Josh should probably start saying "mañana" given how often "tomorrow" turns out to be at least a week later than estimated.

You've told us how much you've already refunded, but the value of refunds still outstanding is also important.  Your mining activities might be bringing in some funds right now, but it's not going to be bringing in much in a couple of months.

Based on your current plan, how long do you estimate it would take for you to repay everyone?

They probably just skim the subject line in the emails they receive at the moment and assume you're just asking about delivery dates unless it's clear it's a refund request.  Setting up a dedicated email address for refund requests would be a good idea.

While this is true, they're screwed if "Batch 3" people decide to cancel their pre-orders now and wait until BFL's delivery schedule for units made from the bulk order chips is more certain.  If they can't accelerate their delivery schedule, then they risk their only guaranteed future sales being those from Batch 1 and Batch 2 who place further orders to get their "discount" (and who'll have to wait months to receive those units).  Batch 1 and Batch 2 may not even be profitable for BFL at all, much less where they stand to make the bulk of their profits.

People will start deciding to hang onto their money until someone can deliver in less than a month rather than continuing the "order an ASIC, any ASIC" frenzy because they're starting to realise that low end units (< 60 GH) in particular probably aren't going to be especially profitable if they're not delivered until the second half of this year.  The network isn't standing still while BFL gets its shit together.

It's understandable that Batch 1 customers are pissed off at seeing every advantage they thought they'd have slip away, but from a purely business stand-point BFL needs to worry about its ability to minimise the amount of people cancelling later orders and its ability to attract new orders - especially if there's any possibility there'll be new vendors entering the market in Q3.

Has Josh posted the picture of the wafer yet?  He said yesterday that he'd do it "tomorrow".

This is about the best advice which can be given to potential ASIC buyers right now. 

Keep in mind that Avalon tends to announce the opening of orders for their next batch at fairly short notice, so you need to check for updates regularly if you even want the option to place a Batch 3 order.

Whether Tom's posts are met with Care Bear {{{{hugz}}}} or outright scorn should have absolutely no bearing on whether he continues to make refunds in the manner he's outlined.  He's honouring an obligation, not doing people a favour. 

The "if I was really a scammer" and "everything I've done for Bitcoin" crap is getting old and is unnecessary.  People want updated, specific information about how the refund process is being handled - the "let me tell you once again that I'm a great guy" stuff is pretty much irrelevant and comes across as fishing for kudos in a situation where none is warranted.

What you can export, in what quantities and to where is something for which each country has its own regulations - things can and do get held up in customs in their country of origin (even using a customs broker doesn't guarantee this won't happen, especially with products being exported for the first time).

They already said prior to CNY that they had shipped 53 units in one batch and were waiting to learn whether those units had made it out of China before CNY.  It would be silly to ship more units by the same route/method before knowing the fate of those 53.

Yifu has made very clear in past posts that they are hoping for people to become Avalon re-sellers, which could make the shipping process much easier for future batches.

I agree that Yifu needs to provide an update on this, but comparisons to other products for which the customs issues were solved long ago are pretty meaningless (hell, even things which should have no customs issues whatsoever randomly get held up, no matter which carrier you use).

Did kano ever claim that the light aircraft in the picture is the one in which he flew or is that just an assumption people made?

Actually, there is very little "proof" which would meet the standard required for criminal prosecution and many people who lost funds to pirate don't want their own financial dealings subjected to investigation.

Just wondering how this is going overall and whether you're on target to meet the turnover you mentioned you needed to remain viable. This is one of the biggest experiments out there and it would be interesting to know how it's faring.

Regardless of what technical issues BFL might be having, there's not really any excuse for the administrative side of their business not being in order.  They should be able to provide people with the dimensions and weight of the ready to ship units and they should have their customer management system sorted out (this should have been done long ago).  

Making people wait for non-technical information makes them look as incompetent at managing the administrative side of their business as they've seemed at managing the technical side and they can't play the "but this is really hard" card when it comes to releasing basic information like weight and dimensions and having their customer management database in order.

Oh, and "the ASIC team" is a contractor in California.


https://forums.butterflylabs.com/bfl-forum-miscellaneous/1054-chip-testing.html#post16189

The problem is that after you've given empty assurances several times, "but I'm really telling the truth this time guys" no longer has any credibility - kind of like BFL's estimated delivery dates.

This was a big project where the risk of failure was high from the outset.  It's not the kind of project which should ever have been a one man show.  When something goes wrong in any project, there's always a point when you need to decide whether to keep quiet about the problem and hope you can resolve it without anyone becoming aware of it until after the fact or whether you should announce its existence straight up.  Making the wrong call on that decision can be fatal to a project and to your credibility as an enterprise.

And people will likely pretend to believe that Tom was framed because his past response to people not giving him warm and fuzzy reactions to his "that's all behind us" posts has been to melt down and go incommunicado.

Tom can certainly claim that, but the "Tom is gone, Dave is gone" post which claimed that bASIC's new owners were a large electronics manufacturer has been quoted all over the place and bears a striking resemblance in style to some of Tom's past "meltdown" posts.  Can Electric isn't an electronics manufacturer, but Tom still needs to explain why he told people that an electronics manufacturer had taken over bASIC if that wasn't the case.  

I hope Tom does continue returning people's money and that he finds peace and stability in his personal life but it's naive to expect that simply returning people's funds is going to restore his credibility given the shit which has gone down in relation to bASIC.

Perhaps Tom's "millionaire friend" could lend him the funds to pay everyone out now and he could repay that person over time.

You seem to have totally ignored addressing the whole CAN-ELECTRIC hoax, which was outright fraud according to the real owner of Can Electric.

They've been asked to provide proof of this in the past and declined.  Any argument that the amount of pre-order funds being held would reveal commercially sensitive information to their competitors is pretty much bullshit at this point as their competitors are already locked in to their own schedules and can't easily scale up production to accommodate any mass cancellation of BFL orders. 

Besides, knowing that they have ordered 75,000 chips already allows their competitors to make assumptions about BFL's projections and what level of order cancellation would start causing them pain.

If their early believers were going to bail, they would likely have done so by now.  It's the later orders which are more at risk of cancelling - BFL needs to keep those people on the hook as well as encourage new people to place orders now.  If they can't keep people whose orders aren't in Batch 1 or Batch 2 on the hook, then the only people who are going to be ordering from them are people using their discount vouchers - who'll probably put up with delivery of their new orders being delayed several months in order to get their "compensation".

Mining's starting to look a lot less appealing to many people, and will probably look even less so by the time May rolls around.  It doesn't matter if every single person cancels their Batch 1 order - Batch 2 people will just get their units sooner.  It does matter if BFL can't attract a steady stream of new orders, though.


I presume that's what's going to destroy the wafer - them dicing it themselves to get test chips.  They're probably wishing they'd done an MPW about now.

I think there point is that there's no benefit in waiting until all of the wafers are bumped - they're going to have to destroy a wafer in order to test unpackaged chips so they might as well destroy the first bumped wafer now as wait until the end of the week.  The alternative is waiting until they have some packaged chips to test.

If the chips test OK then being able to accelerate the delivery of the other 69,000 chips might be worth the sacrifice - but early chip delivery isn't going to worth a damn unless they get the rest of their production processes streamlined in a hurry.  If they can't get 6,000 chips bumped, packaged, placed on boards, assembled into units and shipped, how the hell are they going to manage turning their 63,000 bulk order into working units and getting them to customers before hell freezes over?

I likely do Phinn, there've been so many changes I've lost track.

Josh has been sucked into giving an estimated shipping date yet again.  Saturday 9 March.

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/bfl-forum-miscellaneous/1163-february-25th-2012-update-discussion-thread-2.html#post16081

It would have been better to refrain from giving an estimated shipping date until testing and packaging are complete.

Now people are going to start asking how many of each unit are going to be in the (reduced) Batch 1, when they're going to get an email about their preferred shipping method, when they should send back their FPGAs, and all that other shit all over again.

No-one can be declared "winner" until they can reliably deliver their units on time on an ongoing basis.  What we have right now is some very promising starts and achievements which are notable in themselves, but it would be foolish to try to predict now who'll falter as the year progresses.  A single, well-resourced new player could come along and blow everyone else out of the water at pretty much any time.