Quote from: driksson on September 11, 2013, 04:22:09 PM

exactly. but collect money for assembly is easy! but to assemble it working, different story.
I dont want to get involved, i never participated in parts/assembly, only chips. This was the main reason, the maker of the boards didnt even get it working, then how could steamboat..

My thought process was the same. Everyone should understand that bitcoin, and bitcoin mining is a risky investment, and then take a risk they are comfortable with.

My risk assessment was that Avalon chips were proven technology and basically just a matter of manufacturing them in a larger quantity, therefore low risk. I was wrong on that assumption.

However, getting these chips to mine is a different story. I assumed it was low risk to go for assemblers using Avalon's reference design (there are at least 3 of them out there). Going with one of the new designs (burnin, klondike) was always high risk, as their designs were unproven. Paying for assembly on an unproven design (steamboat, terrahash, etc) was always a risk too far for me. From following the development threads it was always clear that burnin was ahead in terms of progress on his design. A fully populated board was demonstrated working overclocked with extremely low error rates, months ago. Burnin proved his design and then proved he could assemble it in large quantities. He probably lost out the most on potential income because of Avalon's failure to deliver. But for the Klondike design, according to steamboat, we still do not have a fully populated board mining, and we still have the step of proving it can be assembled in large quantities. Maybe, if sample chips would have been sent out earlier the situation would have been different. But I don't think the lack of sample chips slowed down design (at least I never got that idea from bkkcoins). Maybe if tens of thousands of chips had shown up at steamboat's door, development would have been accelerated. Maybe as suggested, the delays (and falling ROI) caused developers to slow down their efforts. Maybe. But how big a difference that would have made is a matter for debate. Just my 2c.