Topic: 1GH/s, 20w, $500 — Butterflylabs, is it a scam? - page 57. (Read 123107 times)

This is very good advice.  Most likely it will be ignored and we will here the gnashing of teeth in 60 days when people get scammed.  The offer to send a test board by itself has no merit.  Actually sending the test board has merit.  Thus anyone basing their buying decision (or decision to keep pre-order) on the offer is not making a sound decision.

Granted there is the greed/fear factor.  Their website does a good job of that.  ONLY 100 AVAILABLE.  SPECIAL PRE-ORDER PRICE.  That is all the bait.  Implied message "You have to ignore everyone else and send us the moniez now or you will lose".

Granted like I said anyone who has already made up their mind is unlikely to be convinced but the quoted is good advice.

Hmmm, BFL is worried about potential competitors posting in this thread, but they're willing to send a test board to whoever the community deems most qualified to perform a formal proof of work analysis. I guess they're really not too worried about a competitor getting their hands on this thing. If a reviewer from the community does step up they will only get the board once it's deemed ready.

That will be once the chargeback deadline for the bulk of their orders has passed.

BFL suggested that people stop ordering until the actual product's ready. That's good advice. For those of you who have already ordered, consider requesting cancellation of your pre-order and requesting your payment be refunded. Report back to the forum with their response (if you get one) and when your money is actually returned to your account. Here's what you can expect:

• No response via email or phone. (silence)
• "Trust us, the product is real. We're almost ready to ship. If you cancel now you'll miss your chance to get in on the first round of orders." (play on greed)
• "Ok, we'll refund your money. You should see it return to your account in 30-60 days." (the waiting game)
• A new person will appear on the forum saying they've got the product and it's even better than expected. But it will not be anyone you've ever heard from before. (sock puppet witness)

2 months~ ago some guy was selling jetblue vouchers for BTC. oh i checked my PMs and luckily i still have a PM i sent to the guy. https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/yankee-bitinstant-21181 this is his profile link. at that time it was 19BTC(at that time about $18 = 1BTC) for 1 voucher.

edit: i did some quick searching and found some threads started my him.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/us-airline-tickets-jetblue-delta-american-continental-19-btc-15971 <-older thread

edit: found a new thread by him selling some more vouchers
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/60-btc-roundtrip-jetblue-travel-voucher-any-city-to-any-city-expires-110911-34457

It's a paper launch at this point so even if you fly there - he's openly admitted it's not built yet
and I didn't see a release date/ETA..

At best you'll find some nerdy dudes with a couple computers and unpopulated PCBs.

-rph

Well I want everyone here to give them the benefit of the doubt until they accept my offer and I see for my self. I plan on filming the whole trip and uploading it to youtube. If also possible, any merchants in the KC area or along my journey who accept btc, let me know and I will see if I can stop by and buy something with coins.

Awsome. I might put a Google doc sheet up to keep track. I also am going to try calling them once more tomorrow and see.

  I will also pledge a few coins toward the purchase of a plane ticket if they take the offer.

I will gladly fly to KC to meet you guys and take a look at the product. I would even be willing to purchase once in person to test it out and report back to the bitcoin community. Anyone in the southern california is welcome to come to my mining facility to see check this thing out.
If everything works great, I will buy at least 20 of the units and more over time.
I invite the representative of BL to contact me and set something up if interested.

Secondly. From the last post by the Labs. That is all very likely. If anyone has ever worked with pcb manufacturers or other electronics fabrication, I can design it out of my garage and have that design made in multiple locations, assembled at one and sent to me.

PS. Someone find me a way to buy a plane ticket from LAX -> KC with bitcoin.

Edit: If Butterfly accepts my offer for a walkthrough visit and possibly purchase a unit, I may take btc donations to fund a ticket bought through the op of Bitegg. Otherwise I fund the trip my self.

 I think it's great that Butterflylabs will give a unit for one of our own to testout.
That should answer our questions. Now we just need to wait, that's the hard part.
 Thanks, Ad

http://ahl.mhdc.com/details.aspx?pr=709#

 I think you're misreading the whole section 8 thing a bit. In order to qualify to rent here under section 8 assitance you would have to make under 28k a year. That is to say, if you make more and do not qualify you will pay the more appropriate rate..  I will call the property management company Monday morning to verify this assumption. I tried today and none of the extensions answered.

  More importantly, someone not being wealthy does not attest to their engineering capabilities.  That being said it would be nice if they would provide us an office address or verify that they live here and do the 'design' work from workstations at this location?  If so, do they have an actual 'public' office location?

  In my line of work one of my business locations is completely 'non public' but it has a real world location none the less where face to face type business can be conducted and of course is registered at that address. Not that every biz needs an office building just to be 'real' but.

 ZOMG< you guys need to give us some more info on your company side... with all due respect, this is frustrating.


  Bring back BFL... ;p  And are BFL and BFK two differnt people using the same forum account or was one a typo??

I dont think, unless I misread you. I wasnt being ironic. I know the guys that build the sensor that most of next years hollywood movies will be filmed with. They could literally do it in their garage,...  if you fund the masksets.


Nah, I dont think. Ive been in to bitcoin for like 2 months now, and just running my pc and a rat rig in the basement. What do I know? Deathandtaxes has my vote too though.

 
hehe, that was my point.


  That being said, I forgot to add P4man to that list of names. =)

I somewhat disagree on this. I know what it takes to make world class CMOS image sensors with onchip processing that have ended up anywhere from satellites to professional high speed cinema camera's, and it basically is just 2 or 3 experienced and talented guys with the right tools (which isnt more than a workstation with the right software).

Oh, and money. Lots of money. If this is a full custom design, a mask set for a leading edge process is no small potatoes  and basically out of reach without some serious VC funding, but assuming this is based on a off the shelve FPGA chip, at least the "couple of engineers in a garage" part is more than plausible. If they have boatloads of money, even a full custom chip would be within reach, but I doubt anyone would be able to raise sufficient capital for a bitcoin chip.

No need for apologies, m8. It bothered me only enough to say 'home cheese nugs' to ya. Which, by the way, I am too old to use. But in real life I use it as a term of endearment to friends of mine if they say something 'corny'.


  Yea, on that note I am not comfortable with their lack of wanting to answer some of the questions I asked, as I stated previously. I hope they will change their minds.  I can't speak for anyone else but it is going to just plain piss me off if I have to spend my own time to find out who they are.......


  Cheers

I'm in Paris. I could go talk to that man, but being a phil major, I'd say he could confuse me rather easilly. However if some of you electronic engineers want to give me a list of question, I'd be up for it.

On the plus side, I can (through some family relations) borrow an office for a few hours in the french Ministry of research and summon/invite this guy to a meeting there, which would have the added effect of making this scammer shit himself if that is what he is.

 Ahh, don't take my lil internet jab personally, m8.  Its just that a couple of engineers working in a garage lab to design a better board and chip is just as plausable as a guy in Thailand being able to pay a third party in KC, MO to go video tape something.. Thats all.

  We certainly need to do DD, but I for one don't have a need to pay for it and am quite capable to do so.  I see no harm in your offering so I did not attack that directly. Instead I chose to jab at you for misconstruing my intentions in my previous post. Obviously childish, but so was your trying to make it seem like you could read my mind and that anything I post that is not a direct bash to Butterfly is somehow, all of a sudden a sign I am 'being convinced'..


   Cheers

  Pleas re-read my post and tell me what parts make you take it as such.  Of course if they are willing to send hardware to someone I will certainly entertain a glimpse into something that if it did actually get sent there would be potentially groundbreaking!  That evokes no level of my trust pretense such a point in time......

 But just read it again, home cheese nuggets....

 hrm.

 I think I liked BFL's willingness to allow proper DD much better.......

  As a long time Republican I will not do business with anyone providing products or services of a highly technical level unless I can verify their identity. Maybe its an old way of thinking but thats just how it works down here in the south.

  Sincerely,
     Derek


As for a list of who to send a completed PCB and Chip to;

  Artforz
   DeathAndTaxes
   ngzhang

  There are many others, some likely more qualified but these are the ones I can think of that have been active lately, don't have competing projects and have atleast an entry level working knowledge of the boards and chips. And more than enough smarts to be able to get one running with proper drivers and software and make professional documentations of their findings.  Oh, and for whatever reason I personaly trust these choices. ;p

Hi Guys, I see there's been lots of questions.

Regarding the USB trace on the BitForce PCB:

The Differential D+ and D- are directed to inner layers by two small Vias placed towards the inner side of the connector. Since they're running at 480MHz, careful floor-planning is essential to maintain signal integrity. The connection that goes to the QFN chip placed near the connector is then routed to the Microcontroller (AVR32). It may not be possible to see the Vias easily, because they are tented. Also note that it's a 6-layer board (would've been more but not much IO is needed, so no more than 6 was really necessary).

Why bitcoin, why now, who have we worked for, are we Satoshi Nakamoto...

Wow. This is getting personal. We're just a few engineers who are pretty good at cryptology and electronics (mainly digital) design. Not necesairily because we're brilliant, but because we've been doing it for quite some time over the course of our individual careers.

I can understand how you're curiosity is piqued and you'd like to know *everything* including the method of our system architecture. However, I think you can appreciate where we might want to keep our company IP proprietary. Furthermore, it appears there are a few potential competitors posting in this thread, so I'll leave it at that.

As to your expectations of a grand lab facility, I'm not sure you would be impressed.  Most of this type of engineering is done on laptops & workstations.  I think any engineers in the crowd will quietly smile in confirmation.  Our actual fabrication facility is quite impressive, but we don't own it...  it's in Taiwan where the current run of processors is underway.

Would one of us be willing to meet a forum member?

Sure, that would be great.  The best choice would be our lead engineer in Paris, France or me.  I'm based out of Kansas City, Missouri.  Either of us would be happy to give you a quick demo when the product is ready for review.

However, I think the real question for everyone is the actual product, so maybe it would be a good idea if you were to pick someone from the Bitcoin community to receive a prototype model.  This person would have to be capable of performing a formal proof of work analysis.  I'm sure there are some excellent candidates out there.

Please reply with your suggestions along with a few words about this person.  Once a list is agreed on, we'll have a survey vote to determine the 'winner'.  Once their review is complete, I trust all the relevant concern will be addressed.

Regards,
BFK

PS.  In the meantime, I would suggest all of you who don't have a pre-existing relationship with the company refrain from making any pre-orders.  We appreciate the interest in our product, but the hostility isn't worth it. Please just wait for off the shelf units to be available.  Thx.

That would be great, I am really itching to get hold of such a card, unfortunately I can't afford losing $500.   Really hope you get the guy to meet up with BF Labs.