Butterflylabs Huge SCAM

[jamesgarfield]

Suspected it for awhile, confirmed now.

[1713405232]

1713405232

[1713405232]

1713405232

[1713405232]

1713405232

[1713405232]

1713405232

[jamesgarfield]

I'm surprised they extend as much courtesy to dealing with people on this forum as it is...

You received no answer because your question was so incredibly stupid that it doesn't deserve an answer.  I mean, seriously, just stop and use your brain for one second.  Just one second.  How did we manage to assemble and ship thousands of FPGA units?  Do you think they just magically fell out of the sky and we shipped them out?  Don't you think (no, you don't, obviously) that we might use that same facility/tables/benches/chairs/etc... to assemble ASIC units?  Are you really this stupid?

This is why I don't take you seriously... you can't even form a cogent thought on simple mechanics, such as assembly... why should I bother to answer any of your other equally asinine questions if you can't even comprehend such a simple thing as new benches vs old benches.

Yea...  'courtesy'.....  

Answering the same retarded questions over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, again, until the next idiot comes up with an even STUPIDER question, for them to answer over, and over, and over...

It's called Public Relations and many businesses seem to handle the challenge without much problem.  

The fact that BFL would put an offensive creep like Inaba out front to represent their company is enough in itself to make me avoid ever doing business with them.
All the lies and other irregularities just cements that decision.
  
  

Agreed+1

[jamesgarfield]

I thought about ordering one of these my main issue is the wait time.


Has anyone taken into account the amount Bitcoins are and how much more you could have made when these went on sale. This company if they have this in Bitcoin that you paid for has made a mint off of you.

Lets say you paid for bit coin around Jan before the huge spike.

Then is was around $10USD a Bitcoin - so with that logic lets break down the products they are offering. Then how much you would have if you just sat on BTC and sold them today. These will be estimates and according to the markets avg.

5gh Miner Jan 10th order would have cost you 27.4BTC - at current markets that would = $3973 not $274

25gh Miner Jan 10th order would have cost you 124.9BTC -  at current markets that would = $18110 not $1249

50gh Miner Jan 10th order would have cost you 249.9 -  at current markets that would = $36234 not $2499


This is the main thing that bothers me. Not grant it, you could still get the product and make all that money back but they are sitting on a huge amount of money and have made way more off you. No one seems to mention or see this and it leaves me baffled


* side note, that current rate I used was today $145, if they had sells when it spiked to $200 or higher that would be much much more.


I do not think they are a scam, I just think doing a preorder of this nature is stupid.

[BTCoder]

I'm surprised they extend as much courtesy to dealing with people on this forum as it is...

You received no answer because your question was so incredibly stupid that it doesn't deserve an answer.  I mean, seriously, just stop and use your brain for one second.  Just one second.  How did we manage to assemble and ship thousands of FPGA units?  Do you think they just magically fell out of the sky and we shipped them out?  Don't you think (no, you don't, obviously) that we might use that same facility/tables/benches/chairs/etc... to assemble ASIC units?  Are you really this stupid?

This is why I don't take you seriously... you can't even form a cogent thought on simple mechanics, such as assembly... why should I bother to answer any of your other equally asinine questions if you can't even comprehend such a simple thing as new benches vs old benches.

Yea...  'courtesy'.....  

Answering the same retarded questions over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, again, until the next idiot comes up with an even STUPIDER question, for them to answer over, and over, and over...

Yeah, that's a courtesy. And the responses are usually given in the same spirit as the 'questions' are posed. If you act like an asshole, the response is probably going to be given in a similar spirit. If you ask stupid, ignorant questions, expect to be treated like a stupid, ignorant person.

If it was just 1-2 idiots, I'm sure the responses might be more patient. But this forum has HOARDS of veritable idiots who continuously nag, and whine, and generally ramp up the derp to unbelievable levels.

I like this.

[MooC Tals]

Just answer my question. You might fool me into pre-ordering again. You know, Me being not so bright.

Mooc Josh is in way too deep. He can't legally answer any of your or my questions. If they fail to deliver but continue to take preorders, then we will file a class action lawsuit followed by a criminal complaint to the relevant authorities. Contrary to Josh's meager understanding, it is illegal to accept almost $100,000 dollars in preorders for minirigs when the company has evidence that the sales claims cannot be true. It is consumer fraud. And before Josh you say false, Cloudhashing has claimed they preordered the minirigs. Either you are lying or they are.  

Cloudhashing's Proof of Purchase
https://picasaweb.google.com/104878918886305681953/ProofOfPurchase?authuser=0&feat=directlink#5866587391835308050

Note the last date of purchase in April. BFL had already received their ASICs and verified the power consumption was too high to scale to the minirig. Therefore, they knowingly took money for a product that did not exist pending R&D.

Def of Consumer Fraud:
Deceptive practices that result in financial or other losses for consumers in the course of seemingly legitimate business transactions.

Seems pretty clear here. Cloudhashing was never told about the R&D risks or given a rough delivery date. The bitcoin preorder option was another example of consumer fraud. We in the community have a reasonable expectation due to the deflationary nature of bitcoin the price will increase over time. To accept bitcoins for preordered goods last year and then not deliver for months on end without refunding the appreciation of the bitcoins at time of delivery is beyond reproach. Some people paid over 3,000 dollars for their 5 GH/s units.  

That is very disturbing. I would have started posting sooner but as many other I still believed its mostly bad luck and incompetence but I am slowly seeing patterns here and if one does not follow this close enough will miss them.

Patterns of timed advertising of great news. Almost euphoric in nature and I ate it up just like any new person waiting for any news. If josh just took the time to be more patient than just claiming everyone just get a refund, I would probably still be waiting.

What was wrong with just telling everyone that we wont see these units until next year the latest. Well for one reason which I can only speculate is the pre-orders would not come in until they post a date. Thats the rub. There is the problem.

How many have said "wow 147 dollars for a jala thats too cheap. Must be a catch some where" well again as speculation I would offer that would do two things.

1) Keep fresh pre-orders coming in
2) Kill competition (honest one)

Then add the ridiculous power estimates. Many others which I have read also sent u red flags that the power consumption could not be met. There are posts that point out that Josh was approached about this and offered to help with the design as they were presently employed by other companies doing exactly that.I believe they talked to Josh at one of the CES conventions maybe the year before this one.  Could that also help kill competition for fear of competing against such hubris expectations. You decide.

Notice Avalon raised prices after batch one? That is because you can't build these that cheap. However as we all have seen Chinese people are very resourceful.

How many times we hear "The week of" from Josh?

Well then their is the CES convention that just past and all they had was the Box of fans. Thats were that meme came from I guess. We can all joke about this but there are people out there that don't find this funny at all. I really want people to get their units, I really do.

How can anyone understand what their buying without knowing all this/

[massnerder]

Answering the same retarded questions over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, again, until the next idiot comes up with an even STUPIDER question, for them to answer over, and over, and over...

Yeah, that's a courtesy. And the responses are usually given in the same spirit as the 'questions' are posed. If you act like an asshole, the response is probably going to be given in a similar spirit. If you ask stupid, ignorant questions, expect to be treated like a stupid, ignorant person.

If it was just 1-2 idiots, I'm sure the responses might be more patient. But this forum has HOARDS of veritable idiots who continuously nag, and whine, and generally ramp up the derp to unbelievable levels.

Again, you completely sidestep my point.  I'm beginning to think it's intentional  

Which requires more effort: calling people idiots over and over, or hitting ctrl+v to paste a stupid answer to the stupid question over and over?

Which one looks more professional?

Ignorance is something they should have been fully prepared to deal with, as you pointed out we are talking about brand new technology, so what do you expect?  Now, I agree that some people are getting belligerent and crossing lines, but IMHO ignoring that kind of thing is the best response.

[ohiwastedmylif]

The idea behind BFL makes no sense in the short run. They will offer their products only when mining efficiency becomes much lower. In the mean time they can make a lot more money using their product, if it works.

[MSantori]

I'm a lawyer. I ordered from butterfly labs.  Still haven't received mine.  Lots of theories floating around out there.

[animalxp]

this is NOT an investment. this is a product, an item which you buy from a company. whatever benefits you get from it are irrelevant, just as long as it works in the state which was promised at the time of sale.

an investment is a " i give you cash in exchange for more later, product or no product it doesnt matter "

the only investment going on is with your mind and the product. you cannot invest in a product alone.
thats called gambling.

The elephant in the room is;  What is going on with the customers money ?
because there is a ton of laws which exist to prevent these companies doing what the hell they want with it and as far as i can see they are all being broken.

i know exactly what they are doing which is why i put a simple & reasonable question about where they were with delivery dates and got hit with a ban. went to my bank the next day to recover the funds.

predictions
the people that ordered this year will not see any product until next year. (the numbers just dont add up)
as previous followers have said the projected delivery dates have been changed multiple times. which also confirms my horrors.
the only time when mass shipping will start (if at all) is when the difficulty changes to a new outstandingly sized margin.

this is what i would be doing if i was inclined at their level of dishonesty.

all i see is useless info on the updates announcements section.
a cluster**** of hopes and excuses for chips and boards.
there is NO way to fulfill the orders unless they were/are lying about current production figures.

now ask yourself "where is the product" and the answer becomes very clear.

[aetos]

on bitminer    there is an alias  realasciminer mining with 5.6 ths  yes ths !!!!!!!

[nikycoin]

will they ship anytime soon ??

[darkmule]

This is why you're a joke, Mooc.  You keep posting the same shit over and over.  Everyone already knows it, no one cares.

I'm sorry I hurt your widdle feewings by pointing out the fact that you're too stupid to realize that we didn't need new benches to be able to to assemble our units and could use the old ones. I figured any 6 year old child would be able to figure that out, I had no idea you didn't have the cognitive capacity of a pre-schooler.

Haha, as the saying here in my mother country goes: Sounds like someone got up from the bed on the wrong side this morning... Time to turn that frown upside down 

It may look like this douchebag is actually angry, but that is not the case.  It is a trick of a scam artist.

He merely feigns anger to distract attention from the fact that he's lying and refusing to answer questions by putting attention instead on what a douchebag he's acting like.  If attention is shifted to Josh being a colossal douchebag, which in fact he is, he deflects attention from the fact that worse than that, he's a thieving piece of shit.

[BTCoder]

I have this feeling that all the idiots who scream that BFL is a scam will just disappear and make new accounts later this year. And there will be a few nuts that believe that hundreds of forum users are being paid by BFL to act like they got working ASIC's.

I will stay.

Lmao I laughed!

[BitCoinzzz]

they seem like complete crap

[clowe]

Perhaps the problem with all ASIC hardware manufactures is that there is not a strong economic incentive for them to deliver on time, reasons being:

1. Once they sell their devices the difficulty goes up, one presumes they are also mining.
2. The longer they delay shipping the more they can make from mining themselves.

You would assume they are selling the devices because they believe that there is more money to be made from selling devices than using them to mine, these people are in business to make money.

I'm not saying this applies to Butterfly labs but this is a unique product, you're selling a product that can potentially make much more money than what you sell the product for.

I think by the time everyone gets their ASIC machines they'll be disappointed because the difficulty rate will make them difficulty to pay for themselves, the manufacturers know this.

[BTCoder]

Yep they are complete crap.

[jordaninthesky]

I openly speculated about the integrity of the process...  (I ordered $2666 in July-August 2012).  They forced a refund upon me and booted me out of my 3xxx and 4,xxx orders of 60 gh/s respectfully just a few days ago.  

Josh said I could vote with my money, but it looks like he did the voting for me. I'm sad and I feel cheated.  They won't talk to me.  =(

After PuertoLibre's fake avalon/dhl shipping notice, (yes, that low can someone's self esteem sink), this is a good joke too:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=114329.msg2100103#msg2100103

Hahaha! That's awesome.

........................
........................
........................

They finally ended up going to Wal-Mart, who has no standards and is used to interacting with trash, and got some tires. As far as I know, the WBC have never been back to McAlester Oklahoma.

That was a long story but I read it anyway.  There's a lot I don't hate about BFL.  But I do feel terribly mislead having been talked into pre-ordering ASICs instead of FPGAs back in July of 2012 because ASICS "are shipping in October", verbatim via e-mail.  And they took my potential (yet directly affiliated) options: bitcoins direclty, ASICminer, or Avalon (which I turned down).  I felt even more mislead that the website claimed that we could do pre-orders because the chips were in the final stage of development.  This, and further investigation lead me to believe that the chips were all we were waiting on.  But then, oh yeah, 8 months later we need to finish prototyping everything else.

Okay, 10 months later, we are waiting on chips again.

Can you tell me why I ought to be happy with WHAT bfl is doing?

My privileged pre-order has turned into an "untouched 'investment'" that has nothing to do with funding BFL's R&D process.

I don't know exactly what your business is or why someone would be waiting out so long for it; but I cannot say that I actually believe that it is a real scenario.  I am intrigued either way, so if you wanted to expound..

[jordaninthesky]

I openly speculated about the integrity of the process...  (I ordered $2666 in July-August 2012).  They forced a refund upon me and booted me out of my 3xxx and 4,xxx orders of 60 gh/s respectfully just a few days ago.  

Josh said I could vote with my money, but it looks like he did the voting for me. I'm sad and I feel cheated.  They won't talk to me.  =(

After PuertoLibre's fake avalon/dhl shipping notice, (yes, that low can someone's self esteem sink), this is a good joke too:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=114329.msg2100103#msg2100103

Hahaha! That's awesome. This guy wants to defame the company and do nothing but complain, but then he gets all butthurt when they tell him to take his business elsewhere!

"I hate you and your company so much, but don't you DARE tell me I can't buy your products!" The hypocrisy is overwhelming!

I have, as a business owner myself, had the wonderful satisfaction of telling the very rare disagreeable customer to take their money and get the fuck out. The reaction is always PRICELESS. You can tell that people really believe this "The customer is always right" crap, to mean that they're entitled to behave any way they want, and businesses are obligated to just put up with it.

You're not entitled to force me into an abusive customer/business relationship. If you're unhappy, I'll try and make you a happy customer. If you're just going to be a prick, I'll save us both some time, and you can go be somebody else's problem.

99.999% of all of my customer interactions are amicable, and most 'dissatisfied' customers are easily turned into satisfied customers with very little effort, a little dialogue and compromise on both sides. It doesn't always involve me giving exactly what they asked for in their complaint.

If I have a delay in being able to fill somebody's order, I give them a choice of a refund, or waiting it out. Regardless, the choice is in their hands. If they believe that my product is worth waiting for, they will. If not, they can seek other arrangements. Most rational human beings can understand that. I used to work for a very large computer company (not legally allowed to say who). More than once, I blacklisted idiot customers (business accounts even) from ever being able to place an order, or get phone support ever again (wonder how well it went for them when they had to explain to the boss man why he now no longer had a service contract, or the ability to buy his computers from that company anymore).

No longer in the computer business, but I have a customer who has been waiting on a $2900 order since September (This is a customer who orders $20,000 worth of products a year through me), when the original estimated delivery time was back in December. I CLEARLY underestimated the wait time. Most of this was based off of feedback from the manufacturer, some of it was probably too much optimism on my part. Either way, the result is, it's been 7 months for what was SUPPOSED to take 2 months, and we're still counting down.

Every few weeks, I provide an update on the fact that I'm STILL waiting on a supplier to provide his order to me, and EVERY TIME I offer to refund him if he doesn't feel like waiting anymore. And EVERY TIME, he thanks me for the offer but chooses to continue with his order, as my price is competitive with everybody else and he's not likely to get it much faster anywhere else. Keep in mind that due to government paperwork, that even AFTER his order gets to me, it will still be tied up in bureaucratic red tape for another 3-4 Months, even if it showed up in my hands TODAY.

If, for some reason, he started trolling forums and defaming my business, calling me a scammer, etc, etc. I would write him a refund check, PRONTO, and tell him that his customer privileges have been revoked. Then again, he's not an asshole, so I can't see this ever happening.

I fully support BFL's response to the idiots who want to go around trashing them but also think they are entitled to continue to buy whatever they want from them. The world doesn't owe you anything. BFL doesn't owe you anything. Learn to watch what you say about people that you want to do business with, because business is a two-way street. You have the right to take your business elsewhere, but business owners have the right to send you packing as well. I love it when a company owner has the cajones to remind imbeciles of that fact from time to time.

The Westboro Baptist church went to a small town in Southeastern Oklahoma one time, to spew their hate at whatever random event was happening that day (military funeral, I believe). Somebody cut 2 of their tires.

The WBCers drove all around town on 2 flat tires trying to find a tire shop to buy tires from. Every single tire shop they stopped at recognized them and told them they weren't worthy to be their customers.

They finally ended up going to Wal-Mart, who has no standards and is used to interacting with trash, and got some tires. As far as I know, the WBC have never been back to McAlester Oklahoma.

cool story bro

LOL cool story indeed.  What this customer service superstar seems to overlook is that there is a clear difference between trashing the company with accusations/being a asshole in general and simply asking a few questions.  Josh's conduct in this thread alone is a perfect example of why so many people are upset with BFL.  Questions are asked, and he gets all upset while name calling and raving about how these questions have been answered before and how dare you even ask them....  He can take the time to spew out his negative feelings about the community reaction to the company, but he can't simply paste a link or 2 and point out those answers like a professional.  Because, after all, it's much easier to type out a long bitchy response to someone than it is to hit ctrl+v.  

Indeed there is a difference. Hence why plenty of people have asked questions, and not had their orders canceled. They aren't canceling orders for every question. They're canceling orders for assholes trashing their business.

I've dealt with plenty of customer questions, and usually do my best to work with them. It's a VEEERRRRY rare occurrence that I tell somebody to GTFO, and it's because they're being an asshole.

We can all see plenty of people who've merely "asked questions" who didn't get their orders canceled, and get blacklisted. So the idea that BFL is canceling orders of those who 'ask questions' is asinine.

And even if they WERE doing so, that's their prerogative. It won't make good business sense, but if they want to cancel every order of any person who asks them a question, they're well within their rights to do so, and you don't have a basis to "Sue or get revenge some other way" as somebody suggested.

If you're gonna talk smack about/cop attitude with a company, be prepared to lose the option to do business with them. If you intend to have a working business relationship with somebody, behave in a manner that fosters feelings of mutual respect. Especially if you're in the position of being hosed if they tell you to get lost.

For every one customer that pulls out or gets booted for running his mouth, there are 10 more willing to take his spot. Beggars can't be choosers.

Ok.  I admit, I criticized Josh's PR capability.  I maybe got a little personal/impersonal?  I don't know how he interprets me, but considering that I am all for an audit, I'm not too surprised he considers me a threat either way.

[AzureEngineer]

on bitminer    there is an alias  realasciminer mining with 5.6 ths  yes ths !!!!!!!

That is a company (ASICminer) and is not affiliated with BFL.

[tiberiandusk]

BFL

Big Fucking Lie