He had as much of a clue as he needed...which was not really a whole lot.  Don't be thick.

Yup.  That should tell us something.  Not something definite, but a decent clue.  That is why on a different post I did not except the assertion that Josh was stupid or incompetent.  It's just that most people (including his fiercest opponents like you) are totally mis-mapping what 'competence' and 'skill' mean in the context of BFL.  Just as was the case with Pirateat40, a brazen 'in-your-face' attitude is/was very effective bait for a certain class of 'customers'.  This kind of operation in Bitcoin-land seems to be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

I don't think pirateat40 had a 'downfall' either.  His operation had a distinct endpoint although it was not predictable exactly when it would happen.

When I say 'downfall', I mean only that I don't believe that the BFL operators will end up in jail or even find it necessary to undergo clawbacks for a significant fraction of their take.

Plain and simple.

Separating fools from their money.

That is one of the few things Josh has said that I actually don't doubt all that much.  Like it or not, the guy probably is fairly bright and effective at what he does.  Unfortunately that is also why a lot of people are out a lot of money.


I don't think there will be a 'downfall' to BFL.  I think they will achieve everything they set out to achieve and probably more than they expected to.

Another Oregon-er, but not (recently) from the metro area.

My interest is potentially conflicting somewhat (explained below.)  I am interested almost exclusively in the K1 USB style units.

My interest is mostly political (in a Bitcoin sort of way) in that I feel it would influence Bitcoin to remain more 'peer2peer' if the barrier to entry for mining were as low as possible.  People who are participating as non-commercial miners are not going to wish the solution to grow past the state where they could realistically mine.

I believe that individual users already overpay for bandwidth which they do not use, and the power costs for a small efficient rig would not even factor into most people's economics.  Thus, widely distributed mining may be competitive with commercial operations which do need to factor in power use as a major cost of operation.

So, I would be interested in any leads you may turn up in terms of local manufacturing and would certainly make an attempt to compensate for any effort it might save me.  Or if at some point you wish to and are able to coordinate such an effort that might be interesting to me also.  Secondly, if anyone else reading this might be of a similar mindset as I, I would be interested to hear from them.

Even if you (OP) are interested in a project along the lines of what I am talking about, I would not waste to much time on research.  It is more likely than not that I will lose interest.  But if you are talking shop with any leads and the conversation comes up, I'd be interested to know what you/they think.

Why you filthy blasphemous heathen!  You are probably going to tell us that the Emperor has no clothes next I suppose

When I say 'trust' I am talking about 'counter-party risk'.  If you think I proved your point, you probably didn't understand much of what I said (and are likely not alone...)

As for some magic crystals to keep my secret keys safe, I'll pass.  Relatively speaking, and from the standpoint of someone who is proficient with basic computer security methods, it is not that difficult to reduce the risk of theft and loss to near zero.  Mostly just tedious and inconvenient.  Not unlike dealing with gold in fact.

A glance at that reddit indicates that that guy is on a whole different plane than I in pretty much all ways (not to sound to conceited or anything

Of course I don't treat all of my coins in the same way, but my main stash is completely inaccessible even to me unless I go to a bank and lock myself in a room.  Alone.  On top of that, I was super careful that even if my secure workstation (a BSD box) got hit with a hot-disk attack by someone who knew how to us dd, it still would not be possible to retrieve my secret keys.  My biggest danger is probably that I could be tortured to death by someone trying to get my stash, but at least they would fail.

As for PM's, ya, they are an expensive hassle to acquire and dispose of.  As much as possible I engineer such an events to be 'several times per lifetime' affairs for that reason.

If I'm getting paid, buying trinkets, etc, etc I'm perfectly happy with fiat, checks, Visa, PayPal, etc.  In fact I prefer them to Bitcoin in a lot of cases since I can do charge-backs or use the court system if I get ripped off.  Sacrilege here on the forum, I know.  That should earn me at least one more 'ignore'

Buy PM's from a reputable dealer who's been in the biz for a long time.  I pay the premium for the piece-of-mind of having technical work done by a professional just like countless other services.  No biggie.

As a computer geek I can managed the risk associated with Bitcoin theft with as much precision as I need to make it vanish.  An Achilles heal of Bitcoin is indeed that this has proven fairly challenging for ordinary people and many BTC have been lost to thieves.  It is not the only system which undergoes such a 'transfer of wealth' though.

To summarize, both gold and Bitcoin allow me to trust myself rather than to need to trust others.  I like that.

Next time you run one of these (if you are not so burnt out that you'll swallow glass first), think about a policy where the shipping queue is organized based on the order in which people paid up when the call for funds went out.

If I were doing one of these, I'd be tempted to see if I could leverage some automation of some sort.  Google Forms comes to mind but that's only because I've seen it.  There are probably other such things, or one could possible roll one's own.

  http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=87809

Yup.  If blowing the estimate by three X was the worst mistake that BFL has made it would be a much happier world for their 'customers'.  I mean how big a deal is power usage in production-level mining-land anyway?

If there is actually a reliable betting site in the Bitcoin ecosystem these days someone should do a bet on whether the chip in the devices BFL has shipped is actually 65nm.

I could see logic to having them loose.  I plan to have mine heatsinked, but I suspect that many/most people will not.  Probably the less screwing things on and off the pcb, the better.  I'm glad to hear that there will be an option.  And I never thought of the utility that they may have in shipping

I would not be to concerned about the chip per-se.  I figure they are given some amount of testing in fab and packaging.  The biggest concern I would have would be mechanical on the PCB.

That reminds me, was there any discussion on how/if the heat-sink is to be included?  None?  Loose?  Attached?

I think I would rather receive my unit untested rather than have it run under-current.  I'm not an EE...which is probably part of the reason I am paranoid about these sorts of things.

Also I worry a little bit about the time it might take to get the cgminer or whatever software figured out for these brand new devices.  I'm sure you will be keeping us informed of progress through the time you crack open the big box.  In the hopeful case that we get that far at any rate.  If everything goes smoothly and seems to be working, it would be nice to have the optional QA.

BTW, has ~friedcat mentioned anything one way or another about any QA they might do at the shop?  I've not spotted it in any of his posts.

Interested.  Watching.

I seriously doubt that they would ever get prosecuted, and even if they did it is unlikely that such a thing is even legally a problem.  I mean specs change all the time.  In the very best of circumstances the specs, appearance, timing of the units are going to be way off of the originally projected item.  Nobody is going to sue anybody over that. Or at least they are not win anything until the distant future.

BFL could just deliver some unit at some point after the 1/2 million Avalon chips get glued on to an open-source board for $10/ea and get  the legal monkey off their backs.  Or at least put it in a cage for 10 years.  BFL has check-mated their 'customers'.  Time to suck it up and move on.

600nm.  Super-size me baby!  You know our moto in America: "Bigger is Better!"

That is your interpretation of Bitcoin, money, value, and etc.  And it is fine.  Other people look at things differently and come to different conclusions or at least different ways of describing the same conclusion.

I view fiat, Bitcoin, and gold as nothing more than 'accounting systems'.  Each have their own properties, strengths, and weaknesses.

When the Krugerrand hits my hands, it's a chunk of metal with the inherent simplicity (and thus, reliability) that I mentioned.

The fact that it took some effort to get it into my hands is a factor in the 'store of value' aspect that I expect of it.

---

As an aside, Bitcoin is similar in a way in that a relatively short string of numbers is the analog of a Krugerrand.  Even if the transmission system failed there would still be a set of entries in the block chain which have value to me and me alone.

In that case, though, actually extracting value from the blockchain would be somewhere between extremely challenging and impossible (unless one had wisely broken their holdings into multiple wallets before-hand...hint,hint...) whereas the pool of market participants with which one could exchange gold or silver coins would be much more expansive.