Many of them sound way too good to be true... Terahashes? For less than $10K?
http://www.nitrominer.com/https://hashfast.com/http://www.asic-technologies.com/ - These guys claim they can ship the KnC Jupiter for $4,350 in six days. Over here they offer same hash speed as KNC Jupiter for $3800 (doesn't make a lot of sense):
http://www.asic-technologies.com/ "shipping now - 521.1 -564.8 GHash/sec – 30 BTC /$3800 – 28 nm chip"
How can I tell who is legit and who isn't? After reading horror stories about Butterfly labs I'm lost. Seems like incredible profit is possible with many of these machines (if they are real) if you act NOW.
I can personally vouch for Sam & Andreas at
www.KncMiner.com, Simon, Eduardo and John at
www.hashfast.com and Ravi at
www.cointerra.com - having met and/or talked many times with the founders and employees of these companies. They are all legitimate companies with founders who have the full intention of having happy customers. They each have different products ranging in performance and delivery dates. KnC are shipping first, in the 28nm generation.. i have 4 of their boxes hosted at KnC and theyre running great... and hashfast are aiming to deliver their first units within the next few weeks... and cointerra is aiming to deliver in December. These are all priced accordingly, with KnC being more expensive - in $/GH terms, hashfast in the middle, and cointerra being the lowest cost $/GH. All of them are sub 1 watt per GH... Hashfast claims sub 0.65W/Gh and cointerra claims sub 0.6w/GH.
I also have dealings with ButterFlyLabs, and have paid for several units of hardware months ago but have not received them, nor do i expect them to ever arrive and i think its clear that this isnt a company that aims to have happy customers (im clearly an unhappy one). This company is very good at marketing and very bad at production (and terrible at customer support!)
I have invested in AsicMiner and though i dont believe their previous strategy is going to be sustainable, i believe them to be an honest and straight forward company who also aims to have happy investors. Since theyre missing out on the 'next generation' chips, im expecting them to announce something soon (or theyre dead in the water... and since friedcat has an excellent reputation im assuming they have something good up their sleeves)
I have also met Valery from BitFury several times and i believe he is also legitimate, although his operations are mostly done personally and not via a company. BitFury tends to sell their chips to distributors (in europe and the US) who assemble boards... so this creates more variability in the performance and reliability of the boards, and they have a more 'hobbyist' or 'hacker' style - their boards are usually not as easy to 'plug and play' as some of the others.
I dont have much experience of BitMine.ch (coincraft chip) but i think their intentions are good and their chip specs seem interesting. Theyre shipping later than hashfast and a couple of weeks earlier than Cointerra. If Cointerra's specs are to be believed (and i do) this may be the fastest (and cheapest $/GH) in the current 28nm generation, as halfway through next year everyone could be jumping on the next silicon die-shrink bandwagon.
At this point, i think there are plenty of scammy ones (eg xCrowd)... and also some that are clueless or useless but not necessarily scammy - though the difference is moot (terrahash, VMC/AMC)
At this point my personal opinion of the ones to avoid are: Avalon, terrahash, VMC/AMC... and the ones to consider are BitFury, KnCMiner, Hashfast, Cointerra, and BitMine.ch
-- Jez