PS - Still waiting for the "Fuck You Machine" you promised me.

This is all BS, did you notice how Josh seems tired and exausted ?  look at his eyes, he seems in total sleep depravation !  Because he works hard ?  because he's stressfull ?  because he does'nt sleep well with the fact of running a scam ?  Choose any you want, but from my point of view.. He's not at his best, whatever why, just give the man a pause.  If he's scamming, then just let foolish peoples get scammed.. If he's working hard for real, for a real product..  Believe me, you must all (trolls) be shamefull for hitting a man that tired/stressed !

Like for any furture asic mining rig, just let it cool for the purpose of it !

I'm thinking the temporary marriage between BitPay and BFL to split the $13K booth rate was arranged last summer or so. Surely not in November or December, for the booth needed to be locked in and artwork for the display had to get underway.

Regardless of whatever sentiment may have arisen after that, it's good business etiquette to honor and maintain the marriage unless, of course, one of the parties is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a nefarious entity (of which the underlined clause isn't the case), then you annul the contract. Otherwise, move forward, as they both did, and hope for a great show, and build further mind share for Bitcoin--as they both did.

Full disclosure: This post was written on my Toshiba Satellite A135-S7404 while sitting on the porcelain throne that may, or may not, need a good cleaning with equal portions of bleach and ammonia. (apologies to Bryan)

Should be interesting as this is a "sure thing".

Just to clarify, I am not making the bet.  I'm just stating that if anyone were to make a bet with Bryan Miscam, you should definitely escrow.  There's no way a character like him would pay out when he lost.

I'd be willing to serve as an escrow agent using Cryptographic Escrow.  This would result in an arrangement where I never touch the funds, and don't have to do anything to release unless there's a stalemate and the two of you refuse to release funds to the winner.  Best of all, no fee.  Benefit for me is publicity for an idea that everyone should know about.

Simply send me or link me to your PGP public keys, and I'll send you each an "escrow invitation code".  (crypto details: they're a pair from a matched set: I create integers/private keys x and y, one person gets a string encoding x and Gy, the other person gets y and Gx)

Once received, you can use my utility at https://casascius.com/btcaddress-alpha.zip to generate a "payment invitation".  (It doesn't matter who does it, but one person must generate the invitation, send it to the other, and the other person keep a copy and verify it results in the same bitcoin address since the eventual winner will also need it to unlock the funds).  (crypto details: the payment invitation encodes a third integer/private key, z.  The escrowed address is Gxyz and its private key is the product xyz, everyone is missing exactly one factor so nobody can calculate the private key unless the missing factor is released their way by one of the other parties.)

Once you have agreed that you are both looking at the same address, and that you have safely saved your escrow invitation and payment invitation codes, each of you pay your bet to that address.

When the time comes, the loser should send his original escrow invitation (the code I sent them) to the winner.  With it, the winner can calculate the private key and collect the bet.  Whoever has both escrow invitation codes plus the payment invitation (all 3 parts) can get the private key.

If the loser won't send the code, I'll have both escrow invitations, and can send both to the person I determine is the winner.

Micon. Iv'e watched the vid.. and kept an eye on  the comments made by BFL staff on the forums.
I have to say that i have never met you... but just watching the video you pissed me off more than josh.

Seriously if you are going to do this sort of  exposure for god sake work on your public mannerisms and STFU when interviewing.
Given the chance: the more you allow a person to say, the more they will catch THEMSELVES out. Unfortunately since you cannot STFU in the vid... you end up catching yourself out.
And dude if you are going to pull the pud about  'being an expert poker player' FFS do it in the bar with your mates not on the internet in a BFL slam-down.

Finally can I recommend that you follow the time approved method of camera control when asking questions(watch the pros), because the way you were swinging the fucking camera about filming yourself made me dizzy.....(I.E we don't need to see your face to hear you speaking...thats not how microphones work dude...)

I agree 100%. The closest thing to proof of this being a scam I've seen is "he looked nervous." Poker tells don't cut it when it comes to issues like this.

For the record: I don't have any faith in BFL delivering either. But I wouldn't be shouting it into a virtual megaphone on the internet branding it with my name as a conclusive scam report if I didn't have factual and tangible proof to back it up.

I respect what you are trying to do here in that there are in fact outstanding issues with BFL. But can you please tell us what part of this is a real tangible issue and what part of this is you saying Josh would regret what he said to you? I mean, from the video you posted I can tell you don't like the guy and "thats how you roll" -- going after someone with a vengeance -- but it tends to cloud the real issues here. Can you please stop your personal vindictive campaign and come up with some actual evidence? The FCC rule violation is a great start, but this poker-tell stuff is pretty lame. Yes, it may warrant a second look but a second look at what? Are you really going to sit here for the next month babbling about poker tells? I sure hope you're right because your coming down a little hard on a company that has a proven track record of actually delivering. Just based on that alone if I was the one running a scam investigation into BFL I'd stick to the facts and be a little plainer about what I had against the company personally.

Here is the currently estimated timeline, and while this is subject to change of course, it's pretty solid at this time:


Week of January 13th
Travel to packaging facility for final prep and walkthrough
Confirm travel plans and trip details with lead ASIC engineer for trip to fab

Week of January 20th
Final assembly facility prep
Leave for fab at the end of the week

Week of January 26th
Final chips roll off the line
Grab suitcase, a BMW or a Peugeot and make a break for the airport, Ronin style (You can see Tom about 6 minutes, 20 seconds into the video)
Arrive California at chip packaging plant
KC facility starts assembly process of units to drop PCB into

Week of February 3rd
Chips packaged
Packaged chips sent to assembly house
Assembled PCB is set for final testing and MCU programming
Notify users to start sending their FPGA units or BTC for trade in participants
Bulk assembled PCBs arrive in KC, we start dropping PCBs into waiting units
Boxing/labeling for shipment

Week of February 10th
We implement the 1/3 shipping plan en mass
1/3 of our assembled units will go to new orders in FIFO
1/3 of our assembled units will go to upgrade orders
1/3 will be randomly selected from both groups

We descend upon the Post Office, DHL, UPS and FedEx like a horde of angry locust


Discussion thread for this update can be found here:

PS - Still waiting for the "Fuck You Machine" you promised me.

Micon,

For those of you wondering why I told him to buy a clue, he was berating one of my employees and cussing at them, in public, at our booth and making a general scene yesterday, stomping around and yelling "IS IT JUST A FUCKING BOX WITH A FANS?!" over and over. Yes, he was literally stomping around like a child.  I figured that was the end of it, but apparently he decided to show up again today, so I was ready for him.

Yes, he was literally stomping around like a child.  

This is to the best I can remember.  I wasn't recording anything day 1, wasn't planning on anything but sneaking into CES to shake some BTC hands as I always do when BTC companies buy booths in Vegas for conventions.

1)  About "sneaking in" to CES:  I always "sneak in" to all conventions I want to go to here in Vegas.  I wear my WSOP media badge from a few years ago and just walk in like a boss.  Sure I could call whatever bitcoin-facing booth is there and have them give me a badge for the ~30 minutes I'll be there.  As will all conferences, the booth buyers usually need to pay extra for another badge, or at the very least pull a "hey let me use your badge and then I walk out with 2 badges and give one to you"   - I "sneak in" because it is +EV for everyone involved.  Next time, if ever, BFL comes to the conference I will acquire a legitimate badge as it was clear they called security to have me removed. 

2)  About the "stomping and cussing" on day 1 that Josh keeps referring to.  First off, Josh was not there day 1.  Only Dave was in the booth representing BFL.  I imagine Josh was off doing Yoga or other form of meditation & self-reflection.  We will get to that in a second.  Let's start at the beginning:

3)  Whenever a bitcoin booth at any conference comes to Vegas, I go to say hi, shake a hand, say "hey, I'm Micon.  I help Freemoney run SealsWithClubs, the market leading bitcoin online poker site."  And just see who is there and what they want to talk about, trade bitcoin ideas for ~20-30 minutes then be on my way.  I have done this many times and met a bunch of BTC industry leaders.  Erik Voorhees I met this way and he is an amazingly awesome human, and Charlie Shrem I met I think at the same Money2020 conference maybe 6 months ago or so at Aria, and I had Charlie on my donkdown podcast for an awesome interview about the bitinstant operation based in New York.  I was skeptical about parts of bitinstant and bitpay at the start, but when I asked the company directors of those organizations I was met with clear answers and follow up interviews.

4) Ok so I was on the same grind on day 1 CES - just go and meet the boys again, shake some hands, congratulate bitpay on the round of funding, etc.  My daughter was born ~ 2 weeks ago but I made time before picking my parents up at the airport to stop by CES to do this because I feel it is very important, + I'm a huge nerd and CES is nerd porn.  Right after the nerd porn convention they have a real porn convention here but that's not the point of this story.  When I found the Bitpay booth,  I didn't realize they would be sharing a booth with BFL, in fact I was very excited to see BFL equipment on display and I planned on asking some extremely nerdy questions about how the hardware will solve the proof-of-work problem much, much faster than current equipment.  I also wanted to understand the metrics of what ASIC will do to the network hash rate, as I understand mining conceptually but not technically.

5) Dave immediately engaged me when I walked near the BFL equipment.  I congratulated him on selling a large amount of pre-orders.  he said in a smug way "yeah... we've done very well"  To a studied poker professional such as myself, his body language gave me the impression that this man felt by collecting the pre-order monies he has already done well.   If I were in his shoes, the first thing I would have said was "We have a huge responsibility to get these things shipped ASAP.  The community has handed us a large amount of money"   I would feel like the weight of the world was on my shoulders to make good on the massively distributed promise of sending these machines.  Dave felt like a winner, IMO.

6)  I asked very plainly "is this your ASICs" or something to that effect.  This is when it got predatory.  He showed me the box of fans + 1 android tablet and said that is where ASIC chips will eventually go, and the android device will be the output screen to show you how fast it's mining and other stats.  I asked what the cube connected to a second android sitting on top of the fan-box was, and Dave said it's an FPGA miner that BFL used to sell, but it wasn't currently mining and you can't buy it from BFL anymore.  I asked Dave what items were available for purchase right now from BFL that they could ship immediately, he said there were none.  I then asked when they would ship ASICs, he said "in a couple of weeks," and showed me 3 cases that ASIC chips would come inside.

7)  After it was clear I was no longer a friendly and was asking some tough questions, he hit me with a classic scammer line something to the effect of "if you don't believe in BFL, then you don't believe in bitcoin."  This is where the "stomping and profanity" as Josh put it came in.  Please don't take Josh's or My word for it - Ask the bitpay guys about this next part - I give a very intelligent response to Dave, certainly using profanity for emphasis (but not in the personally derogatory way that Josh Zerlan does to me here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlWrmIqGs3Y&feature=youtu.be&t=2m43s ) more like "I believe so much in bitcoin that I wear this fucking button (point to bitcoin button I always wear when leaving the house for any reason) each day, and help run the market leading bitcoin online poker site, dedicating most of my awake time to the betterment of this technology."  Ask the bitpay guys.  I was certainly pissed off, and this guy used a classic scammer line on me and IMO it required a forceful response so Dave understands that I'm a real guy with real BTC credentials, and his line is bullshit and +1's in my head that he and his company are dishonest.

  After my response, emotions briefly settled, and I asked him when filled with ASICs how fast this machine would hash at.  He said something like 1+ T-hashes per second.  I.e. 1000 ghashes/s , would produce in terms of Dave did not know network hashrate.  I told him it wasn't a test, just tell me about how many T-hashes/s the network hash rate was.  Dave said he still didn't know, so I quickly looked it up on my Galaxy Note II by Samsung running Android Jellybean OS by removing the S-pen and quickly speaking into google "total bitcoin network hashrate"   This site came up: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/  and to me it looks like the current total bitcoin network hashrate is around 20-25 Thash/s - which means that if Dave was right, just one of these boxes could have ~ 6% of total current network hashing power.   I was surprised he had never run the math before...

9) so after this, I post the pic I took and illustrated that BFL did not bring anything worthwhile to CES.  I posted on bitcointalk that I'd be back tomorrow to film closely and ask the tough questions.  Obviously we all saw Josh Zerlan's response: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlWrmIqGs3Y&feature=youtu.be&t=2m43s


If there is anything that needs clarification please ask.  I am 100% transparent.  I further state that it is possible I have made a small chronological or grammatical error of some sort.  I feel I captured the general feel of the day 1 CES experience as it relates to BFL.

No Bryan, I'm not trashing Bitpays thread to respond to your ignorance and stupidity.  Unlike you, I pay respect to people who deserve it.  You're just a punk bitch who can't tell his head from his ass.

PS - Still waiting for the "Fuck You Machine" you promised me.

Based on what you had done the day before, I am not surprised.

There are plenty of payment arrangements based on performance.  If a chip maker has experience in custom ASICs, and believes that they can produce the product, then they very well may accept such an arrangement.

1)  About "sneaking in" to CES:  I always "sneak in" to all conventions I want to go to here in Vegas.  I wear my WSOP media badge from a few years ago and just walk in like a boss.  Sure I could call whatever bitcoin-facing booth is there and have them give me a badge for the ~30 minutes I'll be there.  As will all conferences, the booth buyers usually need to pay extra for another badge, or at the very least pull a "hey let me use your badge and then I walk out with 2 badges and give one to you"   - I "sneak in" because it is +EV for everyone involved.  Next time, if ever, BFL comes to the conference I will acquire a legitimate badge as it was clear they called security to have me removed. 

2)  About the "stomping and cussing" on day 1 that Josh keeps referring to.  First off, Josh was not there day 1.  Only Dave was in the booth representing BFL.  I imagine Josh was off doing Yoga or other form of meditation & self-reflection.  We will get to that in a second.  Let's start at the beginning:

3)  Whenever a bitcoin booth at any conference comes to Vegas, I go to say hi, shake a hand, say "hey, I'm Micon.  I help Freemoney run SealsWithClubs, the market leading bitcoin online poker site."  And just see who is there and what they want to talk about, trade bitcoin ideas for ~20-30 minutes then be on my way.  I have done this many times and met a bunch of BTC industry leaders.  Erik Voorhees I met this way and he is an amazingly awesome human, and Charlie Shrem I met I think at the same Money2020 conference maybe 6 months ago or so at Aria, and I had Charlie on my donkdown podcast for an awesome interview about the bitinstant operation based in New York.  I was skeptical about parts of bitinstant and bitpay at the start, but when I asked the company directors of those organizations I was met with clear answers and follow up interviews.

4) Ok so I was on the same grind on day 1 CES - just go and meet the boys again, shake some hands, congratulate bitpay on the round of funding, etc.  My daughter was born ~ 2 weeks ago but I made time before picking my parents up at the airport to stop by CES to do this because I feel it is very important, + I'm a huge nerd and CES is nerd porn.  Right after the nerd porn convention they have a real porn convention here but that's not the point of this story.  When I found the Bitpay booth,  I didn't realize they would be sharing a booth with BFL, in fact I was very excited to see BFL equipment on display and I planned on asking some extremely nerdy questions about how the hardware will solve the proof-of-work problem much, much faster than current equipment.  I also wanted to understand the metrics of what ASIC will do to the network hash rate, as I understand mining conceptually but not technically.

5) Dave immediately engaged me when I walked near the BFL equipment.  I congratulated him on selling a large amount of pre-orders.  he said in a smug way "yeah... we've done very well"  To a studied poker professional such as myself, his body language gave me the impression that this man felt by collecting the pre-order monies he has already done well.   If I were in his shoes, the first thing I would have said was "We have a huge responsibility to get these things shipped ASAP.  The community has handed us a large amount of money"   I would feel like the weight of the world was on my shoulders to make good on the massively distributed promise of sending these machines.  Dave felt like a winner, IMO.

6)  I asked very plainly "is this your ASICs" or something to that effect.  This is when it got predatory.  He showed me the box of fans + 1 android tablet and said that is where ASIC chips will eventually go, and the android device will be the output screen to show you how fast it's mining and other stats.  I asked what the cube connected to a second android sitting on top of the fan-box was, and Dave said it's an FPGA miner that BFL used to sell, but it wasn't currently mining and you can't buy it from BFL anymore.  I asked Dave what items were available for purchase right now from BFL that they could ship immediately, he said there were none.  I then asked when they would ship ASICs, he said "in a couple of weeks," and showed me 3 cases that ASIC chips would come inside.

7)  After it was clear I was no longer a friendly and was asking some tough questions, he hit me with a classic scammer line something to the effect of "if you don't believe in BFL, then you don't believe in bitcoin."  This is where the "stomping and profanity" as Josh put it came in.  Please don't take Josh's or My word for it - Ask the bitpay guys about this next part - I give a very intelligent response to Dave, certainly using profanity for emphasis (but not in the personally derogatory way that Josh Zerlan does to me here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlWrmIqGs3Y&feature=youtu.be&t=2m43s ) more like "I believe so much in bitcoin that I wear this fucking button (point to bitcoin button I always wear when leaving the house for any reason) each day, and help run the market leading bitcoin online poker site, dedicating most of my awake time to the betterment of this technology."  Ask the bitpay guys.  I was certainly pissed off, and this guy used a classic scammer line on me and IMO it required a forceful response so Dave understands that I'm a real guy with real BTC credentials, and his line is bullshit and +1's in my head that he and his company are dishonest.

  After my response, emotions briefly settled, and I asked him when filled with ASICs how fast this machine would hash at.  He said something like 1+ T-hashes per second.  I.e. 1000 ghashes/s , would produce in terms of Dave did not know network hashrate.  I told him it wasn't a test, just tell me about how many T-hashes/s the network hash rate was.  Dave said he still didn't know, so I quickly looked it up on my Galaxy Note II by Samsung running Android Jellybean OS by removing the S-pen and quickly speaking into google "total bitcoin network hashrate"   This site came up: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/  and to me it looks like the current total bitcoin network hashrate is around 20-25 Thash/s - which means that if Dave was right, just one of these boxes could have ~ 6% of total current network hashing power.   I was surprised he had never run the math before...

9) so after this, I post the pic I took and illustrated that BFL did not bring anything worthwhile to CES.  I posted on bitcointalk that I'd be back tomorrow to film closely and ask the tough questions.  Obviously we all saw Josh Zerlan's response: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlWrmIqGs3Y&feature=youtu.be&t=2m43s


If there is anything that needs clarification please ask.  I am 100% transparent.  I further state that it is possible I have made a small chronological or grammatical error of some sort.  I feel I captured the general feel of the day 1 CES experience as it relates to BFL.

From what Josh said, they are only using the pre-order money IF the chips work.  Otherwise, the engineers don't get paid.  Josh never said anything about paying anyone with pre-order money yet - in fact, he says "This is why we can refund all pre-orders we want".  How do you get that they are shooting pre-order money left and right when that is exactly the opposite of what Josh said?

What are you talking about?

Hi Bryan.

I am also a poker player, albeit an amateur, but I do have a couple cashes at WSOP and WSOPc. I have read several poker books which go over tells pretty extensively. It is easy for BFL to lie in forum posts and announcements/press releases, however when they do it face to face, they cannot hide involuntary responses the body has while lying. After reading your post and watching your video, I started looking around for articles/videos of BFL at CES.

I found this video interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZUPniBo5UQ

If you fast forward to 4:25, you will see the camera man ask Josh a tough question... something along the lines of "Now this is just a case, you don't actually have ASICs ready?" At this moment Josh gives off several visual tells.

First, he is blinking quickly, which is an involuntary reaction to bluffing (if you don't play poker, bluffing means lying). Now I went back through the rest of the video and he actually blinks a lot more often than a normal person, so as you know Bryan, this tell cannot be given much credence.

Secondly, Josh looked down and to the left at least three times while answering the tough question of "so.. this is just a box of fans?" and saying his product will ship soon. This was the most obvious tell for me that he was lying and already knew about a delay that hadn't been announced or are not shipping products at all. This is the most telling of his visual tells and the one that really made me think he was lying.

After watching this video I do not trust BFL or Josh at all. Good luck on your effort to prove BFL is a scam. I for one am happy to have got a refund so now I don't need to worry about my money being in BFL's pockets.