The problem with litecoin isn't the future possibility of a shadow government creating a litcoin ASIC, it's the real present danger of the network being taken over by bot-herders.

Also because no one accepts it.

Just as an additional thing to consider, I don't think I would have participated in this, because my feeling is the value will be much higher pretty soon (we'll hit $14 by next week). I would rather be buying bitcoin right now than selling.

Every ASIC vendor is reporting that they don't have their chips yet. Right now, it seems the closest is ASICMINER, who is supposed to have theirs finished next week. Because of their business model, you can expect their testing to have an effect on difficulty.

After community outcry, BFL has said that they will only do testing on their own testnet. I'm not really sure about bASIC and Avalon.

Because then he would only get $1,432 because his order is an upgrade order. By selling them together, he gets the full cost of the an SC unit.

Per the new contest rules (as of week 10), the FPGA is no longer part of the giveaway. Only a little single sc will be awarded (once available).

If everyone relays blocks with full transactions, then there's no risk in doing so, although there is an advantage. Sorry, but a block that is faster to copy will propagate faster. If your block gets to a mining pool, say deepbit, ahead of another that that pool will use that block to mine their next block. With that block going out in front of another block on the network, there will be some miners mining the other block, but the majority of miners mining your block.

If deepbit finds the next block first then the other block is orphaned. That's why the person mining single transaction blocks is relaying via  deepbit. They are the pool with the highest hashshare, which improves the odds of their block being in the chain for the next solved block.

I think I may have misunderstood the tone of the message I quoted. I've removed "yours included".

This isn't an attempt at a defense for BFL, it's an accurate accounting of what is going on so that people can use good information to make their business decisions. The problem with a lot of the comments in this topic, is that there is no temperament to reality. It's "BFL are scammorz, har har" which doesn't help anyone.

I think that the two key words in the quoted section are dishonest and naive. BFL has shown themselves to be dishonest through ommission about their delivery dates, allowing customers to continue to believe that chips would be arriving in late November when they knew that they were making clock buffer adjustments that would delay at least until mid-December. Because of the competitive environment for ASICs, it is understandable why they would do this, but it's important to know that they did this when deciding whether or not you can trust them regarding future statements. Essentially, if BFL says on January 8th that the chips will arrive soon, this aspect of dishonesty justifies a person to ignore the information until there is provable evidence that the chips are in BFLs hands. I would even go so far as to say the chips need to be integrated into a working prototype, and yochdog and the other guy go there and see it and report positively. Only does it makes sense to plan around a promised BFL shipping date.

The other word is naive and it does seem that they have some experience to gain with respect to business relationships. This is pretty normal for a new company though, and as such I think it is overboard to label anyone there as an "idiot". From what I've seen, the people at BFL are pretty smart.

As far as being a "scammer", I still feel it is highly doubtful that the intention here was to collect preorder money and then run with it with no product. However, I still feel a scammer tag is warranted and I've laid out the case for that here.



I read those documents and I think you may have misunderstood what they said. Sonny was just part of an illegal lottery. People were still paid out. It seems that some people focus on the idea that they didn't buy tickets, but that was a strong feature of their lottery. If they bought tickets from the government, then the highest payout they could expect is half of what they put in. This is because government lotteries are not used as wealth redistribution, but for funding government programs (typically schools). So, instead, they offered tickets with a higher payout that would be validated by the government lottery. The people got paid as according to their voluntary agreements, and they actually got paid much better than if they participated in the government sanctioned lottery.

However, the government HATES it when you muscle in on their turf. The business model is essentially the equivalent of selling book orders in Bugsy Segal's backyard. The fact that they were giving people a more fair game while cutting out funds that should have gone to the public treasury was pretty much infuriating to the AG. That's why the hammer fell. The fraud argument from the government is that Sonny's company was supposedly representing themselves as a sanctioned government lottery. Maybe they were, I don't really know because the document lacked evidence, and the government's motivation is suspect. But this has nothing to do with defrauding little old ladies.

You're right. I don't know what I was thinking.

Would the scammer tag be removed once BFL ships?

I personally do think a scammer tag is warranted. It has been applied to others who promised something and couldn't deliver at the time, regardless of circumstance. For example, Nefario felt that his legal circumstance warranted his actions regarding GLBSE, and I kind of agree with him, but I also agree that him holding onto the coins and not distributing shareholder accounts warranted a scammer tag. Other examples are the PPTs that are paying back slowly.

The problem I have with BFL is not that they promised in June a delivery in October. At that point in time, I didn't really believe it and even made posts saying to expect delivery in March.

The problem I have is that a few months later when other ASIC vendors announced their products, BFL reiterated that their October date was solid. In my opinion, this caused people to not invest in ASCIMINER, and not preorder bASIC and Avalon, and instead go with BFL. In other words, BFL was pushing forward this statement to their financial gain. It's one thing when you are the only vendor in town, but when you are making statements as a means to block competition and get more money, then a scammer tag is warranted.

BFL really should have known that they would not make the October date by September. But we got statements about bullet runs and whatnot. The fact that BFL was making design adjustments as in possibly October, but seemingly as late as November shows that the initial slippage is not because of their fab, but because of BFL's design team. The fab can be blamed for this recent change in dates (to a certain point, BFL is ultimately responsible for their fab), but the other dates are all BFL.

For what it's worth, I think bASIC should also have a scammer tag. I don't get how they had a working prototype and suddenly have no design.

If you fail to see it, then I'm left wondering what your experience has been with vendors like BFL's fab. In my experience, they misrepresent themselves so consistently that your only option is to not trust what they say. I think BFL's issue was then trusting a vendor they had no prior relationship with, a failure on their part, but one that is easy to see how it happened. I personally have been involved in a project with a pretty similar outcome, where our trust in such a vendor ended up with 0 product on launch day. That experience has it so that I always have checkpoints early and often in my projects with these vendors, and even with new employees.

The problem with pirate wasn't that he had paid out before. The problem with pirate was he was offering 7% weekly interest on all deposits, making his business an obvious HYIP/Ponzi. People like myself spent months trying to convince people that the quacking like a duck was indeed coming from a duck. This has no bearing of a relationship to this scenario where BFL has a pretty modest business plan to execute. The fact that you are conflating these does a disservice to the bitcoin community because it will make newcomers complacent towards the real problems with HYIP scams. Once BFL delivers, those who did not live through the pirate era will see this post as proof that some future HYIP scammer is okay.

Think about the consequences of your words before you post.

There's no right to anonymity. If someone wants to remain anonymous, they need to conduct their online persona as such. This means using TOR or at least a VPN, but additionally not leaking personal information about themselves.

There was a case on Reddit where some guy was operating a bunch of scummy message boards (called subreddits), and a reporter doxxed him. He ended up losing his job and other things. While it sucks for him, he both revealed enough about himself that he could be found, and made himself a target by his actions. This is a recipe to have your identity revealed.

Well, 0.39668 BTC and no risk would be the same as .4 with .83% risk, but .39995 and no risk is better from an expected value point of view.

There is a propagation risk to taking on more transactions. If you find a block and another miner finds a smaller block within the next few seconds, the smaller  block may be sent through the network faster, effectively orphaning your block. This translated into maybe a 0.83% risk, but it's still a cost. When pool operators are charging 2% PPS, that .83% represents over 1/3rd of their revenue. Thus a pool will likely not include as many transactions as possible.

IME, you have to learn to ignore bitcointalk drama. I moved over a little at first just to make sure that the payouts came as expected and did analysis to make sure the numbers on my side matched the numbers on their side. It all came up fine, so really I don't care if it's a pass through or it finds its own blocks.

That said, it is a new pool, so make sure your mining config has a backup pool so if this one becomes unresponsive, you are mining elsewhere.

You could put it up for sale on BitMit. You won't get the coins until it sells and it ships to them, but it's a pretty good way to liquidate gift cards.

This really is not the difference you are making it out to be, but if you think this is that important, imagine putting a large contribution towards an Ouya or any number of kickstarter projects.

The problem here is treating bitcoin strictly as an investment, when it is more functional as a currency. I have an ASIC preorder from the first day, meaning I took $800 in fiat that I had sitting in my Mt Gox account and converted it to bitcoins and then bought an upgrade. At that time, I guess I could have bought $800 in bitcoin and sat on it and I'd have over $1600 now, but I really didn't have plans to buy more bitcoin. If I did have such plans, I would have bought the SC upgrade and bought some bitcoin. Fundamentally, though, buying bitcoin as an investment and buying a miner are different actions and it doesn't make sense to comingle their finances any more than comingling the cost of an Ouya with bitcoin.


I agree with this. Really, it was delivery after the halving that dealt the largest blow to profitability because no matter how many other ASICs were out there, everyone was still getting twice as much.

Sure, they don't exist. But you can't plan a business on the hope that they will continue to not exist. There is every indication that this guy's investment in his GPU rigs won't generate 18 cents/day (factoring power cost) within a few months. Running around comparing ASICs to mythological beings is hazardous to other people's ability to make smart decisions with their money. No one is genetically engineering fairies right now, but people are designing ASIC processing machines.