Frankly I have my doubts which is why I only sank $150 into the deal. The projected mining difficulty when ASIC miners really hit the market might make my payback period 1 year or more. But no one will know until these ASIC miners really start shipping.
Looks like instead of shipping, they are "testing" them.... http://i.imgur.com/flIt3O6.png Hash rate has jumped 40% in the last 10 days.....
It seems seems that the output of BFL does not reflect that of any business model. I was just wondering if the technology even exists. They still mention a 2 month wait period while they struggle to ship out a hand full of orders. Their fulfillment quantity, Quick refund policy, and need to keep orders coming in only add up to one thing. Assuming they are testing any thing is just an assumption. With the flow of orders coming in and damage control only a handful of orders a day I do not think they would diversify in to the bit coin mining field. Also, some thing many on this site may understand is that the price of the system is well below rice and demand laws. However they are in the bounds of high risk payment processors that can handle the rate of fulfillment or problematic clients they occasionally process. Just wondering if their is any thing of value in the black box, more importantly, if it can be reproduced
BFL has actually had a production line up before back when they were selling and shipping FPGA miners. They do actually have a working ASIC design and have shipped a few working units out. Their main holdup at this point is productization. With the caveat that you don't really know who to believe on the interwebs, BFL's competitor Avalon is supposedly offering their unmounted ASIC chips for sale. I'm not sure it's really true.
It's a Ponzi or sort of fraudulent bridge loan. They're using deposits to finance hardware for their own mining efforts. Anyone who bitches gets their money back.... but then why isn't that money going into custom builds? I suspect Avalon may be doing the same as that chart-spike suggests.
If they've been using customer deposits to fund their own mining then I guess I'll feel honored to have been taken by such a huge scam. I still naively expect to receive my 5 Gh/s miner in the next couple of months. And if I don't, I'm only out $150 (all of which is from mined BTC).
Interesting. Apparently DHS has *just* filed a court order to stop Dwolla from allowing MtGox customers to cash out in USD.