Bitcoin Forum

Are we "screwed" if we're at the end of the BFL queue for the 5 Gh/s devices (previously called "Jalapeños")? I ordered mine this month.

Yes.

That's not what David Perry of Coding in My Sleep thinks. (http://codinginmysleep.com/and-the-interviews-start-coming-in/) (Of course he has his 5 Gh/s BFL device already…)

It all depends on how fast BFL can ship units.  If they're going to ship a dozen a day then yes, you're probably screwed.  We don't even know how many units BFL is waiting to ship, as people are speculating in terms of order numbers.  One order number can contain 1 Jalapeno, or 100.  There's also been talk of order numbers being generated even if the order was not paid for, thus there may be less real orders than we think.

There was probably a rush of orders in June and July 2012, and (conjecture) maybe in October and November 2012 when BFL promised they were just a week or two away from shipping products to end customers.  As BFL has started to ship a small handful of units in April 2013, you can appreciate you may be in for a very long wait.  The good news is it's in BFL's strong interests to ship ASAP so new orders don't dry up.

I have an order from September 2012 that has been in the 'processing' stage every time I've looked over the past few weeks.

Quite honestly I think thoes at the end of the queue are WAY BETTER off than those of us at the beginning who paid with BTC.   I WILL NEVER RECOUP those BTC!!!

I paid over 300BTC for a Single and a bunch of Jalapenos back in July 2012!!!!

 ::) ::) ::) :o :o :o >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:(

20/20 ?

In 1930 gold was valued at $25 per troy oz.

Would you say the same if btc price now was 1 usd each ? You did not know this was going to happen (btc will be at 150), so it is a no-op.

Didn't you miss buying the GOOG ipo or the AAPL shares 4-5 years back ? Oh man - so much missed profit, right ?

  ::)

This has nothing to do with USD price of bitcoin...   

I paid 300 BTC for them.  Yes they were sold in USD but even if BTC were $1 each, I will most likely not be able to mine the 300BTC I paid for them back in a reasonable amount of time.

Of course not, but you will be able to mine back the cost of the unit in $USD in a reasonable time, and that's the point. The unit was sold to you priced in $USD not BTC, whatever you choose to sell to get sufficient $USD at the time of the order is your problem. Personally I would have used something that inflates over time, like a fiat currency to pay for an item with a long lead time.

Why did they stop calling them japapenos?  i thought it was a cute name.

I keep on hearing this logic, but when computing values, the same people turn 180 degree, and point to mtgox conversion rate. Face it : none of the crypto mumbo jumbo has any value unless you can trade them for something tangible - and those tangible things still can only be bought with fiat.

BFL did not create miner by spending btc, but using fiat.

Wrap this around your head.

Since the had to insert them onto their back side with all the delays. It's burnin' !

This.

Wow $40,000 for vaporware?

 :P

Pizza was thousands of bitcoins, so look at it this way: you [may yet get] a 5 GHash miner for way way WAY less than a pizza! Plus a free single included! What a deal!!!

:D

-MarkM-

At today's exchange rate, it equates to... (as soon as the numbers settle at Mt Gox, I'll complete this sentence, but somewhere around $232/BTC)

He sold his ass and his soul to BFL, and he will advertise them in order to draw noobs like you to their pre-order scheme. He was paid... A Jalapeño, so you know what type of dude is that.

You won't be receiving your Jalapeño until June... 2014.

Major alarm bells ring in my head when someone offers to sell me a golden goose to be paid for in golden eggs.

ASICs = wealth redistribution from the naive early adopter geek hoarders

thats the big question eh

I suppose you think Luke-Jr. et al. are other "useful idiots," too, then.Proof, please

yes, luke-jr is a shill.

it is simple for the jalapeno thing. you take the amount of orders placed and divide by how many they can make and ship a day. unless they are going to churn out over 1k units a day, next year is a safe bet

Could have been because of the case change perhaps?


https://forums.butterflylabs.com/bfl-forum-miscellaneous/2003-petition-get-butterfly-labs-attention.html#post26648

Quoted from Josh at the link above this post:

"While I appreciate the sentiment and I would gladly act on it if I could, the simple fact of the matter is we can not ship anything but Jalapenos this week and next week. We simply do not have the boards and cases to ship anything but a Jalapeno. We aren't intentionally holding back Little Singles, Singles and Minirigs. The Jalapeno 5 GH/s miner is the only thing we have both the boards, chips and cases for at this time. We had to push all units up one level, so the mining device formerly known as the Jalapeno is now in the Little Single/Single case and the little Single/Single are moving to a larger home. The minirig is moving to a smaller home and will have less hashrate per unit, which also necessitates a case redesign and will use the new Single/Little Single boards as well, hence we have none at the moment.

The new Single case should be in tomorrow and the boards sometime next week, hopefully."

-----------------------

Sorry higher-end BFL customers....your sorely out of luck. (SOL)

You'll be getting your in "a while". Just keep charting your declining profits on a graph paper somewhere (since October 2012)...in the meantime...while you are waiting.

He's a paid shill.  ::)

If they don't ramp up production they won't be selling many more.

I wonder how many of their units are mining in-house while you guys wait.

Hopefully all they make at some point, I would hate to think they would ship them untested.

With all the units they have ready, which means only a few, because they are BAD at what they do.

Yeah, they will test them as long as they are profitable  :D and send a few a day so people can see them in Twitter.

Lets see, a 5GHs unit will do about 1 BTC every 3 days with the current difficulty, and they could probably make and sell one of the $274 units in minutes, which approach would you say was more profitable?

Most profitable? BFLs approach of course!  ;)
Step 1 (mandatory): Sell unit
Step 2 (optional): build unit
Step 3 (unnecessary): ship unit

That's right.

Between Step 2 and Step 3 you don't have "current difficulty" any more. That's when you mine, for as long as you see fit.

If you already ordered Jalapeno / ASIC / blah blah blah, make sure to place a bet on (trusted) betting sites against BFL delivering.

BFL deliver -> you get your free btc maker.
BFL doesn't deliver -> You get free money from betting sites.

Hedging, how does it work ?
And yes, the one that place 250 BTC is a BFL employee.

https://i.imgur.com/eolLgUB.png

http://bitbet.us/bet/7/

April 2013 :
In : 250 BTC
Out : 500 BTC

May 2013 :
In : 500 BTC
Out : 1000 BTC

June 2013 :
In : 1000 BTC
Out : 2000 BTC

2000 BTC for 3 months.
You can continue this until December and x2 your BTC every time.

They have the technology to make >520 5 Gh/s devices per day. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=185399.0)

And they have the stupidity to easily compensate for it.

Which means: Max. 10 units per day.

I believe that he means he sold btc to buy the miner. So if he wouldnt have done this and kept the BTC he would have way more $USD now than this miner can mine ever. I can understand that this is a pain.
Of course miner sellers need people that think that their miner, once bought, will be pay back faster only because the bitcoin exchange price will go up. Good for the seller then.

To all those people complaining about paying in bitcoins and seeing the dollar value of those bitcoins skyrocket in the meantime:

You can't have it both ways.

Real world expenses for goods and services are still in dollars.  Bitcoin is just a proxy for the US dollar.  I bet the foundry was paid in dollars, as was the company that made the boxes.  Those bitcoins would have been converted into US dollars long ago.  It's not like BFL was sitting on a pile of bitcoins waiting for a speculative bubble to arrive.

Can we just sticky a BFL flame thread ? Would be better than seing BFL troll comments in EVERY thread, even none BFL related ones.

Oh the BFL troll thread is coming 'in just another week or two'.

There has been some last minute surprise delays. Everything is almost ready though.

It'll be in a slightly larger font, but it'll be worth the wait, I promise.

(Sorry couldn't resist).

Here is my list:

Phinnaeus Gage
smoothie
k9quaint
Frizz23
muyuu
PuertoLibre
Bitsaurus

Couldn't we just put the 6 people with BFL Jalapenos in one thread and let them post their stuff there?
Then every time BFL ships a thousand units, we let the BFL PR department open another thread.
That should clean up this forum.

Sure, but you would be the first to post a troll comment in there. Wow you are dense huh.

Name:   minternj
Posts:   71
Position:   Jr. Member
Date Registered:   March 30, 2013, 09:46:18 PM

65 posts about BFL...

Josh's intern from a local college perhaps?

Get this through your pea brain. Post count in your case measures your inability to filter meaningful posts on topic with the thread in said discussion. Get a life get outside and meet some real people.

So namecalling/ad hominem-ing people you disagree with is somehow more meaningful, I see...

The person(s) who spend all their time on these forums raging against those who criticize their employer tell me to get a life.
And just when I thought the irony couldn't get any thicker, we have a sockpuppet telling me about real people.
 :D

Wow nothing you just said made any sense.

Please try to take some time to brush the cheetos crumbs off your fat belly and stick to the topic on a thread. This is how adults have an conversation on the internet. Someone writes something meaningful on a topic and then someone replies. then a real conversation happens where someone , even though they may have differing ideas talk. Writing the same shit into every BFL tread makes you a troll with nothing new to add to the conversation us adults are trying to have.

if you find new info to flame BFL with, i'd welcome it.

Order now!!! You'll get it next week!

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

oh oh, please add more names to the list... remember the picture of the anti-BFL Clowns, those who questioned the optimistic power estimates and shipping dates BFL was dangling in front of their potential customers like a carrot, trying to do whatever they could to lure away customers from their competition?

4 months later and BFL still has to prove they can ship a working product comparable to the illustrious competitors.

To be on the list above seems more like a badge of honor...

It actually is. I am going to die my avatar head red just for this occasion.

The guy who ordered his pizza got it promptly.. If he "pre ordered" his Pizza a year in advance then it is a comparable transaction. 

Amen.

I didn't intend to disturb.

Apologies.

This is exactly why you don't preorder anything.

Then how do they get the funding to order an ASIC wafer?

Normal people (who do not commit mail fraud to fund their schemes) put together a business plan, some expertise, and then get one or more investors to put the money up. Unfortunately for BFL, the pre-orders were the business model.

Look you two newbie fucktards, I am not a troll, and everything I do is for the betterment of Bitcoin including trying to protect bitcoiners from being ripped off. And I've done so at an ever increasing cost, both financial and physical.

Maybe if I wasn't stopped dead in my tracks during a preliminary InstaWallet investigation, perhaps I, among others, would still have their coins.

That said, I believe you owe each of us an apology, otherwise go suck each other's dicks, if that is at all possible, for I don't put it pass Josh's SEO knowledge to being hiding behind one, if not both of these recently registered user accounts.

erk you have your head up your ass.  I have a BFL single and I am the original owner.  Obviously at one point in time I believed in BFL - far more so than you did that I was willing to risk my money.  That device has paid for itself and in that aspect BFL was successful for me.  Everything since then has been a steaming pile of poo... much like your list.

If BFL actually made a miner that did 1GH/watt I would applaud them even if it was late to the game sine everything with mining is not all about greed and making money.  Sadly they're barely more efficient than Avalon who managed to put a higher density standalone device almost 6 months before BFL.  What have BFL's preorder customers gained by choosing BFL?  The opportunity to pay for a device via wire transfer is the only advantage BFL has had in all of this.  The failed at being first.  They failed at density - a SC Single will be less dense than a 85GH/s Avalon.  They pretty much failed at energy efficiency - one of their main selling points.  They failed at customer PR - Yifu may talk smack, but Josh's mouth would make most sailors cringe.  Perhaps BFL's website is better than Avalon - I'll give them that.

Getting back into topic, this is the BFL reply I got a couple days ago..


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Butterfly Labs Inc <office@butterflylabs.com>
Date: Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 5:09 PM
Subject: Re: New mail from contact form
To: Felipe


All of our current models are available for preorder on the website.

We are shipping 4.5 gh/s ASICs to developers early preorder customers.

Prepayment is the only method by which your preorder is entered into the queue.

We are working to start shipping in the next couple weeks and have a backlog in the queue,

so new pre-orders, regardless of product or power consumption,

will likely ship sometime in late August or early September, sooner if possible.

This guy gets it.

It's not that BFL hasn't delivered - It's that they promised to deliver IN OCTOBER OF LAST YEAR and when they didn't make their date rather than giving their pre-order customers the option to get their money back, they refused refunds until JANUARY at which point they only offered refunds for the USD value rather than the number of bitcoins paid.

I paid 24BTC for a jalep, got back 11BTC in January and I'm glad I did because even with that 40% refund I could buy 10 Jalep once they're actually manufactured and shipping them.

It's fine if the plan changes - Shit happens in real life, and manufacturing products is hard.   But to give a release date and take peoples money is just wrong if you're not absolutely sure you're going to hit it, and the fact that we're now more than 6 months past that original ship-date and they're still popping out a few units at a time is just embarrassing.  

Add to that the continued pre-sale of units when the UNITS THEMSELVES RELY ON BEING RARE TO BE VALUABLE is insane.  At the point they figured out they weren't going to hit their deadline they should have stopped accepting pre-orders until they were sure of a release date, but that didn't happen.   In fact you can still pre-order today.    

Bitcoin is self adjusting, I'm not really sure why more people aren't upset about this - By increasing the number of pre-sale units, every buyer who came before and paid a higher price (relatively speaking) is having their investment devalued because the block reward "pie" gets split up between more and more power, meaning whatever they bought last year will earn less and less.

If they had released on time, again - not a big deal - This is the normal progression of Bitcoin, mining gets harder, rewards go down relative to power.

But by selling all these pre-orders, BFL sucked up the money that would have otherwise gone into building or buying other mining equipment - It shifted that money into whatever point BFL actually releases product to all the pre-orders, at which point there will be a HUGE spike in network power, we'll burn through the blocks until the difficulty resets, and then it'll be just like we never moved to ASICs except there will be more people getting a share of the same size pie.

Again, compare to releasing on time where the equipment is in use, there is a meaningful bump in network power but it's more gradual for new people to come in over time.  Difficulty goes up more gradually, so people who bought early are able to earn rewards to accomodate their risk.

BFL just needs to learn to communicate with its customers rather than making promises they aren't sure they can keep, and then deflect until it gets so bad that it can't be ignored, and then deflect some more.  Manufacturing product is hard, so if you're going to take peoples money in advance you need to be a professional.  That is clearly not the case here, and based on their continued behavior both from official representatives who are combative at best and downright insulting many times (not to me, from my observations) it appears they see no problem with their behavior.

That's too bad.

This is exactly the problem, more estimates and yet more demands for money up-front from "customers"   Honestly might as well call them donators at this point

They probably need to update that message, they no longer have a 4.5GHs model.

You/they mean 5 Gh/s ASICs?…

Or ffernandex fabricated this email…

Josh said in the so-called shout box on the BFL website, that each chip can only get to 4 GH/s on air cooling and that they have to put 2 chips into the 5 GH/s Jalapeño.

I guess that would make it an 8 GH/s Jalapeño plugged into a surge protector that's plugged into the wall.

I guess they disable 12 of 16 mining units on the second chip, or something like that.
Anyway, just quoting what Josh says.

I'm not fabricating anything, I guess anyone asking BFL last week should have received the same answer. I really don't think they reply emails one by one, they surely got a template reply. If they are 4.5 or 5 GH, that would be their typo, not mine.

I can provide the email in anyway you find appropriate without revealing my email address.

Regards,

Peanuts, Davincij15 has BTC3000 on pre-order.

BTC3000 x $130 = could have been $450,000 right now.

www.youtube.com/user/davincij15

Taking money in one currency and refunding in a devalued one to gain a free business loan/profit, is known as an arbitrage scam.  ;)

you can still mine them alt coins like PPC or Feathercoin.

No you can't. Feathercoin is scrypt not sha256.

If I can build my 160 Gh/s DIY avalon in less time than you can get your 5 Gh/s yes I would say you are. I will buy you a virtual beer if you get yours before I build mine sound fair?

Few notes:

Chips just ordered won't be ready for 10 weeks minimum.
Shipped to US then to Singapore then I pick em up and go to Jakarta.
Then hopefully I have the boards from the DIY variants done and marry the chips to the boards in a few weeks.

All you have to do is wait...

This will be fun to watch.

Have you every tried to place an order with BFL in BTC? It takes you to Bitpay which immediately converts your BTC into USD and pays BFL in USD at the current exchange rate. So these claims are bogus.

You don't know that. Even if Bitpay pays out their merchant in EUR or USD, the merchant can still opt to convert some of it into BTC for the long term.

So Bitpay has no option to pay out the merchant in BTC? Seems like a lack of service...

Bitpay can convert BTC to BTC, but whats the point? BFL could just accept the BTC whien you select that payment option on their website without paying a fee to Bitpay. Bitpay exists to convert from BTC to something else.

The following is not a diss toward BitPay, for I like them guys, but the service CAN be used as a mixer of sorts, having the coins first sent to them as payment for a product/service, then either have them set their, convert to fiat, or sent to you via some other wallet.

I welcome BitPay to deny or verify the above, for I'm not 100% sure, and don't want to be spreading FUD of their good name.

Bitpay and sorts exists because people are too lazy to integrate BTC into their website.

The BTC processors handle the conversion of USD/EUR to the floating BTC price and they make sure the payment is done within a defined time window like 15 minutes

There is absolutely no reason why you can't deal with that yourself, you can connect to various exchange api's to get the correct exchange rate, add 5% on top, generate a unique address and see if the coins get deposited within 15 minutes. If not, cancel the order. If you do get the coins, either hoard them or sell them on an exchange before the price goes down.

But I guess there must be a reason why people don't do it themselves (and even pay a fee in order not to deal with it), there is general lack of shopping cart modules that handles this independent of a payment processor and it's not the core business of somebody running a shop... And people are lazy.

If you want the most blatant example, Avalon has always announced they are not converting their BTC into USD and they have been doing 3 batches so far with Paysius, WalletBit and Bitpay. In the first 2 cases the processors had to convert the listed USD website price into BTC but in the last case with Bitpay, the price on the website was fixed in BTC, so the only thing Bitpay had to do was deal with a DDOS and collect 600 x BTC 75. No conversion, no selling into USD

(Avalon has always used the opportunity to allow processors to get exposure and have them stress test their service)

I will try to get BitPay to respond to this ongoing situation with BFL. Hopefully they will give us some insight as to where they stand. Actually I am more interested if they offer buyers any form of protection or really hold any Vendor/Seller accountable with their merchant account.

I am hoping they do, but you never know.

:D

One of the very often quoted advantages of bitcoins is no charge backs, no reversal of transactions.  If BitPay is just a glorified PayPal that can freeze a merchant's account at any time then there's no advantage.