Bitcoin Forum

We have been giving BFL a hard time.  


I want to explain my beef.   My beef is:

1.  Lack of communication and customer service that is easily remedied.

2.  When already dealing with bad PR, they hire a fucking troll (sorry Josh but it is true)

3.  When coming out with a gamechanging product (ASIC) they hire a pool operator (sorry Josh but you should choose one)

4.  Makes an announcement well before BFL knew they would deliver ON PURPOSE to chill competion and even before they were consistently shipping FPGA.*  

*Speculation: This tells us that they got a sweet deal on highend chips and they didnt have supply beyond a certain number.  You could of been honest and that would of let people know what to expect.  If I am wrong then why can I not order a FPGA right now and have it in a few days?


With that said, BFL maybe just set their ambitions too high when Avalon grabbed the low hanging fruit and the experience to shoot a lot higher.
At this point we should just tone down the same hateful arguements because what is going to happen, will happen and instead we should be seeing if we can find opportunites.

Comments and Constructive Grievances, please post below.


Dalkore

Reserved

1. They didn't order engineering samples of the chips 9 months ago.
2. They sacrificed 125 customer ordered singles to "test" chips 3 days early, while they still haven't actually been able to test the chips
3. They constantly gave short term targets knowing full well they had no chance to make them
4. Their main PR mouthpiece snaps on customers and calls them "cocksucker"
5. They Shit talk the competition who actually has hardware in customers hands, and says "there is no viable competition"
6. They are funding their operation with customer pre-order money.
7. They are flying people around with customer pre-order money
8. They are spending customer pre-order money on advertising
9. All of their ads still say "order now" instead of "pre-order now"
10. Their site misleads new customers into thinking they are near shipping, and a new order would be filled in a reasonable amount of time.
11. Their site and manner relating to refunds suggests that once(if) they ship a product, they will refuse refunds on pre-ordered products, regaurdless of the time it takes to deliver.
12. Their COO is taking a significant portion(10%+) of the first batch of chips for himself. His interests are completely at odds with customers who's money he has held for 9 months.
13. They have "22 employees", yet we only see 3 updates per week, and it takes 10 days to process a refund.

Am i doing this right?

PR is the worst in the industry. Josh actually don't know what PR means.
Unfair business practice to weed-out competition.

That's all.  ;)

Wow I didn't realize this.  Go Team Avalon!  Contrast:

"Fun fact: none of the Avalon team have their own mining units (outside of test units)."

This is simply not true. Yes, Josh is receiving several batch 1 units, but he is not taking these units for his own personal profit, nor is he getting any special place in line. Back before Josh started working for BFL, he started an IPO that bought several BFL pre-orders. These are the units that people keep referring to, but it is extremely twisted point of view.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89902.0

Side note: You wanna cheer for Avalon, because they're so fair and not taking any mining hardware for themselves? Well why would they have to mine when they could sell you a $1500 unit for $6600 (88BTC). A $1500 unit should cost 20BTC, so where are those extra 68BTC going?

It's called profit.  It's what people do when they sell stuff.  If you don't like it, don't buy it - free market at work.

They've said the funds will be used for development of their next-generation ASIC.

23: They are not committing enough engineering resources to the project.  While they hold our millions in funds, their lead engineer Nasser is still living half a world away in France, working remotely for BFL nights and weekends while holding a day job at a bank.  Srsly, WTF?

They have accepted, and continue to accept an unlimited number of pre-orders.  To the tune of 10s of millions of dollars I expect.

It is one thing to take a limited number of pre-orders to help with non-recurring engineering costs.  If that is done, and you are honest with those early customers about the risks of failure and the consequences to them if you are unsuccessful it could be a reasonable risk sharing mechanism.  Taking an unlimited amount of money in advance is profoundly suspicious.  If they never deliver will Josh refund the salary and business expenses he has collected from unwitting dupes?

Continuing to take orders now, after failing to meet dozens of milestones, without disclosing the size of the order backlog, without any forecast of time to delivery from payment is simply wrong.  

Even if the whole thing isn't an intentional scam, it has become one now.  One more round of Avalon deliveries and BFL investors are unlikely to ever recover what they paid in BTC.

Oh, they're forecasting delivery all right.

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/pre-sales-questions/1084-if-i-order-now-when-will-i-get-my-order.html

Or the order page:

https://products.butterflylabs.com/homepage/60gh-bitcoin-miner.html

There's no way an order placed now will be delivered in April or May or in 2 months.

This is much worse than I thought.

If they started shipping today, I doubt that orders placed yesterday would be fulfilled before October.

Every post and ad on this forum should include this disclaimer:

"Warning: BFL has NEVER delivered to a customer on the date they promised when they took their customer's money.  It is reasonable to assume they never will."

hmm.... what is the current bid for ad space here?  Anybody willing to help me buy an ad slot?

EDIT:  Bid 10BTC for 1 ad slot.  If you want to chip in I will use it to bid higher.  PM me.  Note that I will only use further Bitcoin pledged for this ad to either a) Force Josh to bid higher for all ad slots to bump the ad or b) make a bid in the next round for the same ad.

Anyone who can make a nice HTML format for the ad, or improve the text is welcome to do so!

I am pretty sure a resounding yes would follow your question.

How many BTCs were the first BATCH of BFL orders going for? 200btc? 300btc?....and that is just singles. lol  :D

They are inexcusable .. they just hosed down then entire BFL brand with fecal matter.. its gonna a hard road of return and gripes and cancellations and spitting, cursing and possibly a vacation to an undisclosed location!

to be honest the biggest part is the "dialog"


The silence breeds a certain kind of doubt!! When i say breed! Terrible ideas start forming in people head and it gets to riot level and BFL splurts out a lie and the anxiety gets worse, rinse and repeat every month and ... (ouch) ..  

 Edit: and too be quite frank the adverts everywhere.. not just here but everywhere is just a spit in the face of all the investors (cough*)customers!

The adverts really make me wonder just how much money they are pissing away each month that they need that level of new money.  Its almost like a ponzi.

either a ponzi or just digging into some quasi martingale bet...

Of course, they are trying to squeeze every last bit. A lot of people have started calling them out in the last few days, and I see their activity here on the forum has decreased. I think they are aware that they have had the most of it, and are not gonna get any more... and are already packing their bags right now.

Off topic: I like how this thread went to shit after, like, 4 posts. Though I suppose that's to be expected..

On topic:
I have no doubt that they're working on developing some "top tier" tech (compared to everything else coming / already out). My biggest qualms come from the blatant dispersion of misinformation and lack of solid evidence.

After everything that we've seen so far and the difficulties BFL has run into, there's no way they would have actually shipped in 2012..and my guess is that they very well knew that. Essentially they create intricate company timelines as to how everything will proceed, but consistently fail to take Murphy's Law into account during it all.

Their general incompetence was pretty clear when they put Josh in charge of PR. If you're representing a company and trying to create positive public relations, there's absolutely no reason to go about trolling. A PR person should be able to let insults roll off, like "water on a duck's back". Simple as that.

Thank you for your comments Korbman.   Also, I went through and pruned some of the off-topic comments.  I will keep on it.

http://i.qkme.me/3su4ci.jpg

It's a tough scenario to envision.  Just 4 months ago BFL looked like a dominant player in the ASIC industry, Avalon too had customer service problems in that there was no proof/pic/video of a working unit.  People looking to invest may have been drawn to BFL because they were doing the most advertising, had the most polished website, and actually had a track record with selling FPGA units.

I don't think the thread went to shit exactly, that won't happen until Josh shows up. There's a whole lot of anger being directed at BFL and justifiably so, they've caused damage that extends to those that didn't even order from them IMO. I believe we have to get past this notion that their delays are caused by incompetence. While I've said the same thing myself in the past, in hindsight, I think it's pretty clear that they just want everyone to believe they're incompetent. Seriously, there's no way Josh could have believed there was any chance whatsoever that BFL would be able to ship a finished ASIC product before 12/31/2012 when he routinely implied as much in early and mid December. He's done the same thing over and over. There's simply no way. Josh is many things, but he's not dumb. When did they set up their new facility again?

At this point I'd like someone to explain to me like I'm five how there's any chance at all that BFL didn't deliberately dismantle the FPGA market and cause a whole lot of people to lose mining revenue by making what in hindsight were awful decisions based on misinformation supplied by BFL to support their blatantly premature ASIC announcement. I believe they had a very limited supply of FPGA chips and when their source dried up they concocted this elaborate scheme to damage their competitors and gain the upper hand in the future ASIC mining market. They very plainly had next to nothing done in fall of 2012, yet they consistently pretended as though they could be ready to ship at any time. This isn't tomfoolery, or shenanigans, it's fraud. They've cost people a lot of money with their market manipulation games.

You're obviously bright Korbman, and I know you have BFL orders, can you explain to me where I'm wrong here?

...also as to Josh specifically and his PR job, I think he's done an absolutely masterful job of isolating and attacking any and all outspoken outliers here. If someone asks tough questions about BFL, particularly about their financial solvency, Inaba nearly always shows up and begins with the verbal assault. Shortly there after the thread is moved to the "troll museum" or newbies begin to attack Josh's target like a string of over protective groupies. Think about his comments about how a few posters here allegedly increase BFL sales by asking tough questions about BFL. That stuff is brilliant because it sticks with people and plants a seed of doubt in their minds.  

Sorry Dalkore, it isn't my intent to thread crap. This response may be better suited for the scam accusation sub.

I don't think it's thread crapping at all.

There is more to the decision to announce something they couldn't deliver than running out of FPGAs.  BFL was clearly using order money for working capital.  When Enterpoint stepped in and offered boards with payment on delivery, BFL's plan of using 3 months of order queued money to run operations was disrupted.  BFL in turn created their "FPGAs are obsolete, except for ours which you can trade in meme".  This both crippled their FPGA competitors, and refilled their treasury with Scrooge McDuck sized piles of other people money.  Which they have probably spent by now.

Speaking of thread crapping...  My ad about BFL has been submitted.  It links to this thread.  Sorry Dalkore, you are going to have a lot of moderating to do here.

Coming from a family of Electrical and Computer engineers pre ordering an asic from a company that has already provided FPGAs and has a decent track record seemed like a decent idea. I split a pre order on a jalapeno with my friend (poor college kids). While I do think that BFL with eventually deliver, I think they moved their delivery expectations as a form of advertisement and cut out any time for error on manufacturing. So far it seems as almost every single thing that could go wrong has, almost buying them time. If I could go back I'm not sure if I would still order from BFL, however I wouldn't have set my hopes so high.

Out of all the mistakes and troubles they had along the way hiring Josh as their PR was probably the worst idea. Even on their own forums he still is unprofessional.

I think the thread is really knawing at the real issue.

Regardless of what clever responses that we may get from BFL.  The major issues do not change and I would like and official response to them.  It looks quite clear they had limited supply of their "best in class" FPGA chips, if I am wrong then they are they still shipping those quickly being that they are still profitable?   

It  does look like their pre-announcement about ASIC was mainly to be a shot across the bow of any potential ASIC competitors.  If it wasn't purposely done for that effect, we would of seen FPGA shipment time improve over the last 8 months while people waited.  They may think this is business and it is none of our business, but that effected many peoples plans including my own and in the end, they could of kept selling FPGA, developed ASIC and announced in Nov/Dec and not made people do many things that they might not of done like making funds available to order a product that was not going to come out for 8 months+ when it was slated for 4.   

I personally shut down my GPU farm prematurely because I trusted this product would come out near that time and it down make me obsolete and I didn't want to sell when their was a glut of GPU gear out their.  It was my fault but in hindsight, if it I knew they would be this late, I would of still been running, even at $15-20 per BTC.

I feel it just shows a lack of respect for others in the mining community that don't have much choice if they want to mine.  In the environment, you should use a light touch, not the iron gauntlet.


Thoughts?

Ha, I suppose I was exaggerating a bit before. I totally agree with you on this one.


That's an interesting way of looking at it (on the incompetence part). It could surely be that they're only playing dumb, but I'm not sure what the purpose of it is...giving themselves more time overall, sure..but I'm not sure what else. People can say it's to pull in more and more money, but the vast majority of orders (that we've been informed of) so far have all been in the early months (June-September). After that, reported pre-orders have been slowly dwindling..which is understandable given bucket after bucket of bad news has been dumped on our heads.

And I agree that they couldn't have shipped before the end of 2012, even if they stuck with their original chip design.


Unfortunately I wasn't as involved in Bitcoin during the dawn / spread of FPGAs, so I don't have much of an opinion on that side of things. But what I can say is that premature offerings are a great way to build up a customer list (and massive piles of cash), especially since BFL was the first (IIRC) to offer a reasonably priced ASIC device for "pre-order". And as long as they keep pretending they know what they're doing, they can keep playing the "incompetent" card (or at least trying to) in order to fend off fraud accusations when shit hits the fan.


D'aw thanks Creative, and you're quite intelligent yourself :D

As for my orders, the early orders were primarily driven by the notion that BFL was going to ship first..which it did seem that way at the beginning. The later, more substantial orders, were the result of a mix between timing (it was either get into BFL now, or attempt Avalon Batch #2), power efficiency (ordering 8 Avalons would rape my power bill), and space considerations. Not to mention the gamble between which would ship first (at the time).

In short, you're not wrong (yet :P)


I partially agree here. He mostly responds to trolls with more troll-ish behavior and ignores people with valid questions or concerns. But you're right, it quickly derails the thread into a heap of garbage..usually to the point that there's just pages of "User Ignored" (as someone called it, an "Ignore Party") haha.

Not quite on-topic, but Avalon/ngzhang had a track record of selling FPGA units too.

Korbman - First off, well thought out and reasoned reply.  I quoted the above statement from you just to ask the question.

Great for who?  You already know the answer but in the end, that is the rub.  We all support a business decision that was first and foremost a pure benefit to BFL partially at the expense of ourselves. 

The reason I say this is if they would of only taken a deposit that was payable when they were close to shipping, we would of had our coins to invest with.  The reason we did it past profit potential is because of how much the ASIC announcement changed the mining market over night, basically either support BFL or get out of mining.  So if you use modern ethics (college level) to see if their decision was ethical, it fails with you expand it past them being a business and fails of the Ethics of Care which looks at the overall affect the the action.   They did not care about enough about how much power they weld and instead used it to beat the GPU & FPGA innovation into the ground.   

This is my major criticism that I will not be satisfied until they publicly address this from principle ownership (president, ceo or chairman) addressed to the whole community.

Ugh, I keep seeing this pseudolibertarian bullshit. Look, it is not a free market. It is a monopoly. The two concepts are opposites.

Monopoly: it's my way or the highway.
Free market: people can buy similar products elsewhere.

Monopolies are generally bad, though that need not necessarily mean the monopolist is bad. As in this case, Avalon is the monopoly because they got their shit together and bASIC and (so far) BFL haven't, not because of any anticompetitive practices from Avalon (ironically, BFL tried the anticompetitive shit).

 

I wish this was the case. It could have saved me a bunch of headaches instead of tying up my money for 7+ months, not to mention given many initial customers peace of mind. This, of course, raises the question of "why didn't this happen?", and my initial guess is that they did need initial funds to cover some of the costs to develop ASIC chips (..existing profit from FPGAs probably wasn't nearly enough).


Couldn't have said it better myself. I remember a thing or two from my Business Ethics classes ;)

Everyone is in this for money of some sort.   We all want it to spread and work but greed is also driving miners, not altruism.    So, I do not know why you hate BFL so much.   I LOVE THEM.   They take (and continue to take) tens of millions of dollars from suckers and people who are too blind from greed, to put one plus one together.   What you say Inaba or Josh or whatever you wish to call yourself?   Would you invest 20 Million dollars in a company run by a person that is a CONVICTED FELON and cannot leave the state of MO and seconded by a mouthpiece with a third rate education that JUST "by coincidence" goes by the same name (and lives in the same state) as a sorry assed loser that was stealing from directTV?   Come on, explain this to me.   You think Sequoia or Benchmark would finance losers like that?

Well, you all did.   And I am laughing my ass off at you all.   Thanks for keeping the difficulty low for me and all the people with half a brain that can use google to do a background search on people before giving them the equivalent of "venture capital".

There is a saying "pigs feed, but hogs get slaughtered".   you all have financed some pigs that have now become hogs by continuing to take more and more money.   what are you going to do about it?   Nothing?   I thought so.   you got what you deserved.  you all bought a lottery ticket from the dude on the corner......    ironic isn't it?

That sums up my beef.

They stopped selling FPGAs 6 months months ago. They're living off investor (aka pre-orders) funds, which must be drying up since they've switched to "all sales are final" policy.

1.  On your first point.  Yes, this is likely correct.  They needed more money for development, but then we can't forget this supposed "venture capitalist".  Til this date, we still have no information about this person, company or transaction so we should just assume, PRE-ORDER CUSTOMERS are the venture capitalist unknowingly.   Regardless of being their offering being real or not, people should remember these tactics and make BFL hold their business practices to a higher standard.

2.  Thank you, the Ethics of Care arguments fits this discussion so well.  They took advantage by disadvantaging MINERS (Made additional investments in GPU, FPGA and ASIC inherently very RISKY) and CUSTOMERS (by taking all the coins).


Just to expand the venture capital statement, this was used in my opinion to make people feel like "they didn't need the money" and the shipment date was so close (June to Oct), it was right around the corner so they could justify giving up their coins to get a "place in line".  

On the other hand, if customers would of been told up front, delivery would be in 2013, they would of gotten order, not as many and this would of allow more FPGA competition to come into the market before ASIC.  THIS SHOULD OF HAPPENED before ASIC.  In the end, people would of still bought ASIC from BFL (best in class) but they would of been able to provide more efficient hashing to the network and  made more investments in getting coins.

Thoughts?

Your analysis is on the money.  But I made the same determination last June, and used that knowledge to aggressively build out an FPGA farm.

The bad news for me was that BFL's BS brought real engineers into the fray who are putting ASICs on the network right now.  Otherwise I think the development of ASIC solutions would only be starting with the current exchange rate ramp.

That is the problem with scams.  They often make losers out of everyone, not just the folks naive enough to be sucked in.

Sorry to hear of your pain.  Really!  Avalon beat my 2011 estimate of 2014 by a huge margin.  The bright side (for me) is that I never had any intention of buying any mining gear until ASIC became commodity, and that date should move up accordingly.

That's not a fair comparison, because both the lambo and the jet exist. A more apt comparison would be a lambo racing the millennium falcon. Yeah, the Millennium falcon's specs are better on paper, but it's not real.

Glad to hear, but...

It just occurred to me that as the price goes up, the difference in power usage between GPUs and FPGAs becomes less of a factor.  So, balls-to-the-wall hashing is king again for a while.  But I've never put a lot of thought into any of the aspects of mining.

I would suspect that the flexibility of FPGAs would tend to produce opportunities for different proof-of-work algorithms to be explored for alternate crypto-currency(-like things.)

The analogy could become correct, but for the moment being the plane is nowhere in sight. It is rather still in the black project stage.

I almost ordered from them but the same thing which scares me off from buying some videogames at release scared me off from ordering from BFL.

Excessive advertising.

When a company advertises so hard that you see their ads constantly in the relevant places (in this case here on bitcointalk in the adbox and sigs) while also pushing themselves extra hard through their PR outlet and dissing competitors (in this case Josh) and topped off with a wave of fanboy forum shills... it's a pretty good indication that something is very wrong. Something went bad on the back end where we can't see so they step up advertising, step up promises, make it appear as if everything is at 200% awesomeness. Then deliver garbage or in this case deliver a year or more late in a situation where delivering late is almost as bad as not delivering at all.

They get rewarded for their failing though because they get the money first, that's why they haven't stopped advertising and still make it sound like if you order now you get your unit in a couple months (WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE, they are plainly lying about this). They get the money now and that's it, they got what they wanted while customers may not even get their units this year.

Just going by what got people scammer tags on here in the past it's sort of amazing that the BFL accounts don't have them. They are plainly lying about their shipping and have been every time they give us a shipping date estimate, we know this now because we know they never had any chips until just recently. They lied, they even gave us the evidence that they had been lying all along. BFL is obviously just stringing things along as far as they can go, constantly promising "just a couple more weeks, seriously guys!" for MONTHS now to wring as much money out of this community as possible.

Didn't they say they actually had chips way back in Oct or Nov, and they worked, but they just want to make them a little better for the good of the customers and all that?  I thought they were claiming functionality, but some clock timing issues kept the chips from scaling to their potential.

To this day I have seen nothing which would make me know that they have chips.  I personally would be surprised if they have anything of the sort or any hope of having them (unless they bought some Avalons.)  But then I have not paid close attention nor do I care that much, and I give absolutely zero credence to anything they say or take pictures of and so on.  Nothing I have seen invalidates the hypothesis that these guys are a total scam, and if that were the case they would naturally be focusing hard on a variety of tricks to make it look like they were legit.

Are they refunding when asked?

Actually Yes older Order ... Newer are without refund see New Terms

They refunded me on Monday without any issues... but I was only in line for two weeks.

I paid in BTC (~16 BTC) and got back the equivalent purchase price in USD (~680), and felt that was fair.  With the appreciation of BTC, I wasn't expecting them to give back BTC.  It took 1 day for them to paypal me, and I chalked it up as a cheap learning experience...

On the other hand, selling 1/2 my BTC stake from 2010 in the mid forties was not a cheap mistake... so the BFL seems like small potatoes to me at the time.

Personally I would get out while you can, but if I had faith in them I wouldn't be awaiting an avalon.

It's neither pseudoliberterian, nor bullshit. 

A monopoly is not the opposite of a free market.  A monopoly is one possible outcome of a free market. A free market does not guarantee that you can buy a similar product elsewhere.  A free market guarantees that, if you don't like the product on offer, and you have the necessary capital, then you can start making the product that you want to buy, and hope that others agree with you.

In a market with high barriers to entry, a monopoly can quite easily occur naturally, through no nefarious means or back-door dealings.  And in a free market, if the monopolist abuses their position enough, then the capital necessary to challenge the monopoly will eventually come together to do so.

Now if Avalon's "abuse" isn't enough to encourage others to get their shit together, I don't know what is (see my thread here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=156157).  And believe me, I hope it is.

As you say, it was not Avalon that aspired to monopoly, it was all their competitors that managed to completely drop the ball.  But the ability to drop the ball and disappear in a cloud of angry creditors is as much a part of the free market as is healthy competition.  We just had a perfect storm of one competent company and several incompetents, added with a little of BFL's FUD to possibly scare away other potential competitors. 

Nobody said the free market was perfect, and for sure nobody said it was perfect every minute of every day.  But you can hardly argue that it produces the best overall outcomes over time.  We just happen to be in one of the suboptimal regions right now (hopefully temporarily), and I reject outright your assertion that what has come before this day is not the result of the (imperfect) free market at work.

Twice actually.  First they supposedly had chips in October, but they were fail because they had a "diffraction issue".  Apparently we're to believe that they were completely unaware of the need to apply OPC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_proximity_correction) to the masksets.

Then they supposedly had another round of chips in December.  The ones with the "clock buffer issues", still in QFN packaging.

Twice actually.  First they supposedly had chips in October, but they were fail because they had a "diffraction issue".  Apparently we're to believe that they were completely unaware of the need to apply OPC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_proximity_correction) to the masksets.

Then they supposedly had another round of chips in December.  The ones with the "clock buffer issues", still in QFN packaging.
[/quote]

But no one ever saw the first chips. They had clock buffer issues, heat dissipation problems. But again, no one ever saw them. They never proved they could hash anything with the imaginary chips.

Now, they have new chips. Pictures of them even. Shiny. Someone says that they are stable to a specific Mhz. However, in their test rig, they get nothing.

Here is my conclusion on that, is that the chips are bad. I get multi layered boards made from a local shop in 24 hours. In their previous weeks now of silence since they have had chips in their hands, if they only made one board per day and tested that, they could have tested more than a dozen boards. But with how much money is in this, they should be testing several revisions a day.

They obviously have no idea what they are doing, and they have nothing to show for it. It would take all of 5 minutes for someone from BFL to give an update on any of the actual progress. But it's bad news, so they don't. It's better to take some heat for the silence than it is to freak everyone out that their chips simply do not work.

EDIT: Need to add some more.

If BFL had a single working test machine, they would have it hooked up somewhere with videos and pictures and everyone on the planet would know. They would hire more staff to accept all of the preorders that would start flowing in at raised prices.

They have nothing.

at least they haven't staged anything yet.  It'd be easy for them to film a small box of fans with lights on, and stash an underclocked Avalon running at 60 gh/s and claim to have a working SC single.

That is your perception.   I would argue they have staged EVERYTHING.   No company in the world would CONTINUE to collect "prepayments" for machines they have failed to deliver on and do not have the capacity to even know WHY they cannot make a PROTOTYPE work.    Ask yourself the question I asked.   Could you go to ANY VC in nyc or the valley with a convicted felon and a software tweaker who has a judgement against him for stealing sat TV and ask them for 20MM to build a hardware device that neither person even understands?    Josh did not even understand when someone told him what was wrong with his photos.   Instead he did what every con man has done through history, attack the person that is pulling back the curtain.
I would suggest you people that have pre-orders with BFL contact the government NOW.   If you wait, your money will be zero.   (and that zero can be given in either bitcoins or the fiat you paid in).

It is a scam they are offering large amounts of money for something that costs little to nothing.

When I asked who has contacted the government, the pitch forks came out after me.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153084.0

Please provide proove. I'm sure everyone here would appreciate it.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110805.0

There is also extensive discussion of this at www.lmgtfy.com.

I remember when ~bitcoinnv mentioned BFL to some govt agency as an out-of-band sidenote to his ~pirateat40 scam investigation.  Now that brought out the pitchforks.  ~inaba himself went completely ape, but there was widespread scorn from all corners including, iirc, several persons who are linked to bitcointalk.org.

To bad my tax dollars didn't go to work against BFL back at that time (around half a year ago I believe) since it would have saved a lot of noobs a lot of tears and saved Bitcoin itself yet another black eye.

Yeah, he was the first reply in my thread and long before I was just asking for info about who had or hadn't. It's been mentioned in this thread, wondering why BFL has such a golden ticket to do whatever they want to on bitcointalk. Because they are paying lots in advertising fees?

I have.   search my posts.   have posted links to USA government websites that support both "claims"

That is not what I would call constructive.  Deleting your post. 

I think the poster has a point.   A company that is so far behind in promises and make further promises repeatedly and are still taking people's money with ship dates promised out two months should be considered a scammer.   Why that offends your sense of fairness eludes me.   Even if they are working hard to produce the units paid for 9 months ago, their current actions of "order now" and giving new promises which we know not to be true, would qualify them to be labeled as a scammer.

His criticism is constructive.   when you have screwed up, you should stop collecting people's money until you can actually physically deliver what you overpromised many times before.

So you would call even Nasser a scammer?

If the statement "I'm planning to do {whatever} and expect to do it {whenever}"  is sufficient to avoid a spammer tag, then such a tag is fairly pointless.  Particularly if the {whatever} and {whenever} can be re-set as needed.

BFL seems to have been getting a pass via this mechanism for quite a long time now.  Just sayin'

Now how does that make any sense? It's clear your definition of "scammer" is a bit falsely construed.

Based on your definition, I presume Team Avalon must also qualify as a scammer since they're taking people's money now for Batch #3, which won't be out for many months? They're surely a team of scammers since they promised to ship, what was it, 12 units a day at the end of January? Yet April is upon us and only now are they finishing up the delivery of the first Batch...


How do we know their promises aren't true? (Before brashly responding, think about it from a rationalized point of view for a moment)


Ideally I (and many others) wish this was the case. Down payment now, full payment when a product is available.

I don't know about a tag, but I do think that BFL ought to stop taking new orders until they actually begin shipping.

bASIC closed their orders after they had taken on "enough".  Imagine how much bigger that mess would be if they had left them open.

To answer your question about how do we know their promises are NOT TRUE?   Well; a month ago they said their capacity was 500 a day, now they say it is 300 a day.   Have you ever run a factory?   You would know they are full of crap when they think they can run at capacity and their estimate of capacity changes by 40% in one month.    They would not selling more units if they were honest.   As to the question on Avalon, can you direct me to FACTS that either one of them is a convicted felon?   Or that the other one has a judgement against him in a federal court for ripping off DirectTV?   Can you point me to a post where the partner of Avalon called someone a blowjob giving thai whore when someone criticized them.
Let me know the links.   I understand you seem to be ingratiating (maybe to "protect" your position in this fictional shipping line), but that does not mean that anyone with an IQ over 80 cannot see through these people.

Anyone offering a product to sell which doesnt actually exist should be moved to speculation or "possible scam" board.

Now, I am going to go out on a limb here, but surely someone active (or lurking) that is familiar with this issue could do some legal physical surveillance of BFL? It's not like its a secret where to find them...

http://butterflylabs.com/contact/ (http://butterflylabs.com/contact/)

I mean if nothing else, one could easily spot deliveries and shipments to and fro or SOMETHING.

At least there might be a chance to get some solid info into the public domain before troves of nerds heads start exploding from ASIC blue balls. We can sit here and rehash complaints over and over but it changes nothing. NO one is happy. Folks have a TON of money tied up in this companies hypothetical offerings (happy I started with one jal). In a sense, we are ALL in this together to one extent or another.

GMaxwell apparently thinks BFL is a scam.

My thread has been renamed and moved to Scam Accusations.

BTW, hoping for the community to pitch in a bit more for next week.

Josh knows he can't afford to outbid me on one ad, so he only bid for 6 ad slots.

I'd like to squeeze him by outbidding him on another.  So far I have 0.7364.  Toss some bit pennies my way so I can squeeze him on his advertising prices.

I will stop upping the bid on the second ad at some (secret) point, so that the community coins will roll over to cost him money again next week.   ;D

I'm not sure I agree with that statement...

gmaxwell moved it because it's an accusation which belongs in the scam accusation forum; not because he thinks it's a scam.  Which is probably where all this discussion belongs until proven one way or the other...

Nice way of twisting words there.

Nuclear;

you are an interesting dude.    made a name 6 days ago and all your posts are defending BFL.   what is your background?   I am just curious?

My guess is he started out selling satellite dish decoders to steal directTV signals, and has since moved on to collecting pre-orders for vaporware.

My guess would be just another foot-soldier in the sockpuppet army of BFL-istan.  Yawn.

Wait, what?  :'(

6 days ago? Look again...

Date Registered:   June 09, 2011, 03:43:38 PM

I'm not defending them...but at the same time there certainly are some people around here with an axe to grind.   Frankly I've seen some pretty outlandish statements made by BFL employees; and they've obviously missed multiple deadlines.  That said...people saying that moderators agree it's a scam simply because their threads were moved to the proper forum (scam accusations) is equally outlandish.

My background? Merely a curious observer in this mess.

11 posts in two years and all in the last six days?   you were posting a few days ago asking to get out of the newbie jail?  There is something wrong with the posting history function then.   Maybe clicking on your profile does not work?   My apologies, I do not understand the search function properly.   Maybe it shows up like that because you merged accounts?

"I want to link my Bitcointalk name with BTCJam's. Verification code: 7b3c19df-289b-4f31-a80e-2c7300d87f4e"

There's nothing wrong with it.  My post count is accurate and my username has never been changed.

You are correct.  Some of us do have a VALID axe to grind.  Try reading my posts in this thread to get at some legitimate issues they should answer for publicly. 

I've read your posts; and I'll say at the very least I agree with the original post in this thread.  My axe grinding comment was directed at a few others who continually post misleading and twisted statements as truth across multiple threads.

Going in the completely opposite direction and back on topic...this post in particular pretty much sums up my suspicions:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=159104.msg1681314#msg1681314 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=159104.msg1681314#msg1681314)

What about that post is twisted or misleading?

Sorry; I'm trying to say I agree with what you've said. I'll reword that...

you'd better  >:(

I saw the BFL ad saying it might be a scam. Worthy investment OP.

Look at my sig lol  ;D

That better?  Two separate thoughts kinda merged there...when this thread originally started I read your list and said to myself... "Nailed it."

I fear that the BFL "scandal" if you want to call it that has the potential to seriously hurt the bitcoin community-in a similar way (but hopefully smaller-scale) a government sanction against bitcoins would.

Just saw bits and pieces of a conversation josh was having on bfl forum about the problem they are having about power being too much and heat problems i guess.

Said they will be putting up a video of a working unit soon - implied tomorrow but didnt see the actual shout.

I saw a thing where josh said if they missing their power target they would donate 1000 BTC to charity.. I only say this because i run an animal rescue group and would love to be the recipient of this...

Now that they have a working protype I guess you better change that sig.

Why?  They still haven't shipped.  When people who paid 9 months ago are getting their gear, AND it works as promised, it's time to change that signature.

No video? No working prototype.

It should be up tomorrow. They wouldn't lie about it unless they were in a hurry to get refund requests.

Claiming they have no evidence after they post a video would just devalues anything else you claim.

Agreed, perhaps the point was not backed up with constructive criticism, but the request is clear and coming from the community. Who supports this?
 
Give BFL X days to prove itself or give them the Scammer Tag and stop advertising their "Order Now - initial shipping scheduled for the last half of March 2013" crap.

Believe me, I want to like them, but how long does it take for a scam to be revealed? It's always "2 weeks from now"..

+1

Yup.

The statement about power being too much is vague. It's using too much power? Or they are giving it too much power? Sounds like it is using too much power and they can't get enough hashing based on the statement he posted:


It would be nice for him to spell check before announcements. It would also be nice to have some proof that these developments are truthful which still isn't clear.

Too bad he doesn't have a smart phone to post a video. I don't know about you, but on the Samsung Note II, I click the camera. Switch it to video, click record. When I'm done, I click the share button and upload it to my youtube account. Outside of the actual video taking it takes a whole 30 extra seconds.

Obviously since he didn't have time to spell check, he wouldn't have thirty seconds to upload a video of the vaporware.

Better pretend things are working so that people stop asking for refunds. This thread is probably hurting their preorders.

Can you elaborate this statement, please? How exactly could the bitcoin developers have banned any specific payments or mining devices?

Let's just add to the list.

A broken unit is better than a Avalon.  Wow, that is a heap of respect for your competitors.   I can't wait to support this type of attitude.  They really did hire the "perfect" PR person to handle company communications.  Good job Butterfly Labs.   

   Sure when bfl posted back in june the developers could have simply said no unit that hashes over  29Gh will work at bit mining. Until said developer shows working prototype all workers are capped at 30Gh.
  At the time I think some Fpga rigs could do  25 to 27Gh. This would have forced builders to build the rigs first since they won't be allowed to work unless tested.  Capping a worker at 25 or 30  or 40 Gh should be simple to do.  Now the network is in the hands of a few rather then many. 

 This would have  meant buying an asic  from bfl back in june would be far less attractive then it was.  Buying an asic is still crazy stupid hard to do (if buying means getting it in a week or less) and that is really bad for bitcoin.

 Frankly I have 78GH (2x little singles + 2x jalapeños)  on order from BFL I don't expect to ever see it  , but I will get my money back since the orders are paypal. I will just get a refund every 40 days then order a week later.  So far I have done this twice. 

Basically take a good look at Avalon's actions They have sent out emails saying they are developing a mining farm and delaying the second batch along with the third batch getting a crazy price raise. There actions are bad as BFL's in every way except for the lucky 300.  The point I am making is asic's or the lack of the ability to buy them is going to kill bitcoins.  That is on the bitcoin program team not avalon not bfl and not asciminer. Since a 30 or 60 day ban on all workers with 30gh hash power would once again spread the network out instead of having a hand full of people or groups with most of the hash power.

Don't you think the Batch #2 & #3 delay was communicated, and they said in April, Avalon will ship both batches.  They have stuck close enough to schedule up to this point for us to give them the benefit of doubt.  I think that your not being fair compared to your two alternatives. 

I do not advocate an arbitrary ban on mining.  This sets a counter-productive precedent to the future management of the network.  People do not want power influenced in that manner.  In Bitcoin, you truly do vote with your coins.

Dalkore

I agree... plus it is a very slippery slope. One must tread with caution in that conversation. If the bitcoin network was under attack by malevolent parties one might consider addressing such a bottom-up approach to curbing the damage. Barring that, its a very bad idea.

And for all intensive purposes the introduction of ASIC miners (no matter how poorly executed by manufacturers) is not an attack on the system per se.

Nonsense.  They aren't being greedy.  They are selling their product with a 30 day ROI price point.  That is a gift.  It would be nice if they could find a way to make a product that could be priced closer to an enthusiast graphics card so ASICs could be more widely distributed, but that isn't Avalons fault.

ASICs are a net benefit as it is harder to attack the network now.  ASICMiner is troublesome in terms of their market share, but hopefully they will be responsible and start selling hardware rather than growing their farm from where it is.

And ASICs hold nearly 50% of hashpower already.  Good luck putting in place a change that harms their owners.

Yeah, the free market has let us down. we need a central authority to place restrictions on the marketplace! rise up, comrade!

With all due respect, you are off your rocker but I trust you know this already - blaming the bitcoin dev team for not capping workers the way you suggested??

Silly rabbit, asics are for trix!

dissection commencing .. 5, 4, 3, 2 .......

Well I mine bitcoin.  And I took $800 out of my pocket to warn newbies about BFL last week.  I've bid $475 to do the same next week.  Am I greedy?

As for Avalon, what they said was:  "If people don't want to pay the price we think is fair, we will mine for ourselves."

Sorry, but that's not how it works. To refer to a wafer as "customer ordered singles" is as stupid as calling it a "sacrifice" to perform functional testing.

If customers were ordering slices of that particular wafer, with each die individually marked as belonging to a particular order, then BFL would simply have shipped wafer to their customers.


In the context of this thread? Absolutely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4C4bgho5JSI

they are using your money/coins to develop and build the units they will probably not even begin dispatching till july.

Any update? I considered buying one of these once upon a time

Well one of their employees got the hardware but HIS it uses more juice than what they said it would.
and they've shown decent amount of proof to not be a scam, not to mention they've sold earlier mining hardware.

The hardware is still in the lab and the developer left the country.  Not a scam but not shipping either.

If they don't ship it anytime soon then there will bo no difference from scam. They can bring gazillion of reasons, objective and subjective for explaining the delays. Damn, I almost did pre order two devices from BFL. Better stick to my FPGA.  ;D

Who cares? They made 100million already.

All posts in this thread are off-topic except this one because I incorporated a keyword from its title, sans the e's, thus making this post true.

http://www.theroadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/postie-media31.jpeg

I wonder if there is such a thing as Joshin' Jerky.

I've paid for another ad, and pointed it to a thread 'trust no one' in Scam Accusations.

I have a slot reserved for a topic on BFL, but don't have time to write it.

If someone would do so and PM to me I will post it with credit.

Please stick to facts, and documenting the history of lies, broken promises and failures.

Where every that 'Bunch of Fucking Liars' picture is, it would make a great introduction image. ;)

Their own forums are full of examples, like these assembly line units that are stock photos (https://forums.butterflylabs.com/content/120-bfl-invests-assembly-equipment-comments2.html), claiming they are currently being installed with a "full team to run them" yet they never followed up with any sort of proof they actually own these, to my knowledge.


This sucks because I would be all over these so I could write my own mining software for them. I'd drop $10k today if at least one verifiable prototype was proven to exist. Guess I'm stuck with exponentially increasing Avalon 4th batch prices

Theymos has rejected my ad which had the text.  BFL: Bald Faced Liars!

I'm proud of you for sticking up for us little folks. How much did this ad run you? I may kick some coinage your way.

This week I paid 5.75 BTC.  But I anticipate that will be refunded as Theymos doesn't find it plausible that BFL are liars.

I would ask you not to contribute, I will probably be refunding everything contributed so far.

Theymos is not so stupid to think there isn't obvious proof of lies on BFL's part.  Nor is he foolish enough to think that the BoB fiasco is in any way unclear.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what that means about this site.

We get it. No ones refuting that they have lied. Do we need a reminder every 10 minutes?

These things take time.  Give poor ~theymos another 6 months of BFL bullshit excuses and general slimyness and see if he's come around.  I mean he ran ~nefario through the wringer for what seems to the casual observer to be far fewer indiscretions...although not necessarily similarly distributed ones somehow.

Crossing Theymos seems to be the only thing that gets you a scammer tag anymore.

I sent you like ~$13 worth of BTC currently.

Much love!

MNW was staff, iirc, and got a scammer tag.  I don't recall what, if anything, ~nefario was.

Yeah, I was just joking.