A handful were pre-ordered but they never took deposits.
From what I remember, a lot of what they had to offer was being surpassed by other companies(and fast). Butterfly labs at the time was working on a smaller miner that would hash nearly 60 Ghs (for only $1299) and they had proof of this unlike Largecoin.
$1299 Butterfly Labs Bitforce SC at 60GH/sWell we all know how that went!
Another major factor at a very large sum of $30k for only 20Gh/s would mean a very un-reasonable ROI at around 600 days or so. It was unfeasible for people who had multiple cards hashing at around 800Mh/s to invest in that kind of miner when they could easily pick up a few more cards. (This on top of cheaper and faster miners.)
Ah, well that sounds insanely low then.
It's quite strange to see that a company which claimed to have the technical finesse to launch an ASIC in 2011 would fall behind the competition so quickly.
Another major issues was the way that it mined. How it would rely on Largecoin infrastructure to make mining possible while others would allow you to do all the setting yourself. This made people like myself scared as how could we be 100% sure that my hashes wouldn't be redirected or hacked even.
Didn't realize this part. What was the reason for this exactly? Seems like a very odd design choice.
Some other companies that were working on the same type Asics during the time.
Open BasicButterfly Labs Bitforce SCVladimir’s companyAll and all I do believe they just fell by the waist side and became slightly overwhelmed by competition and even irrelevant in terms of price and hash.
BTCFPGA/bASIC seems to be another one.
It looks like BFL was really the only one out of those to not fail completely in the sense that they actually released and shipped a working miner. Avalon and ASICMiner were relatively unknown in 2012 and Bitmain didn't even exist at all but they went on to release the first ASICs in the following year while the companies that were considered the most promising in 2012 kind of fizzled out and disappeared. Very strange.