Welcome to Full Production, where refunds are no longer honored.
I can't believe I have to defend myself against being a BFL shill. A cursory review of the characterizations I've made of BFL would strongly suggest to anyone with an iota of the sense you have that, if I had to bet on BFL's raison d'etre I'd bet 'long con' at this point in time. I know they've (quite possibly illegally) stopped refunds. I don't know, but indications are, they've stopped shipping again; the theory someone had that they had a small number of chips, used most in Jallies, and a few in some tickler Big Boxes looks pretty plausible right now.\ My only point is this guy seemed to indicate that he represented to the PayPal agent that BFL had shipped nothing. And that's not true. And if and when PayPal calls BFL, and BFL can demonstrate that's not true, that does nothing to help the refund cause. Solitude is a bit strident. I wouldn't pay too much attention. He is an equal opportunity hater.  |
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I tried ltc mining for a week, mined about 8 litecoins, sent them to vircurex and exchanged to fiat. Problem is how do you get your money out. Also, yes theoretically you can make more money with altcoins but I didnt see it, during the 5 days of mining ltc.
Now, I am back to mining btc, much much better and more convertible even with monsterous difficulty and downward orice.
You can change litecoin into bitcoin and then send the bitcoins to your favorite exchange. |
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Josh: "Then stop asking for updates, it's that simple. If you want updates and estimates, then they will tend to be modified as time goes on. If you want 100% accurate information, then wait. There's no other option." Josh: "So I'm curious how you know how many orders we ship per day?" User: "How about you just tell us?" Josh: "Because it causes more problems than it solves, so that's not going to happen either." https://forums.butterflylabs.com/bfl-forum-miscellaneous/3703-josh-its-time-update-bfl-asic-status-4.html#post45944This is getting pretty absurd. The huge "defense" of BFL that I constantly keep seeing from their fan boy army is that "no one has a right to other customer's information and what BFL is shipping." What does that have to do with numbers of how many get shipped on X day? His comments to me can only mean that very little to no shipping is happening and they have no clue when mass shipping will start. If they were shipping 50, 100, 200, 400 units a days BFL would be very vocal about it IMO and likely our friendly neighbourhood douche bag would be in here calling people cunts to drum up more orders. They have demonstrated working examples of all the devices weeks ago. BFL stated they had all of the parts needed to clear the backlog. But BFL has stopped shipping (or at least nobody is getting devices and BFL is not claiming to have shipped any). The only reason would have stopped by now is a lack of parts. I see no other plausible reason to not ship. What plausible reason could there be for a lack of parts at this late a date? Did they run out of chips? Does everyone have to wait the 100 days it takes BFL to get a new chip order in? |
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There hasn't been a "I got my mini-rig" post in a while. BFL halted Jalapeno shipments until the other product lines catch up. It is July 8th. |
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Failure to read.
That might be the problem.
Yep. |
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It should be a 5 second exercise to determine the number of units shipped since last update and post it on the forums.
Modern accounting software + a simple counter on a webpage would be another way to do it and that would take 5ms.
The question of "progress update" is such a simple and straightforward question to answer, it boggles the mind that BFL can't do it.
Unless...
BFL realizes that they are legally obligated to refund every pre-order who wants one (and hasn't had their products shipped to them yet).
And if BFL revealed things about their business it would scare folks away.
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For all of the coverage the BFL Long-Con has received, this is the first time I have seen someone give this perspective. To anyone involved in ฿ intelligent enough to not do business with BFL, you really have to be thrilled about what they have been able to pull off, on a personal level. You can thank BFL for the following:
- Herding the most gullible and naive Bitcoin investors together and cleaning them out of all of some / all of their $ or ฿'s, thus removing them from the market. Their purchasing power is gone and they are no longer competing with yours to drive up prices. BFL customers have made us all wealthier.
- ASICMINER has been given the market, thanks in large part to their #2 or #3 challenger offering them a full 12-14 month head start. Any rare BFL hardware that does make it to an investor will now have to compete in a sea of outperforming hardware of scale. BFL has essentially taken $ and ฿ directly from clueless investors and redistributed that bounty back into the network, down the grapevine and into ASICMINER shareholders pockets.
- 50-75% hardware blow-outs on BFL's gear are coming this Fall. For the few remaining marks left in the BFL camp, the odds of receiving hardware that works AND is profitable is becoming a pipe dream. Queue the flood of BFL pre-order fire sales taking place in the Auctions forum on this very site and Ebay. This is what should happen, intelligent investors that had the sense to stay away from BFL can now use their $ or ฿ to buy up the bilked investors discounted hardware. This allows someone to still make a net return on the hardware, and that is how it should be in this case.
The free market punishes lack of foresight, impatience and naivete. It rewards vision, mental strength and timing. The BFL scandal is a wonderful example of how this industry attracts both types of investors in droves, and why shamelessly (and obviously) bilking the most gullible of them is still a profitable business venture.
Man you are full of it aren't you? Welcome to my ignore list. Erk ignores anything that disagrees with his point of view. He probably has half the forum ignored by now. From his little echo chamber, BFL is the greatest company on earth and all of it's customers are happy. Plus, he probably gets paid for ButterShilling (TM). |
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I am eating popcorn. I am also putting 2 spaces after periods. Class of 1959 represent!  |
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Soo I may have spoken too soon. Today the 60GH/s Single just shut off, right in the middle of hashing. I noticed cuz all of the fans shut off at the same time. I unplugged the PSU and repowered it, and still no fans. I see a red light inside, and a blinking red light on the outside. I hooked the Single up to an ATX PSU, and it's hashing away just fine now.
Took a voltmeter to the PSU. It's sparking every time I touch the pins, and I'm getting 0V readings out of all the connectors. Gonna contact BFL for a replacement.
Eeesh. PSU MTBF of 48 hts.  Thank your lucky stars it didn't take part or all of your Single with it. |
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At least they didn't put melamine in the power cords. Or milk.  |
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You want to do research on the company designing and overseeing the production of the ASIC, which is OrSOC. |
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This thread offers humor!
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I give this project 3 thumbs up!  |
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Before: Hypothetically, what do you think a company, faced with all pre-orders canceled, yet holding onto hundreds of TH of mining equipment is going to do? Say "Oh noes! Bye!" ... or do you think they'd press that hardware into service?
Yes, by all means, cancel all the orders, lets see how well that ends up working out.
For the record, BFL is capable of refunding all of the preorders in the queue and remaining in business. Would we have to pare down on employees? Sure we would, but then again, we wouldn't need so many employees if we aren't doing customer service anyway.
After: The internet always remembers.  |
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If you think you are going to have customs problems, ask for the miner to be shipped without a power supply and source an approved one locally yourself. This is what Avalon have been doing, and probably why KNCminer are going to ship without a power supply.
The alternative is the possibility of not having your ASIC miner.
I can imagine the answer from BFL: All sales or final, we can't do it. They have already been shipping Singles without power supplies for some people, this is obviously a potential problem, and it would be nice if you helped people with useful suggestions or refrain from posting.It would be nice if you followed your own advice instead of being a BFL spokespuppet all the time. How about next time you see Josh in the office you mention to him he might want to follow the law instead of dumping mistakes like this in his customers lap. You make it sound like it was an aborted baby. That would be an insult to aborted babies everywhere. |
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When you have something that is 100% functional and available to ship, I would consider it.
I would keep the price as low as possible. A lot of people will want to kick the tires before committing to any purchases.
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Ok, one thing i'd like to make absolutely clear. I am not a BFL supporter. I am a BFL customer and I am not a BFL hater. Their issues particularly surrounding communication have been bad for everyone, and I like many customers wish I had my devices some time ago. I'm pleased delivery is finally happening though.
Actions speak louder than words. You can say you are not, that does always not make it so. There is a reason I generalised in my comment, through use of the word basically. I did not do exhaustive research on the topic, however I did point out a clear bias in your postings of being completely anti BFL and apparently pro Avalon (feel free to point out where you haven't been). There have been some Batch 1 and 2 orders which are still unfulfilled for various reasons too, yet I see them getting a lot less grief than BFL, which despite their poor track record has been pretty transparent in everything else but timelines (two more weeks). You just got here, so I don't expect you to have any knowledge of BFL's past indiscretions. Don't make generalizations about subjects for which you neither possess knowledge of nor did research for and I won't point out that you are mistaken. BFL was anything but transparent before April 2013. Avalon does have a few stuck orders in batches 1 & 2, and those look as if they can't be resolved (payment dispute, bad address, shipping issues) with engineering. Avalon is very late with Batch 3 and that is very disappointing (although from a mining point of view, I stand to gain from that). ASICminer is actually the most successful product imo, not Avalon and not BFL. There is just very little to criticize about them other than their prices. But as the only market entrant that can ship an order immediately, they can set the price. As for chips, I'm well aware of the comparison aspects with the chips, in terms of complexity and cost of production, power density, etc. I suppose one last bit to throw in on a comparison might be reliability and fault tolerance. In a BFL chip if an engine doesn't work properly for some reason it can be disabled and the chip will continue to function, albeit at a lower output rate. Could someone comment on the fault tolerance of Avalon chips? I haven't had a chance to read their info on their chips...
Avalon hasn't had any problems with yield that have come to light. We will have much better insight into that when their chip orders ship. |
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Now the big problem over at BFL's forum over the last couple of months is that no thread can be started about any BFL related subject technical or otherwise without a group of haters piling in and attempting to derail it with the same old shit over and over.
They posted their own threads, other users rolled their eyes and ignored them, so they started trying to stuff their opinions into peoples faces all over the forums.
This is very likely the cause of the banning, and would probably happen in any type of moderated forum. Probably sooner. BFL didn't seem to want to take the heavy hand earlier, but 3 wildly off topic posts with warning each time from mods, would probably get you thrown off half the forums on the internet.
I was complaining about the lack of moderation a month or two back, hell, half these people would have been thrown off somethingawful or general mayhem.
Try it in real life, make a sign about chemtrails or something and take that and your bullhorn to every city council meeting... OMG they're denying your free speech.
One trend I noticed is that BFL supporters generally want more moderation and censorship. They don't like "opinions stuffed in their faces". Personally, I don't think I have anyone on my ignore list. The mods here ban when people spam or threaten. The mods move threads that are off topic, they lock threads that get crazy. I read what other people say. Even if it is lunacy, it still gives insight into how the world works. Banning those you disagree with is an oft reached for tool of the closed mind. Barring opinions other than your own feeds cognitive dissonance. There is a difference between banning for behavior and banning for opinion. Here they ban you for bad behavior but let you have an opinion. BFL seems to require you to have their opinion in order to use their forums. Fair enough, those are their forums and they can do as they like with them. |
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Nice spread sheet. If that is a google doc, you can share it read only and post the link here.
If it isn't, you could import it then share it read only. Might be easier to read for some.
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BFL is in the mail order business not the telemarketing business.
Not to mention the fact that "all sales are final" is referring to a product ALREADY shipped (which btw is perfectly legal to offer no refund or exchange on DELIVERED product.
EU law (distant selling, for EU based companies, of course) is much more favorable to consumers - there is a 'cooling-off' period. A buyer can return the product even 7 days (14 some countries) AFTER delivery. When following discussions here, I must constantly remind myself - it's USA law that apply here. Not always. BFL need not have a presence in the UK for instance, but you could sue them for libel there. I would imagine you could take something to the EU version of the FTC and have them render a judgement, but what happens after that is anyone's guess. |
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