Re: Butterfly Labs CEO 25 Million USD Mail Fraud — A Concise Summary of Evidence

[bigasic]

Sonny has given his side.. Its time to move on..

Where has Mr. Sonny Cris Vleisides given his side?

All we have from Inaba/BFL_Josh is this:

As for Sonny K, hopefully BFL_Sonny will address that when he posts.  As I understand it, he will be working on a response this weekend.

He pm'ed his version to someone and they posted it, Sonny's account is newbie and couldn't post.. It's the same post where he posts a picture of his family.. (Not sure if that helped or hurt) Its here somewhere..Ill look for it, im sure someone has the link handy..

AR

[BadBear]

He was whitelisted, here's the thread. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110868.0

[Desolator]

But hey.. Why bother take some pics, show some screen shots of the software running, and other simple things. That could give competitors some magical advantage that they can use in six weeks.... Or maybe something aint right in asicville?

I know some pics and vid would allow me to beat them to market within six weeks with bitcoin asics. Right guys?

Helllooooo read my post a page or so back!  Someone posted a pic of an alleged Jalapeno and it disappeared!  It's gone!  Someone explain this...aww fuck it, I'll repost tomorrow when I get back to my laptop at the shop where I have a copy of it.

You mean this picture?  I don't know who originally posted it; it's not one of BFL's and has no connection to BFL.  Looks kind of cool, but I think it's a 'shop.



*EDIT* What kind of weird ass keyboard is that in the background?

Ah yes,  Who posted that originally?  At least when I pic troll, it's funny If there's 1 thing Apple's known for, it's sharing its generic device chassis lol.  I'd say you saved me the time uploading it to my photobucket account but...

[Phinnaeus Gage]

Déjà vu all over again? (from 2005)   http://www.talkgold.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-23413.html

James Ray Houston, also known as Rex Rogers , used his son in most of his scams.
Very many of the Flo systems were also present in the Laissez faire City scam.

Ian Fraser is a well known NZ fella, he steers the gullible to these scams and gets a bounty.
J. Orlin Grabbe set up a now defunct online currency sytem, DMT.
Mailvault was a product of Laissez Faire City programmers and buggy as hell, not real private unless you WANTED your info sold to scammers. Or the fed, they hired a ( former , he said when exposed) IRS revenue agent to help them work out the bugs and I bet he did.
The final audit is a classic comedy laugh fest-have a look.
http://www.lfcfa.com/financials/notes.html

[Portnoy]

Your lack of professionalism alone is enough to make me not want to ever do business with BFL.  

But add to that the news about the convicted scammer in charge... and his delay in responding to concerns... well Jesus!  
How could you ever think people would 'not' be upset, especially given the recent history of scams in Bitcoin land???

Fair enough, buy a competing product.  I'm sorry that I don't hold your hand and whisper sweet nothings in your ear.  I am so very sorry that I'm not the kind of customer service person who caters to every unreasonable whim you might have. I am super duper extra sorry that I am not the COO who will tell you anything you want to hear just to keep you as a customer.  Really, I am.  But the fact is, I am blunt and to the point.  If someone is being an idiot, I will tell them they are being an idiot.  If they ask why, I will be glad to explain why they are being an idiot.  The problem is, this forum is full of every kind of idiot under the sun, so my work week is rather long.  I don't get paid to do this, so sometimes I take a break.  I do it because it's  something I enjoy doing, when it ceases to be enjoyable, I stop.  So go ahead and cry me a river about how I hurt your feelings with my harsh words that bruised your little ego... then, by all means, build a bridge and get the fuck over it.

I am not hurt or bruised. I didn't ask you any tough questions or accuse you of anything. I am was just a potential customer. I would never send off some money on a pre-order to a company that doesn't even have that product yet to sell, but I was watching things here and seeing how the concerns and valid questions were dealt with, to see if at some point in the future, if/when that product comes out whether it might be worth buying.

But I am over this. I am over you, and BFL.  Buying anything from you or BFL is no longer an option.   You have got a lot to learn about doing business. 

[tvbcof]

I just got a personal message from Sonny.  My personal ethics are to not divulge pm's, but it had something to do with photos and some data which I personally don't have.

I've been relatively mute on the BFL accusations (though my personal suspicions and disgust at the LFC goings-on shine through sometimes), I'm not a perp-hunter, and I've never mentioned anything about any photos.

I've not responded to the pm in part because I am not completely confident that I understand the nuances of the forum software.  Probably Sonny has just got me confused with someone else (Phin?) although I would expect Sonny to be fairly bright, paying close attention, and not at all unfamiliar with the concept of threads of conversation.  I wonder if anyone else has received such a pm?

[makomk]

Franky may not know the difference between an FPGA, an ASIC, and a structured ASIC. But you are making the situation even worse. A blanket "this is ridiculous" or "this is beyond absurd" is not a response. Either do some PR or STFU.

I'm not sure Inaba does either to be honest:

Ok, lets deconstruct this a minute.  BFL has stated that our chip is a custom ASIC, end of story.  That's what it is.  bASIC is a Cell Based ASIC, which is another name for a sASIC for all intents and purposes.  So we have a parity there; we've both stated what our chip is.

Cell based ASICs are not "another name for a sASIC"; they're basically what most non-technical people would think of as a "fully custom" ASIC. Very few modern digital ASICs are actually full custom designs because they're so much more expensive to design and don't give that much performance improvement.

[bitcoinBull]

He was whitelisted, here's the thread. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110868.0

He locked it for now.

Running a sportsbook is one thing, there are winners and losers and the bookie keeps a vig. But I guess its a slippery slope to a sweepstakes/lottery fraud. I wonder how many winners there were out of $25m? Well, Sonny says it was a "roaring success".

And then there's the whole Laissez Fair City (LFC) thing, but I can't make sense of the scattered references I'm seeing. Can someone summarize it for me?

I'm also curious about his position/role at BFL. How did he come to be involved and what is his role there now? I don't see why BFL as a company would need to employ an expert in "jurisdictional arbitrage" or whitelabel sportsbook software platforms.

[jjiimm_64]

My only regret is that I cannot get all the time back i spent reading this thread!

[abeaulieu]

But hey.. Why bother take some pics, show some screen shots of the software running, and other simple things. That could give competitors some magical advantage that they can use in six weeks.... Or maybe something aint right in asicville?

I know some pics and vid would allow me to beat them to market within six weeks with bitcoin asics. Right guys?

Helllooooo read my post a page or so back!  Someone posted a pic of an alleged Jalapeno and it disappeared!  It's gone!  Someone explain this...aww fuck it, I'll repost tomorrow when I get back to my laptop at the shop where I have a copy of it.

You mean this picture?  I don't know who originally posted it; it's not one of BFL's and has no connection to BFL.  Looks kind of cool, but I think it's a 'shop.





*EDIT* What kind of weird ass keyboard is that in the background?

Ah yes,  Who posted that originally?  At least when I pic troll, it's funny If there's 1 thing Apple's known for, it's sharing its generic device chassis lol.  I'd say you saved me the time uploading it to my photobucket account but...

I'm just going to leave this here.

[bitcoinBull]

Man, its sad there's still people defending all this bullshit. I guess i would be pretty sour too if i threw all my money into a bottomless pit, which is starting to look more bleek by the second.

ITS CALLED A LONG CON PEOPLE.... has everybody already forgotten that pirate paid out on time for almost a year before taking off with millions.

I called pirate a scam from the very first time I heard of him. And even though I have no pre-order with BFL, I am biased and hope they are fully legit because, as another poster said, a BFL scam on the heels of a pirate scam would be devastating to the market sentiment.

I won't be placing a pre-order, even if they produced a demo video. I'm not a big miner. But I would still bet that they'll ship an "ASIC" product that out-performs the FPGAs at lower cost. I'm no expert on chip design, but it seems a reasonable task to outsource the manufacture of an ASIC mining chip to produce a mining rig. Maybe from a company like eASIC back in 2008:

“You need a team of 50 experts to design a high-end ASIC.”
“By the time you factor in NRE and mask costs, ASIC costs a lot more unless your volume is in the millions.”
“ASIC has very long design cycles.”
“ASIC is a high-risk game that only a small number of companies can afford.”
The list goes on and on.  That’s why ASIC design starts have been on a steady decline for more than a decade.
What if there were an ASIC technology that didn’t have the usual drawbacks like high NRE, long design times, high risk, and complex tool flows?
This week, eASIC went a long way toward implementing that vision, announcing their new 45nm, “Nextreme-2,” “Zero Mask-Charge” ASIC family. [...] Since this is a single mask layer, there is very little cost or risk involved in programming/customizing the devices.  Furthermore, in early production, the via layer can be programmed via e-beam, allowing for very small (as in 1 unit) production runs.  The company can easily produce a wafer with many designs from different companies, so there is no “minimum quantity” issue for setting up the fabrication process.

Ordering chips from eASIC? that sounds reasonable. Sharing profits of 7% per week with random people on the internet? that doesn't sound reasonable.

Its a shame this Sonny guy is involved and that his father is who he is, and Inaba's agitation in this thread is a total PR failure for the company.

I know everyone has fresh burns from pirate. But when a LONG CON is so long that it becomes indistinguishable from a legitimate business, then its a legitimate business.

[Phinnaeus Gage]

I just got a personal message from Sonny.  My personal ethics are to not divulge pm's, but it had something to do with photos and some data which I personally don't have.

I've been relatively mute on the BFL accusations (though my personal suspicions and disgust at the LFC goings-on shine through sometimes), I'm not a perp-hunter, and I've never mentioned anything about any photos.

I've not responded to the pm in part because I am not completely confident that I understand the nuances of the forum software.  Probably Sonny has just got me confused with someone else (Phin?) although I would expect Sonny to be fairly bright, paying close attention, and not at all unfamiliar with the concept of threads of conversation.  I wonder if anyone else has received such a pm?

No communications here, and do concur that Sonny would know the ropes in regard to forum communications, for he was editor of Laissez Faire City Times newsletter and owns webspawner.com since 1995, of which begs the question--who ran said site while the Greek geek was sitting in a Dago jail for two years? It had to be somebody he put the utmost trust into.

~Bruno~

[Inaba]

Its a shame this Sonny guy is involved and that his father is who he is, and Inaba's agitation in this thread is a total PR failure for the company.

I know everyone has fresh burns from pirate. But when a LONG CON is so long that it becomes indistinguishable from a legitimate business, then its a legitimate business.

Yeah, PR disaster alright.  God it's a nightmare, we are having trouble keeping with the doubling of our standard sales figures over the past couple days.  It's truly a disaster.

Ok, I lied... we aren't really having trouble keeping up with the 2x bump in sales.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that "normal" people are going to read this thread and come to the same conclusion the batshit insane posters here have come to.  The reality is that people outside Bitcointalk see a thread like this, see the screaming, foaming idiots posting all of this tinfoil hat shit and all these highly improbably or impossible, convoluted contortions to fit the facts into their version of reality and think "Holy shit, they are on to something here, I better go check things out."

Then they go check things out, and being normal, rational individuals that are capable of making rational, educated decisions and then place an order for the best bang-for-your-buck mining equipment out there and here we are.  The more enterprising individuals will go back and look at the BFL FGPA history, see that everyone was foaming, screaming idiots about the FPGAs and lo and behold, BFL delivered.  Now they see the same thing happening with ASIC and guess what?  "Holy shit, I don't want to miss out on that gravy train a second time." 

The people who backed us then came out way ahead.  People who back us now are going to come out way ahead.  The fence sitters and haters are going to lose out, and that's exactly as it should be.  BFL has delivered, is delivering and will continue to deliver.

[niko]

The reality is that people outside Bitcointalk see a thread like this, see the screaming, foaming idiots posting all of this tinfoil hat shit and all these highly improbably or impossible, convoluted contortions to fit the facts into their version of reality and think "Holy shit, they are on to something here, I better go check things out."

Inaba, please try to stay on topic, even if some people go on tangents and ponder on conspiracy theories. There is nothing screaming, foaming, or tinfoily about your customers and potential customers voicing concerns about a convicted fraudster running the company, apparently in violation of his probation.

In some way I agree with you that ultimately everyone here should shut up and either give up mining, or place orders with BFL, or with their competitors - but only after you and the company you represent provide specific answers to specific, legitimate questions. Only then can you expect people to decide for themselves and move on.

Everyone, let's try to stay on topic: post in this thread relevant information you are able to find, and post specific questions for Mr. Vleisides in the town hall thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110786.msg1206139#msg1206139

[makomk]

Ordering chips from eASIC? that sounds reasonable. Sharing profits of 7% per week with random people on the internet? that doesn't sound reasonable.

eASIC make what are known as structured ASICs. They have much higher power consumption and per-unit costs than standard-cell ASICs, and I'm not convinced that BFL could fulfil even the vague promises they've given about power consumption using them. More importantly Inaba has claimed one of the competing miners, bASIC, won't be able to achieve anywhere near the power efficiency of the Bitforce SC because they're using structured ASICs. (From what I can tell bASIC actually describe their chips as using the full ASIC design process and not a structured ASIC; Inaba was just spreading FUD about the competition.)

[kwoody]

I'd be more worried about JP Morgan & Chase's acquisition of BF Labs Inc., than I would be about if they're going to deliver ASICs or not. JP Morgan & Chase has been interested in BTC since the June '11 bubble. It would take a measly ~$630,000 investment on behalf of JP Morgan & Chase to bring down the entire network assuming 1TH/s SC minirigs actually exist, or might exist in the near future; this is a threat.

[Inaba]

Spreading fud huh? So quoting Toms comment in his own thread that he is using cell based ASIC is FUD huh? Nice to know.

[Shadow383]

Its a shame this Sonny guy is involved and that his father is who he is, and Inaba's agitation in this thread is a total PR failure for the company.

I know everyone has fresh burns from pirate. But when a LONG CON is so long that it becomes indistinguishable from a legitimate business, then its a legitimate business.

Yeah, PR disaster alright.  God it's a nightmare, we are having trouble keeping with the doubling of our standard sales figures over the past couple days.  It's truly a disaster.

Ok, I lied... we aren't really having trouble keeping up with the 2x bump in sales.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that "normal" people are going to read this thread and come to the same conclusion the batshit insane posters here have come to.  The reality is that people outside Bitcointalk see a thread like this, see the screaming, foaming idiots posting all of this tinfoil hat shit and all these highly improbably or impossible, convoluted contortions to fit the facts into their version of reality and think "Holy shit, they are on to something here, I better go check things out."

Then they go check things out, and being normal, rational individuals that are capable of making rational, educated decisions and then place an order for the best bang-for-your-buck mining equipment out there and here we are.  The more enterprising individuals will go back and look at the BFL FGPA history, see that everyone was foaming, screaming idiots about the FPGAs and lo and behold, BFL delivered.  Now they see the same thing happening with ASIC and guess what?  "Holy shit, I don't want to miss out on that gravy train a second time." 

The people who backed us then came out way ahead.  People who back us now are going to come out way ahead.  The fence sitters and haters are going to lose out, and that's exactly as it should be.  BFL has delivered, is delivering and will continue to deliver.

You're right, when I see a company that's taken millions of dollars in pre-orders for a product whilst providing incredibly little information on that product, and the CEO turns out to have a conviction for a 25 million dollar wire fraud that involved taking payment up front for products that weren't legit, and then someone representing the company goes on a pissy little rant about how "entitled" the customers who've given them millions of dollars are, I think; "Shit, those people are so crazy and entitled, they should trust the convicted multi-million dollar fraudster and his company despite their total lack of transparency".

If it's anything, I was considering ordering an SC single, a bASIC and an Avalon.
Now I'm ordering 2 bASIC's and an Avalon.

<3

[Inaba]

Sweet enjoy your new products! Congrats. We will gladly accept you back into the fold when you are ready.

[MXRider]

I'm away for two days and there's already a new scandal. I love this place. If you are stupid enough to play the lottery.. Well, you would have lost the money anyway  (just joking)

Regards,
Customer with an order of several SC Singles