC product plan to produce. It's safer than a speculative investment - you could always sue if they don't deliver the product or return the money.

Conclusion:

If they release an ASIC product first, it doesn't matter what that product is - if network hash rates increase by 5 or 10 times (potentially 40 times) then GPU mining becomes pointless. And you'll then be stuck with no way to earn. My advise is this, if you haven't jumped on the BFL bandwagon yet - do it now, order an fpga single and pre-order the upgrade for it. If another company produces an ASIC product, you should buy from them as well. The more developers making this hardware would be the best thing for growth of bitcoin longterm.

An Aside:

BFL has been very careful to leave the small independent miner a very cost effective way to get into ASIC mining - that $150 Jalapeno - affordable and it would will effectively gpu mining for a third of the cost to the miner. This shows that BFL is in fact hitching their company to the future of bitcoin.

So basically Jalapeno mining replaces gpu mining (probably will generate about the same as a high end video card or two after difficulty adjustments) -

Incidently, if the network hash rate goes 40 times - and the asic single hits numbers, it should be pulling in ~20 btc per month. And as long as they're earning themselves out in under a year... I'll be glad I pre-ordered.

Well the vote is kind of split, maybe some more votes will help decide

I don't think it's a lie but I really don't like their PR...

Not to say I know anything... but look at all the trouble the raspberry pi went through to come to market. Now, waiting for a 35 dollar computer vs a 1500 dollar money mill is different, but that is the price of bleeding edge tech.