Is anyone actually going to buy the 600 GH/s BFL unit after their customer service? The reason I ask this is because not only did their employees call their customers who waited a year "stupid" etc. but they used customer money to fund research and development along with marketing. I know I'll probably get flamed by Josh for this but if this wasn't the case, then the people who paid in BTC, why were their refunds offered in USD? So basically profit was made twice, once on sales, and second on BTC increase while people waited a year. I just wanted to know exactly how they plan on selling to people on bitcointalk.org as I have seen their advertisement on this site after their treatment of the people who allowed them to exist in the first place. By making their empty promises, the company profited in the millions because of peoples' wanting of a 1.5 TH/s miner, and the other miners which people thought would make them rich, but in actuality just made BFL rich. Like all my other posts, please keep the discussion positive and reasonable. BFL, realize this isn't a flame to you, but more of a wake up call. I have run numerous successful businesses and the most important thing in my mind is customer service. Hence, with my group buy, though I purchased systems already, along with cooling, humidity control and security structure. I still refunded peoples' money up until early August. With that, let's start some discussion!
I remember way back when BFL first started posting to forums they were saying that they were planning to ship product within three months (HAHA, OH GOD, HAH) and that if you pre-ordered you'd have product in hand
within that time frame.
BFL has tried really well to do well by their customers but it was nearly impossible because of a lot of factors, some of which I'll list here:
1. The founders started out with zero experience and zero knowledge of product design and manufacturing, so there was a lot of trial and error, and every time there was an error it added months to the research, design and production of their product.
2. Because they were naive they were also very gullible. Every time the facilities working on their products screwed up or missed a deadline they offered BFL some kind of shiny reward for not dumping them and instead of sticking to their guns BFL took the shiny reward (more wafers in a shorter time, brushed metal cases instead of plain ones, etc etc).
3. Because their initial design was shit, they had to keep revising the product after they had already started production of parts. For example, they had already started producing standard mount chips before they realized that they couldn't keep them from overheating. They had to stop production of their chips altogether and start over with flip chips, which required the additional step of "bumping" the chips (adding little solder balls to them so they could be mounted upside down).
4. They are located in the US, so every company they went to with their product design knew they would be loose with money and so of course they over-charged them and took their sweet time producing parts for them while the other products being produced for other companies for companies who were much less patient and could have gone to any number of other fab houses got pushed ahead of BFL. Meanwhile the fabs kept telling BFL any day now, any day now.
BFL took WAAAAY too much time making sure they produced a beautiful, functional, aesthetically pleasing box that you're going to throw in a closet or garage and ignore.
What BFL should have done was what Avalon did: Start with a working design, test it, slap that shit in an ugly box and ship it. Fucking ship it. Just fucking get it out the door.
But no. They nit picked over every single tiny detail and so every product they've shipped has been either completely obsolete or nearly obsolete before it even got to their customers.
Look at all the people who ordered Jalapenos: The damn things aren't ROIing even
now but there are still people waiting for their pre-orders.
I don't feel that BFL knowingly sold product they knew would be obsolete in order to fund their Monarch product. I believe what happened is that BFL simply wasn't able to meet the deadlines they thought they would because they didn't have the experience to produce product like Avalon.
I also believe that by the time they get the Monarch out the door (probably around Septermber-October next year) not only will the product be obsolete, but that most people won't be bothering with mining anymore because the network difficulty will be so high that it won't be possible to produce hardware that can mine efficiently enough to make a profit.
At that point what is supposed to happen is that people begin trading bitcoin instead of mining.
I'm anticipating one of two things will happen:
1. Bitcoin will become scared and the price will shoot up as people stop mining and start trading. The scarcity will come from all the people who bought mining hardware, did their mining, then cashed out their BTC for products, services or cash. The value of Bitcoin will spike for a while, then it will abruptly fall off because all the BTC will be with so few holders that no one will be able to trade for it (this is what typically happens with any capitalist economy).
2. The Bitcoin market will crash and everyone will dump the network because they're not forex traders, they're nerds with specialized computer hardware. I'm speculating that a good 90% or more of the people who mine Bitcoin have no concept of how to trade currencies and are only in it until mining is no longer feasible.
