Topic: [Archive] BFL trolling museum - page 55. (Read 69394 times)

No, I said "So they show up at CES without a single working device. ...". How does this imply their fab has produced only one working chip?!?!

There might be tons of ASICS - but at CES they showed none. That's all I said.

Some people here are to dumb to read. Or simply retarded. You can imply this up your ass.

Thanks PG, I missed that one..!

tvbcof, I'll just agree to disagree with you at this point.

From getting scammed obviously.  (And yes, I acknowledge that BFL is not a proven scam at this point, but even if not, being delayed until long after others have their ASIC's humming away is probably not likely to result in the pay-day a lot of people might have hoped for.)

I don't pay a lot of attention to this stuff since I've not yet felt the calling to be a miner, but I guess I pay more attention than you.  From what I gather, BFL's FPGA stuff what a cache of out-of-production (although powerful) FPGA's.  They didn't even know how to compute the power which is why their estimates were so far off.

As for screwing things together, at least one of their customers said that things worked OK when he re-did a bunch of the work.  Highly technical stuff like flipping the fan around and that sort of thing.  I guess they put it in a pretty box or something though, and that's good enough for many of their customers.

But anyway, their business model comes to an end when the box full of surplus/reject FPGA's run dry.  Faced with needing to either close shop, compete with people who seem to know what they are doing, or try an ASIC pre-order scam, it does not take much imagination to envision someone with with a 'rich history' in scammery opting for the latter.

If they really did have chips produced, where are they? Someone should go dumpster-diving.

You don't read either forum, eh?

It's been posted before on both forums I believe. Use the search feature.

Refraction issue is mention here, Spike: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1361779

(no alpaca in this race--just passing info)

Saved?  From what?  Making more money?

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.


Oooh, interesting.  This is the first time I have heard of TWO prior batches.  When/where did you hear about a refraction issue?

I learned something today: http://anysilicon.com/understanding-maskset-type-mpw-mlm-mlr-and-single-maskset/

Almost.

It's more like 50 identical wafers, with a tiny area of each for your project, and the rest of the area of each for other projects.

I understand that BFL did not go this route, and went straight to full wafer production, first for the batch that had a "refraction issue", and then again with the "bullet run" that turned out to need "clock buffer adjustments".  I understand that the third batch, now in production, comes to 100k chips or more.

I imagine they've blown through at least a million bux at this point in masksets alone.

This is the only monitoring device I'd want to check if a minirig had stopped working.

Minirigs will most likely be held in a safe inside vault inside a secret room.  I'd prefer a 199$ refund than a Nexus 7 I wouldn't use.

Saved by (unsurprisingly) being broke.  A practical advantage of being in such a condition.

Anyway, if I were running a pre-order scam, I'd be targetting people much like yourself...albeit with more disposable income.  Cook up some simple mock-up apps and watch the money pour in.

Um, do you even know what most companies show off at CES these days? Did you hear about the WiFi rifle? It's all "lol android tablet" and vaporware. Every booth is the same.

You said "not even one". This implies that there are situations where you would expect them to have only one working chip. You should have said "not even a prototype batch" if that is what you meant.


...Then they would have a couple hundred chips, and they would have done demos of prototype units and sent some to mining software developers to ensure compatibility. This would all have happened weeks or months ago. It would be all over the forums.

It's quite likely that they did a test run, found a minor issue, and corrected it for the real production run.


You always "lose" a lot if an ASIC doesn't work. That is the reality of ASIC development; you burn through a lot of cash before you can actually start making working chips.


Rofl. Calling someone a troll when your sig contains the word "Asshamster"... 0/10.

Well, and that is really what it boils down to.  Has the decision they made brought in more customers than have left because of it?  Has anyone who has a minirig on order decided to cancel the order because they integrated a Nexus 7 into it?

I haven't heard of anyone canceling because of this, but that doesn't mean no one has.  Likewise, I haven't heard of anyone ordering because of this, but that doesn't mean no one has.  It's all a big unknown right now.  Something that we'll probably never know the answer to, but can at least attempt to speculate upon, if for no other reason than to stimulate interesting discussion and thought about why customers of a particular demographic may choose one brand of product vs another.

I don't f*cking understand why all of a sudden everyone is talking about a Nexus7 tablet. And black boxes. And fans.

The whole interview is hot air: "Nexus7 ... bfgminer ... Android ... bla bla bla ... Nexus7 ... bfgminer ... bla bla bla ...".

Can someone in Vegas please visit BFLs booth and kick them in the nuts? One kick per shipment delay.

Can I have one of those instead?

Ok, I am 100% agree with you, but not with them. If the intention is to provide a friendlier interface for miners not so geeks like these should have worked a bit on hardware itself. Simply a micro PC and touch screen, a tablet with android will engage customers in a particular profile but expelled more than it has managed to capture, by the lack of options and the bad image created by poorly designed product.

They should send these to all those with preorders. Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day

My apologies.

I gather what you are trying to say is that people who buy a $30,000 rig aren't generally the same people who need an "easy to use" mining device.  I can agree to that, but I have a couple of responses:

1)  BFL would like to expand the audience of miners from just including the absolute technogeekiest to more of an average user "hey, I want to check this Bitcoin thing out!"  I don't know how much that'll happen at the $30,000 level, but one could argue that if even only one or two more minirig customers were capture because of the tablet integration, BFL could call it a success.

2)  There are some hardcore Bitcoin enthusiasts who do take aesthetics and ease-of-use into account, even though it might not be true of the group as a whole.  Myself, for instance.  I wasn't about to buy an ASIC miner that wasn't enclosed in some case, and it is a bonus that the case looks good (I bought two Single SC's).  If I had the funds for a minirig, I absolutely would have preordered one, and I would have much rather had a tablet integrated as they have done than had an SSH requirement or other non-GUI solution for maintaining the mining.  TBH, I really dislike command-line anything.  It isn't the way I like to work with computers.  I also currently use BitMinter - again, because it is GUI-based, not command-line based like CGMiner and some of the other popular options.  Though I may not fit the profile of the typical Bitcoin miner, I am a Bitcoin miner, and I do spend money on equipment.  With the tablet integration, BFL is attempting to capture the market of people like me who do not want to deal with command-line anything, and want statistics and graphs to be automatically calculated and shown without any intervention on my part.

English is not my native language, I think the message is clear no?
Mining is not like download a app from PlayStore for people that leftover $30,000.

PD: I leave a link to the only products that have now BFL for sale: http://www.cafepress.es/butterflylabs