What makes you think that? I havent read anywhere they were missing their goals by 25%. Where did you read that? For all I know, even as it stands, you will lose the bet with the current state of the software.

? They never claimed $500 for anything other then a limited pre-order.


Maybe you should reread Inaba's post. According to him, the tested unit already represents a significantly better proposition than all the other FPGA. So you think a fixed final shipping product will be worse?

Wait, so you guys are no longer calling them scammers intending only to run off with your money?

It seems you (goat, DnT, etc) were flat wrong on that, and you may well be equally wrong about BFLs inability to fix the performance issues. Particularly since we dont even know how serious they are.

Just sayin'.

Since they also "skew" the bitcoin network hashrate, I dont see why not.

Warranty is to cover product defects, not user defects.
I might understand you if you had blown up a single board, if your point is that ztex gave inadequate information about what kind of powersupply you need (ie, regulated psu). I havent checked their documentation, so maybe it is made clear, but Im assuming maybe it isnt. But I can have no sympathy for the second board you smoked.

If I was ztex, I might consider giving you a 50% rebate on the first board (and explain the PSU requirements better if needed), but certainly no more than that. Id actually find that pretty generous already.

Not that one, the other one please. You know the one that produces blocks with less than 50% CDF pretty please

BTW, if you ever feel like working on the site again, a suggestion for making the luck page more readable; this is how it should be done IMO:
http://pool-x.eu/blocksAuth

They are pool hoppers. If they have no "hoppable" pool to hop to, they have been sending their hashes to us lately.

No that wasnt it. It clearly had problems connecting to the pools and the gpus where idle most of the time.

Anyway, it only happened once and I havent been able to reproduce the problem since; but it did seem like a problem with cgminer considering the problem occurred on 2 completely different machines, different OSs, the network and internet connection was fine and restarting cgminer fixed it on both machines. Not a biggie, just reporting in case other people are seeing this.

I dont think scientists are claiming global warming will eradicate all life from earth. Although one cant completely exclude that if a runaway effect turns our planet in to Venus. The point is that the impact will be massive. As adaptable as you claim we are, just look how difficult we find it to adapt to the rather modest changes we are seeing so far. Sure, our species are under no risk of extinction yet, but go ask Australians how they are adapting. Ask sub saharan inhabitants. So Im not sure what your point is. Something along the lines of "its not likely more than a billion people will die, and a few billion people will suffer, so whats the problem" ?

Not in my case at least. Note I also restarted both my routers and it made no difference. I dont know if it was a maxing out of bandwidth that triggered the problem but its something I might test later. So far the problem only occurred once, but on both machines.

There is strong evidence its exactly that that killed the dinosaurs.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/07/25/did-methane-cause-the-mass-extinction-that-made-way-for-the-dinosaurs/

I have a poll on "free" electricity mining and farm size here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=52756.0

Much too few responses to draw firm conclusions but it may give an idea.

Or they have several businesses (engineering and sales & marketing) with their own name, or they cant agree on the public name. Its really the kind of thing you see when a bunch of engineers start their own company and they havent hired anyone with commercial and marketing experience (or given him the authority to make those decisions). Believe it or not, Ive seen it before with a startup.

Fair enough, but in order to make a judgment you have to wheigh those questions (which IMO are really lightweight) against the evidence that points in the other direction. To name a few, the fact those people clearly have some related technical skills, have already spent a serious amount of money on this, dont seem to hide their identities from Inaba, so far apparently have no problems refunding canceled orders etc.

When I put the risk, effort and lost opportunity against the potential profits from a scam like this; Id say its incredibly stupid. If you want to scam bitcoiners I can think of a 100 easier, safer and more lucrative ways.

The people behind BFL seem dispersed over the US, France, and perhaps even other countries; they claim to have engineers fluent in French, Italian, Spanish and even Farsi.  It seems like sales is done from the US, but its entirely possible there is a "butterfly labs" registered elsewhere. If I were to guess, Id say the engineering is done elsewhere, and "BF labs" is only created to handle the commercialization from the US.  Quite possibly Butterfly labs exists in one of those other countries.

Thats not to say I disagree with you they should put the contact info of the legal entity you are dealing with on the website, I do find that a serious oversight, but that they may go by different names is not that weird.

BTW, it seems they registered other names too:
http://digicomlabs.com


As a hypothetical assume a couple of french engineers have worked on these things for 10+ years under the name "jean marechal SPRL". Some bloke in the US wants to market their product for bitcoin and comes up with a fancier name, registers the website and does all the marketing specifically for bitcoin. Does that make the above statement incorrect? Maybe, but its not that different from AMD claiming to have 10+ years experience designing GPUs. Technically its not AMD, but ATi, but thats really semantics.

That said, its still possible Butterfly Labs as such has existed for that long somewhere in Europe, but I guess only BFL can explain that. My point is merely that its not proof of a scam, its just one of several unanswered questions.

Just about any image sensor can do that if you process the image in software.
If you need to offload the processing of the QR code, look for a 2d barcode scan engine on alibaba. Something like this:
http://www.alibaba.com/product-free/119691292/2D_barcode_Scan_Engine.html

In the latter case, $10 might be difficult though, unless you are looking at a really large volume. In which case, contact me through pm.

DrHaribo can you please turn on the block finding cheat again? Thank you .

We are going in circles here. I see nothing weird about selling their first batch of test chips for a discount for all the reasons already mentioned.


IIRC the preorder actually had a 4-8 week delivery schedule. They have not missed that yet. Even if they do, a tiny delay (if that) is evidence of a scam now? Better tell AMD, nVidia, intel, microsoft, etc.


So anything with a 6 week shipping date is suspicious to you? Better tell my Audi dealer as I ordered my car 3 months ago and Im still waiting.


And less protection to the seller. I had to give my Audi dealer a certified bank check. Scammers!


Since you can pay with a bank transfer, Im sure you'll get the correct name and address, though I agree they should put that on their site.


Obviously the people in that company have experience and the company is a startup (/spin off). We said the same thing when we spun out a cmos image sensor chip company, since the team had many years of experience, just not under that company name.


Big deal. Particularly since that demo was not even officially announced.


Not knowing the technical details of their yet to ship product is not evidence of a scam.


Inaba is allowed to say whether or not the board generally meats the performance claims; considering they admit issues with the software, I think thats entirely reasonable. When is the last time AMD or Intel allowed publishing benchmarks of preproduction hardware? If for whatever reason there still is 10-20% lower performance than promised, it doesnt exactly prove a scam or does it.


+-10% running variance.


Yeah, there has been a small delay, I think you mentioned that already a few times.

You seemed to insinuate their pricing made no sense and that it was evidence of scam. But apparently I misunderstood and you seem to agree with me that particularly in the scenario they use s-asics, that their pricing strategy is likely completely sensible?

If so, good.
I also think you -along with everyone else- agree that the performance and power consumption claims are completely believable if this is an s-asic. I think everyone agrees the pictures and PCB look pretty damn real. BFL people dont seem to meet Inaba wearing a face mask and sunglasses. They dont seem to make any fuzz about canceled orders.

Someone remind me, what evidence was there again of this being a scam?