The IPv6 issues for our portal should be resolved now.

In other news, our portal is accessible via IPv6.

There is no loophole.  The warranty follows the board, so you can sell it and the warranty is still intact.  Thus you don't need to register it... because we aren't warrantying the fan (at least not past 6 months or a year), there aren't really any seals we are going to be placing on the unit, either. 

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/showthread.php/31-Community-Representative-to-Visit-BFL-Manufacturing-Facilities-Poll

Go forth, vote!  Exercise your right to public steering.

Yep, we are re-doing the website and will be adding that when we roll out the new site.

Actually, the Jalapeno would be a great hermit crab / lizard heat pad.  New market!  Earn money while your pets bask in the glow of bitcoin!

Yeah, still a few bugs to work out.  The missing pictures should be fixed.

With regards to the email, I neglected to get the reverse DNS setup - I will be doing that now, but in the meantime, a lot of email servers may be rejecting it because of that.

In an effort to improve our customer service communication, one facet we have been working on is our communication portal.

portal.butterflylabs.com

It's a combination of forums, articles we intend to publish and some blog style communication from certain departments within BFL.  We are also working to improve our Customer Relation Management system, which we should have in final testing next week.  Between our portal and our back end management system, I hope to improve our communications a great deal. 

The forums will be moderated, much more so than Bitcoin Talk and our forums are not meant to replace Bitcoin Talk in any fashion, but are intended to provide our customers and potential customers with a place to ask questions, get answers, find news and announcements with regards to BLF products and events as well as just talk to other users. 

I've done quite a bit of testing locally here, but I would like to get some feedback from users on what we can improve as far as that goes.  Please feel free to sign up and take a look around.

portal.butterflylabs.com

Please don't turn this into a flame fest or some other off topic discussion.  I will lock the thread and promptly forget about it if so.

I would like to know what one or two individuals (in the US preferably, unless the non-US person wants to pony up a ticket) that Bitcoin Talk community would nominate and accept as credible, verifiable individuals to be flown here to KC sometime around the end of October/Beginning of November time frame to see our facility, inspect the manufacturing equipment and test out the devices.  We don't have an exact date yet as to when we would do this, but I would like to get the ball rolling as far as names in the hat and see if there's even a vague consensus on who the individual(s) might be.

I know this Inaba dude, he's in KC, but I hear he's kind of a jerk.

The same or less than our current models.

From what I know of the Avalon, the power requirements are going to make it only interesting to those that don't have to pay for power. Our units are optimized for power efficiency as well as performance, not just one or the other.

We have absolutely no plans to raise the price after the pre-order phase.  I'm having trouble envisioning a scenario where we would do that.

It's not bad, I just don't want to make a commitment and then have to break it due to unforeseen difficulties. As to "why" those details were told to certain individuals at the conference, it was simply because they asked. I don't even know who the various individuals were that I explained our plan to.  If the community did not react so violently to changes in statements made here, we would be more open about our plans, but as it is, if we make a statement and then later have to change that, it turns into a giant mess.

Nedbert9:  We have the best interests of Bitcoin as a whole at heart.  Since you disagree that keeping the security of the network is of paramount importance, please let me know what your order number(s) are and I will get your refund issued immediately so that you may pre-order elsewhere.

Not at this time, no.

You'll have to talk to Gavin and the others than maintain test net if you want answers to that.  They have repeatedly requested that people not mine on test net because it raises the difficulty, making it impossible to test with.  If we unleashed 20 TH onto test net for even 24 hours, it would make it unusable for everyone else.  Feel free to disagree, but this has been an issue for a couple years now, please go research it.

Yes, I am going to shrug off this invalid point because we are not now and have not been testing ASICs on the live network, so it's an immaterial argument. 

No more certain dates as of yet.  We are still nailing down production procedures for how many we can produce a day.

If we tested on testnet, it would make testnet useless, since it would spike the difficulty to unmanagable levels. 

Regardless, we aren't testing any ASIC equipment on the live network either now or in the past, so it's pretty immaterial.  We already have a plan, which I explained to several people at the Bitcoin conference on how we are going to handle the live testing when that time comes.

Bit-Pay was indeed under a DDoS attack, but the problem has been mitigated now and payment should be working through Bit-Pay now.

All of our equipment is burn tested after final assembly/testing for ~24 hours on a live pool (In this case, EMC).  After the burn-in, it's taken off the rack, packed and shipped the same day.  We do this for both the singles and the mini rig and the singles PSU's (we've had a few of those go bad, so now we burn those in as well). 

We are not mining with any ASIC equipment at the present time.  You can be sure there would be a big announcement if we had turned up the ASICs on a live pool.

Absolutely. I apologize for the making the comment (I would go back and edit it, but we've seen where that leads).  So someone quote me, quick, so I'm not accused of editing anything after the fact. 

But in all seriousness, I do apologize for the comment and I will refrain from guessing at your numbers until they are publicly available.

I don't think otherwise, it's a reasonable statement and I believe it to be true.


Actually, you have, at least by implication.  You asked (and I'm paraphrasing here)  how are we going to sell our devices if we don't have mining software.  That implies that no developer is going to work with us.  At the time it was false for a number of reasons and it's still false now.  But lets break down this argument for a second:

Kano, have you now or do you ever demand AMD (or nVidia and Intel to a lesser extent) pay homage to the developers to support their hardware?  No?  Why not?  They owe you just as much as any other hardware developer, since you (or another developer) are required to write code to support their devices, both GPU and CPU.  As a software developer myself, I find your argument spurious at best.  I write software because a) I like to write software and b) I like people to use my software.  My pool would not be where it's at today without the users. A number of my other software products would not be where they are today without the users (ShowEQ being the biggest example).  I add support for various features in my software to attract users and have people enjoy it, not because I expect a reward from them.

Take out AMD support from cgminer, see how far it gets at that point. Why was it put in there in the first place, were you expecting a reward from AMD? No, you wanted to attract users.


I only know bits and pieces of BFLs discussion with ckolivas, so I can't really comment on that.  I do know that going forward, those discussions will/would be very different.  But as far as why I think miner software developers should work on our devices for free, please see above.  If you want your software to be popular, you have to support the popular devices, otherwise your software will fail.  Do you honestly think cgminer would be where it's at today if it did not support BFL devices?  It's a symbiotic relationship.

Now that said, I am absolutely 100% on board with showing the love to the developers in the form of hardware donations to the cause because it's nice and it's the right thing to do.  But for you to say or even imply that it's entirely one sided is completely disingenuous.  You yourself even admit you do things because you want to and it's your choice.


I'm not making any attempt, you brought it up.  As I said, we have already made plans to show support to the bitcoin developer community and those plans have been in place (if not finalized) long before Tom made any announcements.  You can believe that or not, it doesn't matter and it doesn't change our plans and you'll still be included on those plans regardless of the animosity you hold for BFL, if for no other reason than it's the right thing to do.  


Who was expecting you to do anything for free?  When/where did BFL say "Hey bitches, write code for us!  And do it for free!"  Can you direct me to that post or PM or email?  I mean, I suppose that could have happened prior to me coming on board with BFL, but I very seriously doubt it.  In fact, let me tell you how it really happened (because I do know this part):

1. BFL was not familiar with the mining scene and approached Ufasoft to create software for them and paid that developer to do so.
2. During the development process, the BFL information leaked and we started our journey (we being the Bitcoin community) back in late October/Early November of 2011.
3. Ufasoft development continued, but scattered support for BFL devices started creeping into cgminer and poclbm.
4. Frustrated with the Ufasoft result and worn out from all the complaining, work begins on EasyMiner.
5. Eventually full blown support is put into cgminer, since the Ufasoft software was a major pain in the ass to use.  BFL never requested this directly to my knowledge and EasyMiner development slows down.
7. BFGMiner splits off from CGMiner due to philosophical differences, mostly unrelated directly to BFL, but mostly related to FPGA in general.
8. EasyMiner development picks back up

So as you can see, BFL did, in fact, commission a developer to create software for the BFL devices.  It didn't really work out as well as they hoped, but by that time ckolivas et al had already added support to cgminer, so it wasn't really a big issue.  If it were, BFL would have figured out a solution, either by paying another developer or finishing EasyMiner.  ckolivas, Luke-jr, etc... put support in their programs for BFL because they were popular devices, not because BFL demanded or expected it.  It was already there by the time BFL decided to switch the focus away from Ufasoft.


I absolutely agree with this.


I'll be straight up with you here, if you wern't so vocal in your hate for BFL, the "support" probably would have come long before I came on board.  That's the plain and simple truth.