There are tons of successful entrepreneurs that have mortgaged houses, sold cars and maxed out credit to fund business. However, I would never do it if there is an outside factor such as hardware delivery that could crush my plan though.

 Hah, bitcoin is about the hottest investment area there is for startups. $50 million is however a damn fortune to take in as A-series financing, period.

It's scary that 3 Jupiters can make 149k a month at current difficulty

Well, yeah, but difficulty will probably be at least 100 million by the time the first one goes online. Still will be nicely profitable, but plugging in current difficulty is pointless. Time is everything when it comes to ASICs!

Thats fine.

I own avalons and (possibly used to) own asic miner hardware. Its not a large portfolio, its not integral to my way of life, and if it was valued at 0 tomorrow I'd be annoyed but not devastated. I couldn't care less if this was Avalon suddenly saying 300000000000GH for $1, I have no allegiances to any company.

Its too good to be true:

• tiny process no one has even attempted to get close to. Smallest actual miner today is 90nm [ignoring bfl as no significant quantity and their problems]
• massive, massive hash rates predicted
• tiny power consumption predicted
• really cheap prices
• 3 month lead time
• excellent engineers, apparently really clever

All promised without any designs shown, a shitty drawing of a potential case that doesn't even make sense, no pictures of any actual ASIC hardware. Anyone can rock up an FPGA - that's not proof of anything [watch everyone concentrate on this sentence *sigh*]..

.... and all the while they're a for profit company. They don't have great ideologies like Yifu, they're here to make money. And how do you make money with a miner you designed? You mine on it. You create a proof of concept, raise funds then deploy the shit out of it.

You don't advertise it on a forum, collect preorder money then sell it drip by drip for rock bottom prices. All combined, too good to be true. If these were preordering at 3x the price then it would make more sense, but they know *something* we don't yet.

Avalon should probably be discussed elsewhere, but the difference is we have actual evidence, proof, miners from Avalon. Batch 1 was the risky one, unknown Chinese company, fresh graduates etc. B1 buyers probably made 100k a unit, but Avalon had 'for the greater good' philosophies.

You've raised an important point, this appears to be the best current option. That doesn't make it a good option though. Its like if you go to Mcdonalds and all they've run out of fries. All they have are those fucking retarded carrot sticks, or apple slices. Apple slices are probably the better bet out of the two, but it doesn't make it good.

So only first batch avalon is suppose to be the only miner anyone is suppose to get great ROI from?  Did you pay attention that this isn't pure ASIC dev and just FPGA design onto small ASIC chip.  Maybe since they are in the business they realized it before the rest.  Maybe they bullshit us.  Place your bets

And Yufi said go hug your mother.  

I can respect your thought process on this one, however don't underestimate the motivation for riches... I'm not rich by any means, but I can tell that if I had the knowledge, means, and most importantly a couple of million dollars that magically landed into my account by random strangers I would make it my goal in life to shit asic's if that was what was needed to keep the money flowing. Now by no means are these guys rich or proven, which arguably works against them, but I'm sure they will give it their damndest to make sure they can give something to their grandchildren. Hopefully its not just a couple million they swindled off some schmucks online... but time will tell.

As for the whole idea of mining your way to success, any investor worth his weight in salt wouldn't even think about dropping 50 million , let alone a million on a unofficially recognized currency that's volatile as hell, and has virtually no serious outlets in which to dump all your golden coins(and no, I doubt Mt'Gox would be able to bring in enough dollars to unload all the coin at a profitable rate). They know this... Its better to sell 10 suckers a pick and get a surefire quick buck than it is to spend hours trying to pan for gold, even if we are the asses wanting the pick, its not hard to understand the concept. 

Admittedly, I am invested in this whole thing, and I have to admit that myself like others are dreaming of sunshine and rainbows, and close to a terrahash of mining power in an environment where BTC is at-least worth $100 USD and difficulty lingering around 100M.  But I am also aware that it could all be a very expensive lesson and nothing more than a pipe dream. Alot of people are overextended in this, and I hope for those that are mortgaging  the house that it pays off but the reality is, your right... there is risk, but nothing good ever comes easy, and Fortune favors the bold.

Lets just hope everyone makes it out of this without triggering another mortgage crisis...

So now from $50m we are down to $5m? I'm still waiting for you to tell me how long would it take to actually mine $50m or even $5m. The numbers may be big now, but don't forget that until September there will be many many ASIC in the wild (avalon chips, MAYBE retards bfl, ASICMiner plan to deploy another 100TH, 100TH project, Bitfury and so on) so you can't actually make a good projection on how mining will be. Second of all nobody can predict the price. What's the use of xxxxxx bitcoins if the price is way lower than it is today. Why do you think none of the people who made ASIC raised the funds totally outside the bitcoin community? I think many thought about it, but actually doing so may be a lot harder that it seems.  If you think it's that easy go ahead and do it yourself. Find a good team of ASIC developers, find someone with money and start mining for yourself

If i understood correctly they aren't doing a full custom ASIC chip. They are doing a hard copy from a FPGA one and that seems to be a lot easier and a lot cheaper to do than a custom one.

P.S. of course they can run tomorrow with the money, but the probability is a lot smaller than BFL let's say.

Edit: TheSwede75 i know bitcoin it's the hottest thing, but comparing to any other real life business i still think that there are a lot more skeptics when it comes to this. What amount of money do you say it could be easily funded for a bitcoin business?