I imagine they've blown through at least a million bux at this point in masksets alone.
This has been my concern as well. They went the risky route, and got burned maybe even twice. They might be in a situation where they need more orders to be able to pay the fab, hence the delays.
Believe me, I'd be as skeptical as you are if BFL had not previously delivered good working products. Absolutely NOTHING from them has shown me that they are operating any kind of con. EVERYTHING points to them just having things go wrong in the design/production process. I am not surprised that they delayed past their expected date - it was a "best case scenario" date. Certainly, you are entitled to your opinion that they are a scam, but I have seen zero indicators of such that cannot also be representative of a small company experiencing a few setbacks.
I agree they don't appear to be intentionally trying to scam anyone, but they're inexperienced in ASIC design and have been reluctant to answer certain details. I think it's probable that things went wrong in a way they couldn't predict. And despite what Josh tells us about their "money in the bank" and "not using preorder funds" to fund NRE.. I'm almost certain that Josh has no access to their bank account or balance sheet. What worries me is that the man with the access to those might the one with a shady history. No one wants to break the bad news to everyone.. You saw what it did to Tom..
If the chips haven't been paid for, and there really isn't enough money to get them finished, they'd be in a situation where every delay and bad news causes more and more people to cancel, further deepening their deficit of funds to actually deliver those products... and you probably understand where that ends.
