The day has arrived, the Butterfly Labs forum Latest Update reads "Jalapeños are making their way to their new homes. http://ow.ly/i/1WUo4".

They have even provided us with a photo of a few of the ASIC bitcoin miners sitting on a trolley presumably waiting to be picked up and delivered to their new owners.

[caption id="attachment_2159" align="alignright" width="816"] Photo Provided by Butterfly Labs at http://ow.ly/i/1WUo4[/caption]

While there is no mention yet of numbers that have been shipped or when the other Butterfly Labs devices like the BitForce Single or Little Single will be shipping this will be welcome news to bitcoin miners everywhere.

Butterfly Labs was the first of the bitcoin manufacturers to announce that they will be upgrading their existing range of FPGA devices to ASIC early last year and started taking pre-orders on June 23rd last year, nearly 10 months ago. Since then they have had a series of technical and logistical problems in their quest to bringing ASIC devices to market.

Any sort of ASIC development is bound to be fraught with difficulty and there are still hurdles for Butterfly Labs to overcome before they get to full production of their entire line of devices. It has to be noted that so far two other ASIC contenders have already failed in their efforts (namely BTCFPGA and the short-lived Deepbit Reclaimer).

This also means that the bitcoin difficulty will be increasing at an even faster rate so while your new Jalapeño ASIC Bitcoin miner will currently earn you approximately 0.28 bitcoins a day (\$35.55 USD) at the current 8,974,296 difficulty you should make the most of it because that difficulty is unlikely to last long.