Quote from: spinoff on April 01, 2014, 03:38:36 PM

while we are on the topic, what about chips from AsicMiner? They should be testing the first batch and we'll probably know real specs and price in a few days, but the theoretical specs were about 0.3 J/Ghash and 0.5-1$/Ghash, which seems pretty competitive to me... of course this is for the chips only, full boards would cost more per Ghash

Generally speaking I must agree that I remain skeptical with the preorder economy: why should you effectively loan bitcoins with 0 interest and without any certainties on what you'll be getting and when?

I've never been a big fan of ASICminer equipment. We actually have one of their USB sticks that I donated to Nasty Mining some time ago. I don't believe it ever came near reaching any sort of ROI. In my opinion ASICminer is a great company because they're good at making money from selling their equipment. However, I question whether anyone actually made anything that purchased from them. Similar to how I view gridseeds, I think that ASICminer will start off with the highest price they can to sell units to their supporters, then you will see them lower the price every 2 weeks at a faster rate than the equipment is mining, ensuring that nobody ever sees a ROI. Perhaps this next round will be different, but you won't catch me buying at their original asking price. Anyone who did that with their last round of equipment got burned, whereas we came out quite handsomely from our BFL preorder.

I get that people are skeptical of the preorder scene. It sucks paying for something that would make you $10,000 a day and then only making $100 a day by the time it arrives. However, there is nothing wrong with a preorder as long as you have reasonable expectations and know what you're getting yourself into. As is the case with our Black Arrow preorder (if they ever refund it), they also act as a put option on BTC. I'm not saying I like preordering and giving 0% loans, but I feel it is important for us to have efficient equipment. That is also why I structured our debt at 0%, so the preorder risk is really just an exchange rate risk. In the future, there are plans to have something in place to keep that exchange rate risk at bay as well.