Companies do not spin up $20M worth of product on extremely limited supply chains on letters of credit.
That statement is patently false. Letters of credit were, are, and will be written for various sums, both lower and higher. It is a mainstay of many industries, not just produce importers.
I had to front it, and I cant front it through August with no concept of demand numbers. This was not a profit taking venture, Im trying very hard to make sure these cards make it into the community without price gouging that was about to happen. With out that effort, they would have continued to produce small batches and introduced heavy lead times and price increases. I took the risk off them, everyone here benefits. Simple as that.
I don't have an inside knowledge of your venture so I can't make any definitive statements.
What I will comment about is one fact: you may think that you can freely mix true and false statements and they will average to "reasonable". No they average to "are you on drugs?" or "what film set did you came from?" or "did you forgot to take your medications?".
This vacillation between heady optimism and dark paranoia in a single person is not only off-putting. It is the reason to raise suspicion among both crypto-currency people and traditional finance people.
I started this project to get the VCU1525 going once bittware entered the space. After having tried dealing with them as far back as august/september 2017. I already knew they were not going to provide the pricing that was required to really move into the space. I didn't want to see anyone be taken advantage of with high mark ups. I had already been dealing with Xilinx for over a year trying to get them to open up to the crypto markets. They wouldn't deal with me. I had no previous business with them. As far as they knew I was just some crazy guy walking in off the streets asking for 10s of 1000s of units of product and pricing that's hard to get for even their best customers. David had that relationship, he's done business with them, and knows how they operate. After a little 1, 2 action we got a KO and were able to execute on what by industry standards is considered an unheard of deal. There's one caveat to that, we had to lock up the market to do so and required large purchase amounts. It's not unreasonable to get a sense of what market demand will be. Further, this is not a pre-order where you're ordering some imaginary asic a year or 2 out that may not even function correctly after tape-out. This is a proven product with existing supply channels and production lines. The risk on our end offering pre-orders is minimal as Xilinx is contractually obligated to fulfill their role.
Here's where Xilinx is at. They don't know what to make of this market. They don't know what if I've been telling them and others have been telling them is true. But, they've decided to find out for themselves and put their toes in the water. I can say they're watching this space very closely and I have no doubt that multiple people from Xilinx, possibly even C-level, have read the posts from these threads or at least received a summary of what's going on. If we went to them with some letter of credit instead of cold hard cash, it's quite possible this deal would have never happened. They're saying "show me the money" -- not -- "show me a letter of credit".
Again, I don't think it's unreasonable for us to open up pre-orders. I'm excited that Xilinx gets to see what this market looks like and how it operates. Yes, it's fast and loose, wild west, crazy, insane, pick your word. I can imagine even their lawyers being on the edge of their seats watching the space. We're doing the best we can, we've been transparent with everything that's been going on as much as we possibly can be. Yes, we're not perfect, we make mistakes. I was a little snippy to a customer before and I'm not very happy about it. Give us a chance and let's see how this thing goes. Maybe you'll be pleasantly surprised by the end of all this. We have no intention of "going bitmain".