Absolutely wrong.  When people purchased BFL or Avalon, there was no guarantee that they would be receiving a product or when.  It was PURE speculation and a gamble as well.  People decided to take this gamble and base their purchases on speculation.  Speculation that the price would not drop, speculation that they would receive a product, and speculation that that product would be hashing the amount advertised.

Basically you are saying "never buy miners" because so far, none of them are shipping the same day.

Go back and do it again?  Ask BFL how easy it is to go from FPGA to 65nm, so forget 28nm from KNC.

This is a ridiculous argument too.  I paid in BTC for one order, but I also paid in paypal for another with fiat.  That money could have just as easily been converted to bitcoin.  Butterfly labs has always had the DOLLAR AMOUNT of their products.  They have never just had a BTC price.  The reason for that is their devices are purchased in dollar amount.  

And there is a risk at ANY point.. this is bitcoin.  Hindsight is ALWAYS 20/20.  As many people have said including myself, what if bitcoins went down to 3$ a bitcoin after he purchased this miner for 200BTC?  He would have went to the BFL webpage to see that they were offering the same product for 400 BITCOINS!!  But in the grand scheme of things it would have still said $1299 USD.

..and when BTC crashed to 3$.. was it REALLY economic for ALL people to buy instead of mine?  What was the difficulty then?  What was the electricity costs of the person mining?  What if it crashed even further to $1.50?  

Way to many factors to be so black and white.  Using hindsight is never a good thing to anyone Captain Obvious

This is such a lame bullshit statement and what I call "cherry picking" your circumstances.  No matter what the outcome, you will ALWAYS be right because you are the type of customer that has to complain..

First off, lets set some clear facts. 

In June 2012 BTC was in the neighborhood of 5-6.5$ per bitcoin.  You paid 200BTC for your product. 

When Avalon batch 3 came out for preorder, (March) bitcoins were anywhere between 35$ and 90$ (I could be "slightly" off on this so no nitpicking).

So would you rather have paid 200BTC @ 6$ a bitcoin?  Or would you rather have paid 80BTC @ 35$ a bitcoin?  Let's also turn the whole equation around.  Lets say a month after you purchased your BFL device, bitcoins dropped to 1$ a coin and stayed there.  If bitcoins were worth 1$, do you think Avalon would have sold a miner at 80BTC still?  Would they even have sold a miner at all?  If bitcoins were 1$ each, I can guarantee you people would not have made mining devices and if they did, no one would have purchased them for thousands of dollars unless the difficulty was so low that they made 200BTC PER DAY.

So with all of this said.. YOU would not be here today complaining about the 200BTC you never made back.  YOU would be complaining that it will take forever to make back the 1200-1300$ it cost for you to buy the BFL device.

People like you, and there are plenty in this forum, like to mold their argument based on whatever makes them win instead of using common sense.

If you receive a 60GH/s device in the next month.. next 2 months.. next 6 months.. will you make your 200BTC? no..  That would be ridiculously greedy of you to moan about not making $20,000 back on your $1200 investment.  But will you make your $1200 back?  Yes.  Will you make more than your $1200 back.. ABSOLUTELY.  Unless bitcoin takes a nosedive to 5$ again, you will most CERTAINLY see a return on your investment in fiat. 

I guess the appropriate answer would be.. would you rather have 200 bitcoins worth 6$ a piece that you originally invested, or would you rather have 58 (the amount you can mine in a month currently with 60GH/s) worth 100$ a piece?

Lets also see how much in fiat we are talking about from June 2012 (When you ordered) to October 2012 (when they said they would ship, and the prices at that time) to a month from now (estimating doubled difficulty as conservative number, and 100$ bitcoins).  From the bitcoin calculator:


June 2012:


Difficulty Factor :  1,500,000
Hash Rate (mega-hashes / second) : 60,000
Exchange Rate ($/฿):  6.00
 


 Coins Dollars
per Day ฿20.12 $120.70
per Week ฿140.81 $844.88
per Month ฿611.53 $3,669.21




October 2012: (Butterfly labs supposed shipping date)

Difficulty Factor :  3,000,000
Hash Rate (mega-hashes / second): 60,000 
Exchange Rate ($/฿): 12.50
 


               Coins Dollars
per Day ฿10.06 $125.73
per Week ฿70.41 $880.09
per Month ฿305.77 $3,822.09



July 2013: (Doubling the difficulty which is most likely not going to be this high in only 1 month)


Difficulty Factor :  30,000,000
Hash Rate (mega-hashes / second) : 60,000
Exchange Rate ($/฿) :  100.00
 


 Coins Dollars
per Day ฿1.01 $100.58
per Week ฿7.04 $704.07
per Month ฿30.58 $3,057.67


Now that is at DOUBLE the difficulty next month.  The next difficulty raise is estimated to be 17 million from 15.  This happens every 2 weeks so the possibility of it getting to 30 million by even late July is still pretty slim unless a MASSIVE amount of miners hit the market this month.

I'd be happy with a 2 week ROI. And I know what people are going to say in response is, and here are my answers:

"BUT THIS IS ALL SPECULATION"
So is everything else in this thread.  You can't complain about someone speculating if your argument is also pure speculation

"BUT I WANT MY BTC BACK!!"
This is just like the people demanding refunds in BTC.  Ridiculous.  If bitcoin crashed to 1$ a bitcoin, would you be ok with making 200BTC then?  Only 200$ worth of your original 1299 spent?  IS that what you consider a return on your investment? 

"BUT BFL WON'T SHIP BY JULY, THEY NEVER WILL"
Still speculation.  I'm willing to bet that a June 2012 order will most likely be seeing his shipment by next month.

Though I by no means have been impressed by BFL when it comes to shipping etc. I do believe that the 100 days will be kept for a number of reasons:

- It's chip only. No design to mess with, no power draw to worry about.
- The chips are ordered straight from Global Foundries
- Design, functionality and performance has been verified already
- BFL are in fact currently (according to public posts) shipping 100s of Jalapeno a day (Apparently through the weekend they caught up on entire July/Aug 2012 pre orders)

Nope, their pricing was a certain amount of dollars, and there is in fact still a pretty good chance to get that amount of dollars back. It was your own choice to sell BTC for USD when BTC was low.

Yeah, it's easy to be "right" when you are basing your entire life process on hindsight.  That's why he's a schmoe sitting behind a computer ineffectually flailing about instead of someone out in the real world, you know... doing something.

I would simply buy a Corsair H60 or H110 and use thermal adhesive to mount the block once I was satisfied it could do the job. I mounted a H55 to my 7870 using zip ties and it never went above 57C at 1225mhz  core (tahiti chipped version) so I already have experience with conditions that aren't exactly ideal and it worked out just like my custom water loops have and honestly took far less time but once the adhesive is used and sets there is no going back.

I hope this has been done through investor money. If their investors have goven them enough money, no worries. The margins on FPGAs was not very high. That is easily said since you can source all parts on digikey, even the FPGA chips.


I dont know shit about their operation, but I know the costs. I don't earn anything from a smear campaign, actually. I'd love them to have been more professional. But since I found a COO calling customers stupid cunts, I have refunded a lucrative order.

The last time I heard a CEO call someone asshole and cunts was with a pretty big other company: ENRON


Also, according to the laws of the state BFL is incorporated in, they would have to disclose non-private venture capital funds. As a corporation, the only thing they have to disclose is who owns shares, in a limited manner.

So, from information policy and what I could dig up, the only way they could pull off what they have been saying is by having someone private signing a private loan to the corporation. Thats the only thing that does not leave a papertrail to follow. Or a bank loan. But sorry, never ever.


But, since you said most orders were done after the wafers were done: Interesting, that means they would have had such an amount invested at that point. Or not. Depending on what game they were actually playing.

I don't care either way, a COO calling people cunts on a public forum who argues that an engineer can tell a customer and his superior that "the project is done when it is done" is enough for me to pull my personal plug.

But, we will see. This is an interesting game of competition coming.

What penalty? People voluntarily let businesses lapse all the time, that's why the dissolution process is in place. It essentially is a passive system to dissolve no longer functioning/needed business entities.

There is plenty of new info on them, just not in this thread.

Where do you get they are Swiss !?!?

Only Swedish.

K9 i'll start taking you seriously when you post the same about avalon, knc, bitfury, et al getting these certs. Until then your motive is pretty clear.

Of course you wouldn't have a clue. This is utter BS. you don't know about investors or revenue from their FPGA sales or nothing about them, it's just a really obvious smear attempt.

Damn, I find myself caring almost 0%, pitchforks people!

Yes. With 10 estimated employees, 4-5 million dollars in costs towards development through subcontractors, I call it money problems.


10 employees at around 25-30k if they are not so well paid, makes for another 360.000. Lets say they burnt the first batches of chips, blew a lot of cases.... blew lots of chips, have to pay health insurance. Another 300.000.

I have calculated an ASICs business, since I have no idea what to do there. I called up contractors and specialists for everything, since I thought if BFL makes millionaires, why not become one myself?

As it turned out, some of the more prestigious development companies asked between 1.5 and 2 million EURO in advance for initial development and estimated a timeframe of one to two years until serial production could start.