Bitcoin Forum

Has anyone heard anything about this?  I caught a snippet of this discussion -somewhere- but when I wanted to go back and read in more depth I couldn't find the article again.

The premise of the article was:

BFL chips = 20 days from the foundry.  Delivery to chip buying customers=100 days.  Float = 80 days.

Accusation: BFL is selling chips and using the 80 days worth of float as a way to have chip buyers finance their chip purchases.  They are using the float and that free financing to obtain chips - at no cost to themselves - that they are building production units out of.

Does this ring a bell with anyone?  Can anyone point me to the article/discussion concerning this?  There was a lot more depth to the article than just this, but it seems to have disappeared.

Havent read anything on that, but doesnt sound too far fetched.  There are many business like that.  A business orders a product from a manufacturer, it ships, and that manufacturer invoices the business, but the payment terms says that its due within 30 or even 60 days.  Well, in that mean time the business will attempt to sell the product at their marked up price before the invoice is due, essentially having the product pay for itself and they business keeps the profit and never had to come out of pocket.  This is a pretty standard business model.

Not saying that that is what BFL is doing, but if they are, its not out of the ordinary.

To be fair, if you're not running your business like this, you're doing it wrong.  Buy on credit, sell with markup before credit is due.

I would imagine that he is using 80 days to combine orders, which would potentially get him a better price from the foundry and also just simplify ordering, packaging and the like.  He probably also wanted to give themselves a buffer between all the orders they are currently shipping out, and when the chips arrive for shipping. 

I don't think they have an immediate money crunch where they would need to spend incoming money on funding their current orders because they continue to get preorders for units.  I imagine just putting the smaller Minirig up for sale got them a million dollars from anxious buyers.  If I've learned one thing from these forums, it's that people will throw money at miners with only the slightest hope that they'll ever even receive them.

So it's more likely just a management thing.  Put all the orders together, get a better deal, package them at the same time, ship them at the same time.  Just makes sense.

20 days from placing the order at foundry to delivery of chips sounds very optimistic

Does 20 day include, packaging and bumping ?

It's 100 days delivery time from order date, and 50% up front, escrow for group buyers, see the "group buys" section in "hardware".

BFL are still packaging and bumping  the 70,000 chips they received in feburary --- they would need to change the whole process to meet those times

You are referring to Kernel32's group buy.

Go to the Group Buy section and it will refresh your memory.

How about mentioning the bit where it takes GlobalFoundries 2months to make a wafer from the time BFL have gathered enough orders from people to fund a wafer run?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhsKCnDD3F8


Or the bit where you only have to pay 50% up front and the balance on delivery?

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/announcements/3014-butterfly-labs-announces-bulk-chip-sales.html


Or is this just another smear thread the mods don't care about?

Nice try.
If they have already done one wafer run, the lead time is cut dramatically because they don't have to make the layer masks from scratch. They just do the etching and slicing, which is far easier to schedule. So no, it shouldn't take 100 days of lead time to get more chips.

Censorship is always the go to card for scam artists. BFL spokespuppets like Erk reach for it constantly. I am surprised BFL hasn't threatened people with SLAPPs, or have they?   :o

Reminds of a song " Can't SLAPP this"  :D

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/SLAPP

I'm just glad I got my unit,FINALLY  ::)

anything is possible with BFL, no matter what they do it will always end up a mess with long delays and customer getting buttfucked

They will used the 60 days to mine for themselves!!