http://www.thewiring.com/?p=1257TLDR;I have been working in technology since 20 years and I’m passionate about it. I have all kinds of electronic
devices popping up from any drawer in my apartment and I can tell you with absolute certainty that
ButterflyLabs is the worst company I’ve ever dealt with. They are lacking all the components to make a
company a good company:
- the quality of their products is an absolute disaster;
- their shipping department has big problems. They even don’t check what is in their boxes and I have
my doubts that USPS misunderstood Switzerland for China;
- after sales support does not exist except for their robot-like rma procedure.
Butterfly Labs experience. Lets your dollars fly away…
by Wire Master • February 1, 2014
I always had something telling me that the financial system we live in has something wrong.
Growing perpetually in a physically limited world is simply not possible. Capitalism surely matches
the nature of human kind which strives to have more and more, but we cannot go over the limits
given to us by mother nature. Unfortunately in history, the extreme growth periods were followed
by mass destruction wars, giving the grown “graph” a pulse trend.
Besides that, the financial system is driven by banks that together with the states governments
have gotten into a sick mechanism of debts and money generation, going into a very dangerous
direction.
So a few months ago I got fascinated by the Bitcoin idea. It’s a virtual currency that is not
regulated by central banks and governments instead it goes into a different direction than the
current world we live in. A limited number of Bitcoins will be issued in the next decades and they
are released at a slow pace from the “miners”. Similar to the gold mining era, mining Bitcoins is
not an easy task and this has to be performed by more and more powerful computers the more
the mining fever raises.
Once it was possible to mine with a normal PC CPU or GPU, but as more power was required,
dedicated hardware has been produced by a few companies around the world. This hardware is
very expensive and most people who buy them are aware of the fact that they will not be able to
mine the cost of the miner itself, so it’s not about becoming rich, it’s more about being part of a
revolution.
I am one of those, believing that the instinct to grow is part of the human kind. It’s not all bad,
it’s also the fuel to our progress. But probably I’m wrong and growth of ideas and progress can
be unlinked by money growth or probably the other alternative Cryptocurrencies (virtual currencies)
can give this opportunity. Not growing forever otherwise we are again in the same situation like now,
but I am curious to see what happens. Or probably growth paths can be driven instead of being left
to it’s own exponential destiny. Driven by the money eager parts of this system like banks, and as a
consequence governments have to cope with that growth pace. Isn’t it so that nowadays the power
is not anymore within the governments hands but in the moneys hands and that all the world has
to run after that? Think about what you read in the first pages of all the newspapers around the
world.
So I checked the web and the most popular Bitcoin mining hardware
(ASIC Application Specific Integrated Circuit) producer is ButterflyLabs in the USA. The price of their
products vary from few hundreds to several thousands of dollars.
In December 2013 I bought a Jalapeno 5GH/s from Butterfly Labs which I connected to my PC and
after 5 days I had a power outage at home. It happened during a weekend I was away from home
so I had a bad surprise in my fridge upon returning… After that, the device turned on again but could n
ot be detected by my PC anymore. I wrote some emails to Butterfly Labs, wrote in their forum but never
received a feedback. If you are extremely lucky you get a standard email with their usual procedure:
“apply for RMA (return merchandise authorisation)”. Not a word saying that they are sorry or that
they will improve their products… nothing. So I had to ship this box to the USA with additional costs.
Who knows how long the repairing procedure takes…
Before it broke down I decided to buy a more powerful one, a Single SC 50GH/s from Butterfly Labs.
It’s a product worth around $1000 and when shipping to Europe that price becomes roughly $1150.
Initially they send the parcel to China instead of Switzerland… but they blamed USPS for it. After several
mails, forum posts, etc I got a mail from a human in Butterfly Labs telling me that they would send one
of these devices they had in stock with FedEx so I didn’t have to wait for the one in China to go around
the world. That was appreciated. I got the parcel on 28 January, unpacked the box, plugged in the device
and after 20 minutes of mining the PSU (power supply unit) started to turn on and off by itself. Basically
it was looking dead. According to the forum community they delivered a PSU that was supposed to be
used with a smaller model. That’s why after 20 minutes the PSU could not cope with the power
required by the device I bought. I filed another RMA.
In the meantime the forum community was saying that the PSUs delivered by Butterfly Labs are very bad
quality so they suggested to use a ATX (one of these PC desktop square power supplies). I went the day
after to buy one of these ATXs, with additional costs. I didn’t want to wait another month for the new
PSU to be delivered from the US. Besides that, according to the community, the ATX is of much better
quality so you can avoid sleepless nights, thinking if your house will burn down. So I connected the device.
It worked for 3 hours and then went dead. And could not be detected by my PC anymore.
Tired of this waste of time and money, I wrote them a mail asking for a refund and at the same time I asked
them to keep the PSU and the first device delivered (Jalapeno) and again got silence from their side. While
waiting for their reply, they sent me the tracking number for the new PSU. I immediately replied asking to
check my refund mail… Silence. After half a day I get the confirmation that the PSU was delivered. Incredible…
I have been working in technology since 20 years and I’m passionate about it. I have all kinds of electronic
devices popping up from any drawer in my apartment and I can tell you with absolute certainty that
ButterflyLabs is the worst company I’ve ever dealt with. They are lacking all the components to make a
company a good company:
- the quality of their products is an absolute disaster;
- their shipping department has big problems. They even don’t check what is in their boxes and I have
my doubts that USPS misunderstood Switzerland for China;
- after sales support does not exist except for their robot-like rma procedure.
But the worst is, that they seem to fix products that have been returned by customers and send them on to
other customers selling them as new and therefore at the full price but without properly testing them. Only this
can explain, why a new product stops working within the same day you put it in operation. Besides of course,
that they provide a thousand dollars product with the wrong power supply.
So be aware! I don’t know how the other producers are (Coincraft, Cointerra, Hashfast, KnCMiner, etc) as I
didn’t experience them, but for sure my Butterfly Labs experience is the worst I’ve ever had in my life.
Support Bitcoin, don’t support Butterfly Labs!
)
