The problem wasn't "money was tied up with bfl" it was "ordering an avalon was random and frustrating because of f-tarded order site" and "asicminer goes against everything bitcoin is about"

So ok, it would have been nice to clear a thousand bucks a day for awhile. But honestly, people are just too greedy. Whenever you get your BFL orders it's still going to make money, and it would have been stupid to not upgrade if you already had fpga gear from them.

If for example you got your 60gh single upgrade right now... ROI in under a week. If it's in a month or 2 from now... maybe it takes 2 or 3 weeks. There's no reason after waiting this long to cancel any order imo... much less an upgrade order.

And yes I actually have a bunch of bfl orders (I even did some upgrades after the 60gh went away and the price went up - just to get discounts from my last 2 fpga). But I also have ~90k usd sitting around waiting for a legitimate hardware vendor to offer a good delivery time on a decent product.

As much as you guys want avalon and/or asicminer to be that product is just simply isn't. I can understand the geek-out over avalon chips since you can apparently actually get those. You may never regret those orders either, but you will be shutting them off much much sooner than anyone using a bfl product.

The thing everyone has to understand is... this isn't a video game, nobody gets completionist acheivements at life. So stop getting all bent out of shape and take a look at your situation with a fresh attitude. Traditional investments earning 100% per year are unheard of (except for scams)... even if it takes you a year to get what you order, once you roi in 2 weeks you shouldn't care.

It's an interesting point -

If I were going to write a wallet stealing software, I'd think it would be hilarious to just distribute the balance to random people.

~

What if there's a clandestine service designed to 'clean' coins. What does the turn around time on a laundry service need to be? What would be the fee incurred (what if it isn't a service but code developed for personal use).

Lets assume it's a service.
Lets assume they take btc and distribute it in tiny pieces to 10000 different change addresses. Lets assume some percentage of those addresses (10%?) are randomly selected off the block chain and not controlled by the client or the service.

Now you've broken up the clients bitcoin into 10000 pieces, and introduced a 1000 false leads for LE to follow.
Now you do it again with different source address using say... 9000 new client controlled addresses and 1000 false leads.
You run this all at the same time (cycling through groups of false leads for 10 different clients) for 10 cycles.
Now you've muddied it even further. aka everything links to everyone. . . if you got enough big enough clients you could literally spam every address with some amount of coin (over time).

If you did the payments over a long enough period of time... the client addresses would eventually accumulate enough of a balance to be 'spent' probably used to buy some good or service that could then be resold (or cashed out) in some way.

Then you can get really diabolical and trade private keys off the blockchain and obfuscate the trail even more.

In summary, you've got some clients 'cleaning' bitcoin (but it takes a long time) - you've got a bunch of random people being investigated if the client is ever investigated - you've got the service making a tiny fee by owning some addresses that are somehow included in the above process - and anyone who investigates it, ends up wasting time investigating thousands of nerds who just buy bitcoin and use it for stuff like gyft cards, alpaca socks and silver.

One of the very best things for bitcoin would be if the USA started a "war on bitcoin"... every single 'war on' anything that the US starts fails miserably and their target becomes legal and/or legitimate.

'war on drugs' anyone?

of course it is:

Just go close the accounts, take your cashiers check and walk into any local credit union. Explain to them your business (arbitrage) and that you need whatever volume of wires over whatever time frame... I'm sure they'll be able to set you up with the accounts you need.

I will actually take the opposing stance. I believe that such an event as you've described would do wonders for bitcoin... everyone would hear about it and how it they got away with the money. Nobody who's serious about bitcoin becoming what we know it can become is interested in the direction you seem to want to take it. Honestly, I would love to have a mixing service built into the protocol so it wouldn't require any actual service at all.

And yet - some us (specifically myself) have managed to sell shortly before each large downturn and then rebuy near the bottom. I sold some coin at 127 - then bought again at 65. It isn't hindsight, you either learn how to read the charts to figure out what it's likely to do next and/or extrapolate impacts of events that will affect price.

I've been saying for awhile that we could expect a large dip once the hash-rate was between 15 and 25 million. How large would be determined by that rate of increase in the hash rate. This is what we just saw over the last few weeks. New Asic owners waited some period of time to 'get a feel' for their new means of production then started cashing out to make ROI. I'm Hoping that this is it for the asic related dip... but I secretly suspect that we'll see a small recovery (probably just around 100) then another slower slide into aproximately 50 bucks... I really really hope I'm wrong tho. If it does happen in the next month or so - it will be because of BFL catching up on their pre-orders.

I agree with this. The concept of a buy bitcoin at one end - transfer - cash out at the other end. Is really one of the most amazing things about bitcoin.

Ideally I don't think that op-moderated threads should live in general forums - they should have their own sub-forum - and sales shouldn't be allowed there at all.

So if someone is 'selling' something it then gets moved to correct sub-forum and OP is no longer able to remove posts.

We as a community have an interest in keeping the general forums as a place for discussion rather than advertisements/propaganda.

Nobody jumped to any conclusions.

Here's a copy of my last (and also deleted post from the thread) and if you'd been reading regularly since it's posting you'd have seen all the evidence yourself.
I should point out that the only difference between (originally) obvious scam and others is that the OP has refined his scam to bypass some of the concerns raised in the thread. Example: no longer accepting pre-orders. Editing some of his posts to correct spelling and grammar errors. Completely removing his 'defense' of his previous scams as well as all mention of them in the thread.

~


Lets recap the thread by going down FireFop's ASIC SCAM checklist:

1. CEO posting on forum?
2. Spelling and grammar errors?
3. Insane expectations re: development speed.
4. Accepting pre-orders.
5. Unrealistic pricing.
6. Dox quickly linked showing CEO has a history of scams.
7. CEO attempts to defend former scam(s) in the process revealing even worse spelling and grammar - even less understanding on the industry he's supposedly had experience in.
8. Someone breaks the business modem wide open using the numbers provided by the OP. Invalidates offering via economics and math.

Final Score 7/8 (nobody got #8, because scammer neglected to publish numbers).

+1 Bonus point for the scammer providing his own links to documentation of former scams!
+1 bonus point for the scammer correcting "typos" on his website!

Total Scam rating 112.5% scammy (not a new record unfortunately).

@OP 'nitch' is actually spelled niche... you know in case you wanted to go back and fix your spelling.

So far I like your style.

Develop, produce, sell. Just let me know when you've got the first batch of hardware ready to ship.

~

Also I wonder if you could make my day and produce a product and will go in a 19inch U2/U3/U4 ? save us the trouble of having to mess with things.

Yes it's obviously a scam - all the research and effort that we put into dis-proving it was a real product has been removed from the moderated thread.

Also - the same idiot who's apparently in charge of it... also has another sham company where he sells mining bonds to buy 'pre-orders' from himself.

Speaking of jokes, have we had an underage sex slave joke in the last few pages?

 
Yes, the scam is probably more likely to work on you if you use a mac. That being said it can work on anyone who sends btc to the OP - even if they don't have a computer.

 

I should point out that there are no administrators since the requirement states they be able to both issue and redeem (withdraw from circulation) --- nobody can withdraw a bitcoin from circulation - so we have no administrators.

so the only thing at applies is "as a business" re: exchange of bitcoin to fiat or vice versa.

So miners and users don't need to concern themselves - only exchanges and people who are registered as a business...

Everyone knows this. Nobody talks about it.

The 3 things that keep any currency working.

1. Drug Trade.
2. Sex Trade.
3. Gambling.

The main issue right now isn't that people can't get USD into bitcoin... it's that vendors are having issues getting it out... this is making them increase prices to cover the inconvience... which is driving the market price down.

The other issue is that whenever the hash rate grows we have more downward pressure because coins are being created at a faster rate. If the target is 14 days... and hash rate it growing by 10% you have difficulty adjustment in 12.6 days instead of 14. That's 15% more coin that can be sold/traded by miners.

It will right itself soon - people are starting to recall that mining is all about power consumption.

well, thanks for taking that hit for the community. I always knew you had more money than sense...   

but I really just wanted to thank you for reinforcing my suspicions about itrader.

Moderators should do nothing to any racists. His right to speak shouldn't be taken away even if we don't agree with the content. Period.

But back on topic here:fpga manufacturers did it for love of bitcoin - BFL making asics are a result of that venture (and their love of bitcoin). friedcat's business model is a 'standard 2nd world' approach to business... you leverage the things that are cheap in the second world nations - labor, electric cost - and use it quickly bring an inferior product to market... effectively flooding that market and making it much much harder for legitimate businesses to make any money because although their products are superior they have much higher production costs... and now the competitors junk looks just like the high quality product.

I'm not saying friedcat (or anyone) doesn't a right to make whatever product they want to make... but if he were in it for love of bitcoin he'd take his profit now and stop operations before he sets up a 'kill bitcoin' situation. (which frankly may already be the case - but we just don't have enough information)


 

 

IMO this largely a non-problem.

But if it were actually a problem - the solution would be an increase in block generation target time + block reward reduction... preferably automatically done by the protocol after some long time gap between blocks.

personally I buy beer and pizza with mine.

shallow orderbooks are a problem... but I think a bigger problem is that everyone and their brother pegs their prices to gox - so any time it's affected everything else follows it. Specifically, speculators on every other exchange. It isn't efficient in the sense that it being arbitrated - people are just following that single market to set their price.