While i do see some logic to BFL testing their equipment in a real world scenario before they ship them to customers, I also know the hashrate should be A LOT higher then it is already. We are only 30% higher then we were in 2011 so either a small portion of them are being tested at a time or we simply have more miners.
The part that really confuses me is how the total hashrate bounces up and down by as much as 30-40% in a 12 hour period. For what its worth, im a GPU miner and ive went from 1gh to 2.4gh in the past few weeks. I know the GPU end is near, but i dont see any risk in buying video cards when i had tons of free PCI-e slots. When GPU mining is crushed, ill sell my machines as gaming rigs on craigslist.
It's because the hashrate is only an estimate based on the number of blocks solved in a given time period. There is a LOT of variance in those shorter time periods.
They specifically stated they do not mine while testing because they do not want their units to attempt to send corrupt or otherwise bad information to the rest of the Bitcoin network.
There is zero risk of this happening - either a hash is correct or it is not. Any node can instantly determine this with certainty and refuse to acknowledge a bad one.
I was waiting for someone to confirm my suspicions on that. Thanks.