Spreading fud huh? So quoting Toms comment in his own thread that he is using cell based ASIC is FUD huh? Nice to know.
Saying that's the same thing as a structured ASIC when it's not and claiming that means it's going to have inferior power consumption to BFL's supposed ASIC (which is almost certainly going to be cell-based itself if it actualy exists since even major manufacturers with really high-volume products don't have the cash to do full custom ASICs these days) is definitely spreading FUD. |
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Ordering chips from eASIC? that sounds reasonable. Sharing profits of 7% per week with random people on the internet? that doesn't sound reasonable. eASIC make what are known as structured ASICs. They have much higher power consumption and per-unit costs than standard-cell ASICs, and I'm not convinced that BFL could fulfil even the vague promises they've given about power consumption using them. More importantly Inaba has claimed one of the competing miners, bASIC, won't be able to achieve anywhere near the power efficiency of the Bitforce SC because they're using structured ASICs. (From what I can tell bASIC actually describe their chips as using the full ASIC design process and not a structured ASIC; Inaba was just spreading FUD about the competition.) |
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Franky may not know the difference between an FPGA, an ASIC, and a structured ASIC. But you are making the situation even worse. A blanket "this is ridiculous" or "this is beyond absurd" is not a response. Either do some PR or STFU. I'm not sure Inaba does either to be honest: Ok, lets deconstruct this a minute. BFL has stated that our chip is a custom ASIC, end of story. That's what it is. bASIC is a Cell Based ASIC, which is another name for a sASIC for all intents and purposes. So we have a parity there; we've both stated what our chip is. Cell based ASICs are not "another name for a sASIC"; they're basically what most non-technical people would think of as a "fully custom" ASIC. Very few modern digital ASICs are actually full custom designs because they're so much more expensive to design and don't give that much performance improvement. |
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I agree, and yet that's what happens. Such is the absurdity of Ponzi schemes and the way they turn large numbers of otherwise intelligent people into irrational morons. Have you considered group conformity effects here? If everybody around them is insisting that they're an idiot for even thinking that BS&T is a ponzi and that only stupid people don't understand BS&T's business model, even a lot of intelligent people are going to irrationally go along with the group consensus. There is literally no such thing as a non-irrational person. Doesn't exist. Why wouldn't this apply equally to everyone who deposited money with Pirate? If we can assume that every reasonable person must have known it was a scam, then everyone who deposited money with Pirate was paying Pirate to steal money from others and give it to them. It should apply to everyone who convinced other people to invest money in Pirate and insisted that all the people calling it a Ponzi were trolls. |
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Traditional angel funding (in the unlikely event anything significant's ever repaid) is probably the harshest to collect on since there generally aren't hard terms defining exactly what should happen, except when $10m+ companies with a brigade of lawyers are able to draft it up in a satisfactory manner. So, you might get a slip of paper (if lucky) saying you own 10% of Bullocks, LLC - aaaand... well - good luck turning that into anything useful. With regards to that, debt is a very attractive investment, because it has easy-to-define terms. I'm strolling way off-topic, though. Which is of course part of the reason the SEC has "accredited investor" rules which restrict those kinds of investments to the wealthy - anyone else is almost certain to get scammed. |
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As already mentioned, Butterfly Labs is a corporation with 22 employees and some shareholders. The corporation is the legal entity who receives funds, processes the orders
and delivers the products. What you have mentioned does not apply to a corporation. If you have any questions, please ask and we'll clarify as much as possible. Isn't Sonny (the convicted scammer) one of the directors of said corporation? |
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I think it's borderline ridiculous to think a scam would first start with the heavy engineering required to develop FPGA's just as a trick to hook us for a larger ASIC run. If you think they started out with the intention to scam, well then I think they've realized they've stumbled onto a "more profitable if legitimate" business. Developing FPGA's is not trivial, nor is the amount of engineering that has gone into BFL's already developed products. Not only that, BFL also has competitors- some of whom also are offering pre-orders for ASIC's by the end of the year. A competitor could have at any point scooped BFL by announcing their ASIC's first or developing them earlier It doesn't require that much heavy engineering; I did a fair bit of work on bitstreams for one or two of the competing boards despite having no prior FPGA development experience whatsoever, and I believe someone else has been building a mining farm out of home-built FPGA boards soldered on a hotplate. The FPGAs that BFL are using are a bit trickier on the board-design side but probably easier on the bitstream-development side, so really it all balances out in the end. |
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Yeah, that didn't add up to me either. I was always under the impression bitstreams can't effect it's "power" or "voltage", nor would it change automatically even if you pushed it hard via overclocking. The worst that happens is invalids or errors in the output.
Well, the FGG484 package that Enterpoint are using is apparently much worse at dissapating heat compared to the CSG484 package that Ztex's boards use, but... |
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Interesting: Some bitstreams such as some current “220” bitstreams can use excessive power and hence generate heat that is impossible to extract from the FPGA packaging. This may damage FPGAs and our warranties will not support boards damaged by running “220” bitstreams or similar. The maximum recommended bitstream is currently “200”. If in doubt email bitcoin.support@enterpoint.co.uk for a list of approved bitstreams. |
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KickStarter has shown upfront financing can be highly effective.
Sure, there are flame-outs. That does not detract from the successes.
I'm not sure whether there's actually been a large-scale Kickstarter project that's actually delivered yet. In particular, a lot of the high-profile ones for electronic doodads have been massively delayed, and most of the really huge gaming ones aren't even due to give anything to backers for some time. |
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As for a scammer being an asset to the community, maybe, I mean, Bruce Wagner engaged the community with his bitcoin show and meetups and could have been thought of as an asset in that way. However when his history was exposed his entire credibility went down the drain and he hasn't been doing any since then. I think at least Bruce Wagner has served his time right, he might deserve a second chance
Bruce Wagner's recently started using his reputation and SEO-foo to start scamming people who're trying to buy Bitcoins, from what I've read elsewhere in the forums. So no. |
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What's fraud? That we shipped orders for FPGAs late or that we have taken preorders for the ASICs? In either case, I don't see where there is any fraud or what the FTC has to do with it, please explain.
I'm thinking you might not know what a Ponzi is, so I would kindly suggest that you read up on what a Ponzi is. I'm not sure it's even possible to have a Ponzi scheme when products are delivered... it may be possible, but it seems unlikely. In either case, even if it were possible to have a Ponzi of Products, can you describe how BFL would fit into such a convoluted picture? Quite right. It's got to be a pre-order scam if anything. If I recall correctly, there's an old scammer trick where they deliver a bunch of relatively low-valued orders in order to prove honesty, then take in a much larger amount of money on the back of their established reputation and run off with the proceeds. If you remember Pirate, his MO for building trust was fairly similar. |
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@salty Thanks! However, I got some messages say: Icarus Detect: Test failed at /dev/ttyUSB0: get 00000000, should: 000187a2
.
. That's almost certainly the wrong COM port. Try /dev/ttyUSB2 and /dev/ttyUSB3. |
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However you want to phrase it, BFL has always been at the forefront of disruptive product announcement.
Yeah, they managed to hugely disrupt the market of FPGA boards that could actually be built by announcing impossible specs for their Bitforce Singles and again by pre-announcing their ASIC line with equally impressive specifications. Now, disruptive products, that they haven't been so good at so far. |
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There's new official release of poclbm with native Stratum support. Can anybody try it on Stratum-powered pools and confirm that it's stable? Unfortunately I don't have any GPU around  . Gah! I was using a patched version of poclbm with my toy FPGA miner, but it's down right now due to me not having the right software installed to reload the bitstream onto it. Sorry. |
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This statement to add to the contract is merely bringing any unforeseen circumstances back into the fold & control of shareholders. I run my offerings to the best of my abilities and have no intentions of abusing such power. As the asset issuer & manager, I need the latitude to make decisions on how to proceed in certain situations & to decide which situations warrant a motion. Hopefully at some point GLBSE will support polls, making things much easier. This is quite dishonest of you, Obsi. The entire reason that Nefario intervened in DMC was because Diablo-D3 wasn't running the company in the best interests of the shareholders. With the extra clause you're trying to add the shareholders have no control at all - if you say that something doesn't need to go to a shareholder vote, or that it doesn't violate the terms of the contract, or it's in the best interests of the shareholders, your say on the matter is final no matter how obviously bogus it might be. |
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I haven't yet read about about these other protocols, but I'm really disappointed to see more protocol proliferation. Getblocktemplate is well established, peer reviewed, and is good for bitcoin's decentralized security. I hope GBT gains whatever features its missing so it can subsume these things. Having yet another protocol to cope with is a bummer.
The problem with GBT is not so much what features it's missing, from what I can tell. Everything that can be done with Stratum can be done with GBT, it'd just far require more bandwidth and every piece of mining software would need code to parse and serialize Bitcoin transactions and blocks and to implement a whole bunch of different cases. Plus, I suspect most mining software would end up requiring a different subset of the GBT protocol than the one bitcoind supports so it's not like using the same protocol for both would even help solo miners. |
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As far as I gather he has made investments that take time to mature rather then let money sit. I think it's rational... I don't know maybe I am missing something. The part where investors are trying to stamp him into ground rather than try to get what is going on with his vision is what kills me.
No. He's made investments in mining bonds which are, for the most part, pretty much guaranteed to lose value over time and may even lose value at a greater rate than they pay out dividends. usagi's proposal involves giving him a fixed 20% of the revenue from everything - including those mining bonds - effectively incentivizing him to invest in bonds that are guaranteed to wipe out shareholder value rather than making investments that will actually grow. (Also, he's diluted the holdings of existing shareholders massively by trading newly-created DMC shares for shares in other GLBSE assets at ratios which severly undervalue the DMC shares.) |
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It is not an increase in the total value, but of course printing more money or lending out money doesn't increase the total value either. What bothers them is that this isn't any value that they can appropriate, because it's shared by all currency holders equally. Okay, so you're saying that the thing that bothers them is that people who want to invest money in new businesses can't "appropriate" value from other currency holders who just sit on their money because any increase the size of the economy resulting from their investments is shared by all currency holders equally? Because that's what the blog post seems to be complaining about, and it does seem like it'd not work out terribly well. |
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