I have a suggestion for future 'pre-order' funds management.

This suggestion only works of the vendor does not need to use the funds prior to shipping for operating expenses (and if they do, I would argue that pre-orders and are inappropriate source of funding anyway.)

I suggest that an entity who wishes to queue up in the delivery line simply transfers a particular value to an address that _they_ retain control of.  The address list would be public domain.  When their turn comes up in the queue, they can optionally take delivery.  If at some point prior to delivery they wish to de-queue, they just transfer the funds back out.

Any terms involving exchage rate adjustments (and the like) could be drawn up.  As long as it's clear that the vendor had an option to capitalize on favorable exchange rate moves up front, I'd be totally fine with that.  To clarify:

 - if the BTC values go up, the original outlay is taken
 - if the BTC values go down, additional funds are needed to exercise delivery.

In vendor-favorable scheme like the above example, the customer may still choose to take delivery or not.  If not, the next guy in the queue gets the option.

Lots of permutations are possible.  It is the case that people with excess funds could queue up as a speculative move planning to potentially sell their spots (which is why I used a vendor-favorable example above.)  At the end of the day, though, who cares?  Accounting and management of funds should be trivial and mechanical.  Most importantly, it should leave the customer in control.  Bitcoin offers some pretty unique opportunities because of it's transparency and it would be cool to seem them leveraged by vendors in efforts to demonstrate good intentions.

This denial is an entirely natural human reaction.

When the operators blew the Chernobyl reactor sky high, they spent the next bunch of hours trying to insert the control rods into the mostly non-existent graphite pile.  This even as everyone who went out to have a look came back and told them that there just wasn't anything left.

I mostly remembered Inaba from an epic thread where he got ripped off (IMO) on an auction for use of a timeshare, then almost everyone piled on adding insult to injury.  I can only imagine how butt-hurt he must have felt.  I would not even blame him if he decided to 'get even' by demonstrating in convincing fashion what a bunch of idiots a fraction of  the community is for falling for the (likely) BFL scam.  Not to mention getting himself some pocket change in the process.

I think it was also Inaba who got harassed by Mt. Gox when he wanted to pull some funds out of BTC.  $25k or so IIRC.  One way or another, the guy seems to have been mining back in the mo-betta old days, and also seems to have a relatively good command of the technology.  Not a moron by any stretch.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/09/05/us-conagra-popcorn-idUSN0524254120070905

The guy must be a bitcoiner.

As I understand things, the credit card companies are not stupid...they keep a hold of enough money to protect themselves against charge-backs.  But I've never (and never wanted) to be on the receiving end of credit cards or pay-pal so I don't know the exact details.

Eventually the credit card companies have to fork over the dough to the vendor.  That's why one needs to request a charge-back within a certain period of time of making a purchase.  Those who missed this window will be shit-outa-luck in being made whole via this mechanism.

I guess if one is scamming via credit-card, one needs to have a way to string people along for long enough for the charge-back window to close.  Like maybe you lose your place in the pre-order queue and miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime mining Bitcoin or something along those lines...

I remember BitcoinNV throwing BFL into the mix as a side-note when he was on the pirateat40 case.  I thought I was the only person who considered this action to be awesome.  I must have already been pretty suspicious by that time.

I guess maybe this is where it came out that BFL had taken over some defunct companies papers and the best conjecture seemed to be that perhaps it was in order to save like $100 on filing expenses?!?  I mean a company who is supposed to be developing ASICs and they were this tight on funds?  That didn't pass the smell test to me.  One of many things which make one go Hmmm.

Seemed to me that Lucas (iirc) was about as clear as it gets.  Had a meeting with Tom and found nothing/zero/nada/ziltch of any value.  Certainly no 'chips' regardless of their 'usability', and probably nothing more than some drawings on some napkins.  Sounds like there is nothing to salvage, and even if there was, the performance of the last few days besmirched whatever name Tom had.

If/when another skilled engineer besides the Avalon guy enters the mining space he may as well start from scratch.  Although I could well be fooled, I would trust the new PR guy (buzzdave?) on the basis of his forthright suggestion to go straight to charge-backs, and because he seemed to have been able to get a few people some of their BTC back.

Don't take my word for it.  He could be pushing up the daisies for all I know.  I had some conversations with him about tractors and shit, and he struck me as someone who had a short attention span is all.

I'm suspecting that if/when PM's start the next leg up we'll see him back.  If not before.  It sounded to me like he had a footprint in BTC also, so if/when BTC valuations blast off I expect that that would bring him back as well.

Sorry to belabor an already made point, but some people still don't get it.

If BFL is paying their costs in USD (never mind that it's looking more and more laughable that they have any costs by the day) then it only makes sense that they would convert BTC to USD.  And refund accordingly.

OTOH, if it is true that they reserved all pre-order funds in an untouched pool (even more laughable) then they could have just sat on BTC.  If they were legit, however, they would have made it perfectly clear what they were doing in this regard and given customers an option.  Of course few of the dim-wit 'customers' (cough) envisioned the possibility to want their pre-order funds back (their minds being filled with visions of fast cars and attractive sex partners) so it's not surprising that this level of planning was neglected.  (To be fair, I am actually just guessing that this is the reality of how things went down, but if anyone wants to prove me wrong, go for it.)

I see nothing wrong with 'troll-like characteristics'.  In order to be a good troll, a statement or concept has to have an element of truth.  THAT is what gets people's attention and gets them thinking.  And actually thinking about something is never a bad thing.

Now it is true that I have taken some of your posts to be on the needling side over the years.  But here again, if they have some element of truth, as most of them have, there is nothing wrong with that.  I only ask (and have asked) that one takes it as well as they can dish it out.

I (think I) actually delight in a situation where someone legitimately calls me out on a mis-statement or situation where I've gone so far out on a limb that I lack comfort.  Molecular got me just today on another post.  In most such cases I have to think or research overtime to recover, and that is where I get my most valuable insights.

No shit.  The switching to BFL option might as well read "jumping out of the frying pan into the fire."  As it looks (to me) at present.

This whole poll is actually most likely to provide info useful to BFL to decide when to exit stage left.  To the extent that polls on bitcointalk.org have any reliability at all.

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pre-post edit to OP:  make the option be something like "Avalon when possible."

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BTW, for those who are unfamiliar with how at least some of the more successful open-source hardware projects work:  The actual goal is to get out of hardware manufacture and distribution altogether.  What you actually sell is expertise to people who have specific needs and what-not.  If an organization in intimately familiar with all aspects of the project (like because they designed the reference hardware and software) then they are better prepared to deliver on engineering projects and have a lot more legitimacy than some random jerk-off.  This only works well in certain circumstances, and only works if the organization has demonstrable superiority in engineering and reliability.  That ~nzhang guy seems to have some potential here in the mining hardware space.

Of course I have no idea whether this is the path that Avalon wishes to take.  I'll only put some focus on researching them when they demonstrate delivery of a viable ASIC unit.

Right.  I actually am potentially interested in aquiring some mining capability but it was a no-brainer to me to wait until something was proven rather than try to capitalize on some theorized early-bird advantage.  Better just to buy enough Bitcoin to compare to what I might have been able to mine should all the planets align.

To your point though, I expected that as with almost any new technology a first-generation will be pretty rough and many lessons from it will feed into follow-up generations.

For my purposes, first generation Avalon (if it is not a scam) might be perfectly adequate as long as I can do my own OS images.  And might even be a screaming deal if a 2nd generation comes along.  That's my best hope.

What I won't be doing is buying any gear which I cannot fully manipulate to my specifications no matter what the price/performance.  Said another way, if it is not fully open-source, or at the very least fully analyzable and able to be made open-source, I'm not interested.

He struck me as a guy with a variety of interests and other things going on.  Sometimes people like that get interested in other projects and take a break from things like Bitcoin.  Sometimes for a while, and sometimes forever.  I think my record is like a month of not checking up on things.  The slow-motion train-wreck that is ASIC has me captivated at the present time.  To bad it's such a waste of time an energy, but if that's what one is looking for, on a sub-conscious level at least, what can one do?

Also, of course, those of us with significant PM investments are kind of in a relatively long duration funk which has been mostly not the case over the last decade.  Bitcoin is doing better over this period so it's hard to show up and be berated and humiliated by the likes of cypherdoc   I don't mind though

If BFL, or any ASIC developer for that matter, owed me money at this point I'd be thanking my lucky stars to get half of it back.

It's actually hard to believe that BFL pre-orders are not being dwarfed by refunds at this point, but I don't know the business or the numbers...and I cronically underestimate the propensity of the Bitcoin community to fall for scams.

If BFL are still giving refunds (normalized to USD which seems legitimate to me) this strikes me as evidence against the hypothesis that they are straight up scamming.  Again though, without good data on their books it's hard to make a call here.  It was interesting that bASIC let a few refunds sneak under the door after it slammed shut.  Lack of coordination it looked like to me, and BFL strikes me as having it together much better in this way than did cablepair.

BTW, does anyone know the details of credit card chargebacks in this areana?  I mean, with pay-pal I can issue a charge-back up to a month after I made a purchase if the counter-party does not deliver.  In the few times I've leveraged this capability I've had to be on-the-ball and at least start a claim before this cut-off or I lose the ability.  I've never had to do such a thing with a credit card purchase.  I thought it interesting that the (apparently upstanding) bASIC PR guy suggested chargebacks but expected that the 'statute of limitations' had probably kicked in for a lot of 'customers' (or 'marks' to be more accurate in terminology.)

Some other time on a more appropriate thead and board.  And after I've brushed up on some tech and spent more effort understanding more precisely the current state of things.  Current magnitude of some of the numbers, and studied some recent growth charts some more.  Thx for your patience.

Huh.  Another BFL groupie who is impressed by some picture of numbers on a display.  Who'd have imagined?

You may give Sonny and Josh some of your money but I am less confident that you will actually buy anything in the common sense of the term.  Maybe a sore a-hole.

As for betting about Avalon, why should I?  I've no idea whether they even have an ASIC much less whether they will ship it on time.  They do seem vastly more credible to me than did bASIC and do BFL.

Perhaps because, as I mentioned above, it would show nothing.  It would, in fact, be mainly a waste of time and Avalon may not have a compelling interest in impressing the segment of the community who would be be impressed by such a feat.

Again though, it would not be big effort or waste much time, so why not?  An ominous reason could be that it would be admissible,  incontrovertible, and documented evidence that they were running a scam if that happens to be the case.

There is not much reason for them not to do it either.

But anyway, my point is that it would take a barely competent script monkey about 5 minutes to hack out a mock which would display anything they choose.

A better solution would be to publish a set of nonces shortly after a new piece of data came into existence.  Even here, though, someone who was intent on conning people could hook up a collection of lesser gear to work on the problem and pretend that it was their new little ASIC which had produced the results.

An image (or vid) of a box (or pcb) along with a display showing some numbers is not something which would impress _me_ a whole lot.

What would it take to make the suggested exercise be impressive to you?  Or have you put much thought into it?

In a nutshell, that's about the size of it.

It's a bit more complex than that of course.  Bitcoin can still contribute much more than the enormous contribution it already has in an effort towards proving the viability of alternatives to modern fiat currencies.  But on it's current trajectory Bitcoin is more-or-less destined for the same fate as the USD, and in my opinion, headed that way even faster than the USD when Brenton Woods is taken as a starting point.

To clarify, the 'fate' I mentioned is monopolization by parties who don't have the interests of the public at large as a primary goal.  Not that this was ever fully the case with the USD, but it has served surprisingly well over a fair period of time as a vehicle upon which the bulk of the population realized significant benefit by it's use and/because had some pretty decent management over much of it's lifespan.