So, let me get this straight....
in return for bare chips, delivered the same time as the first fully operational hardware boxes, we are to pay 0.85BTC per chip (25GH). At $150/BTC, that's $127.50 per 25 GH, or $5.1/GH. No guarantee that all 32 engines are working on every chip purchased, at least so far as I can see. Mining dashboard says that difficulty would have to stay below an increase of 80% per month to reach 0-ROI, some time in APRIL, so the chip costs eat up the first 90 days income, even if power costs are ZERO.
At these prices, I think this is a very expensive hobby.
Kinda hard to see how anyone would make a successful business out of it, unless chip prices were dropped into the $3-4/GH range, and even then a 2 week slip in delivery destroys all the expected profit for the life of the product, and then some.
Ah, well - I've had more expensive hobbies, I suppose.
All excellent points, but in some respects this buy from Zefir allows us to get a smaller number of chips not 500 as Bitmine offers up. I think at this point Zefir's the only one trying to keep the DIY stream going and that we should be thankful for. Even if it is expensive at this point being able to develop and bring to the community something that is DIY is I think still an important aspect for Bitcoin and Altcoins. There will be a future point where the difficulty will level out and project experiences now could be very important for groups of DIYers later as long as the chips are actually shipped and specs are provided. We all learned a horrible lesson with Avalon... and we are now learning about the difficulty wall vs. the cost of production. Break even might be the only thing one can shoot for with these units but as DIYers that might be enough. Also pretty keen to have you working with us in the Wasp project DickMS... I think this DIY hobby will be a lot of fun and terrifying as well.