Would just like to mark this important milestone today, 1BTC > 1000SGD.

Re China - why now?

I am a long term bull and I'm pleased to see the recent price increases, but I must confess I am puzzled by the pace of the recent price escalation. I have been a little busy and didn't have time to read up on everything I've missed - but perhaps someone can summarize things for me - what are the (perceived) reasons behind the growth in the past 2 weeks? Voodoo chartists please stay away. Thanks.

Even if speed increases hit a brick wall (which I disagree with), the total computing power on the planet will still go up, as it has, at an exponential rate.

Even if asics hit a "brick wall" in terms of process (at 28nm) and then hit another brick wall in terms of design optimization, the hash rate can still go up significantly due to parallelism. More of the most efficient asic will be brought online. More efficient hashing power will displace less efficient hashing power. Yes, the rate of increase in the hash rate will certainly go down - it's unsustainable. But hash rate will continue going up for a very long time, unless bitcoin price crashes.

De acord cu investitul in BTC, dar nu cu corelatia dintre dificultate si pret.

http://organofcorti.blogspot.sg/

Sunt de acord cu philips in linii mari, dar e foarte putin probabil sa vedem scaderi de dificultate, chiar si temporare in urmatorul an. Ar trebui ca mai mult hash rate sa fie retras din actiune decat este adaugat, si nu prea vad cum s-ar putea intampla asta.

Pe masura ce profitabilitatea scade, costul electricitatii devine din ce in ce mai important, si din cate stiu Romania nu sta foarte bine la capitolul asta.

Sfatul universal e nu cumpara ASIC-uri, cumpara BTC.
 

Also received refund, it was submitted within an hour of steamboat's refund e-mail.

He only has 1 open order with Avalon, so 10,000 chips - batch 6 was ordered by zefir and the rest were all refunded.

I'll bring the pliers, you bring the blowtorch.

Might have misunderstood your post, but basically what I mean is that given the refund procedure it doesn't matter what 50% of people want (by chip count) or what they agree regarding what chips are worth. Bottom line is there will be a split batch where some people want a refund and some do not, and that batch will be delivered, even if there are 8,000 outstanding refund requests. Because there will be no forced refunding for the 2,000.

I don't think you understand steamboat's posts and his refund procedure.

Common sense should tell you that that is impossible (or mathematically exceedingly unlikely).

The sebastianju / zefir approach, was to refund a batch if more than 50% wanted to refund. They are effectively screwing some people who wanted chips or boards instead of a refund (i.e. forced refunding) in favour of a majority who asked for a refund. Steamboat is doing the opposite, he is only refunding batches once requests cover an entire batch, therefore practically guaranteeing that some people who ask for a refund will not get one, in favour of some who either want chips / boards or cannot be bothered to reply. Either way someone gets screwed. (Unless the number of people who want chips / boards adds up to a multiple of 10,000).

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.

Good point, but to be fair, separate confirmation requires more processing on Steamboat's side - he has to process hundreds of refunds manually. People will post on this thread once refunds start coming in - if you don't get yours and there has been no further communication from Steamboat, you should probably get in touch.

Because we're not really getting any communication here, just wondering if we have some blockchain vigilantes among us with some time to check whether Avalon has refunded some of the orders to Steamboat. I'm not sure if they are refunding to the sending address, but we could use zefir's and sebastian's refunds for reference.

For reference, that guy got refunded too, so far everyone who has asked for it has gotten a refund.

By and large if you look at all the other big groupbuy organizers they have all been refunded for all the orders they requested - they have also finished refunding individual buyers. Sebastian had refunded 40,000 chip orders, zefir another 30,000 and then moved on to a bitfury group buy. Problem here is without communication we don't know where we stand.

Sebastian, I'm not a part of your group buy, but I'm just trying to keep track of Avalon orders, can you please update the status of yur orders from the Avalon website? If I read correctly you have refunded 4 of 6 orders (so you have 2 open orders) - can you confirm the dates of the open orders and the current status?

Appreciate your time!

I think you are being optimistic about how much assembling the boards and mining would net you. What is your expected start date? You should factor in at least 2 more retargets, if you think assembly will go without a hitch.