[Archive] BFL trolling museum

[becoin]

So you get the same ammount BTC back from BFL.... What then will happen is that you will exchange them at current market price?!

You seem to forget that I had THE SAME BTC amount in my pocket BEFORE sending them to BFL. Since this SAME amount in BTC is my money I can do whatever I want whenever I want BEFORE or AFTER the BFL episode!

[SgtSpike]

So you get the same ammount BTC back from BFL.... What then will happen is that you will exchange them at current market price?!

You seem to forget that I had THE SAME BTC amount in my pocket BEFORE sending them to BFL. Since this SAME amount in BTC is my money I can do whatever I want whenever I want BEFORE or AFTER the BFL episode!

Take it to a courtroom, buddy.

[ElectricMucus]

So you get the same ammount BTC back from BFL.... What then will happen is that you will exchange them at current market price?!

You seem to forget that I had THE SAME BTC amount in my pocket BEFORE sending them to BFL. Since this SAME amount in BTC is my money I can do whatever I want whenever I want BEFORE or AFTER the BFL episode!

I think you are out of luck. When using bitpay you basically signed a contract to have your currency converted to USD.
Now you could try to contact bitpay and ask them if they have "sold your BTC yet". Somewhere between the lines there was to read that they haven't converted the majority of BTC form the BFL preorders to Dollars for themselfes, but that was months ago so you will probably be out of luck. But if anything I think this is your only hope.


And on the other hand: If, lets say for instance the conversion rate would be in favor for the USD, you wouldn't complain wouldn't you and probably insist to get payed those USD instead, wouldn't you?
It's a bit too much to ask what you are expecting....

One more thing you could try if it turns out to be a scam is get together with others and sue BFL and bitpay alike, with the accusation that they worked together on the fraud. But I don't think you'll have any success with that either. 

I would suggest you lick your wounds and get on with it, see it as an expensive lesson on personal finance management and try to be more insightful next time.

[BR0KK]

So you get the same ammount BTC back from BFL.... What then will happen is that you will exchange them at current market price?!

You seem to forget that I had THE SAME BTC amount in my pocket BEFORE sending them to BFL. Since this SAME amount in BTC is my money I can do whatever I want whenever I want BEFORE or AFTER the BFL episode!

I payed for an Item with BTC 8 month ago at 3-4 €..... Now i want my BTC back because ----?

[freeAgent]

Assume that buying stuff with your BTC was like selling your BTC for USD.

I can not assume something that is incorrect. I didn't sell my BTC for USD. BFL did. I don't have any contract with BitPay. BFL have. This is why only BFL can sell BTC to BitPay!

I don't know how you are reasonning, but for me, it was clear that it was refundable in USD.

Read, read, read... I thought you have read all my reasoning so far and this is why you are annoyed?! For me, it was clear that I'm paying in BTC and it was refundable in the currency and amount that was originally paid.

Good grief. The BFL website clearly puts the *price* in USD - and lists Bitcoin as one of the payment *methods*.
The deal is DENOMINATED in USD. End of story.
You're wrong and obnoxiously so.

This is truly getting obnoxious.  Since the price is denominated in USD, you take a risk using another currency for your preorder(s).  The same thing happens with foreign exchange rates with physical currencies.  Would you be complaining so loudly if the BTC/USD conversion had gone the other way and BFL gave you more BTC now than when you placed your order?

[Korbman]

You seem to forget that I had THE SAME BTC amount in my pocket BEFORE sending them to BFL. Since this SAME amount in BTC is my money I can do whatever I want whenever I want BEFORE or AFTER the BFL episode!

We get what you're saying, but you're failing to understand that this isn't the way it works, no matter how much you'd wish it to be. BitPay is the processor, so if you really have a qualm about it you should take it up with them instead of squabbling on here...

[MrTeal]

Can I please request a mod to branch this dead horse discussion to its own thread?

[boonies4u]

Can I please request a mod to branch this dead horse discussion to its own thread?

Seconded.

[becoin]

.. Now i want my BTC back because ----?

Because ---- you didn't deliver what I paid you for!
Month after month after month after month nothing but baloney!

[becoin]

BitPay is the processor, so if you really have a qualm about it you should take it up with them...

Why? I have no contract with BitPay. BFL have! My contract is with BFL. BFL have FULL control how BitPay handles BTC payments BFL gets, including the % of BTC => $ conversions.

[repentance]

More technical information from Josh.

No, we haven't been able to test the FCBGA in real life... but FCBGA is basically the best you can get as far as heat transfer goes. I mentioned the internal junction temp of 121C in the post - I want to clarify that 121C is the maximum temp for the internal junctions in the ASIC, not that we ever saw anything near that. Our maximum temps were around 95C I think it was. The ASIC chip itself was perfectly fine under all conditions, it was the heat migration out to the rest of the components that was causing a problem and was due solely to the fact that we could not evacuate enough heat out of the top of the QFN package. Switching to FCBGA almost completely eliminates this issue.

FCBGA is what's used on many 130w - 150w TDP chips and works fine... we are running 6.4w per chip. There won't be any issue at all with heat.

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/bfl-forum-miscellaneous/690-13-jan-2013-asic-update-discussion-thread-7.html#post10426

[SgtSpike]

Nevermind...

[Nemesis]

.. Now i want my BTC back because ----?

Because ---- you didn't deliver what I paid you for!
Month after month after month after month nothing but baloney!

Jesus christ, just shut the fck up and cry to your mom.

Stupid bitch shouldnt have offsprings to begin with.

[Fuzzy]

BFL says they have successfully tested their ASIC chip design then, and all is good to go on that front, it's just the chip package that needed some changing.

I'm not comfortable with how much information they're still hiding. They claim it's because they don't want the competition to see what they're doing, but that's B.S. if you're truly only weeks away from shipping the completed product.

Given all the commotion, it would be all too easy for them to disclose what they're doing and calm everyone down, but they don't. Suggests to me there's no progress to show.

Not that I'm complaining, but that's my observation.

[meowmeowbrowncow]

...

It's not a scam.  All signs point towards a company inexperienced in producing Bitcoin ASICs ASICs attempting to produce Bitcoin ASICs.  
...

ftfy


Heat management is not exclusive to "Bitcoin ASICs."  Knowing a certain TDP will be problematic with a certain package and it's consequences to other components isn't rocket science, err, Bitcoin ASIC science.


I'm really getting tired of hearing pedestrian engineering mistakes being attributed to the difficulty of the bitcoin hashing algorithm as implemented in hardware.

[SgtSpike]

BFL says they have successfully tested their ASIC chip design then, and all is good to go on that front, it's just the chip package that needed some changing.

I'm not comfortable with how much information they're still hiding. They claim it's because they don't want the competition to see what they're doing, but that's B.S. if you're truly only weeks away from shipping the completed product.

Given all the commotion, it would be all too easy for them to disclose what they're doing and calm everyone down, but they don't. Suggests to me there's no progress to show.

Not that I'm complaining, but that's my observation.

What other information would you like to see?  Josh seems to be fairly open to answering additional questions at this point.

Also, what I said is wrong (I edited my post).  Josh clarified that the simulations done by the 3rd party company in December showed the chip itself was fine under all conditions, not that they had actually tested it with the updated PCB design.

So, here's what I piece together:
1) BFL received a small sample of QFN chips in October.
2) They decided to do additional testing to account for "worst case" scenarios.
3) They figured out that they were too close to the thermal limit, destroying their sample chips in the process.
4) They redesigned the PCB to hopefully alleviate the thermal concerns.
4) In December, they paid a company to test the redesigned PCB to see if they could sufficiently cool the QFN chips.  It turns out they could, but that the PCB would be partially acting as a heatsink and could potentially destroy some of the other components on the board due to heat.
5) They decide to go with flip-chip BGA at this point.
6) We're waiting on said flip-chip BGA.

...

It's not a scam.  All signs point towards a company inexperienced in producing Bitcoin ASICs ASICs attempting to produce Bitcoin ASICs. 
...

ftfy


Heat management is not exclusive to "Bitcoin ASICs."  Knowing a certain TDP will be problematic with a certain package and it's consequences to other components isn't rocket science, err, Bitcoin ASIC science.


I'm really getting tired of hearing pedestrian engineering mistakes being attributed to the difficulty of the bitcoin hashing algorithm as implemented in hardware.

Alright, fair enough.  One could certainly argue that the thermal problems should have been foreseen.  I am no expert, so I couldn't tell you - I can only take someone else's word for it one way or the other.

[BR0KK]

why aren't they showing us the god damn blown chip then ....:/

[SgtSpike]

why aren't they showing us the god damn blown chip then ....:/

They did - it was in the first set of pictures they released showcasing the PCB.

Pictures:  http://bitcoinmagazine.com/butterfly-labs-releases-more-asic-photos/

We made the decision to go with QFN in December. I can't really talk about our development process itself, but we have gone through extensive design and testing phases... at one point in early December we decided to look at a worst case scenario if the chips were in a really hot environment (you can see the bubbled chip in one of the pictures, I think someone pointed it out.). We paid a company out of California quite a bit of money to run a run of simulations under different scenarios on our boards, as well as if we made changes to various portions of the PCB if we could salvage the QFN package's thermal envelope. We were able to get the thermal loads down about 6C off the current mark, but we were still within single digits of the max temperatures of surrounding components once the heat started to migrate through the ground plane. If someone in a really hot area ran these things, the fan would be on full blast the entire time, and as dust and other detritus collected on the HSF the unit would start to overheat and throttle (or worst case, you'd get bubbled chips). The internal junction temp of our ASICs, if I recall is around 121C, however the MCU and a couple other components are around 100C or less if memory serves and we were butting up against that in some cases, in the 90's.

I've already touched on some of the roadblocks we've had. One of the more annoying ones was the diffraction issue ... for example, at 65nm if you try to make a square shape on a wafer, you can't just make a square shape on the mask, you'll end up with an ellipsis of some sort due to the wavelength of light. So you have to shape the mask to accommodate the wavelength so what ends up on the wafer is a square, though it looks very different on the mask. So you have to go through just about everything, making sure what you want is actually what ends up on the wafer... the delay this caused was not anticipated to the extent it delayed us and since this is a full custom, hand routed chip, basically it had to be gone over by hand from top to bottom.

Another delay we've had to endure is the fact that we have effectively tied the ASIC teams payment to the success of the chip. If the chip were to be a failure they don't get paid... so they have incentive to get it right but that has made them very cautious and slow to approve final masks (This is why we can refund all pre-orders we want and why we have the capital to do what we need to do without a failure putting us in bankruptcy).

Ultimately, it has all boiled down to the incredible complexity of the chip (I mean, look at that beast, it's all black in the shot it's so dense). If the chip were not so complex and so efficient there wouldn't be a heat issue, there wouldn't be the wariness of releasing the mask, etc... This is why I find it patently ridiculous that Tom kept claiming his 90nm sASIC or PnR chip would be 100w, it's ludicrous. Avalons claims are far more reasonable at 400w for their design and is why I haven't given them such a hard time. I think Avalon is going to run into some problems that we've run into, but I don't think they will be anything insurmountable, but I suspect it will delay them a bit while they try to figure out how to mount all the heat sinks or the giant heatsink they are going to need to keep the thing cool, and the board itself has to be massive. Tom was estimating 7 x 9" if I recall for his 16 chip 90nm process... the Avalon is 110nm with at least 80 chips I estimate... though I'm sure the chip footprint is much smaller, we're still talking about a bucket load of chips that all have to be cooled. If their package, and I think they are using QFN, is not letting enough heat out the top they are going to flood their thermal and ground planes with 300w+ of heat and cook everything in sight. We were fighting 60w of heat (granted, on a much smaller surface area) and it was a problem, I can't imagine trying to fight 300w of heat. For their sakes, I hope they have already considered these issues or it's going to be a nasty surprise the first time they turn a unit on and the chips start popping and letting the magic smoke out.

[Fiyasko]

why aren't they showing us the god damn blown chip then ....:/

They did - it was in the first set of pictures they released showcasing the PCB.

Pictures:  http://bitcoinmagazine.com/butterfly-labs-releases-more-asic-photos/

Someone please point it out for me, Those look like the same photos from awhile ago, I would assume that someone would've gone "LOOK!, ITS BROKEN!"

[Phinnaeus Gage]

why aren't they showing us the god damn blown chip then ....:/

They did - it was in the first set of pictures they released showcasing the PCB.

Pictures:  http://bitcoinmagazine.com/butterfly-labs-releases-more-asic-photos/

Someone please point it out for me, Those look like the same photos from awhile ago, I would assume that someone would've gone "LOOK!, ITS BROKEN!"

I believe it's the bottom chip of the two that are in the middle. See how it has a bulge to it, whereas the other seven chips are flat. Somebody confirm or correct me in this regard.