Spondoolies may be the most "legit" company but they are not immune to the unpredictable variables involved in making an asic. Just like every other company they have no idea exactly how the chip will perform until they have it in hand. They also have no idea if it will work right away or take some troubleshooting. They don't even know if they will get the chips on time.
July only has about 3 weeks left and afaik they don't even have chips. They leaves basically zero time for fuckups or testing.
As for the companies there are: BFL, HF, CT, BA, KNC, bitmine, avalon, terrahash, AMT, VMC, and probably some others I've missed.
First of all the chips will arrive after 20 July so there is still time.
BFL, HF, BA and Avalon were mentioned. VMC was an obvious scam right from the start and Ken has a long history of conning people. Bitmine is doing okish. As for AMT and TerraHash they aren't chip manufacturers, they are just third party PCB assemblers so they were not worth mentioning. None of these companies were funded by any VC with direct statements for backing them up. I know that Cointerra received some kind of Angel funding, but none of them (except aerobatic) showed some kind of public support for them. Maybe because they knew that they will fail and didn't want to mud their name.
Now tell me how do these companies compare with SP-Tech regarding their background and their intentions. I don't find any similarities.
You can make the exact same purchase by buying 11 bitmain s3's. In fact you would have saved ~$1/gh.
I'm ok with paying extra in order to avoid unnecessarily headaches. One box, 2 cables and I'm hashing in 2 minutes plus no reselling hassle. I would like to be busy planning the future, not dealing with present avoidable issues.
Yes but with the difficulty derivative I find it extremely difficult to predict the next difficulty a week away. Even predicting the next difficulty ~3 days away is not easy.
You don't have to predict difficulty for the next 3 days. You need to predict difficulty for every change.
So why even attempt to predict the btc exchange rate/difficulty 5+ months away?
Because some people find it doable.