People seem to be oblivious to the fact that a currency must be available in order to be useful. There is a reason that Gresham's Law has achieved "Law" status.
Oddly, the right thing to do for currency acceptance would be to shutdown all of the ASICs.
Gold serves as a currency yet the methods of mining have changed drastically in the last 1,000 years.
Why would anyone wants to sell the goose who lays golden eggs while gold cost more than the goose?
They'll pile up cash from "preorders", mine bitcoins and when time is right - will dump outdated devices to customers.
From BFL's perspective if they don't release first they're dead in the water. They don't know where their competitors are compared to them but they recognize it's a winner take all situation. The natural thing to do would be to take pre-orders to fund the manufacturing and start realizing profits now. Also, if your competitors are offering pre-orders you should be too.
Only if they're "long BTC". What makes you think they are? They're just providing shovels & tools to "miners in a gold rush". Historically, such providers have always done phenominally well.
At least they get the rigs at production cost to run them---selling them for good ol' USD may just be a hedge or sideshow, only time can tell.
Can you explain this in more detail? I don't understand what decentralization has to do with miners' profit.
That said, I've half-joked that probability of receiving my miner is probably about 0.98^(USDBTC).
Also, for anyone wondering: At current difficulty and rate of exchange this will cost you <$0.10 a day to run and generate $40 of Bitcoin.
Additionally, he tried to convince people to buy BFL rather than one of the competing boards by arguing it was so much more power efficient miners using them would be forced to shut down. It's barely more power efficient than ASICs which shipped months ago, and those companies are already looking at newer models.
Oh, for what it's worth that's also less than 10x the power efficiency of the best FPGA boards...
As ASICs come online, the difficulty is going to go up, which will reduce the daily generation rate for any given miner. I've been trying to decide whether or not to order a device now based on my profitability prediction for months from now when I might actually get it. I'm guessing by the time I get one I might be able to produce at least 0.05 BTC/day. Assuming that's $6/day, the $274 device will take about six weeks to pay for itself. Not too bad, but I don't know if keeping tabs on it afterwards is worth it for $6/day. It'd only be worth it if I think BTC are going to be worth a lot more in the future... getting back to hoarding coins as an investment rather than using them as currency.
If you run a CPU at the same voltage, but at half the speed, it uses 1/2 the power because CMOS circuits only really use power as the transistors change state. However you're also able to run at about 1/2 the voltage without getting errors. Because V=IR, 1/2 the voltage at the same resistance is 1/2 the amperage, and since P=IV, that's 1/4 the power for normal circuits. Of course CMOS circuits already run at 1/2 the power. In the real world there's also leakage and such, but in a perfect world doubling the clockrate takes 8 times the power.
Transmeta's Crusoe was the first processor to really take advantage of this, by varying the voltage and running slower to save battery life. Before this time (2000), laptops would use a duty cycle to save power. Soon all the major chip manufacturers started copying them.
I still haven't paid and am going to now. I wonder if they will honor it or not.
I don't see where it says you won't be penalized for the time it takes for you to make a payment. With that said - I'm curious, did people pay in advance of shipping?
Holy moly: $27K.
I wonder who reaped the most out of this.