Having created the bet, you don't get more authority than other betters, but you do get more responsibility: you can't blame anyone else for poorly defining the bet.
The bet was approved by the site administrators before being opened for betting. "Discovering" that the bet was "ambigious", when it clearly wasn't since it failed numerous criteria, after the outcome had occured, is all BoB's fault. Actually you, Luke-JR, can't actually be much blamed for this point. You're just the soccer player who raises his arm after the other teams scores a goal and claims that it was off side when everyone in the stadium saw that it was nowhere near off side. While your soccer career would be tainted forever due to the association with this referee corruption scandal, it was actually the referee who annulled the goal who was the truly corrupt and will get punished, since your raised arm didn't really influence his decision.
"Shipped" is sadly enough ambiguous by itself due to the precedent set with Avalon's "shipping".
In the case of Avalon, both hand-delivery to customers and turning units over to the bulk shipper, would count as "shipped". However, for the sake of a bet, it would be hard to verify that it was shipped, and what the boxes actually contained, until it actually was in the hands of at least one customer - thus some additional requirements where needed.
The terms of the bet gave it an explicit definition in this case.
The title is part of the definition of the bet, as admitted by BoB. The additional terms just mean that shipping doesn't count until the additional requirements are also met. It had to be shipped, and hashing within certain specs as proven by posting by a non-employee customer on the forum.
By your attempts to finangle the meaning of "shipped", you might just as well have claimed that if BFL took the board on a boat trip on a lake, it was shipped. Likewise that a room full of GPUs counted as an "ASIC".
Look credible enough to me. I don't see how Josh taking the pictures makes them non-credible.
The conditions were there to make sure that the product was actually in the hands of a non-BFL employee, a customer. Since the pictures were taken by a BFL employee, the essence of your post was actually made by BFL Josh.
More technicalities.
Before I got my Little Single, can you honestly say you would have interpreted the bet to exclude it?
It's clearly listed in the conditions. Since you consider both the title and the additional conditions all to be "technicalities" it shows that you're just pretending that the bet doesn't exist. The only thing in there that would be interpreted as a technicality, and actually be a subject of serious debate, is the time zone thing - but since the BFL side already lost the bet on so many other points the time zone question would never need to be decided.
It is perfectly clear (to me, at least) that I am not a BFL employee.
If you want to doubt me, that's your problem - I'm sure you could ask the IRS somehow or another.
If this ever were to make it to court, this might actually be a point that never would need to be argued, due to the more obvious criteria already mentioned (like that it never was even shipped, and that Josh took the photos on the test bench). But if they make it to the employee question, the fact that BFL are paying your expenses and sending BTC to you from their test bench would probably end up with you being considered an employee
in the context of this lawsuit where the obvious intent of the non-employee clause is that the evidence is provided by a third party not under the control of BFL. However, if this was a lawsuit between you and BFL about whether or not you have a right to workman's comp, health insurance, etc. then you might have been found to be a contractor doing work for them instead.
No, I wouldn't lose anything if BoB ruled in your favour.
It would just set a precedent for BoB bets being decided on technicalities.
You lost face the second you posted that thread. That BoB decided to use your thread as an excuse for cancelling the bet made your loss of face even more memorable, but as I said that part wasn't really your fault.
I might, but I'd also recognize that the real problem were in the terms of the bet not being "cheatable".
You can never define a bet, contract or a piece of legislation to protect it against people who redefine what the words mean after the fact. The only way to protect against that is to have judges/referees who use a conservative, strict constructionalist interpretation of what was written, rather than the types who redefine what things mean based on their whims.
