I wonder what people think of the following I dragged from a vertocoin thread:
"[]D4wn0ff473 7 points 4 days ago*
First of all these asics are jokes. The hash power for both btc and ltc is not worth the price. The only thing that makes them worth the price is the 7w of power usage for 300Kh/s on solo scrypt ventures, but the 8gh/s for btc mining at 100w is not going to make a dent in the current pedohash network power. Even going after other 256 coins on the btc side would not be worth it because most of those networks are already drowning in asics and fpgas. Even if you had a a couple hundred of them you would still not be making a decent enough dent to have roi ever especially with the current price.
But alpha technologies has 5mh/s and 25mh/s scrypt asics that will be shipping in a few months. Not to mention that sluicebit has 2 and 4 mh/s scrypt fpga's that will be shipping soon. The game will soon be over for scrypt coins with no differential built in like vert does. But I really feel bad for the people who wasted and will waste their money on these asics. The company obviously saw the train coming of the larger asics and fpgas so they sped up dev to get these out as fast as possible. They will be outdated and worhtless in a few months and the owners will never have a chance to make the majority of their money back."
Discuss.
The problem is people read this thread, but not other threads like
https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=15133.0 (so low readcount: why hasn't everyone considering buying this googled 'gridseed issues' recently?) which point to Chinese websites advertising additional technology needed to keep these ASICs from running at low hash. The truth is that while these ASICs exist, no-one has tested them out with the promised 'new firmware' that I can see, and so far as I can gather the current product is largely unfinished - and won't give an average hash over time of anything like that advertised. If you just developed new hardware, you'd know its capabilities. Why ship it with firmware you knew to be so under-spec? This is my reason for not considering these ASIC. Not only that, but the set-up seems ideal for these to turn out below-expectation or have a short shelf-life, and the original company can easily disappear. I'm not making an accusation, only that there's always a risk that will happen and in my view this set-up (no accountability besides a forum handle & a young Chinese website) is too risky for me. If it were a local company in a country where I had trust in the legal system regarding financial foul play then I would think differently. But here, these guys can vanish and reappear in a couple of months with another product unrecognisable from lightningasic.
Of course, the ultimate bottom line is that time will tell. In a week, more people will have their product in hand, and then we'll all know who made the right call. In a month or two, we'll see how many are still operating and how well they're supported, and I'm more than happy for this to work out well - I think in hindsight I will always agree that this looked too risky for me - even if it turns out to be kosher.
