*shrugs*

Assuming folks mine BTC for profit, the BFL ASIC is a necessary investment if folks want to stay competetive in the BTC mining market. I suspect that most folks that want to buy a BFL ASIC already have or have ordered the BFL FPGA products (Single or Rig) and those will be exchanged for the BFL ASIC when they become available plus half the price of the ASIC. They can still mine during the time they wait on the new product, sure they paid a bloody big chunk of cash up front, but I assume that as this is an investment, they are prepared to lose that money. That's what business is all about, taking risks and making money. Not taking the risk most probably will cost more money (that is an educated guess because we can't see the future and only hindsight is 20/20).

Let's say that BFL doesn't come close to the state hashing numbers, as long as performance is at least twice what it is now, no money is really lost. Maybe a bit more to compensate for the additional difficulty to compensate for the added extra hashing power. I doubt power consumption would be twice as high, because that would probably generate more heat then can be dissipated. Heck, if a $30k Rig could only do 100GHash/s, that is still four times more then a $15k Rig could do. Sure the advantage over the folks not using the new BFL products would be less great, but the financial advantage is still very much there.

If it was a scam, it could be made far more attractive for folks to invest in, more 'believable' numbers could be used, lower prices so more folks would be willing to risk it, etc. This reminds me very much of the time when the rumors of the iPad 3 and it's very high resolution display, there were many naysayers that it couldn't be done, stating very reasonable 'facts'. The problem was/is that technology isn't an analog increase, it's a digital one, with jumps in performance instead of a gradual increase. Even in the processor industry you don't buy a 100MHz proc and then a 101MHz proc. It went from 100MHz to 120MHz. From DVD to Blueray the maximum amount of data a single sided disk could contain increased 15 times (8.5GB to 128GB), sure those are not mainstream disks, but is a $30k Rig?

Honestly, if you don't trust BFL, your pretty screwd as a big miner (best price vs. MHash/s vs. KW/h). And if you don't trust BFL, that's your right and your welcome to your opinion, because after all, it is an opinion, nothing more. Folks that do believe are also welcome to their opinion. Personally I'll wait and see, not only do I have mixed feelings about the future of the BTC value and the difficulty of mining it, I'm also not currently in the position to mine for profit in any meaningful way (due to not enough budget for a BFL Rig and cooling issues, not to mention very high local power costs).