BFL in its entirety is being dragged through the mud because of the checkered past of one employee.
The hiding of the fraud conviction of a primary company officer is just the next item in a long list of questionable activities. We've all seen the mug shot of Bill Gates, yet no one feared that he was going to tank Microsoft and run away with the cash - not because we trust old Billy that much, but because he's operating within a system that was explicitly designed to prevent him from doing so. BFL operates within exactly the same sort of system.
No comparison. Microsoft is a public company, and as such is under far stricter rules than a private company. For example, the entire list of Microsoft board of directors is: Steve Ballmer Dina Dublon Bill Gates Raymond V. Gilmartin Reed Hastings Maria M. Klawe Stephen J. Luczo David F. Marquardt Charles H. Noski Dr. Helmut Panke John W. Thompson a big structured organization of 22 people with a board of directors
And what are the names of the individuals on the board? While being publicly traded certainly does add new stringent criteria on how you run the show, I was more speaking to anyone's ability to take the money and run. Incorporation still requires such measures in most states and whether it was required of them or not, they have indeed taken those measures. I don't know the names of the board but I'm sure some BFL employee out there does and would have no problem giving up that list. It's not really my question to answer. |
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Comparing Bill Gate's conviction of driving without a license with the large mail fraud operation, where Sonny was a major operator, and suggesting that there should be some similarity in the reactions to each is not a solid argument. Attempting to equate a minor misdemeanor with multiple counts of Federal fraud charges is both qualitatively and quantitatively way, way out in left field - maybe somewhere around Alpha Centauri.
Valid point. I should probably find a better example for comparison there. It also does no-one's credibility any good to dismiss a very long-term, aggressively marketed fraud as "a youthful indiscretion". You regain trust by owning up to what you did, not by trying to minimise it (it sure as hell wasn't "jurisdictional arbitrage" which got Sonny into trouble). That said, the information is now out there and people need to make up their own minds. There's no point in those who choose not to deal with BFL mounting a crusade to try to convince others to boycott BFL. I feel the need to ensure it's clear that "youthful indiscretion" were my words, not Sonny's. Poorly chosen? Perhaps. It's an issue that a lot of folks have become very emotional about and I thought it deserved the closest thing to fair and unbiased reporting I could give it. You know my conclusion and you're free to draw your own. |
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Comparing Bill Gate's conviction of driving without a license with the large mail fraud operation, where Sonny was a major operator, and suggesting that there should be some similarity in the reactions to each is not a solid argument. Attempting to equate a minor misdemeanor with multiple counts of Federal fraud charges is both qualitatively and quantitatively way, way out in left field - maybe somewhere around Alpha Centauri.
Valid point. I should probably find a better example for comparison there. |
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History is full of people who have had some moral faults but then turned their life around.
Yeah, right. People always see the light. Having Sonny Vleisides watching over ten million dollars is like hiring Charles Manson as a baby sitter when he gets released from prison. Good luck with that.  That is unfounded speculation, nothing more. We were told the money is held by the company, not Sonny himself. I guess the next question would be, if the money IS held in a company bank account, does it require two signatures on the check to be spent, or is it still entirely under Sonny's control? (Until Innaba answers this, any claims will continue to be speculation). I don't think any company would reveal to anyone other than their accountants how their financial control system works. So this will continue to be speculation forever I imagine. Generally, it's standard practice for companies to have financial controls in place, unless they are very small or family privately owned. Since there is implication that the company ownership is shared among a few people (Sonny mentioned he was not the majority owner), all we really need to know is if they do have some financial control systems or not. Doesn't matter what the specifics are. And if they have financial controls, then Sonny's entire background is totally irrelevant. They do have financial controls in place. Furthermore, the fears of running away with BTC are moot since they only ever receive the tiny % of BTC they think they'll need for refunds as BTC. The rest is converted to USD by BitPay and deposited directly into a corporate bank account. Seriously people, read: http://codinginmysleep.com/interview-with-sonny-vleisides/ |
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After all the mud-slinging that's been going around, I thought it would be good to have a chat with the elusive Sonny Vleisides so I spent a bit trying to get in touch with him and much to my surprise he responded and gave me an excellent interview. http://codinginmysleep.com/interview-with-sonny-vleisides/ |
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Use the IDE/SATA ports, hook up the regular everyday molex connectors, then get an adapter like this one. You can probably find that adapter cheaper, but it's dead common and shouldn't be a problem to lay your hands on. |
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I've not heard any other complaints about them but I do know that it's common practice for sites that deal with a lot of coins to keep two wallets, one "hot wallet" that is live on the site and holds only a small amount of coin to handle expected daily tx volume and one "cold wallet" that is held offline or on a different PC so that it cannot be compromised by hackers gaining access to the server. It sounds like they just ran out of funds in their hot wallet. I'd give them a bit to transfer from cold storage before pulling the scammer trigger.
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If you scroll waaaaaay to the left:  |
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Congratulations and a big thank you to Coinabul for becoming my first sponsor! If you'd like to sponsor an ad and don't want to go through Operation Fabulous, there is now a handy form on my site. |
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If you can't afford the money for development, which sounds like what you're trying to get out of fundraising, then you can hire me on the cheap to improve things around here, however small that may be.
Be aware that I can find far better value for my labor on the market, but I am willing to help you guys for token wage at first, until you got more customer and can afford to pay closer to market value.
I want operation fabulous to succeed too. So it'll make me money in term of additional publishers in the ecosystem.
PM'd!  This makes me pretty damn happy |
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Can't these bars be tested electrically? Pump enough current through, and the performance characteristics of a solid gold bar should be sufficiently different from a gold-plated tungsten bar... Or would the current have to be high enough that you'd just melt part of the bar, thereby not solving the non-destructive test problem?
Meh. Seems like there's a business selling reliable non-destructive gold-bar test equipment somewhere in here...
You'd be quite right in suggesting that the conductivity characteristics would change, tungsten has resistivity of 5.60e−8 Ω⋅m (at 20C) where gold has resistivity of 2.44e-8 Ω⋅m. You're also right in suggesting that you'd need quite some amperage to measure anything more than surface conductivity, which would be unchanged since the shell is still gold. There are other characteristics that would probably be more useful - the speed of sound through tungsten differs from the speed of sound through gold, so an ultrasound could be used. Electrical conductivity could also be used in the form of eddy currents, introduced inductively, since they have more penetrating power than just passing current through the bar. |
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if I'd spent as much time in the past 72 hours contacting would-be advertisers directly as I've spent staring at that damn OF logo I probably could have sold two ad slots for a solid month the hard way. Hell, I may still have to consider that option...
Turns out I was right, a couple hours and a few PMs worth of effort scored a Coinabul ad at a fair rate (thanks Coinabul!). Admittedly it would be way harder to pull that off if I didn't have good volume, but it still shouldn't be easier for me to negotiate ad placement via forum PM than via a platform explicitly designed for such. On the plus side I do finally have a couple bids trickling in for my first ad box so I can at least confirm that OF *does* work, just slowly. I'm glad to hear there is progress being made, OF seems like it has the underpinnings of a good platform, it just needs some work - and it looks like it's getting that work. |
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I can say definitively that OF has some serious work to do. I signed up as a publisher something like 4 days ago and after wasting the first 24 hours displaying an OF logo because of a manual approval process I've displayed that same logo for another 72 hours because no one is bidding. You can't say my ad spots are bad - slot 1 is close to the top of the page and damn near the center, and slot 2 is just beneath it. Granted I only have 2 days worth of stats there but the averages, while falling well below my actual readership (I'm guessing adblock is responsible for that), are respectable - certainly higher than some of the other publishers in the list that actually have active bids. They're good solid ad slots and they've been sitting vacant for 72 hours, I even tried setting to minimum bid to 0 and I couldn't even GIVE the slots away. There has to be a better way for advertisers to find good ad slots. I have no doubt that someone will eventually buy some ad space and I can start making money but honestly if I'd spent as much time in the past 72 hours contacting would-be advertisers directly as I've spent staring at that damn OF logo I probably could have sold two ad slots for a solid month the hard way. Hell, I may still have to consider that option... I really want OF to succeed, the Bitcoin world needs both CPM and CPC advertising and right now OF seems to be the best contender in the CPM realm, but man there's still a long way to go, especially where getting ads into slots for new publishers is concerned. |
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what is SR? i plan on investing my BTC.
Silk Road, anonymous marketplace on TOR for buying and selling drugs (and other stuff, but mostly drugs) with bitcoins. |
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Not sure what my average is... maybe 0.1? I'll say that most of the time, it is sitting at the 0.6 BTC rate, but those peaks from the bidding wars are very nice! I only have one banner ad from op-fab, so it's per slot. Look on this list: https://www.operationfabulous.com/advertiser/index.php?e=add_bidYour site does appear, and mine does too (to me). You should definitely be able to see your own site. Huh, it shows in the old interface but after paging through the new interface I don't see it anywhere. Weird... Maybe it just takes a while for op fab to finalize my listing or something - I am a member of that incredibly impatient generation that grew up with the internet (though, to be fair, I started with 9600 baud dialup, so I'm not as spoiled as most), so perhaps I'm the problem here. 0.6 per day for ~1500 hits is about 0.4 BTC CPM which at current rates is ~$4.77 CPM - a damn good rate, very nice! Sorry, I missed a 0 there! It's currently sitting at 0.06 (or therabouts), but averaging in the peaks, I probably get 0.1 BTC. $4.77 average CPM would be insane! But my average is more around $1.20 CPM right now. Which is still excellent even compared to google's adsense! Ah, that makes more sense then. Still a good CPM though, yes. |
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Not sure what my average is... maybe 0.1? I'll say that most of the time, it is sitting at the 0.6 BTC rate, but those peaks from the bidding wars are very nice! I only have one banner ad from op-fab, so it's per slot. Look on this list: https://www.operationfabulous.com/advertiser/index.php?e=add_bidYour site does appear, and mine does too (to me). You should definitely be able to see your own site. Huh, it shows in the old interface but after paging through the new interface I don't see it anywhere. Weird... Maybe it just takes a while for op fab to finalize my listing or something - I am a member of that incredibly impatient generation that grew up with the internet (though, to be fair, I started with 9600 baud dialup, so I'm not as spoiled as most), so perhaps I'm the problem here. 0.6 per day for ~1500 hits is about 0.4 BTC CPM which at current rates is ~$4.77 CPM - a damn good rate, very nice! |
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The op-fab ad on my gaming community website (with around 1,500 daily pageviews) pays about $0.70/day at the bottom rate, vs maybe $0.10/day for the USD equivalent on the same site. At peak, the op-fab ad has generated $12/day, and I had a 3-week run with > $5/day too. So, keep it up for a while, it'll start generating some nice revenue soon. Especially since it's a BTC-oriented website, much more of a related target audience than my gaming community website!
Those are some pretty decent stats, is that per slot or total? If you don't mind my asking, what's your average if $0.7 is your bottom and $12 is your peak? I'm ok to stick it out as long as someone confirms I'm on the listings - maybe I just can't see my own sites? I'm very happy to accept BTC anywhere and everywhere I can, so ad-revenue should be a no-brainer, as long as it actually works  |
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Your minimum bid is too high for me, sorry. Not that it's not worth it, but that I don't have the coin to spend on it. If I were you, I'd drop it down to 0.01, then let the market figure out the right price.
Fair enough, I'm lowering the bid now. Better to have something there than the default op fab ads. I wish I could say I had faith in the market finding the price, but since I'm apparently not in op fab's listings, I don't know how the market is expected to find me  |
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