1st let me say im about 6 grand USD in the hole with my bcu, fk and acorns.
that being said, they actually do have "working products" but the software is sorely lacking. the bcu, fk, and acorns i have all run at a very slight profit. maybe in 6 years ill break even. maybe. unless those higher powered bitstreams that get promised finally get here.
but scammers? i wouldnt go that far (but there may be facts im unaware of). i knew the risks and took it. so far its been a loss. oh well. thats on me.
It doesn't matter if you profited or not. There are tons of scams where people profited. The question is did they provide what they promised? That is pretty cut and dry.
Can anyone link me to a functioning GPU acceleration product?
At what point do you say "they lied"?
oh there were lies involved.. but from whom? kristy (ohgodagirl) seems (at least from my pov) to be the one that lied, and others (people and companies) that believed her and made promises based on her lies got burned big. could this have been handled better? sure but with lawyers involved we wont know till its over.
so was the whole acorn thing a scam? on sqrls part, i dont think so, just a lot of naivety. others opinions vary of course. but a scam to me is.. well BFL was a scam from the start, even with shipping products. scam was the very foundation of BFL. i cant bring myself to put sqrl in that category. time may change my mind however.
anyway, sqrl does tend to have ambitious launch schedules. and missed deadlines are a running joke that long ago stopped being funny. sqrl thought there would be a lot more devs cooperating on bitstreams. on that they were wrong, lot of devs doing their own thing, so lots of reinventing the wheel. slows things down considerably.
as for the original purpose of acorns, helping gpus, that window of opportunity is past. and yes, that sucks. it may even of worked if gpu acceleration code had been ready when the acorns were released.. who knows?
but now, acorns are a curiosity. that may find uses down the road, possibly unrelated to mining. hope so, they are too small to make proper door stops.
The hardware is there, but the software definitely is not and it seems like they're always dead set on biting off more then they can chew then not only getting blowback from that when it falls through, but all existing customers suffer because of it.
very true. every missed deadline on their part hurt the bottom line on every customer. i bought early and watched my money more or less evaporate as the missed deadlines accumulated.
I was very active on the discord and one of the things I mentioned close to a year ago is the software and kept talking about software and bitstreams as it seemed like the weak link. Here we are, still lacking software (bitstreams). And while it's fine and dandy to gloat about 'how good it will be' and 'how everyone will want one', that's not the reality that currently exists. If you're a larger farm with private developers you're making bank off of this. Most of us that helped crowd source this are not.
yeah i bough acorns pretty much as soon as they came out. and i sure havent made bank on acorns. basically i watched my money go seemingly everywhere but the actual code needed to make it useful.
there is a dev or two on discord that are playing with acorn/gpu accelerations but its private devs, not associated with sqrl. may be wrong on that though.