Topic: Butterfly Labs Announces Bulk Chip Sales - page 3. (Read 15858 times)

BFL chips crap all over Avalon chip, read about them before you post. The market is NOT flooded with Avalon chips, the have not shipped.

Puts on MASTER BFL Shill costume.

WTH, BFL customers?!

BUY Damnit, BUY NOW. BUY MORE!

.......alright I didn't want to do this...but....

Moderators, cut the oxygen to BitCoinTalk by 20%. If they won't buy because of "sanity"...they will buy through induced hypoxia. We just need to level out this "thing" called sanity once and for all...

(MASTER BFL Shill)

Well it's been over 48 hours, several people have tried starting group buys but as far as I can see not a SINGLE person has commited to SINGLE chip.

A few who did show interest would only do so if payment was on delivery and nothing up front.

Sanity prevails on bitcointalk

My experience is that PayPal pays attention mainly (or only) to communications that went through their system.

Most of the people who've tried to screw me have not provided responses to my queries through PayPal's messaging system, and coincidentally or not, it took PayPal investigators a matter of minutes to decide I was in the right.

I have always tried to format my correspondence such that a PayPal investigator could easily follow things.  Short simple questions of the merchant which should be easy to answer.  And which should be answered.

Why would they? BFL chips bang for the buck is about the same as Avalon.

Retail prices:
BFL   2.5GH/s for $85  29MH/s per $1
Avalon  280MH/s for $10 28MH/s per $1

Avalon of course has access to wholesale prices for their own chips, so their chips are far more efficient for them to use than paying BFL.

Josh is the bestest COO in the whole wide world. He'll handle every aspect of your company with that title, from handling care of customer service, overseeing the production line, taking care of the financial matter, and even single-handedly man the official Twitter account. He's even on record in directing the webmaster as to what corrections need to be taken care of.

He won't have a single leg to stand on if he ever claims that he was limited to information at BFL when Sonny ups and disappear after his probation is over.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/terms-outside#user_responsibilities

Part 4

Prohibited Transactions. You agree that you will not use PayPal to accept payment for illegal products or services, including but not limited to materials that infringe the intellectual property rights of third parties. You will not use the Service, the PayPal website or any of the services offered therein for any unlawful or fraudulent activity. If PayPal (or Wells Fargo, in connection with processing credit card transactions) has reason to believe that you may be engaging in or have engaged in fraudulent, unlawful, or improper activity, including without limitation any violation of any terms and conditions of this Agreement, your access to the Service may be suspended or terminated. Further, if such behavior involved a MasterCard or VISA credit card transaction, it may result in you/your business being prevented from registering for payment acceptance through any payment provider or directly with any bank acquirer operating under license to either the MasterCard or VISA card associations. You will cooperate fully with PayPal Wells Fargo, MasterCard or VISA to investigate any suspected unlawful, fraudulent or improper activity, including but not limited to granting authorized PayPal representatives "guest" or "member" access to any password-protected portions of your website.

You also agree not to use your PayPal account to sell goods with delivery dates delayed more than 20 days from the date of payment, or to sell securities, business opportunities, franchises or multi-level marketing or goods with delivery delayed more than 20 days from the date of payment. You agree not to impersonate a PayPal User or a PayPal representative, or to request that a PayPal customer provide you with their password or other information to access their account.

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Highlights for pointing out the obvious...

I can atest to this being true. (Ref: The chargeback fees)

The biggest issue is not that you get charged a fee for a chargeback. It is that you gain a reputation for poor transactions.

Most Merchant accounts (that accept Credit Cards) will only allow you to fail 2% of the time. Then they drop you and charge you a termination fee.

There are probably several reasons why BFL doesn't have a standard Credit Card account*. The Main Rep (Josh) has even lashed out at Paypal on BFL forums. (which I am sure is against their terms of service)

Link: https://forums.butterflylabs.com/pre-sales-questions/2843-what-happened-pay-google.html#post34971



If they lose PayPal, they lose a good portion of their Credit Card charging ability. I am unsure whether BitPay accepts CC. I believe they do not and only deal with Virtual Currency.

--------------------

Anyway, BFL customers don't complain enough, hence why they get bent over a desk quite alot. (Rather than them bending someone over the desk)

*PayPal Merchant Account is not considered a "real" standard merchant account in my opinion.

Maybe Avalon should simply buy a large lot of chips and design Avalon MK2 to run on bfl chips. Sure would solve a lot a problems for them and bfl.

BFL and Paypal get charged a hefty fee whenever you do a chargeback through your credit card and sideswipe their normal processes.  Bonus for those of you who feel helpless and maybe even a little vengeful.  Vengeance aside, it is still leverage.  Most reputable merchants will be more flexible in the face of a chargeback where they are assessed additional fees.

But yes, I've successfully charged back items as late as 6 months after a purchase that went bad.  The scummier the merchant, the more willing they are to go to bat for you.

That is good knowledge. 

Yes, I'm not a BFL customer, just trying to protect my ass elsewhere.

I also spoke to Paypal, they will do nothing for you after 45 days, aside stop the seller from using Paypal if enough complaints are received...

I read elsewhere that visa and mcards 180 day warranty is invalid with third party payment via Paypal, so rang a my card issuer and Paypal.

Paypal wouldn't confirm anything but their 45 day window, surprisingly my card company was willing.

I have them on record saying that as I recorded the conversation.

Respective banks handle disputes in their own way so don't take my situation for granted. This is only for credit cards, not debit, but again your bank maybe different. I'm not in the US.

Any BFL customer should have done this beforehand. It was their responsibility, but greed blinds...and I've seen f**k all due diligence applied to most 'investments' here!

I was talking about Paypal disputes, which are different than CC charge-backs.
I guess if you can get the CC bank to consider a charge-back then they will go to bat for you. Insuring transactions through the CC might be a good avenue to explore as well.

That's what I thought, but it's not the case; apparently depends on the card issuer. I've been looking into this and speaking to banks...

IMHO, BFL is going to have to sweeten the pot considerably if they want to entice people to go with their chips. Considerable effort and progress has already been made toward open-source Avalon chip platforms. Pre-orders have been in place for several weeks.

With their price/hash being right on Par with Avalon, there's no incentive for anybody to jump from the Avalon ship, IMHO. Why would people invest the time and effort to develop boards for chips, when BFL has had trouble getting chips for themselves in weeks past. If they've had trouble getting enough chips for their own production in a timely manner, what reason is there to believe it will be any different for us?

BFL, IMHO, if you want to sell your chips, you're going to have to SERIOUSLY come down off that price. Somewhere in the <$50 range, if people are going to put the effort and money into developing yet another platform for chips that may or may not come in the next year.

Nobody is going to pay roughly the same price/hashing power to go with a new chip, and start over at square one on board development. The numbers simply won't work. There has to be a financial incentive that drives people to branch off from the relatively safe status quo of Avalon chips (which already have a pretty good jump on you in terms of time, development, release of chip specs and reference design, etc).

Sure, but after 45 days Paypal considers the sale final. So if you have an old pre-order (100 days old for instance ), Paypal won't help you. Since the CC companies are paying Paypal and Paypal didn't rip you off, the CC companies won't help you. That is why people were recommending renewing a pre-order every 45 days with BFL through PayPal.

Well seeing as BFL are incapable being confident of shipping products they are satisfied; work, remain working, aren't likely to burn your house down, what are the chances of you receiving your goods before someone else DIY's them a solution through bulk chip purchasing?!

To be fair, I think it's your only chance of a working product, based on their behaviour of opening their intellectual property to this kind of usage...

It'll take months, at best, to ship all prior orders. Whereas chips just need to be received from the factory, repackaged, and mailed out.

I'd agree if chips were the only missing component to getting retail units out the door, then they should all go into retail units. But if plenty of chips come in and there is a shortage of some other component, I have no problem with them shipping chips while waiting for the other components to come back into stock.

PayPal does...

I will be really really angry if they ship ANY discrete chips before the ship all the pre-orders have shipped.