EDIT: This was obviously a hoax. The WSJ has issued a correction (behind paywall here) and The Tavistock group has put out a press release disclaiming any association:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323997004578644491403250124.htmlJoe Lewis, a billionaire foreign-exchange trader who teamed up with hedge-fund manager George Soros in 1992 to bet against the Bank of England, is the latest high-profile financier to throw his weight behind the virtual currency called bitcoin.
Mr. Lewis leads the Phoenix Fund, a Zurich-based private-equity fund that on Tuesday plans to invest $200 million in Avalon, a company that makes computer servers aimed at creating bitcoins, according to people familiar with the situation.
....
The Phoenix Fund was set up this year to invest in bitcoin mining-hardware companies. It looked at several of Avalon's rivals in the sector, including Butterfly Labs and KnCMiner but decided against investing, according to a person familiar with the private-equity firm's strategy.
....
The bitcoin deal was put together by Andrew Laurus, a former government-bonds salesman at Lehman Brothers who is also an investor in the fund. Avalon was set up by Yifu Guo, a pioneer in the bitcoin-mining industry. He was part of the team that developed the first ASIC bitcoin mining hardware. ASIC stands for application-specific integrated circuit, a type of custom-designed microchip. Mr. Guo couldn't be reached for comment.
So here's the question: Does this explain all of Josh's weird behavior lately? It's likely that Joe Lewis didn't tell the other people he was looking into investing with that he was also looking possibilities as well.
With Inaba's hubris, he probably assumed the deal was a definite go ahead. That would explain why he was in here telling everyone that he was going to laugh at people who were predicting their failure, that he was going to "stick it up [our] asses" and that the bitcoin talk forum was a "minor player" in everything - clearly alluding to "major players" elsewhere, like Joe Lewis.
Anyway, obviously this guy decided BFL wasn't for him. They have a chip design, but Avalon (and ASICMiner) have probably made enough to fund 20nm designs on their own.
Interestingly he also looked at KnC and wasn't interested.