Yeah, except I don't trust BFL as far as I could spit a goat. They do have a track record shipping solid FPGA based product. They also have a CEO who has been convicted of defrauding investors in the past. It's a fuck load harder to design a new ASIC than it is to slap a off the shelf FPGA on a board with USB and power port and call it a miner. So i don't know, they may be legit, or they might take all the pre-order money and run. Who knows. I still don't trust them enough to pre-order an ASIC rig from them. I'll pass on those first gravy days of owning the brand new ASIC's in favor of seeing a working product first. ASIC's are just an announced product at this point. Nobody has shipped one, nobody has even released video of a prototype working. But ASIC's will happen. There are at least three firms that have announced ASIC products with a good track record in the bitcoin community of shipping FPGA based products that work well. BFL is one of them. One of them is bound to release a ASIC with capabilities more or less up to what their sale literature claims. That will be a game changer that wipes out GPU and FPGA mining just as GPU mining did to CPU mining. If the claimed speeds and power usage of the ASIC is even in the same ballpark as their projections the difficulty will shoot up so high that it wont be worth turning on the GPU or FPGA's rigs anymore. FPGAs really aren't faster than GPU's, especilly when comparing hardware costs vs speed. FPGA's big selling point is that the cost to run them is a bit less than 1/10 of a GPU rig. Which is great if you have enough run time left to pay of the hardware costs... and there isn't much time left. A viable ASIC will hit the streets "real soon now" and that'll be the begining of the end for FPGA's and GPU's. The FPGA's owners are going to be stuck with product that really isn't good for any but miing, and is no longer competitive for that, and therefor have no resale value. The GPU guys can sell off their cards for some cash and try to buy into the ASIC game. Between the upcoming halving of the block rewards, and ASIC's about to hit the market it's going to make for an interesting Christmas / New Year.
I realize you said you aren't in the BFL camp but in the interest of fairness lets assume they aren't complete scam artists for a moment and choose to believe that they will come through. If you have a BFL fpga right now they will buy it back at full price when you trade in for an ASIC so comment about no resale value really isn't accurate for all fpga's.
Very good point, and very true. and if they start shipping ASIC's I'll be standing in line to buy their ASIC products with the rest of the non-believers who didn't pre-order. Maybe I'm just gun shy after the Pirate40 fiasco. (Although I got out of that before he bolted with the cash.)
I'm coming back to necro this thread to point out that I knowingly took a loss grinding bitcoins. I lost $200 a month in electricity grinding bitcoins, but I made a fat wallet. Guess what? Bitcoins are $91 a coin and my fat wallet is worth over 10 times the amount I lost. Sold most of my wallet off, and I'm still mining at a profit. So you either suck at research or are unable to understand a market economy. Treated bitcoins like stocks, made a profit like I would on a high risk stock. The system is designed to drive the price of Bitcoins up, those foolish enough not to notice missed out on one of the fastest money making operations I have ever been a part of. Thank you cryptocurrencies for giving me my shot at investing in baby Microsoft and baby Google.
