Bitcoin Forum

Is anyone actually going to buy the 600 GH/s BFL unit after their customer service? The reason I ask this is because not only did their employees call their customers who waited a year "stupid" etc. but they used customer money to fund research and development along with marketing. I know I'll probably get flamed by Josh for this but if this wasn't the case, then the people who paid in BTC, why were their refunds offered in USD? So basically profit was made twice, once on sales, and second on BTC increase while people waited a year. I just wanted to know exactly how they plan on selling to people on bitcointalk.org as I have seen their advertisement on this site after their treatment of the people who allowed them to exist in the first place. By making their empty promises, the company profited in the millions because of peoples' wanting of a 1.5 TH/s miner, and the other miners which people thought would make them rich, but in actuality just made BFL rich. Like all my other posts, please keep the discussion positive and reasonable. BFL, realize this isn't a flame to you, but more of a wake up call. I have run numerous successful businesses and the most important thing in my mind is customer service. Hence, with my group buy, though I purchased systems already, along with cooling, humidity control and security structure. I still refunded peoples' money up until early August. With that, let's start some discussion!

Yes it really is a shame how they conducted themselves as a business and profited on the hopes and dreams of many people left in the dirt.

Yes those who already have an unfulfilled BFL preorder can upgrade to Monarch.  That is their target market.  And at this point this may be the only hope for users with pending BFL orders, as you can get an ASICMiner blade delivered next week for the price of a brand new single order placed today that would ship by Christmas ... hopefully?  LOL

How many people have actually received their BFL miners? Other than the 2 500 GH/s systems I heard of?

I just read this on their website "Butterfly Labs has shipped more ASIC products than all competitors combined"

ROFL. Okay, now I'm just getting upset. How can they blatantly lie like that when AsicMiner, Avalon, etc... have shipped TONS more than BFL. This is getting ridiculous now.

Read this website for more details: http://www.butterflylabs.com/monarch/

Sadly, they are getting away with getting basically a loan that increased in value because of people's naiveity. The more I read into this, the more upset I am getting....

"As a fairly early Bitcoin adopter and institutional miner, the choice for mining hardware comes down to innovation. Who is going to have the experience and best technology going forward to keep me ahead of the curve? The fact that BFL has a proven chip design, combined with their innovations in form factor and node size means that they will be hard to beat moving forward."
James Gibson - GigaVPS


One of the only 2 people that got a miner, GigaVPS. Haha... funny stuff.

Quite a few people have received theirs, but I'm sure those that have only comprise a small percentage of the total order book.  I'm glad you're doing your research instead of being blinded by greed like so many of those who went the BFL route.

Funny how you don't hear much from gigaVPS these days.  He used to be a a flagship member around here.

I would hope sanity prevails this time around, people have grown wiser to BFL's antics, and will not be supporting them with their latest offering.

I know of 3 people local that have received equipment. 2x500 ghash, 3x50ghash and 1 jally.

I have 2 Jalepenos but canceled orders on 5 more jalapenos and 3 singles. Buy form BFL? I would like to say never again, but every time I say that, sometime in my life I have to go back on it. I like their gear, but the antics of the "Face of the company" are a complete turn off.

 If that was the face of your company, could you stay in business?

My business is extremely competitive and if my representatives acted like that, none of us would have jobs.

edit: Took quote out. Did not intend to quote.

Well I am happy that we are going to be providing a service soon to bitcoiners and already to have done a group buy with 9 systems for KnCminers jupiter. Hope they don't let us down like BFL did. I will NEVER buy from them. Wasted one year and 80K on these guys.

Yeah after waiting a year and a half for them to do r&d advertising etc with their money? That sounds legit. If I ever ran one of my businesses that way, I'd probably commit suicide from guilt. Then again, I have a conscience.

I'm one of the lucky ones that got his jalapeño, before a lot of other people that was behind me. But still I wouldn't buy a 600 ghs unit. Given their workspeed, customers service and everything I know I'm not walking down that path again...

Even that I was lucky I feel identified with this video:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jYNMKdv36w


But I may be wrong...

History will repeat itself once more. Sure a lot of people will not invest with them again, but a hell of a lot will prepay for fear of missing out.

We just need another "bubble" and BFL will be set for life.

I received my 30 GH/s Unit, Just 10 months late!

I'm happy because it allowed me to get into BTC.... If however they had shipped when they promised to I'd be sitting on dozens of thousands of dollars worth of BTC....Even if I had bought btc outright I would have made a better deal...

My miner will probably ROI (most of other BFLs won't)

My reason for buying the miner was never to ROI though, I just wanted to get into bitcoin (I have stated this many times in the BFL forum)

Honestly BFL created a far superior product to most of it's competitors at the time....

The avalon units seem a far worse deal to me....

Most ASIC manufacturers up to now have screwed up in many ways...

Maybe manufacturers like Cointerra and Bitfury won't continue with this model

There is no way a person could trust BFL to ship the 600 GH/s unit unless they promise to give you a 2% refund for every day they are late or something similar... Pre-orders need to have some parameters too!
BFL fails horribly at customer service because they didn't offer an easy way to get a refund... You'd have to fight it every step of the way. Being one of the few satisfied customers doesn't mean I didn't hear the outcry from the customers that were absolutely screwed (and not partially like me). Even Madbitcoins has orders that haven't yet been received from butterfly labs and is unable to get a refund (I sent him a bitcointalk thread that may help him).

BFL up to now has some really horrible business practices: A record of huge delays, Bad customer service, Unclear and changing purchasing terms, arbitrary increases in price, unreasonable shipping costs
On the other hand they do go from production to shipping quickly and efficiently, Their products hash at the promised rate and they are one of the first companies (and generally the first to ship 65nm at a very high volume...

Am I high or did you just say they ship quickly and efficiently?! Lol. You should buy some products from one of my companies and see what quick and efficient shipping really looks like.

 "Quick" and "Efficient" are two words that cannot be used to describe anything about Butterfly Labs' current production debacle.

Hey KonstantinosM,if you think they go from production to shipping quickly and efficiently.......go ahead and place another order today......I dare ya.......you scared  ???  :D

Well I have ordered one, But for me this was free so why not? I have received BFL units and after my ROI I have used funds to pay for the pre-order, I agree that BFL's shipping history it was a choice I had to make carefully but for me it's a case of "better late than never"

Definately not

I nearly made a large investment in BFL equipment in April, thank god I didn't!
They were making the same claims then as they do now, faster then market hashing speeds, better manufactured products that wind up being duct taped together and arrive in your hands 1 year too late if at all.
For me they did the bare minimum to avoid legal issues by providing some units to a select few that praise the the product as superior even if it got here a bit late BFL then promise the super mining box as an upgrade for something the customer has not even received yet?!

I have allot more faith in companies like KnC, Hashfast and Cointerra to name a few but its a wait and see game.
One thing is for sure, all companies manufacturing ASIC chips and hardware up to now have had production problems, some just did a better job of dealing with those problems and communicating with there customers.

It would be about the same as pre-ordering a donkey kick right in the balls a year from now.. maybe longer..

sometime in late 2014, early 2015.. you will hear the doorbell ring... open the front door.. see the back side of a donkey.. then BAM..

another topic to cry abt BFL ...

I'm not positive but I'm pretty sure no one here is crying. We are just stating that a business should be run like a business. Not take customers money to support R&D and advertising. Since you have nothing to add to the conversation, kindly go somewhere else. Thanks.

You sir, are hilarious. :D

I think you'd have to be a complete retard to order anything from bFL after their behaviour.

However. I also imagine that they get a large (or not most) of their orders from unsuspecting folks new to bTC who don't read these forums or know any better, and just get suckered into one of the many BFL ads around, such as the ones on a few of the bitcoin mining calculator sites.

I think I have a bigger chance of getting struck by lightening than seeing the Monarch ship on time.

My man, as someone that sold 2 BFL pre-orders I would have been very sad for you if that occurred.

In the latest Custom Hardware poll I ran for September, with 162 votes registered, BFL still garnered more votes for September pre-orders than HashFast or Cointerra! [That or a a few BFL puppets voted just to troll our poll, eheh].

2 guesses as to which mfg. fared the worst in this latest poll?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=291775.0

If you didn't order day 1 June 23rd, you got screwed.  Even those that did are only making 15% of what they should have.

Serious network protection was going on at BFL for most of 2013.  Parts have been ordered slow on purpose.  And wanting to hold longboard production over even further to implement xlink was retarded.  Hell, trying to cram everything onto a Jalapeno hoping it would cover all product lines might have been a failure done by design as well.

There are a lot of things an ASIC developer can do to create "plausible" delays.  There is a lot of incentive to purposefully delaying while a small 20TH mining farm somewhere was chugging away.

Lets all be happy for gigavps who was mining at 3.5TH since a diff of 9mil.  How nice for him.

Never trust what this company says about the number as Time is the cost.

ASICMiner provides almost nothing due to bad power-to-hash ratio (2.5W roughly for 300Mh/s), true hashrate for people if ordered as there is stock available. Also the representative on the forum, says there are many units available if interested.

I remember way back when BFL first started posting to forums they were saying that they were planning to ship product within three months (HAHA, OH GOD, HAH) and that if you pre-ordered you'd have product in hand within that time frame.

BFL has tried really well to do well by their customers but it was nearly impossible because of a lot of factors, some of which I'll list here:

1. The founders started out with zero experience and zero knowledge of product design and manufacturing, so there was a lot of trial and error, and every time there was an error it added months to the research, design and production of their product.

2. Because they were naive they were also very gullible. Every time the facilities working on their products screwed up or missed a deadline they offered BFL some kind of shiny reward for not dumping them and instead of sticking to their guns BFL took the shiny reward (more wafers in a shorter time, brushed metal cases instead of plain ones, etc etc).

3. Because their initial design was shit, they had to keep revising the product after they had already started production of parts. For example, they had already started producing standard mount chips before they realized that they couldn't keep them from overheating. They had to stop production of their chips altogether and start over with flip chips, which required the additional step of "bumping" the chips (adding little solder balls to them so they could be mounted upside down).

4. They are located in the US, so every company they went to with their product design knew they would be loose with money and so of course they over-charged them and took their sweet time producing parts for them while the other products being produced for other companies for companies who were much less patient and could have gone to any number of other fab houses got pushed ahead of BFL. Meanwhile the fabs kept telling BFL any day now, any day now.

BFL took WAAAAY too much time making sure they produced a beautiful, functional, aesthetically pleasing box that you're going to throw in a closet or garage and ignore.

What BFL should have done was what Avalon did: Start with a working design, test it, slap that shit in an ugly box and ship it. Fucking ship it. Just fucking get it out the door.

But no. They nit picked over every single tiny detail and so every product they've shipped has been either completely obsolete or nearly obsolete before it even got to their customers.

Look at all the people who ordered Jalapenos: The damn things aren't ROIing even now but there are still people waiting for their pre-orders.

I don't feel that BFL knowingly sold product they knew would be obsolete in order to fund their Monarch product. I believe what happened is that BFL simply wasn't able to meet the deadlines they thought they would because they didn't have the experience to produce product like Avalon.

I also believe that by the time they get the Monarch out the door (probably around Septermber-October next year) not only will the product be obsolete, but that most people won't be bothering with mining anymore because the network difficulty will be so high that it won't be possible to produce hardware that can mine efficiently enough to make a profit.

At that point what is supposed to happen is that people begin trading bitcoin instead of mining.

I'm anticipating one of two things will happen:

1. Bitcoin will become scared and the price will shoot up as people stop mining and start trading. The scarcity will come from all the people who bought mining hardware, did their mining, then cashed out their BTC for products, services or cash. The value of Bitcoin will spike for a while, then it will abruptly fall off because all the BTC will be with so few holders that no one will be able to trade for it (this is what typically happens with any capitalist economy).

2. The Bitcoin market will crash and everyone will dump the network because they're not forex traders, they're nerds with specialized computer hardware. I'm speculating that a good 90% or more of the people who mine Bitcoin have no concept of how to trade currencies and are only in it until mining is no longer feasible.

Better not to at this moment as real 100Gh/s module is just barely done in 28nm. Which will be available on or before 30 September 2013.

If like to do seriously, Get ASICMINER's stuff before ask more questions. I personally suggest you to order USB Eruptor as many as possible, each ATX based computer can represent at 120GH/s  (Each 10 represents as 3Gh/s, 3Gh/s by 40 sets, that is 400) while still has space for basic scrypt mining.

Sure. I will buy a 100 AM erupters right now for 0.085 each, or for 0.05 at the end of October. Do you see it happening? Probably not. If you just want do play, then order a few erupters and write off the loss on taxes (somehow :) ). Buying 400 erupters is just dumb at this point. I personally wait for AM blades price drop to under 3 and then red fury seems interesting. Since it's a hobby for me, it seems justifiable to drop a few hundred $$ here and there to play with the new shiny bitcoin toys.

As for BFL, I was one of the stupid ones who got into bitcoin game in April of 2013 after seeing an article in Wired where they showed a jally. I ordered one for $250 and now laughing my ass off at the naïveté. Good times.

BFL is "located" in Kansas. Anyone live near there that can verify? I wonder if picking it up at the store is an option. Or just zerging the store/warehouse/offices whatever. lololol

I think BFL "discontinued" local pickups before they started shipping...

Only people who have to goddamn many money, which are not many people but the early adopters.

Stay away from BLACK FUCKING HOLE { BFL }  , once u get sucked in the black hole , there is no coming out.  :-*

No way, scammed once is enough.

Deal sounds sweet, but they always do.

are you talking about the Monarch 600card? if so you must be crazy that's a fluff piece to keep you interested in BFL !! think about it ......................

Small unit with single fan 600Ghash ???????? are they getting nasa to design it ? the image is of a GTX690 Classified case!!! knocked up and rendered in Blender3D to get your taste buds going


if they build that card i will eat my hat. look at the size of KnC and the 60Ghash boxes BFL make now they gonna (reduce power by 90% size by 80% for arguments sake) get real folks thats a step to far from a company that ships units with broken power supplys and dodgy burnt out mainboards! fuck it i will make a 1Th USB miner that uses 1w and it costs £1999 im taking orders right now let me photoshop some crap together like hashfast lol ...................

I hope you're referring to the monarch PCB concept that is floating around on the net, being two ASICs on one board, otherwise no, sorry not a 690.

Keep in mind that KnC is using a in house(joint venture) ASIC design by ORSoC, and has more to it that it must power(and pay for) as a whole.  Whereas the Hashfast and the upcoming BFL monarch will be using the "Golden Nounce (GD)" ASIC Which is a newer design projected at:

Chip Specifications:

28nm ASIC
Hashing Output: 400 Gigahash/s at nominal clock speed
Power Consumption: less than 0.65 W/GH/s
Designed to be underclocked for greater efficiency, and overclocked for greater performance.

With that said, and BFL claiming for 600GHs (2 chip board), they're underclocking these ASICs a little to achieve the desired hash rate/thermal power envelope.  Dropping each chip to 300GH is a good start. So, a guess of this could be:

.6W * 600 = 360w (BFL projects 350w)  - just a guess

The PCI-e connectors alone (though not stated if it is a 6/8 or dual 8 pin) alone has more than enough power to supply this card(a GTX690 eats over 600w at peak!), and even OC a little- plus the provided 75W off your mainboard as well.  Its a pretty solid design assuming that this is the overall idea behind it.

Honestly, Id love one if it wasn't from BFL.  This design is something id love to have replace my GPU rig with nothing more than plug n play.  

Now only if BFL knew how to deliver: http://bitslammed.com/butterflylabs-sends-another-update/

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ku836/bfl_already_delaying_monarch_until_feb/

PCI-e Specs:
http://www.pcisig.com/developers/main/training_materials/get_document?doc_id=fa4ec3357012d69821baa0856011c665ac770768

KnC Joint venture:
http://www.coindesk.com/a-look-inside-kncminer/

I bought, simply because my current order at BFL will mine almost nothing when it delivered, so why not just grab another piece of toy with already paid money ;D

If I were in your position, I would too!

I still don't even have my Jalepeno.  You get to screw a single customer once, then that customer will never do business with you again.  If you screw everyone once at the same time, then you best cash out your business because its over.

BFL is dead to me.

They forgot to mention, the year in question is 2015.

These guys are clowns, bragging about production capacity with a huge backlog of last-gen products. You would have to be a complete sucker to order anything from them.

+1

Also, "BFL's customer service" is an oxymoron.

all, in I mean ALL, ASIC manufacturers have been playing to stupid suckers that can't add 1+1. Look at ASICMINER and how many millions they made when they were selling the BE at 3BTC when the manufacturing cost is at most .01 BTC. They simply called this community a bunch of stupid greeders and continue to call when they are selling them at .07BTC knowing very well that no one will ever recover the money they invested on the BE and will have to  use a BE as replacement for toilette paper. 

I'll buy some...















When they offer them retail. I'm not putting down any cash without product.

I'll buy some too, if they are free..

BFL wont ever get anymore business from me. Paid 50 BTC for miners. Had they been delivered on time, would have made that back + small profit.
Now will be lucky to make 10BTC back.

i ordered a 60 gh/s from them and i never will give them a single cent again.

The Monarch is over priced in my opinion.  We have cheaper dollar to hashrate ASIC devices out there that will most likely come out before BFL.  I'm going to guesstimate by the time the Monarch is released.. the difficulty will be so high that ROI chances will be slim.  Basically, the same scenario with the majority of BFL's 65nm ASIC devices.  Sure, if you look at 600GH now for today's diff. it seems enticing... but you have to factor in the likely date when you'll receive it and the diff. for that time period. So in BFL's case.. it's anywhere from 2 weeks to 1 year (definitely the latter).

And to answer your initial question; NO.. I will never purchase anything from BFL again.  NEVER.

Monarch: 600 GH/s for $4680 delievered in Feb or later.
Jupiter: 550 GH/s for $4995 delivered in Nov.

The choice is clear. BFL is far too expensive and risky.

Buy from BFL  , instead donate your money to poor at least u will get blessings for putting food on some ones table & feel good about it  :)

If you donate to charity...

I will be very happy for you...

Agreed - I don't trust this company at all.

+1 gold lol

I transferred my early June Jalapeno to Mining by the Ghash (Monarch) to be hosted by BFL for a year.

My choice was probably this:
A - A December delivered Jalapeno that might mine me 1 BTC over a year. And I would have to pay customs which would negate that 1 BTC.
B - Getting 40 Ghash or so in Feb I hope. That might get me 1 BTC over a year. No customs.

My debate came down to "Do I want the novelty of just having a Jalapeno years from now?" and I almost chose yes but the pain of paying tax on something when I could probably buy it on Ebay in December for 100 bucks and have my 40 Ghash is Feb won out...

And there is the great chance that BFL can't deliver on the Monarch and by some act of God I actually get a refund.  ;D

IAS

i payed 139.8 btc for 60ghash back in october 2012. i doubt ill make that back :P
/kick myself in the nuts

l o l !
made my day, now i dont feel so bad about the 140btc :)

I just recently passed on buying one of these babies for 3,000.  I can't trust their shipping dates.

i doubt ill be buying any more untill the dust settles, ie diff not rising so much and the companys lower the prices,
the way things are going right now, you wont get roi on anything unless you can get it in hand today :(

only getting the hashbuster nano`s to have something to play with, they are awsome x)

Meanwhile, someone just spent $1mil with BFL.

Sucker born every minute.

Unless they signed a GigaVPS style NDA to slip equipment out the back door.  Seems more than one person was talking about this at Atlanta.

man that sucks, if you take in mind that 600 gh/s miners wont be so usable in 6 months

Yup, the funny is it is reasonable to expect Monarch delivery no sonner than in 6 months from now, yet there are people preordering it  ???

i cant belive that ppl are still ordering thoose miners, ROI will be few years. When they get their minners difficulty will be higher than anyone predicted

yesterday a company preordered a million USD worth of those mining cards.  what i dont' get is wouldn't they order KNCminers instead

i dont get why they didnt buy some BTCs on low price

Well, KNC is still spitting out miners from their first batch, and is widely expected to meet their november deadlines for batch 2, right?

i guess

Maybe they don't want to deal with firmware upgrades every other day? ;)

J/k, no clue why someone would pre-order from anybody so far in advance anymore. 

the problem is that they have a pre-order for everything before its built... if it wasnt pre-ordering, id consider it! but a company should not put all of the risk that comes with being an investor of a volatile industry on the buyer

stop buying pre-orders of any mining hardware! or dont complain if you get fucked, because your buying a non existant product

Paid for a 5GH box on April 13th.  Numerous assurances I would receive it in 2 months.  After months and months, I'll be getting a noisy coffee warmer this week.  Nope, will never deal with BFL, in particular because of Josh.  I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire.  Obnoxious, arrogant, abrasive self righteous pile of excrement...  I think the CS department will improve with some of the new additions (who seem to care), but never again for me.

you have absolutely right about complainings :D

i so agree! :)

The worst part is...they were making money with our miners and our funds!  Holding it for several months and profiteering.  Interest free loans are great aren't they?  Until the ppl realize and never deal with you again.

you are right, or some cpl of ppl are still inventing it cuz they didnt have any money to start producing it

I doubt someone would invest in Monarch so much. I mean with one million USD one should do some small research before preordering, no  ???

Yes, I am going to buy it with credit card so I can charge back any time if they fail again...

They're accepting credit card again?

BFL advertised "Tape out August 2013". Didn't happen in Aug. Didn't happen in Sep. Didn't happen in Oct. Now it's Nov. They're already several months late.

BFL Monarch: 600 GH/s for $4680 delievered long after Feb.
KnC Jupiter: 550 GH/s for $4995 delivered in Nov.

Why would anybody waste a single second considering a BFL product? It's a guaranteed loser, no matter how you pay for it.

Far smarter people have fallen for far more obvious scams unfortunately. This is the world we live in, Josh knows it, and is raking in a handsome profit.

Heeeee.

I took my  Singles, because there is no way they were going to ship this 600Mh/s on time.
The really great thing was sooooo many daft people swapped to the 600MH/s , that it completely cleared down the queue.

Mined the kit for a month… then dumped it on Ebay.
By the time the 600Mh/s ship… they will be more useless than if people had taken the 50/60Mh/s kit……


But you can bet that in a year they will have a 60TH/s rig for some stupid price…… with an upgrade from the 600Mh/S they did not ship…..

And the shipment time is so crazy. I assume that miners are already working and when they worked for couple a months then they are shipped

please submit your reviews to http://www.bitcoinsniper.com/asic-miners/butterfly-labs/


Let new bitcoin miners know all about BFL

A $4500 Monarch will be lucky to make $600 back if it starts mining in February. And with BFL that is a big IF.
http://mining.thegenesisblock.com

The customer service was not the issue.

In my mind there are only 3 issues:

• the nearly 9 month late delivery
• the extreme amount of noise produced by the unit
• the high power consumption

At the end of the day I rather be called names by support and get a working product on time. Unfortunately BFL doesn't have much going for them at the moment. Why should I give them another chance? The 600GH/s cards look inferior to competitors since they are more expensive etc... Personally for next generation ASICs I am looking at HashFast and Cointerra.

for almost the same price you could have a KNC

if they come at february, some will recive later i am sure