I basically review computer hardware for a living, and everything being suggested with these ASICs flies in the face of what I see regularly with AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, etc. processors. Now, maybe building something to do SHA256 hashing is just super easy and you can focus on that and nothing else, but I just don't buy it. If people started working to make one of these ASICs last summer and they had a team of a dozen superb engineers, I'd still say 18 months to go from design to tapeout to shipping product would be an incredible feat. So basically, it's a warning to those that are throwing potentially thousands of dollars at these people that it sounds too good to be true, and thus it probably is.

I'm also curious to see if anyone has information that I'm just overlooking. I could be totally wrong on all of this and would love to know exactly why. Is ASIC design perhaps a lot easier than I'm thinking? Or maybe BFL actually has a really large team of engineers, so it's not that far out for them to do an 18 month product cycle? (Though really, with the tanking of BTC price up until January I can't imagine people kept pursuing ASICs during the Sept to Jan time frame.) So someone made a thread and I felt like joining in for discussions... and I basically only look in the Speculation subforum (don't ask me why....)

And thanks, ElectricMucus -- got a good chuckle out of that comment. :-)