https://forums.butterflylabs.com/pre-sales-questions/3043-point-were-all-investors.html#post37924LabRat says it is so.
Logic with BFL is not even apparent anymore whether an employee or shill.
1. I give you money for a product you dont have.
2. You spend months and tons of the money I sent you to develop your product.
3. Once product is FINALLY prototyped you claim I am not an investor despite your actions over the past 12 months of acting as if I am by using my monies to develop your product.
SMH
That looks almost like a classic "societas leonidas" - customers "invest" their money into a new company. They take all the risks - like BTC price crash, company's inability to design a working ASIC, competitors designing ASICs faster and driving difficulty up, etc. In such case company just declares bancruptcy and customers get nothing. In case of a success company owners get all the shares, all the technology, manufacture as many ASICs as they want and "print" as many BTC as they can. Customers get their ordered devices (which are much less profitable than in the beginning) - so that's I call it "almost" a leonine company. Customers take all the risk and a tiny profit, company owners take no risk and most of the profit.
And it's legal!
In one word: Brilliant!
P.