I would make that bet, except there is no way to order a Batch 4 device yet I will likely be one of the first in line should that happen.

 If you can't trust Butterfly Labs to offer timely and accurate information on their ASIC project, when they have such an attitude of "contempt-of-customer", why on earth would you give them any trust whatsoever to manage your Bitcoins or believe it is going to ship in their stated "two months" estimate ?
 

I recently came across this thread on Butterfly Labs' own forums of growing discontent with the state of the project and company.

---

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/minirig-sc-support/2513-mini-rig-concerns-open-letter-bfl.html

From: backburn  (Senior Member)
@ 05-07-2013, 02:56 PM
Join Date: Oct 2012

"I have had over 60 thousand dollars tied up with BFL's mini rigs since August 2012. It is saddening that Mini-Rig purchasers have been essentially been put to pasture. We take the largest risk and invest the most capital only to, seemingly, be shipped last. There has been next to no proactive personal communication from BFL. If there is an issue with our order we have to "search the website" everyday to be apprised. Car dealerships get a bad rap but they are saints compared to the customer handling by BFL. At least a car dealership will personally call you when they encounter a delay, hell they might even throw in free service. It is as if those who ordered a Mini-Rig are a liability to them instead of an asset.

While in Vegas for CES, several industry consultants including myself met with Josh and Dave at the Bitpay booth. We expressed concern about not only their power specifications but their density in the mini-rig chassis. We even offered to test and make recommendations on the mini-rig chassis and cooling systems for free. All of our concerns were brushed off by Josh and Dave and we were not contacted. (We are PAID to do this for Intel, nVidia, and ASUS. Many of they show systems you see at events are developed by us.) Maybe they were just tired from all that goes on at CES, maybe they thought we were just another group of nerds... I don't know. Mind you this was MONTHS before the wafers were manufactured. They were informed of these "new" issues months in advance.

a) The eVGA Classified 1500w power supplies they have already purchased were not proper for even their ORIGINAL board/rig specs. More than 80% continuous usage WILL cook consumer PSUs, not a matter of IF but WHEN. My car may be rated to go 120MPH, but if i leave it at full throttle how long will it last?
b) They pre-built daisy chain type usb cables: Bad idea. If one board goes tits up so does every properly functioning board behind it. Additionally, when you replace/remove the bad board you have to play usb cable musical chairs for the downstream devices. Each board should be home run. We're were told this was not an option because "they already made up the wires".
c) Even with the new boards it will take an extremely optimistic minimum of 3 Mini-Rig chassis. To add insult, each chassis will have be retrofit with an additional power supply, something we also pointed out at CES months and months ago.

Maybe they have addressed some of these issues. Who can know? I wont hold my breath, they have not given proper updates regarding Mini-Rigs for over half a year.

Agreed it could be misleading, it could be deceptive, but im banking on ignorance.
We've collectively paid to kick-start the company for them.
We've paid from them to learn how to operate as a proper business.
And now we've paid and are waiting for them to learn how to make proper ASICs.

Bottom line:
It is amazing how far a personal phone call to those that have made $30,000.00+ orders will go.
We should NOT have to email you and search through a forum every month to find out what the heck is going on.
Please do not skip mini-rig orders to ship loads of smaller units to pander to the masses. And if you do, at least provide demo singles or even jalapenos units free of charge to mini-rig customers.
Don't forget that those of us with min-rig pre-orders in August could have had near $750,000.00 with their $30,000 if they had just bought BTC and sold during the last bubble.
Help take some of the sting away from pre-ordering with your company and show that you care. Throw us a bone!"

Doubt we will see anything before September.

 10 BTC would have indeed been a good sale... for the ASICMiner shareholders.

 For the purchaser, not so much.

For managing hopping your hash power at pools. I was running bitHopper 2.6.2 for getwork stuff up until very recently before I took the plunge to Stratum.

Have been at a loss for how to manage hopping the hash power in my farm through a local proxy, so I just went legit and have each CGMiner worker connecting to the pool directly via Stratum instead of connecting to my local bitHopper proxy and then out to the pools for getwork.

Knowwhatimean ? Automated poolhooping has become practically impossible today AFAIK.

 Which proxy are you using for hopping ? You banging away on the Deepbit prop pool ?

 Thanks for the update.

 Two requests.

1. Ability to sort workers alphabetically
2. Display my reward of each mined block on the Blocks (Income) page

 Great pool. Have been mining with you guys for a couple weeks now since Slush's rewards started getting wonky.

If you were to pre-order right now, it might be conceivable you could receive product some-time in early-to-mid 2014.

Not if you plan on receiving your order in any reasonable amount of time.

20nm chips developed specifically for hashing SHA256 ? Sorry, need to call shenanigans. 3-5 years from now ? Maybe. Right now ? No fucking way.

Not sure what to say, homies. GPU 0 and 1 is each core of one of my 6990's, and GPU 2 and 3 are each core of the 5970 in that one rig.

 Oh lawdy... where have I heard this sort of logic used before ? Oh thats right, with prior busted scammers right here on these forums !

 Christ these scams are just getting pathetically obvious now.

There should be no technical reason you can't mine BTC on the next-gen consoles and conceivably pull in around 500MHs. What's unclear is how easy or not it will be to run home-grown binaries on the new consoles.

I suppose someone could make a Bitcoin mining app and offer it for sale at the console online stores, assuming MSFT or SONY approve such utility apps.

I'm down on all my miners at BitMinter. They're all chugging away on my backup pool ATM

Try it on either a 6970 or 6990 and see your yourself. I have a couple 6990s in my farm running at those speeds.

"We" being concerned citizens of Bitcoinia who are vocal about shenanigans impacting our ecosystem.

I'm interested. Let me know when you get back stateside, assuming that's where the system is currently located.

9 BTC reasonable with shipping ? You here in the states ?

(Added to main topic)

If you are a former, or current customer of Butterfly Labs, and are disgruntled and fed up with how they have conducted themselves over the last year, I would urge you to contact the following agencies and filing formal complaints.

The more light we shed on Butterfly Labs' business practices, the more chance we have to effect positive change and hold them to anything resembling responsible accountability to their customers.

https://www.consumer.ago.mo.gov/ - Missouri Attorney General Customer Complaints Deptartment
https://econsumer.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/ - Federal Trade Commission Customer Complaint form

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110805.0 - "Butterfly Labs CEO 25 Million USD Mail Fraud — A Concise Summary of Evidence" is a good thread highlighting historical issues with Butterfly Labs' officers that should document concerns and facts.

I would urge you to not openly complain on these forums if there is any way Butterfly Labs can trace it back to your orders with them. They have demonstrated a will to punitively cancel and refund orders.

Finally, I would be lying if I didn't have a slight concern of someone affiliated with BFL showing up on my doorstep and confronting me for creating this thread, seeing as how they know where I live, given their checkered history. But lets just hope that's my paranoia kicking in.