Guys, how many of you received their equipment? Is this company reliable or is this another scam? I would like to order few basic platforms, but I do not know if they can be trusted.
Guess it depends on your definition of scam, they seem to be trying to run a legit company.
The question comes down to "How much risk are you willing to take?"
My concern is that they are selling a one-trick pony. From what I've read they use an encrypted bitstream and, if I understand that correctly, that means only BFL can provide another bitstream that would work. Also there's the issue of the unknown hardware that they use. It seems that they bought the chips (stratix?) at some reduced price which suggests that they have some number of chips but can get no more. So 6 months from now when yours has an issue you're out of luck if it's the FPGA. That's too much risk for me, 6 month warranty doesn't inspire my confidence.
I was originally one of their strictest critics and now (after receiving my first BitForce Single) I
believe know that they are completely legit.
Hi Cablepair. I'm glad to hear that they're legit and that you've received your single, but I'm curious how long did it take from the moment you pre-ordered to the moment it arrived at your door. I'd like to buy one for shitz and giggles (although I prefer Icarus and X6500 due to their greater power efficiency) but I have doubts that it will be worthwhile to wait 6 weeks to get one.
hi allinvain
Let me clarify, the one BitFORCE single that I have - I did not purchase from BFL, I also
did not could not wait six weeks to get one (I just had to have it!) so I was able to make a deal with one of the lucky individuals that got one on the very first shipment and when it got here a couple days later (thank you priority mail) I was very very impressed with it, its a remarkable piece of equipment - it is engineered extremely well and I love the fact that it just works! It runs full blast mining away 24/7 with no software changes or overclocking, if it starts to get too warm it throttles it self down and corrects itself. Its very impressive and I love it. I added it to a machine that has two 6990s in it just for comparison and its very impressive.
So I start opening up a conversation with Sonny from BFL - he seems to be the guy who wears the P.R./C.S. hat, and I start emailing back and forth , probing for information - feeling them out, and now I feel a lot better about this. I was able to place an order for two more of the BitFORCE singles and pay via dwolla, they sent me an invoice and I paid the invoice it all feels very legit to me now. I could be wrong but I have a good feeling about BFL that I did not have before, mostly the product itself won me over. Theres a little bit of genius - magic there that always wins me over when I experience it and why I work in the technology field (remember the first time you used an iPhone?)
As BFL is not really a part of this community coming into this I don't think they realized how exciting and demanding we would be about their product and how critical we would be of them. Although their customer service was incredibly poor and they made some mistakes that set off a lot of red flags for a lot of people (myself included) I think we were over critical of them and I think they are getting it together. I also think a lot of their delayed shipping times have to do with the amount of liquid cash they have and the amount of chips they can have made at one time. It seems to me that once we get to the 3rd and 4th shipments it will be a lot quicker because of these reasons.