Bitcoin Forum

Hello, people were saying that BFL is a scam, the other person says it's not.
So... let's have this poll :D

Also, if you have any BFL experiences, please post them here.

I hope not. I ordered 15 asic sc miners 8 and a half months ago. I had good experiences ordering fpga miners from them in the past also.

I happen to know someone that was recently at ButterFly Labs

They are not a scam. At least not in their opinion.

I was told they are unlikely to ship in April.

I haven't ordered, so I'm not invested either way, but it smells fishy to me. I don't think they were necessarily an out-and-out scam selling vaporware. Rather, I think someone was overconfident in their tech and their supply chain's ability to provide them with what they needed. Some numbers didn't add up, so the hashrates dropped and the prices increased.

I wish the best of luck to anyone who is still holding out with a preorder throughh BFL. I, personally, wouldn't give them a dime until people have working ASICs in-hand from BFL.

Nope, not a scam.

Their products are real.   They're producing game chaging hardware, thats pretty much the first of its kind.. Give the people a break. Bugs happen.  Not everything goes according to plan, delays occur.  No one gave a crap when bitcoins were 5$ .. Now that they're 240$ everyone is chomping at the bit (hurr durr) to get mining and crying because this company who's spent countless sleepless hours on developing a brand new product to bring to market, with chips that have never been made before, by anyone, is taking a little longer than expected.  

I think that they (BFL) are just realizing what it takes to mass produce asic's and how easy things can go wrong. However wish them luck in and hope they come through or on the other hand congratulate them for the elaborate scam that pulled in thousands.

It's definitely a scam.  Until they deliver something.  Then it's not.

I'm stuck between ordering an ASIC miner (which nobody can get) or building a GPU mining rig. I have $4k to build one, but I won't order anything till I've done my homework. I don't want to order an ASIC miner, and have to wait a year to get it!

My understanding is that they have delivered FPGA units in the past so I would assume the company itself isn't a scam.

prob. not a scam, but they will  release them when it's not worth mining anymore :|

If the rigs exist, then they can't ship during April cause they are 'testing' them. Thanks for your understanding and patience (esp during a time of BTC hyper inflation lol).

Exactly - why on earth would you be selling a rig for a few hundred or thousand respectively, when they can make you tenfold that? They will probably sell them once the difficulty has gone up enough or similar to double-dip and make a profit of reselling the hardware on top of having used it. Worst part, you'll be buying them as 'new' but technically they will have be second hand... oh, I mean 'tested' sorry  ;)

You mean triple-dip.

After the difficult has gone up, people will have to buy even more of these machines just to be able to mine anything.

Not trying to troll you but GPU mining is pretty obsolete with current generation hardware.  Google "bitcoin mining hardware comparison" and with the current difficulty level you'll see you really can't be cost effective.  You would probably never recover your hardware investment.  This weekend, I got two easily available Radeon 6770 which were listed as having the third best Mh/S/$. I ran about at the listed hash rate and generated ~.0156BTC or $3 at today's rate.  That would have taken me roughly 75 days at current rates to recover my investment. In 75 days even BFL will probably have an ASIC out and mining will be even harder.

So, basically BFL will ship the hardware when it's nothing worth anymore (for mining)
And they will use it in the meantime for mining themselves.

So that makes them a LEGIT SCAM. Or a half-scam, what you wanna call it!
So should I then get a GPU Miner? Or just give up?

Why would they ship when they can make 1000x time more money by mining with their asics....

GPU mining is not particularly profitable at this point unfortunately, might be best to sit on the sidelines (or mine with existing hardware) until the "next gen" of ASICs come out and try to get in on those.

How about the the guys from BTCFPQA who sell the ModMiner Quad? I've been wanting to get one but I've been iffy because I hear the owner is shady. I want to wait to see if BLF delivers but the date keeps getting pushed back. I wanted to get a Jalapeno in November when they were going to ship in January.

i would not trust them with my money. i have been watching them closely.

It would be pretty sleazy business, but I know id be tempted to do the same.  Hold them for a month and mine a ton, which would make more people need to buy your product, by raising difficulty, to stay profitable.  Then ship the machines after getting a ton of bitcoins. 

If not all of you then MOST of you have a pretty shity idea about what the difficulty really is and how it works.

I've been following them for a while. It seems to me that it's not a scam but they were very overzealous with their shipping estimates. On their site it states they are in the last phase of development. If that's the case they should need months of testing before shipping. Instead it says they'll start shipping this month...

4k is a lot if you went with asic thats like 3 avalon rigs no idea what that puts out but if we use bfl as a guide its about 75ghash/s

a 7970 is getting me .5ghz so you need 150 of those to match the power, which is 37500watts of power just on gpu so you wouldnt get anywhere near that power, 4k might get you 5 1.5ghz rigs but it would be hugly inefficiant but, in contrast youd have your  8ghash by weeks end its your call

For the Batch 1 and 2 Avalons, before the huge price tag increase. Now $4K might buy you half an Avalon.

yea i was basing pricing and power off of butterflys simple because there numbers are visible also its late and im tired, so be nice :P

seriously?

It is pretty undeniable at this point that they have been blowing smoke up our ass for months.  They have been "a couple of weeks" from shipping for six fucking months.  We gave them more than a break; we gave them millions of USD of interest free loans and they have not even had the decency to communicate honestly with us.

FYP

I sent them just under 21BTC earlier in the year for the privilege of finding out.  ;-)

Back then, using round numbers, that was about $1000.  Now, it's about $1750.  (Earlier today, it was about $2500 or so...)

I hope it's not a scam, I'm in for two!  ???

I ordered 2 units as well.

seems like a suckers bet at this point.


but history has shown they have shipped hardware, so who knows.  8)   before they raised their prices, it wasn't too much money to just.. throw away? hope and pray? etc?

No personal experience, but I do know someone from another forum who has two what I think are FPGA ( jalpeno 4.5GH/s models ), he also posted a picture of the PCB for the 8 ASIC model the two jalapeno's paid for . . . Not sure where he got the picture, but there you have it.

One thing that does kind of nag me a little in the back of my head. Why would anyone make these to sell to others, when they could be used to make much more money mining coins ? Yeah something about that doesn't sit right with me, but that doesn't mean I think it is a scam. Just means I think it is odd.

Yes, that's a good question: Why would anyone sell ASICs if they could use them to make more money?

I hope they really are not a scam for the sake of everyone invested in them.

For the good of BTC and LTC  ::) I hope they DONT ship anything

I ordered 1 units as well.

I think BFL is not scam by selling ASICs. But they are very much involved with the price manipulation of BTC. And this is reasonable. Any curious trade historian can confirm BFL's selling and marketing strategies with 1850's California's gold rush mining equipment sellers!! Too much similarities on this!

+1 it is kind of fun building and owning the monstrosities we do, would be boring to have these well behaved little usb boxes making them obsolete :/

Ordered 1 unit. If no news about shipping before 1 may, I'll request back my money.

They are not a scam, but their attitude to customer satisfaction and delivering when they promised is piss poor...

Why would anyone want to be so GREEDY, dont ruin it for us

I have also sended email to them to see about date when units can be availible, but no answer. I have a feeling of scam, why I don't know I hope not, because I like to buy one of those units. But when BTC reach 21 milions than we can use this unit just for plant stander....
Like someone said before, how can some device manage so much Ghash?
With special chips? why they don't use it in video cards?