This is why it is a distasteful business practice to ask your customers to pay in full before you deliver your product. This is deplorable and should, at the very least, be kept in an interest bearing account which is payable to the customer.
There is simply no other legitimate business out there which makes you pay to capitalize a business so they can develop a product which doesn't exist yet.
All the BFL fanboys will gnash their teeth and say how great BFL is, but they have no retort for paying in full for a product which doesn't yet exist.
A deposit of say 10-20% would make sense for a custom manufactured device. Anything else is just gambling.
Don't like it? Don't buy it. It was a gamble for me as well. But I certainly wasn't going to keep that high of a balance in BTC if I didn't order the mining units - I would have cashed it out to USD instead. So, I have no regrets - I've got a good place in line (should definitely receive on the first batch of shipments), and I would have only had a pile of USD to show for it otherwise. |
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I am confused as to why you NEED to have people vett and verify that the units exist and do what they are supposed to do? Why not just let the first shipment tell everyone that? Do you expect a huge wait time between the time when you have a handful of units that you could ship out to high profile individuals vs when the first large shipment will go out? Personally, I don't think you need to prove anything. Your FPGA singles have already proven that you can produce a good mining product.
Let the skeptics be skeptics until the first large shipments go out. Remember that when you shipped the "test" FPGA's out, plenty of people were still skeptical and said that those individuals were in cahoots with BFL, etc etc. I don't think you'll get many more people to trust you by sending out units to special people - most people who would trust BFL after seeing a few ASICs out in the wild already trust BFL after seeing the previous-gen Singles. Just my opinion - certainly, feel free to do what you want.
The difference is that this time around, they aren't trying to prove the legitimacy of the company. They're trying to prove the claimed specs of their new product. If they've sold as much as they claim to, then they don't need to convince anyone because people have already voted with their bitcoins. Right? That's exactly my contention as well. As long as they have a backlog of product, they don't need to prove anything to anyone. Focus on shipping out the backlog, THEN work on convincing the skeptics (which they won't need to at that point, since the shipment of the backlog would have proven everything they can prove). |
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Sorry guys, but you, as the community, decided on the 1/3 strategy. The majority of the folks that chimed in deemed it would be the best way to handle it and that's what we are going with. It's not only coming up "just now." It was decided on before we started taking orders. It was what YOU chose and I find it incredibly unfortunate that there are people now complaining about it. It is, quite literally, impossible to please everyone, I hope you realize that. If you want the FIFO method, you should have ordered first and you would be in the 2/3's of the orders that are FIFO (depending on if you're upgrade or new order). Simple as that. If you failed to do that, if you waited or hemmed and hawed and someone got in ahead of you, then that's on you. It was announced when we would be taking orders, the exact date and time, so it's not like it was a surprise, either. The details for the random, I am trying to solicit the community involvement on how to handle that so it's comfortable for the community. If you want me to handle it internally, I will do that as well, but I wanted to make it a community project. But you guys are dreaming if you think we are going to release proprietary sales figures just for the heck of it. Seriously, what business does that? The only ones are the publicly traded companies that are required by law - otherwise they would not be doing that either. With regards to the high profile individuals, if we did NOT release them then you people who are complaining about releasing them would now be complaining about "BFL isn't releasing them because they don't live up to the specs!" So again, it's impossible to please some people. We think it is better to release a few units to some devs and media folks to vett and verify that the units exist and do what they are suppose to do, prior to us releasing them en mass to everyone. If you folks that are complaining want to just take our word for it, then that's ok by us as well, but we certainly can't have you complaining that we are lying about the specs because we aren't showing a unit to anyone trustworthy. Please excuse me for a bit while I hold on to my BFL hat very tightly to remind myself not to post what really should be posted in response to some of the complainers.  I am confused as to why you NEED to have people vett and verify that the units exist and do what they are supposed to do? Why not just let the first shipment tell everyone that? Do you expect a huge wait time between the time when you have a handful of units that you could ship out to high profile individuals vs when the first large shipment will go out? Personally, I don't think you need to prove anything. Your FPGA singles have already proven that you can produce a good mining product. Let the skeptics be skeptics until the first large shipments go out. Remember that when you shipped the "test" FPGA's out, plenty of people were still skeptical and said that those individuals were in cahoots with BFL, etc etc. I don't think you'll get many more people to trust you by sending out units to special people - most people who would trust BFL after seeing a few ASICs out in the wild already trust BFL after seeing the previous-gen Singles. Just my opinion - certainly, feel free to do what you want. |
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Probably no exiting from me until well after we break the previous all-time high ($32), or I absolutely need the money in USD form, or I get my ASIC miners. As it is, I just want to hold what I have so I have SOMETHING if Bitcoin goes completely crazy.
Regardless, my exit strategy will always involve only selling a percentage of currently-held coins. So, I might make that 20%, and then 20% of the 80%, then 20% of the 64%, etc etc.
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I agree on FIFO, but w/e. I'm one of the first in line anyway (or should be), so it really makes no difference to me. There were 300-400 orders placed in the first 24 hours, so my guess is, BFL won't even be shipping out the entire first day of orders when it starts. Who knows though, maybe Josh can give a better idea. We will release a few demo units to high profile individuals (not high profile miners necessarily) to check out if we are in the accumulation phase of assembled equipment.
What's the point of this? Reward the people that kiss your ass? Either order numbers order or the original 1/3 process order, but don't just make up a new shipping order now. You may want to call your state's FTC, the FTC in BFL's state(s) of registration, and the Federal FTC if you are in the USA. They will act on shens such as this and levy fines or file criminal charges, if any apply. At the least, it will send a bigger message than some forum posts and won't take much more effort. Also, didn't they just hire a COO? Preventing, handling, and resolving issues such as this exactly that person's job. I'd fire the COO of any company where I had leverage who was so ineffective. (Fortunately, I'm more careful with my hires.) Reeses, meet the new COO: The plan is still to do 1/3's on the shipping type.
I do want to mine the community here to flesh out my idea for this, though:
I want to use the block chain as the random number generator. Something such as this:
After block X, every block's first Y bits will determine what order number gets their unit in the 1/3 random portion. Obviously, this needs a little work to work out. So I am looking for ideas on how to implement this in a fool proof way that everyone will be satisfied with that we are not gaming the system or somehow twisting it to our own ends.
Keep in mind we will not be releasing any specifics on orders (such as name, order number, etc...) publicly, but only to the people who own those orders, if they choose to publish them here, that is their own business but we won't divulge private information or sales numbers. So the plan needs to work from a blind standpoint.
So I'm looking for comments and ideas from the community that the community itself will be satisfied with and that is as transparent as possible without dipping into proprietary information.
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I couldn't find a general Bit-Pay support thread, but this has the right title so I'll post my inquiry here. From another thread: when we create a unique address for an invoice, its basically a bucket whose address is only known to the customer. Then we sit and wait for the bitcoins to fall out of the sky (literally) into this bucket. When they do, we usually have no idea where they came from, but since its a single use address, we can confidently say that particular order has been paid for.
You say it is unique but it appears that Bit-Pay is re-using bitcoin addresses. I just made a payment, and when I checked to verify that the payment had confirmed, there were several previous, older transactions to that address. This seems odd to me. One reason why includes how this re-use of a bitcoin address might be confusing to someone new to bitcoin. The recommendation given to someone trying to see if the payment "went through" is generally first to look up the address and see if it shows a payment. If there are prior transactions for an address then the user might become confused. Another reason this seems odd is because this is lessons privacy. Because I now know this address is used by Bit-Pay, I can probably conclude accurately that the other half dozen payments to that address were payments to Bit-Pay as well. New receiving addresses are pretty cheap to acquire (free, actually) so I don't understand why address re-use would be performed. Probably because stacking up a Bitcoin wallet with tens of thousands of addresses really does slow it down (I've tried it, and it was basically unusable by the time I got to 150k). If Bit-pay is planning to scale to whatever volume they can acquire (which I hope they would), it would make sense for them to reuse addresses to avoid bogging down their bitcoind processes. A better solution would be to throw away addresses once they are used and no longer contain any BTC, but the default client doesn't allow for that, and there's always the chance that someone might accidentally resend some BTC to that address - that'd be one reason I would want to keep it on hand forever, anyway! |
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What about the early blocks that still have untouched 50btc in them and no other transactions?
If we don't know they are lost, they cannot be added to this list. |
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@SgtSpike This must be you with the 900hp 9 second Miata huh? Heheh seriously though the guy makes a nice save. Haha, no, I wish! Well, in some ways, haha. |
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Looking at the list here, I wonder if BFL might finally catch up on orders. There were 86 ordered in May, 43 in June, 4 in July and 4 in August if my quick count is right. It looks like they're about 1/3rd of the way through the June orders, but assuming their actual order sheet has a similar distribution to the list in another month they might actually get all caught up.
No facts supporting this- I think they're using the pre order money from the asic orders to fill their current back logs. I don't think we're going to see asics through BFL for a while if at all. No facts supporting this either. |
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Hmm, thought I had fixed account details so BTC is always listed first. Have to look at that again. And yeah, the hashrate is too high to display on the site. What to do!?  Obviously banhammer the ones responsible... |
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unclemantis if you obtain the privkey for that address we all might as well give up and go home because it would imply that bitcoin is fundamentally broken
Or the owner responds and gives you the private key. I doubt he even knows he has it in his wallet, presuming its not lost. He could send a binary message via satoshis and include his email address or something in it. |
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Got it:
5HrGsm6TekRMjjB3MvLD9E8Sbe29EBseNcsGGXEQkhL3t3pfHaU
1ButNahUW8pD9cX1xLbRYHfP5KSumJCchP |
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But you need to view it from the perspective of Amir's hacker-type personality. Confidential arrangements are simply not suitable for him. He should have realised this himself before getting involved in Bitcoinica and explained that he can only get involved if he is not required to compromise his ideals. It might sound silly, but that's the way it is.
For past transgressions, this of course should have no effect on the responsibilities and/or punishment. But the future is what I'm worried about. People who are different should not be condemned for all eternity. Rather, their qualities and peculiarities should be assessed impartially and not hinder mutually beneficial arrangements, as I believe the conference can be.
Lol, is that like saying murderers are ok to murder because that's their personality type? Putting the legalities of what Amir did aside, he DID violate his ethical obligations to Bitcoinica's customers by releasing the source code and by refusing to relinquish his control of Bitcoinica. I don't think anyone here is questioning the legality of Amir's actions - that'll all get figured out in court. But they have every reason to be upset at him for his actions because of the delay and potential reduction of the refunds they will now be getting as a direct result of his actions. And those sorts of actions can't be passed off as a "personality" type. He absolutely should be condemned by those attending the conference (and he should step out of it too). You wouldn't sit down for lunch with a criminal after prosecuting him in the courtroom minutes earlier, so why do you expect those who are owed so much money by Amir to act cordially around him and the other Intersango guys as if they don't still owe them hundreds of thousands of dollars? If I was in his position, I would definitely fear for my life, and wouldn't set foot anywhere near a Bitcoin gathering of any kind until the situation was resolved. I don't know why he is so anxious to put his life in danger. People have been killed over much smaller things. |
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How about variations like 1gig 1Gig 1gIG and the like? I remember there are both ways to find firstbit addresses, and at least one site/service/script does indeed honour capitals..
Mantis, I am very sure you won't reach your goal on the route you are now. Tell us what you have in mind, maybe there are other solutions..
Ente
What site/service is that? Capitals shouldn't be recognized - it introduces way too much confusion when relaying firstbits. |
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You're all not listening to what I'm saying. I am sorry this happened, but not because a large amount of money went missing but because it affected people in personal ways. Affected them personally.
My choice of words was poor:
I feel far much more for the guy who has lost all of his already small net worth that is paying for his next meal and this month's housing than the guy who has lost a fraction of his already large net worth and has legal recourse available to him.
The absolute numbers don't mean much. It's the effect it has on the person's life.
What do you say to someone when they email you a desperate plea for help because they might not make next week? I remember one guy in particular. I lost his email because I was being flooded with tons of emails. That was really devastating and hard to deal with.
And how do you know that Roger's 25,000 missing BTC hasn't affected him personally? How do you know that it's only a "fraction" of an "already large net worth"? How do you know that that wasn't Roger's life savings that he had worked his a** off over the last 30 years to accumulate? How do you know that those people claiming that they are on their last meal are telling the truth? Why are you in a position of any kind to judge who is in the worst position as a result of your actions? And frankly, why does it matter to you? Would you rather have divvied up the money based on who needs it the most? A modern day robin hood, screwing the pooch with regards to fairness of who actually deserves what? No one is going to feel sorry for you for emails you found hard to deal with, by the way. |
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The G35 is a fun little toy, if you don't need 400+ HP.
Its electronically limited @ 155 MPH, I've only been able to get mine up to 142MPH(stock)
Mods on this engine don't produce huge gains, if you put an intake your lucky to get 5 HP.
Has pretty good brakes, if you put good pads and cross drills you never have brake fade.
If someone taps your bumper @ 5mph the repair cost run around 2k. I've had 3 people back into my car! both the front and back bumper!
headlight are a Pain in the ass to keep clean, because they haze over.
Traction control on this Car seems to work great compared with other cars, Its almost a game to see how many times you can set it off lol
The G35 I raced didn't appreciate being smoked by a Miata.  |
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That fat girl is a person you know. Why would you insult her when she's an innocent bystander?
I'm not saying I'm happy Roger Ver lost money, but simply that his life is not really impacted in a huge way compared to someone who barely has enough money to survive or eat because they lost it in Bitcoinica. I seem to recall in Vienna that you were talking about renting out an aeroplane. That's a level of extravagance that goes way way over my head. You probably live far more comfortably than the majority of people do including myself. Don't tell me that 25k out of 50k is more of a loss than $200 of $600. That's the difference between homeless and starving, vs surviving.
Wow, just wow. You make me sick. |
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The main reason I didn't use this site yet is it's not at all clear to me that the sellers are the real creators of the content. What stops somebody from registering as a seller and just uploading other peoples music?
If there was a way for a seller page to link to some proof of ownership, like a page/tweet/Facebook post/whatever on the creators official sites naming CoinDL as a market, that would help a lot.
http://www.justinbporter.com/ shows a link to CoinDL. |
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I completely acknowledge the efficiency of Miatas, I'm just one of those people that can't get over the look heheh.
Fair enough, I understand entirely. I have a turbocharged one, and I just love the look on people's faces when they get schooled by a girl's car, in a straight line OR in the corners. It's priceless. I do wish they'd put a much more aggressive look on the things though, something more along the lines of the BRZ. |
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