It looks like it's related to using multiple payment methods.  The person in the post I linked to above also used multiple payment methods and has heard back from support - their refund will be split into multiple payments (they received $520 first and were waiting on $163 and used Bill Me Later and PayPal).  So it does look like it's an accounting thing and that if your payments came from different accounts and were made in separate transactions, your refund will also be made in separate transactions. 

It would be pretty damned useless in many parts of Australia, too - only about 25% of Australia's land mass has terrestrial mobile phone coverage.

Are all the other South American scammers who've shown up recently your "friends" too?

Close.  It's acid inspired.

This isn't a uniquely Australian problem.  Bank transfers are risky everywhere, especially if you don't impose a "clearing" period of at least a couple of days.

It might be helpful if you posted how you got burnt and by whom and also which bank was involved.

Why does the entry say that the highest value coin is 1 and the highest value bank-note is 1?  There are no "official" coins or notes and if you're going to include unofficial ones then Mike Caldwell produces coins of a much higher value than 1 BTC.

Your ego is leaking again.

Did MP ever receive a response to the email he sent to SRG informing them about Patrick's activities?

Also, I've mentioned this before but Patrick belongs to two professional bodies (he's a Chartered Secretary and a member of the Institute of Directors) which almost certainly have ethical standards for their members so that might be another road to go down.  Sometimes the threat of loss professional status can be more effective, faster and less costly than the threat of legal action for getting people to the negotiating table.

Do keep up Josh.

http://thewhet.net/2012/shall-be-delivered/

Perhaps you'd like to enter the short story competition yourself.  The theme is especially relevant to the Bitcoin community.


http://polimedia.us/trilema/2012/voluntary-contracts-after-a-while/

But Facebook is the best tool for organising revolutions, donchaknow.

Real-time reporting has never relied on "investigative journalism".  The 24 hour news cycle means that media organisations publish whatever information they're given without verifying it in an effort to be first with information.  Sadly, consumers care a great deal more about getting new information every five minutes than they do about whether or not the information is accurate.  Once one large media organisation has published wrong information, others pick it up off the wires without verification and it often becomes imprinted in the public memory as "truth" regardless of the later release of actual facts.

Even if media organisations themselves declined to publish names until they were verified by authorities, insanely inaccurate stuff is often posted in the comments section of developing stories by Joe Average and that feeds the whole internet detective thing which leads to random accusations taking on a life of their own.

This is kind of self-adjusting, though.  If people abandon mining because it's not profitable, difficulty will drop and the remaining miners will get a bigger share of the pie.  Also, people tend to forget about transaction fees.  If mining is not profitable then those maintaining the network can use fees to keep their participation in the network worthwhile - after all, Bitcoin is planned so that more income will be produced by fees than by mining over time and that switch needs to happen progressively to keep the network stable.

According to Josh, he'll be personally over-seeing the slicing and packaging which I would call a significant role.

Generally speaking, you don't keep PR updated on every little detail of a project because it's just not necessary for them to be filling in customers on every tiny detail of the production process and doing so can be extremely counter-productive.  This isn't a time-critical project in the conventional meaning of the phrase.  End users were treating it like one and demanding information because so many of them had foolishly counted on ASICs being available before the reward halving. 

The company made a rod for its own back by announcing unrealistic timelines in an attempt to dominate the ASIC pre-order market.  Once it started giving explanations (real or fabricated) for date slips, end users then felt entitled to constant updates and BFL got locked into the "just a little further" game.  While it could certainly be argued that customer retention is part of PR's role and that reassurance that their needs will be met soon is one aspect of that, PR often creates illusions with smoke and mirrors and they often don't need hard facts to do that.

Ummm, every ~ten minutes.


The proposed lowering of the threshold for transaction fees might make remaining part of the network attractive to some people who can't afford ASICs or who see them as ridiculously expensive shovels.  Mining returns get so much attention it's easy to forget that it's only important to Bitcoin in the short-term whereas Bitcoin literally can't survive long-term without validating transactions being profitable for those who maintain the network.

Out of curiosity, was your refund in USD or BTC?  I imagine (hope) that they don't have a shit-ton of BTC just sitting around in a hot wallet, so I could see BTC refunds taking a little bit longer to process if they need to move BTC around.


Opportunity cost should be factored into any purchase/investment.

Someone over on the BFL forums is complaining about having only received back the $520 for their upgrade so far and not the remaining $163, so my guess would be that those items show separately in their books and so are refunded in separate transactions.

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/bfl-forum-miscellaneous/544-wtf-bfl.html

Sure there are ways (formal and informal) to have disputes arbitrated, it's just that 1) the amounts involved are utterly trivial so it's not worth the time and expense and 2) many Bitcoiners value their financial privacy more highly than they value whatever amount is at stake.

Watching for a response to this post.


https://forums.butterflylabs.com/bfl-forum-miscellaneous/544-wtf-bfl.html

He's in New Zealand.  ASIC is the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

Based on what they've posted, they've never received a batch of ASIC chips, bad or otherwise.  Josh is the only one who implied that they had and Nasser quickly corrected Josh's statement.


https://forums.butterflylabs.com/content/127-bfl-asic-delays-depth-expanation.html

The design is complete.  Period.  That is where things are at.  They do not yet know when the production run of their chips will happen, only that BFL should be able to take delivery of them in January (after which other things still need to happen before they can be assembled into mining rigs).  Nasser and Dave's statements imply that Josh was not fully aware of where the process was actually up to before and was simply assuming that the fab had fucked up in some way.  As Josh's role in the production cycle doesn't begin until it's time for the chips to be sliced and packaged, it's easy to see that he mightn't have been kept up to date on every little thing which has been going on up until now and has been making statements based on assumptions he's drawn from what information was available to him rather than hard facts.

Aren't you forgetting to mention that Bitcoin was added to the Highest-valued Currency article on Wiki in response to a dare on reddit - a suggestion made by a poster named trollilio - a deliberate change which could be considered "Wikipedia vandalism" itself?

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/14rz9z/i_dare_someone_to_add_bitcoin_to_the_top_of_the/

And greyhawk, you forgot to follow his flowchart.

https://i.imgur.com/DEhIC.jpg