I see that argument over and over about why not mine with the gear instead. If it takes an hour to build a single and get it out the door, how much could you mine with a single in that hour? I doubt if you could get much over $10 worth of BTC in that time, but you can get $2500 if you sell the thing and get it out the door. It's far more lucrative to sell the hardware then it is to mine with it. Sure once sales drop off then mining becomes an option. They already have the $2500, getting it 'out of the door' has no effect on their bottom line.Ding ding ding. WINNER!  |
|
|
|
If BFL is taken to court, then no one gets their miners. If they are not, then people get their miners, they just get them late.
So you don't want BFL to be taken to court because the penalties for their illegal activities will be the final nail in the coffin? Why would I want $800 instead of a money machine printing $800/day, even if it is 9 months later than expected? So you are fine with pyramid schemes built on pre-orders as long as you are near enough to the top of the pyramid that you stand a chance of profiting from those beneath you. Very telling. Nope. I do not believe BFL to be a pyramid scheme. They are a legitimate company with many setbacks in their production process. Then why would you worry about people suing and taking BFL down via the courts? You already said you don't care about BFL's illegal activities and just want people to refrain from suing them because you want your money printing machine. There need not be any wrongdoing taking place, in order for the court system to bankrupt and destroy a company. Tax dollars=unlimited. Private lawyers and court fees=finite. Yeah, but that isn't what the discussion is about. (BIG SURPRISE) I asked if he was worried that BFL's illegal activities would be the end of them if they get taken to court. St. Spike said "Exactly". That is why I asked for clarification. |
|
|
|
If BFL is taken to court, then no one gets their miners. If they are not, then people get their miners, they just get them late.
So you don't want BFL to be taken to court because the penalties for their illegal activities will be the final nail in the coffin? Why would I want $800 instead of a money machine printing $800/day, even if it is 9 months later than expected? So you are fine with pyramid schemes built on pre-orders as long as you are near enough to the top of the pyramid that you stand a chance of profiting from those beneath you. Very telling. Nope. I do not believe BFL to be a pyramid scheme. They are a legitimate company with many setbacks in their production process. Then why would you worry about people suing and taking BFL down via the courts? You already said you don't care about BFL's illegal activities and just want people to refrain from suing them because you want your money printing machine. |
|
|
|
If BFL is taken to court, then no one gets their miners. If they are not, then people get their miners, they just get them late.
So you don't want BFL to be taken to court because the penalties for their illegal activities will be the final nail in the coffin? Why would I want $800 instead of a money machine printing $800/day, even if it is 9 months later than expected? So you are fine with pyramid schemes built on pre-orders as long as you are near enough to the top of the pyramid that you stand a chance of profiting from those beneath you. Very telling. |
|
|
|
Josh's bullshit Post of the Day on May 24th was "As for the Singles, hopefully next week... we should have some boards coming in on Tuesday I think."
Another week gone by and still no singles shipped.
IIRC they started "shipping" jalapenos at the start of May. May is now gone by and they've shipped how many jale's? 100 tops?
There is obviously zero bitcoin enthusiasts with a background in Law because BFL should have been taken to court months ago.
If BFL is taken to court, then no one gets their miners. If they are not, then people get their miners, they just get them late. So you don't want BFL to be taken to court because the penalties for their illegal activities will be the final nail in the coffin? |
|
|
|
If people want to hear about sony, they can check the other bfl threads since the history is rehashed in every one. It's rough to wade through this crap. It's like watching another superman or batman or spiderman movie, and they have to go through the origin again for half of the movie. Move on. bring up new info.
There was new info in this thread. Erk said people are smearing Sonny's name and that he forced to plead guilty. Others responded with Sonny's trial history. The history is only rehashed because someone is trying to re-write it. Fine then my message is to him too. I'm an equal opportunity crotchety m'fer. Start a new thread in the legal/general/butthurt forum. If all BFL threads turn you off so much, stop clicking on them. You can go to forums.butterflylabs.com for more carefully moderated views of BFL. This thread says BFL ASIC Status 5/29. We are discussing that. Please stop your off topic complaints and attempt at thread derailment. |
|
|
|
If people want to hear about sony, they can check the other bfl threads since the history is rehashed in every one. It's rough to wade through this crap. It's like watching another superman or batman or spiderman movie, and they have to go through the origin again for half of the movie. Move on. bring up new info.
There was new info in this thread. Erk said people are smearing Sonny's name and that he forced to plead guilty. Others responded with Sonny's trial history. The history is only rehashed because someone is trying to re-write it. |
|
|
|
Is it too much to ask for one BFL thread to stay on topic? Unless this sonny guy is actually running the pick and place machine, i dont give a flying fuck. We are here to talk about the hardware or lack of it.
This thread is exactly on topic. Every time BFL posts another "two weeks until delivery" update people ask why it will take another two weeks. Then the speculation beings as to why BFL failed again to deliver on their promises. Then someone points out that this is the nature of a long con, they string you along until finally they run aground. Then some newcomer to the forums defends Sonny Vleisides and says it was either an IRS witch hunt or that we are smearing his name with these fraud allegations. Then someone posts the well documented history of Sonny's fraud conviction for lottery scams. This cycle can be broken in two ways. 1) BFL could actually start delivering on their promises 2) People could accept the history of Sonny Vleisides and stop posting disinformation about him It only seems tedious because BFL has "updated" like this dozens of times. |
|
|
|
It could be a more advanced long con. Their CEO or whatever is a convicted con man, and spent time in prison for fraud. It's possible that he has learned from his mistakes, meaning he is now a "better" con artist. The "best" con men tend not to go to jail because they operate inside the law as much as possible.
Here's an example... Let's say Sonny is drawing a huge salary and one day BFL announces that their venture has failed and that they are declaring bankruptcy. It's clear where the money went - right into Sonny's bank account. What did he do illegal? Will they be able to put him in jail?
The person you are trying to smear, posted a long straightforward explanation of the events on this forum last year, why don't you take the time to read it first? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110868.0I would imagine most have read it. It is very old news. You can read where he pled guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud which you can read here: http://ia600409.us.archive.org/34/items/gov.uscourts.cacd.383556/gov.uscourts.cacd.383556.136.0.pdfYou can read the indictment here http://ia600409.us.archive.org/34/items/gov.uscourts.cacd.383556/gov.uscourts.cacd.383556.8.0.pdfThe name of the case was: California Central District Court, Case No. 2:07-cr-00134: USA v. Vleisides et al as you can read here: http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/case.html?id=1500526He wasn't just mixed up in a betting company. He owned the shell corporations that funneled the money back to the gang. They didn't buy lottery tickets, they used a little of the money to pay "winners" of small amounts. They kept and spent the rest. None of the people who got scammed out of $20,000,000 got their money back. They targeted senior citizens who were retired. Every so often, an "Erk" shows up and tries to deflect and obscure Sonny Vleisides' history. |
|
|
|
I find this situation fascinating from a psychological perspective.
If someone repeatedly lies to you, why would you suddenly think that lie #19, lie #23, or lie #58 might actually be true? What makes you think that this time they are telling the truth, as opposed to the previous 30 or 40 or 50 lies?
This company has proven that they can not be considered honest and trustworthy. At least to anyone who has done more than 30 minutes of research on the forums here.
Fascinating situation...
Broken analog watches tell the correct time twice a day. Both of these comments are comparing apples to oranges.. This situation is more like "When your meth addicted friends tells you on a monthly basis that he "is clean now" and "I'm never going to touch that stuff again". It may be true at the time... and it may be his/her intention. But after the 4th, 5th, 20th time they do it, you just nod your head and say "Good for you" all the while not really believing that this will be the reality. ..The people who did not order BFL, or cancelled their orders are the people who don't really have a relationship with that person, and say in a very blunt way "whatever, you'll fall off the wagon soon enough", and even at times would rather see them fail so they won't have to deal with seeing them later on. The people who do have orders with BFL are like the friends or family of that person. They don't really believe it will happen, or believe in the timing, but only hope that one day what they say comes true. I personally think the company doesn't really plan for the setbacks, and when given an expectation by a vendor (say 1-2 weeks), they tell their customer base "1 WEEK!". By now it is at the 7-8 month mark, but they are still going. The way I figure it is, if the company was a true scam, they would have taken the money already and moved on to a new scam. This is beyond the meaning of "long con". The only thing that will tell is time. I could see a possibility that they take too long, and only a handful of people getting these devices while they are still profitable. That would be my personal opinion of a "worst case scenario". At that point either they can get back several returns until they file bankruptcy, and at that point, everyone looses their money that still have not received their product. Best case scenario is within the next 2 weeks they get anywhere CLOSE to shipping out to their reported amount of 400 per day. I have this sneaking suspicion that the reality will probably somewhere in between. It could be a more advanced long con. Their CEO or whatever is a convicted con man, and spent time in prison for fraud. It's possible that he has learned from his mistakes, meaning he is now a "better" con artist. The "best" con men tend not to go to jail because they operate inside the law as much as possible. Here's an example... Let's say Sonny is drawing a huge salary and one day BFL announces that their venture has failed and that they are declaring bankruptcy. It's clear where the money went - right into Sonny's bank account. What did he do illegal? Will they be able to put him in jail? The lottery scams that Sonny was convicted of went on for a decade before the police finally made arrests. If BFL is paying Sonny $500K a year in salary, why wouldn't he want to string it out forever? He wouldn't even be a very well paid CEO at that figure, but BFL could be leasing cars, houses, boats, etc. Who knows? Money goes in, very little comes out in terms of hash rate. I remember in early April everyone declaring that the "BFL locusts" were coming. Then again in late April. Then again in early May, and again in late May. Now we have 1 more day till June. Maybe Smoothie or Puerto can collect a master list of all BFL shipping date promises. |
|
|
|
If one miner is earning BFL $8k/month, why would they sell it, for $2500?
(if you don't take into account the AM blades, that are heavly overpriced).
LOL Oh man I can't believe people sometimes. BFL is priced too low, so they must be mining to compensate. ASICMiner is priced too high, but they are blatantly mining on the hardware before they sell it (currently at what, 30TH/s?). Love it. When people want to support something, they will twist any feature or point to the positive even if it means becoming obviously idiotic. Just watch politicians during an election campaign, all ethics goes out the window. FTFY. |
|
|
|
The math still doesn't work in FPGA's favor at that price. In order for the math to work, FPGAs need to be $200-$300ish for a ~400m/h unit...
Which is within the realm of what the Blackarrow Lancelot FPGAs are going for ($269 - $350). I agree with you though, a lot of the FPGAs that are being sold are grossly overpriced - like I can't understand buying the ModMiner for over $1000, when two Lancelots will give the same or better hash rate for less. Heck, you could get four Lancelots (if you buy on the group manufacturing deal) for about the same price as one ModMiner, and you would have 1.6 GH/s. Once ASICs begin shipping in mass quantities though, there will be no reason to purchase FPGAs any longer. Right now, I think they can still be (mildly) profitable. FPGAs made a lot more sense when the difficulty was lower and BTC were $6 each. Then it was barely profitable to run GPUs if you lived where power was expensive. |
|
|
|
..it is just lame when someone decides to actually waste more time creating a thread and kind of "misleading" people with the synopsis than it would to search for 1 minute longer. Then the thread devolves into the typical BFL trolls saying it's a Ponzi scheme, and the BFL fanboys (who somehow can't acknowledge that there are some seriously messed up things going on with that company), arguing back and forth. Your typical thread derailment.
On the other hand. Now people know how the process was resolved. Anyone who can't get a response to a refund request can come to this thread and find out exactly which process elicited the correct result for the OP. There have been several complaints about BFL responding to customer inquiries and having at least one thread on the forums that contains a method to obtain the correct response to a BFL inquiry will probably save time in the long run. We can link directly to the message that contains the relevant information and people need not wade through pages of back and forth. |
|
|
|
It was a joke.
I will check for firmware upgrades for my sense of humor module. |
|
|
|
I find this situation fascinating from a psychological perspective.
If someone repeatedly lies to you, why would you suddenly think that lie #19, lie #23, or lie #58 might actually be true? What makes you think that this time they are telling the truth, as opposed to the previous 30 or 40 or 50 lies?
This company has proven that they can not be considered honest and trustworthy. At least to anyone who has done more than 30 minutes of research on the forums here.
Fascinating situation...
Broken analog watches tell the correct time twice a day. |
|
|
|
I will let you assume whatever you want. I prefer: Well, lets assume you order 2 x 3.5GH/s chips to make 7GH/s. BFL has been ordering small batches of chips (a few hundred).
What happens when their 2.5GH/s bin is empty, but they still have 3.5GH/s chips. They can make your unit chips, but they can't make other people's who ordered the 5GH/s unit and can use the chips they have in stock. So ordering might "affect" your position in the queue very slightly. But it probably won't be noticeable.
Your converse assumption is not necessarily true. Chips binned for 3.5GH/s can also run reliably at 2.5GH/s. Chips binned @ 2.5GH/s cannot run reliably at higher rates. They can make 5GH/s units out of chips binned for 7GH/s but not vice versa. The counter example case is: If every chip binned at 3.5GH/s, they could make both 5GH/s and 7GH/s units out of that bin with 2 chips per unit. If every chip binned at 2.5GH/s, they could only make 5GH/s without adding a 3rd chip (which might not be economical due to their margins). |
|
|
|
They're just binning like GPUs do, find ones that work better than typical and sell them for more.
Thanks for the clarity Maqifrnswa, but Philips; the original author in this chain of comments, had stated that this was more than just a firmware update, but a hardware update as well two pages back. In which case I was pointing out to him that should it be a change of hardware that required new production it would be hard to justify his exact same place in the queue should he chose to upgrade. What I said is that for 100$ you will get selected chips guaranteed up to 7GH. So a firmware update is not sufficient. It may work or it may not for your 5GH unit. That is why I made the 7950 vs 7970 comparison. Well, lets assume you order 2 x 3.5GH/s chips to make 7GH/s. BFL has been ordering small batches of chips (a few hundred). What happens when their 3.5GH/s bin is empty, but they still have 2.5GH/s chips. They can't make your unit until they receive more 3.5GH/s binned chips, but they can make other people's who ordered the 5GH/s unit and can use the chips they have in stock. So ordering might "affect" your position in the queue very slightly. But it probably won't be noticeable. |
|
|
|
crazy temps I see  this board die very soon Since when is 76C crazy? I run my GPU's at that all the time mining for years. I'm sure AMD/Nvidia use a higher quality process. Without knowing where and how the temperature measurements were taken on the BFL chip, it is impossible to know if the temp is too high. AMD has several on die measuring spots, they then do interpolation to determine an "average" overall die temperature. They also profile the chip performance to know what temperatures begin to damage the chip. BFL might have a diode to measure on die, they might be measuring from the chip mount on the PCB, etc. It also depends on how far from the point of measurement the hottest spots are. |
|
|
|
since this is the prototype of a 50gigahash I'd say just give it at least another 2-12 months.
I think that if they had the money (and chips in quantity, that should not be far from the truth), the should theoretically be able to ship every order in a short tf, like, 1 month. They should simply outsource everything, from the pcb to the case/packaging... However, i think that since that they lack liquidity, they will do it in house and as slow as possible. Why don't they start selling batches of their chips as well? That could have a fixed delivery time... Liquidity problems?! That one rig has scored them over $8k the past 30 days, it says so on the screen. That's their rent paid for at the very least! $8k is a drop in the bucket when you start figuring 30+ employees, wafers, PCB, PSU, marketing etc. I bet BFL is burning over $500k a month easily. That is about what I presumed. 7 months x $500K and they still have to come up with $3M-6M in parts to be able to manufacture their backlog of orders. Once they start shipping in bulk, we will have a better feel for how much money they have left. |
|
|
|
And you can be a felon for mouthing off to a cop. Which ALL cops deserve. Yes, I know that is not directly relevant to this case. I'm just sayin' that in the modern Imperial court, Felon don't mean much, morally speaking.
Sorry if I missed a post before this, but I'm taking it at face value (so if I come out looking like a fool, so be it, it wouldn't be the first time  ). Are you suggesting that it's a felony to swear at a police officer (which it's not)? Also I don't get where the dislike for all police comes from. I know I'm probably missing something here but I had to post this anyway just in case. Technically, it's not a felony to tell a cop to get bent. But he/she/it can and will make something up (usually "resisting arrest" even where there was neither resistance nor arrest) and will be believed one thousand percent by the Infernal Repairs department. And he can/will beat the shit out of you and get away with it. My dislike for all police is simple enough. I could just cite 44 years of living in a crumbling Empire, but I'll be more specific. I dislike criminal gangs, regardless of WHAT mafia they belong to. Anyone who still thinks that police are there to protect anyone BUT governments and their favored subjects (i.e. NOT the commoners) either needs to get off the happy pills or get out more. I have no real fear of other gangs, as I've no intention of stepping on their turf. But cops are just about always looking for trouble, so as to exacerbate it. They are above the law in all but a few "throw the people a bone" cases. They routinely get away with murder (as documented daily) and they make boastful claims about how dangerous their jobs are. I could go on for pages citing chapter and verse, but instead I'll leave you with a name to google. William Norman Grigg. Only "elected" officials get my ire more than cops. It's an immoral profession. People who live in places that have dysfunctional police departments tend to hate all police. |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
