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Yeah well, i'm sorry to tell you that there are always better people than you know.
I can guarantee you that there are people not involved in bitcoin that could produce a better ASIC than any bitcoin-involved parties. The only question is, are they interested enough to get into it now.
There is nothing magical about bitcoin and the algorithm the ic will need to execute is already decided.
Also notice that the problems the ASIC companies are having is not with the hardware implementation of hashing but with the actual technical bit of producing ASICs. They would be screwing up the same way even if they designed an mp3 player instead of a bitcoin hasher.
And all these problems are what real pro's have learned to manage.
So i can fully imagine someone with a plan being able to poop out bitcoin ASICS in a much shorter time frame then what we currently see.
If not then maybe you can explain what would make a bitcoin ASIC so difficult to design for an outsider that they could never catch up.
How many failed (serious) outsider ASIC companies have there been for you to have noticed this dynamic as a general fact?
It's easy to explain.
The outsiders always think like an outsider.
They've made chips that do simple stuff and don't require much power or much complexity.
Yes the algorithm is simple (hell I even wrote a program that generates optimised working BTC c sha256 code from a simple text definition - that works) ... but to implement it in hardware is not.
Go have a look at the FPGA bitstreams and discussions from the latter part of 2011 to get an idea.
I'll certainly will get up to date on that discussion.
Meanwhile i don't see how the actual implementation needs more than than a thorough general understanding of how to use die space effectively. I'm not sure there can be anything specific to bitcoin that would change this process compared to implementing other algorithms. Sure, SHA256 will have its own set of 'hot-spots' that you need to deal with but every design can have these and they always need to be dealt with.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter - we are already 10 days into the "few months" and they've only just announced this hardware company.
When 10-July rolls around, they wont be anywhere near complete and they'll have proven themselves that they cannot do it in "a few months"
This will depend on the actual specs their devices will have and the price at which they will sell them.
If they, for instance, use a smaller process then they will have a competitive product even if they deliver much later.
If you think that they are a scam because they seem to not start when you think they should have look at BFL. They will probably deliver at some point but they are horribly over due. But are they a scam? I'd say no, but they sure have a scummy side to them. (ow, and i propose a complementary to the scam tag: the SCUM tag
)
We've got 4 companies who have already built bitcoin hardware before they started on ASIC.
ASICMINER, Avalon, BFL and bASIC.
The last one failed, the 2nd last one still hasn't released their hardware, and the other 2 took way over 3 months to produce a chip that hashes slower than an FPGA - it just requires hundreds of them to get 'ASIC' speeds.
One thing I think you don't understand, is that BTC is full of tech people who DO know what they are talking about and who DO work for companies that do this sort of stuff.
Anyway, well see on the 10th of July.
If the bitcoin community is realy this full of 'people in the know' then we would have seen ASICS way back in 2011 already.
There is not much difference in difficulty designing an ASIC now then it was 2 years ago. It's the same process. So why did all these tech people that you say BTC is full with take so long to see the future?
What i also see is that these skilled tech people frequenctly disagree with each other. They all seem to have copyright on the truth. In such a situation, even if the people are experienced, there is always room for a 3rd party to actually do better.
I'n not saying this is NOT a scam of sorts.
I'm saying that you cannot say that it's bullshit per se.
We realy need more information to even get close to being able to assess this.
