Bitcoin Forum

I think A2 and A3 are the most likely and B4 is near impossible.

To compensate for the lost revenue caused by a ~6 month delay BFL is offering those who ordered in the first two month a 10% or 25% discount voucher *on a future purchase *to be made in the next 45 days. https://forums.butterflylabs.com/bfl-forum-miscellaneous/1037-discount-voucher-policy.html

How ridiculous ?

* Building chips has a high upfront cost, the remaining chips are much cheaper.  Fact.

* Future chips will be much more efficient and cheaper to produce.  Fact.

* Strong competition in the market will force BFL to reduce it's price. Fact. (Not only avalon, There are many more in the race that we don't know about)

To reassure it's customers Josh has offered a guarantee while leaving himself some margin, this time it's not a guarante of ROI... :
What are the chances that someone who purchased their BFL miners with BTC at 6$ to 10$ will make a return on it's investment or maybe get 50% back over the next 5 years ?

Why is it that this "to become" profitable company is not willing to share it's future profit to thanks it's early investors ? (is there a future ?)
And what if, as per B3 scenario, we're not investors at all,  we've at least provided them the money to purchase bitcoins who've since quintupled in price.

Why so selfish and greedy ?

We’ve given our trust to BFL by ordering early and now that they’re being so late it would make sense to expect shares of the company as compensation.

Next step for them is to sell our BTC at 65$, refund VC and together purchase most of their own production ... diluting furthermore the value of our BFL purchases.

these numbers hurt so much :( i feel for you.

i didn't care about my bitcoin wallet for about one year and then i saw bfl, said to myself fuck it, invest my 20 btc, equivalent of $350. now i really regret having lost almost $1k. that's a huge amount of money for a student like me. hopefully shit is gonna be sent soon and i can make back maybe 10 of these 20 this year. but dude, your numbers, i really feel for you. fucking stock exchange. only good for the rich ones and the retarded ones. not good for sane people.

So... "We can't deliver your stuff, but if you send us more money in the next six weeks, we'll give you a discount on more stuff we won't deliver after we don't deliver your original stuff?"

Really?

This is getting to be as epic as pirate@40.

Holy crap, OP - 25 grand?

I'm so glad I decided to quit mining last August, and just buy.

I'm not trying to insult anyone, or anything like that; but just... holy crap.  I bleed for you.

Some of those options don't make any sense, specifically "BFL didn't needed any of the money from pre-orders BUT sold 100% of BTC at maket value."

BFL doesn't accepts BTC directly. You can pay in BTC, but it goes thru BitPay, which takes the BTC and gives BFL cash. BFL never even touches the BTC, so they have zero influence on the market, price, anything. They are a business, and you can't pay a foundry or employees salaries in BTC.

That said, there's a big difference between "We didn't use pre-order money for development/manufacturing" and "We havn't touched the pre-order money for any reason". The development/manufacturing may have already been pre-paid, but they're still a company with upwards of 22 employees that require salaries and a brand new office that requires rent to be paid. I'm guessing operating costs have come out of the pre-order money, but that's to be expected, and isn't wrong in any way.

It's well known BitPay allow to merchant to get either BTC or USB from payments.

I think it's wrong in that given ASIC high initial production costs, the cost for a large vs small batch is relatively the same and if they didn't have had this much early pre-order money they would not have been able to sell cheap chips in the future and recoup their initial investment.

The problem is that they may not even have to recoup their initial investment ,,, it's the early customers who paid most of it and them who will never see a ROI.

Now that their initial costs are behind them,  It's in BFL best financial interest to sell as many chips as they possibly can,,, even if it mean lowering margins.

It's also in bitcoin network's best interest to have as much hashing power as possible.

Even when Josh say, "we won't drop the price" ... When a competitor come out of the dark with a much cheaper hashing product in his hand, BFL will have no other choice that to cut prices.  And fuck their customers once more.

I knew from day one that this business model would not protect the customers investment even if the company become a big money maker.

I wish I could find to my old post that said: BFL should offer a lifetime guarantee of performance for $.  That would mean, for example, That a 1.5ths device paid 30 000$ would entitle the owner to a huge discount for a future v2.0 unit producing 2Ths for 15 000$, ... a very similar outcome to the trades of FPGAs for ASICs.

+1 -That's right dammit - Set them straight.
BFL pays their bills in USD just like the rest of us.
It won't forever, but for now, the USD reigns supreme.

Where is the "BFL took the money and ran" choice?

I just requested a refund for my purchase through PayPal. Immediately after the dispute was filed I received an email with a refund confirmation from BFL. Interesting that they have it setup to automatically respond to a dispute that way.

However, they charged an "adjustment fee" of $13.28USD so I've got another message in to get that fixed. We'll see how that goes.

Note that the PayPal dispute I filed was for item not received. I did ask in the message for a refund, but I wonder if they're just refunding all the disputes or scanning the messages for the word refund. Would be odd to think they have a person actually reading them that fast and taking the proper action (as it's a Sunday afternoon here in Missouri).

I want to trust that they'll follow through, but I can't keep waiting.

Cool story bro. Unless your order was for 12 minirig the fact that they had the money to refund you is meaningless.  Anyway it was most likely locked in their PayPal account.

yeah  there are  60 something days to be 1 year since they scammed the first buyers

with october 2012 delivery date

they by now safelly tuck away the many millions aroudn 25 they made

and the only thing  taht keeps the scam  going

beside  inaba aka josh bfl  oscar worthy string along nomination is that

they actually offer refunds becouse they can balance  the succkers placing orders

to the ones asking for refund

like in any pyramidal scheme

if only  10 or 20 procent would ask for a refund  en mass

bfl would disapear same day with a mesage wi are unde ddos wil return shortly

How did you came with that figure ? (25m$ )

super easy

first 100k chips would come up to 16 mil

to my last math they sold   150 k chips

easy really