{BFL} Bitcoin miners sue Butterfly Labs

[grumpy619]

Love it American greed at its finest.

[1715024375]

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[abacus]

Please admins put some emoticons with popcorn;

this thread really deserves them!

[bcp19]

Where is that Monarch you ordered?

"The focus is on customer satisfaction with BF Labs and our products," the company said in a statement through its attorney, Jim Humphrey of Polsinelli PC. "And we are disappointed in the filing of the lawsuit. We are taking this issue very seriously, and once we were notified of the lawsuit, we took steps to defend our interests, and we will continue to do so vigorously as we dispute the claims"

Laughable.

Appears to be in the same place as your December WASp rollout.

Hanging out on Neptune, no doubt.

(This is not meant to be a dig at any one particular ASIC company or in support of another ASIC company -- just pointing out how difficult the production of cutting-edge ASICs is, and that the development cycle is at this point longer than the useful lifespan of any given generation of hardware).

+1

This was a new and untested area and the learning curve was very steep.  The first 2 ASIC's out were made with what could be considered extremely dated technology (110nm for one of them) and with the push for better and faster it's become AMD vs Intel for who can put the next gen online and who can push the boundaries even further.  Sadly the generation we live in falls into the "instant gratification" group and cannot see the time and effort needed to produce anything like this (must be why some people create boards and forego creating chips) and can only criticize things they have no true understanding over.

Personally I doubt this lawsuit is going very far, the person who initiated it has used false data to come up with damages based on past performance of the network without consideration of the fact that by adding his 3TH to the network at the time he specified that the results he calculated become skewed and no longer valid.  In order to mine 150BTC a day with 3TH, the network difficulty would have to have been ~10,080,000 which at the time was roughly 70-75 TH.  He's figuring he'd have 4% of the network coming to him without affecting said network.  Of course, he also discounts the 10 months of people who ordered before him who would have to get products before his could be added to the network.  Must be nice to live in such a dream world.  Reminds me of Unacceptable and his "I would have made 100BTC from a little single if they had shipped in Feb!".  Sooner or later the rose colored glasses will have to come off and the harsh shade of reality will sink in.

[Bicknellski]

What takes REAL balls and REAL courage is to tell the truth and not be BOUGHT by BFL. Being a liar is pretty easy and the way of a coward or a sociopath I wonder which one he is?

[Flying Hellfish]

Personally I doubt this lawsuit is going very far,

So then you think it's perfectly legal to "sell" a product to a customer and then NEVER deliver his product OR refund their money?  What fucking planet does a stupid troll like you live on??

You will get to see first hand if this ends up in a court room that all the FTC rules we have been quoting for months are going rip BFL a new asshole.  For a genius your grasp of very old and very tested consumer protection laws is incredibly lacking.   If this hits a court room BFL will lose, probably not the full 5 mill the dude is asking for but he will win much more than the 60K BFL owes him by law already.  And as for you laughing at the guy because he is asking for so much, do you even know how this shit works, that is exactly what you do, you ask for the absolute maximum you can think of then either settle it down or work it out with the courts to determine a number set by the court.

You're a stupid troll, will be fun to laugh at you and BFL when they get a good schooling I can't wait!!!!!!!!!

[krampus]

So then you think it's perfectly legal to "sell" a product to a customer and then NEVER deliver his product OR refund their money?

No, of course not. But your statement is a straw man. Clearly, BFL has delivered their products (albeit pathetically late). You seem to be insinuating that they never deliver their products, ever. That's simply not true.

[lightfoot]

Likewise if you offer to deliver the product, the customer "refuses" and the items delivered meet the specs then what the heck else do you want?

If you make a mistake on an investment you don't get to call for a "do over". That would be one hell of an investment strategy though....

Everything I have ordered from BFL has arrived. And oddly enough I can see where they delivered me *more* product to meet the exact terms of what I ordered (4.5gh jalapeno that should have not been expandable. They shipped me a 5gh unit with the capability of going to 32gh. That's not bad)

[Flying Hellfish]

So then you think it's perfectly legal to "sell" a product to a customer and then NEVER deliver his product OR refund their money?

No, of course not. But your statement is a straw man. Clearly, BFL has delivered their products (albeit pathetically late). You seem to be insinuating that they never deliver their products, ever. That's simply not true.

I was specifically speaking about the case linked below (the one that the troll I quoted was speaking about) and responding to him about this case directly.  Of course BFL has delivered product (lots of it too) but reportedly not to this person.  I would have thought it clear since everyone know's that BFL has shipped merchandise that I was speaking about the case at hand and not generically.  It wasn't a straw man bro, was a comment on this specific case.

http://ia700702.us.archive.org/13/items/gov.uscourts.ksd.95395/gov.uscourts.ksd.95395.2.0.pdf

[krampus]

So then you think it's perfectly legal to "sell" a product to a customer and then NEVER deliver his product OR refund their money?

No, of course not. But your statement is a straw man. Clearly, BFL has delivered their products (albeit pathetically late). You seem to be insinuating that they never deliver their products, ever. That's simply not true.

I was specifically speaking about the case linked below (the one that the troll I quoted was speaking about) and responding to him about this case directly.  Of course BFL has delivered product (lots of it too) but reportedly not to this person.  I would have thought it clear since everyone know's that BFL has shipped merchandise that I was speaking about the case at hand and not generically.  It wasn't a straw man bro, was a comment on this specific case.

http://ia700702.us.archive.org/13/items/gov.uscourts.ksd.95395/gov.uscourts.ksd.95395.2.0.pdf

Without the link or ANY kind of context in your post, it was absolutely a straw man.

[Flying Hellfish]

So then you think it's perfectly legal to "sell" a product to a customer and then NEVER deliver his product OR refund their money?

No, of course not. But your statement is a straw man. Clearly, BFL has delivered their products (albeit pathetically late). You seem to be insinuating that they never deliver their products, ever. That's simply not true.

I was specifically speaking about the case linked below (the one that the troll I quoted was speaking about) and responding to him about this case directly.  Of course BFL has delivered product (lots of it too) but reportedly not to this person.  I would have thought it clear since everyone know's that BFL has shipped merchandise that I was speaking about the case at hand and not generically.  It wasn't a straw man bro, was a comment on this specific case.

http://ia700702.us.archive.org/13/items/gov.uscourts.ksd.95395/gov.uscourts.ksd.95395.2.0.pdf

Without the link or ANY kind of context in your post, it was absolutely a straw man.

Well I'll have to disagree with you I posted my response to a quote.  The quote I responded to mention this case specifically.  So I responded to something about this case in a thread about this case, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume the comment was about THIS CASE and not a generically blank statement about something that is pretty clearly not accurate.  You threw in all customers not me.

Would it have left less ambiguity if I provided the link, possibly, but the lack of the link doesn't change the intentions.

[bcp19]

So then you think it's perfectly legal to "sell" a product to a customer and then NEVER deliver his product OR refund their money?

No, of course not. But your statement is a straw man. Clearly, BFL has delivered their products (albeit pathetically late). You seem to be insinuating that they never deliver their products, ever. That's simply not true.

I was specifically speaking about the case linked below (the one that the troll I quoted was speaking about) and responding to him about this case directly.  Of course BFL has delivered product (lots of it too) but reportedly not to this person.  I would have thought it clear since everyone know's that BFL has shipped merchandise that I was speaking about the case at hand and not generically.  It wasn't a straw man bro, was a comment on this specific case.

http://ia700702.us.archive.org/13/items/gov.uscourts.ksd.95395/gov.uscourts.ksd.95395.2.0.pdf

Without the link or ANY kind of context in your post, it was absolutely a straw man.

Well I'll have to disagree with you I posted my response to a quote.  The quote I responded to mention this case specifically.  So I responded to something about this case in a thread about this case, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume the comment was about THIS CASE and not a generically blank statement about something that is pretty clearly not accurate.  You threw in all customers not me.

Would it have left less ambiguity if I provided the link, possibly, but the lack of the link doesn't change the intentions.

It's still a bogus lawsuit, there's no way he could ever hope to obtain $5mil in damages when the ONLY way he could have mined that much is if he were the ONLY person with a minirig starting all the way back on May 1st and mined constantly to date without ever spending a single bitcoin in the process.  Since the 1st mini-rig didn't ship until somewhere around June 24th, this is already an impossibility and his claims are therefore unrealistic.  While we will never know exactly how much BFL had in sales prior to his order, there would have been a huge impact on the network to the point where he likely would not even made 1/10 of what he is claiming as his 'damages' if BFL had shipped everything prior to him in order to get him his units by the date he claims he should have gotten it.  While you call ME a troll, you in true fact are the troll because you are still blinded by the belief that everything would have been so simple and you would have made millions when you actually probably made more from your GPUs than you ever could have had BFL shipped on time.  Anyone with a modicum of intelligence could sit down and figure out the effect of 10's of thousands of people's order on the BTC network and see that your pipedreams are just that... dreams.

Months ago I posted what would have happened to the network if BFL had started shipping ONLY a single mini-rig a day starting Oct 1st and the outcome wasn't pretty.  The reality would have been much worse.  The interesting thing is that the last few months are an indication of what would have happened 15 months ago had BFL been able to ship on time.  I realize the troll in you will think I am trying to say todays difficulty would have happened last year... but that is not what I am trying to say.  I am saying if you look at the dif on Oct 2013 until now, that is the change you would have seen a year ago if BFL had shipped on time.  Deny it all you want, but you were spared a year's worth of crying over difficulty spikes all due to the fact that BFL wasn't able to ship on time.  None of the Avalon Batch 1 people would have made ROI if BFL had shipped on time.  ASICMiner shares would have never been the success they were if BFL had shipped on time.

The sad and simple truth is that you and all the other trolls will never open your minds to the harsh reality of what would have been cause you are too content living in your rose-colored glasses dream of being millionaires and living the high life if BFL had shipped you your miner on time.

[Bicknellski]

There are literally 100's of similar incidents of late, failed delivery, no refunds, poor RMA etc and the tip of the ice berg given how pervasive these issues are across the planet. It really begs the question how inept are BFL?

There are more complaints posted and threads started about BFL in the widest range of social media that any other fabricator. Partially do to the volume of orders but mostly due to the ineptitude on so many levels at BFL.

Let us all hope that this is not the last time BFL goes to court. Let us also hope that these lawsuits finally put an end to BFL. Their model for bait and switch and delay shipping is being shown to be a scam based on competition being able to design, sell and ship in cycles in the same time it takes BFL to push a single design out in what is always a 12 month design to product window. 10 months now on the Monarch.

[krampus]

There are literally 100's of similar incidents of late, failed delivery, no refunds, poor RMA etc and the tip of the ice berg given how pervasive these issues are across the planet. It really begs the question how inept are BFL?

There are more complaints posted and threads started about BFL in the widest range of social media that any other fabricator. Partially do to the volume of orders but mostly due to the ineptitude on so many levels at BFL.

Let us all hope that this is not the last time BFL goes to court. Let us also hope that these lawsuits finally put an end to BFL. Their model for bait and switch and delay shipping is being shown to be a scam based on competition being able to design, sell and ship in cycles in the same time it takes BFL to push a single design out in what is always a 12 month design to product window. 10 months now on the Monarch.

Given the bait and switch that KnC appears to be attempting, and the long delays that HashFast encountered, I don't know that singling out BFL is really appropriate. Yes, BFL are incredibly inept. That's not the same as being scammers, though -- not by a long shot.

[Bicknellski]

How about we focus on BFL?

What BFL is doing is nothing more than selling equity and passing it off as a product. 12 months does not a pre-order make. It is fraudulent plain and simple to say you are going to deliver product in October when you know full well your product won't ship for at least another 3 to 4 months and possibly more. We all have seen them do it and this lawsuit puts a fine point on it. Let us look at the Monarch... started design over 10 months ago according to their own statements. Same play every time put up "optimistic" date and then wow go figure they fail to meet the deadline and push and push and push 12 months later still people have yet to receive their miners. Same pattern again and again. This is clearly fraud and if you say different you are obviously paid by BFL in some fashion. Shills for me get ignored I have not time to argue with anyone who is paid to promote this company when we all understand without reservation, based on evidence right here in these forums, that BFL is morally and ethically bankrupt. Let us hope in the future we can just drop the adverbs.

[krampus]

This is clearly fraud and if you say different you are obviously paid by BFL in some fashion.

Ah yes. The "your position automatically equates to this other thing" argument. Brilliant stroke of logic, that.

I do say different. "Fraud" is a legal concept. And legally speaking, incompetence is not the same as fraud. Anyone who says otherwise probably isn't a lawyer.

[dropt]

This is clearly fraud and if you say different you are obviously paid by BFL in some fashion.

Ah yes. The "your position automatically equates to this other thing" argument. Brilliant stroke of logic, that.

I do say different. "Fraud" is a legal concept. And legally speaking, incompetence is not the same as fraud. Anyone who says otherwise probably isn't a lawyer.

I don't quite follow you here.  Bicknellski's argument is that BFL is knowingly deceiving the customer.  Fraud is more or less defined as knowingly (and deliberately) committing a deceptive act.

If it can be proven that BFL knew their timelines were unachievable, then they knowingly participated in a deception. Ergo, fraud.

I could see how the first round of ASIC timeline failures could be construed as an innocent misunderstanding of the scale of task at hand, but to have a second round follow an almost exact replica of the initial product and it too be taken as an innocent miscalculation is not something the average person would accept.  This especially after BFL posted that they had "learned their lessons and this time was different".

[ndrmutz]

One element of fraud that I've seen surprisingly little suggestion of is, that the c/e/r/t/a/i/n/t/y/ the possibility that they were doing extensive mining with customer equipment before finally shipping it.  Although this seems a bit slimy to me, it also seems like a rather slippery thing to pin to them.

I think it would be a ton of fun to use the discovery process to pick apart what's privately known about this story.  What smoking-gun emails are there?  If these guys are pros, then they probably saved their darkest communication for face-to-face or on-their-knees encounters.  But there would be plenty of external email from their vendors that can more clearly establish the circumstances of requests, timing, reason for and actual existence of delays, etc.   It would be easy to demonstrate that various BFL spokesmen were l/y/i/n/g/ /s/a/c/k/s/ /o/f/ /s/h/i/t/ systematically knowingly far from truthful over a long period of time.

It would also be a lot of fun to reconstruct the timeline of "where were the chips?"  When did BFL finally get their hands on which batches?  How were they tested?  How long did that take?  Were they _able_ to do mining at this step?  Then what?  Were these chips _ever_ the bottleneck in production?  Were they innocently sitting in a big pile in a warehouse while other bottlenecks were dealt with?  Continue this into their attachment to the PCBs and then assembly into the final equipment most of the customers eventually received.  If you watch this closely I predict you'd find large quantities of chips available for ill use over a long duration.  Somebody will have a lot of 'splainin' to do about why these chips were sitting the in the warehouse doing nothing while the customers are screaming for fulfillment.

And don't even get me started on the order of shipments.

[joeventura]

So then you think it's perfectly legal to "sell" a product to a customer and then NEVER deliver his product OR refund their money?

No, of course not. But your statement is a straw man. Clearly, BFL has delivered their products (albeit pathetically late). You seem to be insinuating that they never deliver their products, ever. That's simply not true.

I was specifically speaking about the case linked below (the one that the troll I quoted was speaking about) and responding to him about this case directly.  Of course BFL has delivered product (lots of it too) but reportedly not to this person.  I would have thought it clear since everyone know's that BFL has shipped merchandise that I was speaking about the case at hand and not generically.  It wasn't a straw man bro, was a comment on this specific case.

http://ia700702.us.archive.org/13/items/gov.uscourts.ksd.95395/gov.uscourts.ksd.95395.2.0.pdf

Without the link or ANY kind of context in your post, it was absolutely a straw man.

Well I'll have to disagree with you I posted my response to a quote.  The quote I responded to mention this case specifically.  So I responded to something about this case in a thread about this case, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume the comment was about THIS CASE and not a generically blank statement about something that is pretty clearly not accurate.  You threw in all customers not me.

Would it have left less ambiguity if I provided the link, possibly, but the lack of the link doesn't change the intentions.

It's still a bogus lawsuit, there's no way he could ever hope to obtain $5mil in damages when the ONLY way he could have mined that much is if he were the ONLY person with a minirig starting all the way back on May 1st and mined constantly to date without ever spending a single bitcoin in the process.  Since the 1st mini-rig didn't ship until somewhere around June 24th, this is already an impossibility and his claims are therefore unrealistic.  While we will never know exactly how much BFL had in sales prior to his order, there would have been a huge impact on the network to the point where he likely would not even made 1/10 of what he is claiming as his 'damages' if BFL had shipped everything prior to him in order to get him his units by the date he claims he should have gotten it.  While you call ME a troll, you in true fact are the troll because you are still blinded by the belief that everything would have been so simple and you would have made millions when you actually probably made more from your GPUs than you ever could have had BFL shipped on time.  Anyone with a modicum of intelligence could sit down and figure out the effect of 10's of thousands of people's order on the BTC network and see that your pipedreams are just that... dreams.

Months ago I posted what would have happened to the network if BFL had started shipping ONLY a single mini-rig a day starting Oct 1st and the outcome wasn't pretty.  The reality would have been much worse.  The interesting thing is that the last few months are an indication of what would have happened 15 months ago had BFL been able to ship on time.  I realize the troll in you will think I am trying to say todays difficulty would have happened last year... but that is not what I am trying to say.  I am saying if you look at the dif on Oct 2013 until now, that is the change you would have seen a year ago if BFL had shipped on time.  Deny it all you want, but you were spared a year's worth of crying over difficulty spikes all due to the fact that BFL wasn't able to ship on time.  None of the Avalon Batch 1 people would have made ROI if BFL had shipped on time.  ASICMiner shares would have never been the success they were if BFL had shipped on time.

The sad and simple truth is that you and all the other trolls will never open your minds to the harsh reality of what would have been cause you are too content living in your rose-colored glasses dream of being millionaires and living the high life if BFL had shipped you your miner on time.

When ya want a million, start by asking for 5 million.

This must be your first rodeo.

[krampus]

If it can be proven that BFL knew their timelines were unachievable, then they knowingly participated in a deception. Ergo, fraud.

And there's the rub. Proving that they knowingly participated in a deception is fairly difficult.

Hanlon's Razor states:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

On the face of it, the simplest explanation is plain incompetence. To make it to the level of fraud, you're going to need some proof. Note that I'm not actually saying that BFL are (or are not) fraudsters. Just pointing out that the legal threshold for calling it "fraud" is just a wee bit above the allegations thrown around by the armchair lawyers here.

As an aside, designing and manufacturing an ASIC is quite a bit more complicated than most of the armchair hardware designers would have you believe as well. I write software for a living, but I do it in a hardware world. It's pretty fucking difficult to ship a commercial hardware project out the door, let alone one that involves custom silicon.

[Unacceptable]

Where is that Monarch you ordered?

"The focus is on customer satisfaction with BF Labs and our products," the company said in a statement through its attorney, Jim Humphrey of Polsinelli PC. "And we are disappointed in the filing of the lawsuit. We are taking this issue very seriously, and once we were notified of the lawsuit, we took steps to defend our interests, and we will continue to do so vigorously as we dispute the claims"

Laughable.

Appears to be in the same place as your December WASp rollout.

Hanging out on Neptune, no doubt.

(This is not meant to be a dig at any one particular ASIC company or in support of another ASIC company -- just pointing out how difficult the production of cutting-edge ASICs is, and that the development cycle is at this point longer than the useful lifespan of any given generation of hardware).

+1

This was a new and untested area and the learning curve was very steep.  The first 2 ASIC's out were made with what could be considered extremely dated technology (110nm for one of them) and with the push for better and faster it's become AMD vs Intel for who can put the next gen online and who can push the boundaries even further.  Sadly the generation we live in falls into the "instant gratification" group and cannot see the time and effort needed to produce anything like this (must be why some people create boards and forego creating chips) and can only criticize things they have no true understanding over.

Personally I doubt this lawsuit is going very far, the person who initiated it has used false data to come up with damages based on past performance of the network without consideration of the fact that by adding his 3TH to the network at the time he specified that the results he calculated become skewed and no longer valid.  In order to mine 150BTC a day with 3TH, the network difficulty would have to have been ~10,080,000 which at the time was roughly 70-75 TH.  He's figuring he'd have 4% of the network coming to him without affecting said network.  Of course, he also discounts the 10 months of people who ordered before him who would have to get products before his could be added to the network.  Must be nice to live in such a dream world.  Reminds me of Unacceptable and his "I would have made 100BTC from a little single if they had shipped in Feb!".  Sooner or later the rose colored glasses will have to come off and the harsh shade of reality will sink in.

I still believe I would have,say what you want