REVELATION I JUST HAD ABOUT BTC!!! Read This

[fuggedit]

 
So I am constantly seeing a series of dillemmas on these boards about the various mining products and services they got all hyped up over enough to preorder and when they were told they would get it, the company in question stalls. What they are most times doing is using the preorder scam. It is an old school ponzi type thing where they will take money now for promise or goods/returns later. Why can't people realize they THEY have the power to change this, not these greedy companies (BFL knc, etc....) All you do is don't preorder! That simple. That way the company actually has to give you a product at the time of purchase (neat concept huh)

Why can't you all see this?

[Kazimir]

Why can't you all see this?

Because greed.

[DELTA9]

Damn I bet all those people who preordered from butterfly labs want their money back too bad they can't do chargebacks...you gotta be careful who you send your bitcoin to because there are so many people online that want to steal your hard earned bitcoin. People who ordered from butterfly labs were dumb to trust a new company that just came out of nowhere lol do some research next time.

[franky1]

yep very simple idea, the only issue is that greed overpowers rational thought in most people. meaning those promised a machine that spews out loads of coins per day only see dollar signs and think they are smarter for getting in first. well to those that think getting in first is the smart idea, here is something to think about

do they even have a working finalised PROTOTYPE ready for mass production?
if not, walk away, your not paying a pre-order your paying their R&D costs.

do they set limits to how many pre-orders they allow per batch?
if not, walk away, they have no clue how fast they can make machines, they just want as much money as they can grab.

if the delivery promise is over a month, and ROI is X months are you really profiting?
if not, walk away. alot of people find that a 3-12 month wait could have yielded them more profit playing the markets or even buying produce such as T-shirts, mugs etc and reselling them at a mark up value, repeating the process for the same 3-12 months.

unless a machine will actually give a ROI in under a month at time of delivery, knowing every 2 weeks the difficulty jumps. it is not that profitable to be on a waiting list.

instead invest your coins wisely else where

[Light]

Because greed.

Pretty much the best explanation. People don't want to think about the possibility of scams when they could be making thousands of dollars a day from mining (based off their ridiculous calculations that they'll get the miner tomorrow and start mining 24/7 etc) so they conveniently ignore it and then obviously get scammed.

[CMMPro]

Thank you for that news bulletin!

Everyone is aware of the pre-order carrot dangle...but many are willing to gamble to get an advantage.

I think the tide has turned recently though in terms of the big mining stock scams and big losses on Labcoin, Avalon DIY, BFL...maybe more failures coming in the future.

There will always be speculators willing to gamble to make big money and the companies that try to lure those funds away.
It's up to the individual consumer to decide their risk level.

Hopefully going forward we will see more skepticism in the marketplace, but I think it will take more people getting burned to change people's attitudes. 

Personally I would like to see a "general standard of accounting and financial reporting" implemented at the exchange level.
If they don't do it themselves the SEC is going to do it for us....and nobody wants that.

The companies selling hardware need to be further along in their development schedule before actually offering hardware for pre-order/sale.

Personally I doubt that in the future I will buy any hardware that isn't verified to ship within 1 month of my order....hardware that actually exists and for a price where I can at least break even.
 

[adnanabbas]

if it wasn't for bitcointalk and the folks in it, greed would have got the better of me and i would have been DOOOOOMED!!! i tells you

[fuggedit]

Personally I doubt that in the future I will buy any hardware that isn't verified to ship within 1 month of my order....hardware that actually exists and for a price where I can at least break even.
 

NO! The concept for any pre order of a product doesn't make sense! The companies will scam in this  economic community over  n over. If tou even preorder a week or a day you are hurting the buyers/investors market here for good.

[sidhujag]

I think alot of the noobs who didn't know where to start and missed the initial boat were the ones who bought in to pre-orders.

This is basically done now and any monkey can see the difficulty graph and see that todays $5k order is worth 1/10th in the very near future.

I said this 100 times before (when idiots where buying pre-orders @ 100x the cost on ebay) that the true value of any of these pre-order asics are 1/10th of the retail cost, so if its on for $5k i'll buy it for $500.

The asic business is pretty much at the saturation point done as more and more people are not willing to front their money for R&D costs and an initial discount which is meaningless in the face of the difficulty spiking.

[Peter Todd]

So I am constantly seeing a series of dillemmas on these boards about the various mining products and services they got all hyped up over enough to preorder and when they were told they would get it, the company in question stalls. What they are most times doing is using the preorder scam. It is an old school ponzi type thing where they will take money now for promise or goods/returns later. Why can't people realize they THEY have the power to change this, not these greedy companies (BFL knc, etc....) All you do is don't preorder! That simple. That way the company actually has to give you a product at the time of purchase (neat concept huh)

Why can't you all see this?

I've ordered equipment from BFL three times now. Two of my orders have been delivered (after IIRC 4 month and 9 month delays) and a third hasn't yet. (6 months and counting)

Every one of those pre-orders was for an amount of money I could afford to lose. Why? Because pre-ordering means your not a customer, you're an investor. I did what due diligence I could on BFL, just as I would any other investment, and decided the possible return outweighed the risk. Two of my three orders have netted me a positive return, and as for the third, we'll see what happens.

Am I happy with BFL? Not really - I'd be happier if they met their advertised deadlines. But I myself work at a hardware-oriented startup - and have worked at other startups prior to my current job - and I know damn well that investments don't always work out.

Jeff Garzik had an interesting strategy: he figured at least one of the ASIC companies would deliver, and the return on investment would cover the losses on the ones that failed due to technical reasons or because they were frauds. So he took the money he could afford to invest in ASIC mining and split it evenly between all the companies claiming to make ASIC projects. His investment got him the first Avalon delivered, which by itself was enough of a positive return to cover his losses even if all the other companies turned out to be frauds; IIRC none of them failed to either ship a product, or refund his money in the end.

Of course whether or not what BFL is doing should be or is legal is another matter, but myself I generally favour that society let adults make their own choices.

[fuggedit]

Just because you "have money to blow" and are looking to flip it, doesn't make your choice equitable for the poorer folk who were really keen on getting into this but couldnt afford to buy other people's miners or do what you did. Hiteherto you guys were the main contributing factor that led to the state of the scams and greediness perpetrated on the investing and mining community and essentially locked the rest of our abilities to get any legit equipment because of the preorder becoming a set industry practice (what "maker" wouldnt take your $ ahead of time if they could...
For all we know, (and what is most likely true) one company Bs'ed you on preorders for close to a year now, didnt make shit with what you fronted them, then while they were leading you on they used the $ and used the machines owed to YOU to mine for themselves! Again its speculative but most probable.'



In the end, just dont make flagrantly unsound decisions when buying for all of our benefits

[Peter Todd]

fuggedit: You mean you're jealous because I had an opportunity to take a risk on an investment because I had some spare money lying around and you didn't? That's just life.

Nothing was stopping you from simply scaling down your investment - you could have ordered a BFL Single for $700 w/ shipping, or a single BFL Jalapeno for less than $200 with shipping. There are very few high-risk high-reward investments out there with such a low barrier to entry.

[gogxmagog]

one thing that might make n00bz think twice before ordering any mining hardware would be an app, or a webpage that calculates exactly how much each mining product would earn updated in real-time. even without factoring in power usage, the resulting numbers would be so depressingly shitty that NO ONE would dream of wasting their money on such larks. If you plugged in a BFL single today, what would it earn you? ~0.3 btc every 24 hrs? if there was a chart showing the decline in earnings for the same single over the last 6 months, everyone would easily see that making ROI is a dream. I wonder when the mining companies are going to start offering to buy up all the privately owned hardware? an app like i described above would certainly help them with this endeavor. lol.