Topic: And some more delays in BFL shipment plans / no shipment before 14th Jan 2013 - page 3. (Read 22705 times)

By mining

How can I profit from maintaining the network?

This is kind of self-adjusting, though.  If people abandon mining because it's not profitable, difficulty will drop and the remaining miners will get a bigger share of the pie.  Also, people tend to forget about transaction fees.  If mining is not profitable then those maintaining the network can use fees to keep their participation in the network worthwhile - after all, Bitcoin is planned so that more income will be produced by fees than by mining over time and that switch needs to happen progressively to keep the network stable.

Let's just accept the fact that the day these things ship, if they ever do, that the mining difficulty will have already made mining, no very profitable.

Hey, where'd you hear that?  Why wasn't I informed of this?  Argh!

PS - My job is not PR or investor relations, which is why I don't coddle idiots like Frizz and PuertoLibre when they display their stupidity over and over.  If I were the PR guy, I'd have to tell them warm fuzzies and make them feel good about themselves.  Thankfully, my job is much different and it involves firing "customers" like Frizz et al because they cost far more than they generate in revenue and we do not want them as customers.  Ever.

According to Josh, he'll be personally over-seeing the slicing and packaging which I would call a significant role.

Generally speaking, you don't keep PR updated on every little detail of a project because it's just not necessary for them to be filling in customers on every tiny detail of the production process and doing so can be extremely counter-productive.  This isn't a time-critical project in the conventional meaning of the phrase.  End users were treating it like one and demanding information because so many of them had foolishly counted on ASICs being available before the reward halving. 

The company made a rod for its own back by announcing unrealistic timelines in an attempt to dominate the ASIC pre-order market.  Once it started giving explanations (real or fabricated) for date slips, end users then felt entitled to constant updates and BFL got locked into the "just a little further" game.  While it could certainly be argued that customer retention is part of PR's role and that reassurance that their needs will be met soon is one aspect of that, PR often creates illusions with smoke and mirrors and they often don't need hard facts to do that.

Seeing as Josh's role is Public Relations / Investor Relations and not head of slicing and packaging I find it hard to believe that he was left out of the loop on that one. Seems in his role at BFL he should be made aware of all those pesky little details....

You know, I think this is a fair assessment and conclusion as well.  I will have to take it under consideration.

Based on what they've posted, they've never received a batch of ASIC chips, bad or otherwise.  Josh is the only one who implied that they had and Nasser quickly corrected Josh's statement.


https://forums.butterflylabs.com/content/127-bfl-asic-delays-depth-expanation.html

The design is complete.  Period.  That is where things are at.  They do not yet know when the production run of their chips will happen, only that BFL should be able to take delivery of them in January (after which other things still need to happen before they can be assembled into mining rigs).  Nasser and Dave's statements imply that Josh was not fully aware of where the process was actually up to before and was simply assuming that the fab had fucked up in some way.  As Josh's role in the production cycle doesn't begin until it's time for the chips to be sliced and packaged, it's easy to see that he mightn't have been kept up to date on every little thing which has been going on up until now and has been making statements based on assumptions he's drawn from what information was available to him rather than hard facts.

Indubitably.

I can't really speak to what greyhawk was implying with any authority, but I read his comment to be referring not to BFL not doing a test wafer first, but to the insistence of some customers on the BFL forums that they don't want their units burn-in tested or tested at all, so that they can be shipped out 6-24 hours earlier. If you want stupidity on a scale of 1-10, those few are pulling a page out of Spinal Tap's playbook.

That's what they want you to think. They know they can string you along with ship dates that are just around the corner.

Early Oct: "We'll ship this month."
Late Oct: "We'll have chips and ship next month."
Nov: "We'll have chips and ship next month."
Dec: "We'll have chips and ship next month."

This will go down in history as a case study of what it means to have a company run by idiots.

Basically what the CEO muppet (Vleisides, Nick the Nameless, whoever) + board muppets over at BFL did was, they took equity from "customers" --because call it what you will, a few millions paid 6 months before there's a product do not constitute any sort of orders, pre or otherwise. They constitute equity investment.

This was a horrible idea, because the deal was horribly structured. For one, the equity investors received nominally no equity, just some bizarre sort of implicit redeemable notes paying no interest. For the other, they were in no way selected. And so fifty or a hundred random Dicks and Janes picked off one of the most accomplished cesspools of human stupidity on the whole Internet --this very forum--  ended up with nigh-on a controlling interest, which nominally controls nothing. Worst possible deal, some people who have no actual interest in the continuation of the company and no actual anything of value to contribute to its success.

Because that deal was so poorly structured, at the first sign of trouble the company finds itself in the position of being forced to do the most stupid thing possible. I mean, sometimes inept corporate owners will force an engineering company with a chance into the ground. It happens in VC land all the goddamned time. But never before, at least never before as far as any of us here at MPEx ever heard, was it the case that a company found itself forced to do an ASIC run without tests because that's what nonshareholding investors voted on.

It's beyond boggling. This is why you need real CEOs doing real CEO stuff for you, people. This is why it's not the case that any random schmuck can be a CEO. Citizen dentists, citizen bankers and citizen CEOs do not work.

Lol, that picture makes me laugh every time I see it.

I am simply speculating here, yes.  Based on everything I have read coming from BFL over the past months, I believe they received chips in late October or early November (shortly before they posted the pictures with the chips attached to them), and they didn't work properly (or performed so sub-par as to require a revision).  They're doing the clock buffer revision (and who knows what else they are revising and not admitting to), and now waiting on the fab for the new chips.

I really wish they would be more open about their happenings, but it is what it is.  I could be completely wrong, this is just my guessing based on what I have read between the lines in their statements.  I truly do not believe they have intentionally misled, only that they have made estimates that turned out to be wrong.  They were fully intending to ship in late October, provided everything went right.


They sure thought they were though, and every post prior to late October indicates their confidence in this fact.  Once they realized their first batch of chips were bad, they then revised to the date they thought their foundary would be able to ship out a new batch.  And that part keeps taking longer and longer.

Without working chips, they were never close to shipping.

You're completely pulling this out of your ass, am I right? Ten bucks says I'm right.

What does "the chips came in wrong" even mean?

You believe they had actual chips, but were "unsatisfied with performance" and trashed them?

That was Nasser's late November spin on the situation IIRC.

Then the latest story: "The fucking foundry, man... Made our chips all wrong so that we have to redesign them."

And let's not forget, they were "close to shipping" in October.

That's what Nasser says, yup.

I thought there wasn't problems with the chips, and they just wanted to make improvements?

Syke, that's because, at the time, they WERE close to shipping.  Until the chips came in wrong, and they had to redo them, and now they're stuck waiting on the foundry to make the changes.

That's not how they portrayed things:


They made it sound like there was no way they'd miss Oct. Let's see what BFL_Josh really said:

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/pre-sales-questions/104-shipping-2-3-weeks-2.html#post1461






That post is from Oct! Oct was never portrayed as a best-case scenario. It was always portrayed as an almost sure thing. Read the actual quotes again. Even in Oct they claimed they were "on time", which by now should be clear was a flat out lie. They're still not close to finishing even after months have passed.