Topic: Butterflylabs Huge SCAM - page 130. (Read 415663 times)

Clearly, I forgot to write the sarcasm there.  Let him know wasn't meant to imply as to me personally telling him, but more of a joke like a rock through the window.

No, I'm saying that they should have had a product before accepting tons of pre-orders for something that did not exist.  I'm saying that it doesn't make sense to order one at this point.  

You are exactly right, and thanks for confirming my point BTW, the only way to remain competitive with these things coming out in mass is to 'go big'....  or be first, which has already passed most of us by.  So what happens to someone who throws tens of thousands of dollars into them just to see a few hundred GH/s on a network measured in PH/s?  What if that person has not broke even by the time BTC reaches the 21 million mark and nobody can mine anymore?  They lose, that's what.  

Did I say 'boo hoo I can't get rich off this'? No, I don't believe that I did.  All I said was that I don't see it being able to pay off at all, making it not worth buying, again with the exception of the 'cool factor'.  If I am wrong, please explain why instead of just trying to insinuate about what a greedy bastard I must be.

I doubt BFL will deliver anything on a massive scale any time soon. The ones that were shipped to those writers are not the final product. It's just another way keep certain believers believing, while keep more money out of the pockets of other ASIC companies.

Know about what? Josh's not an idiot, he knows to watch his own back after all the BFL drama.

I live less than 10 minutes from BFL Headquarters in Kansas City.  Need me to let him know?

BFL and Josh in particular will get what's coming to them. You don't walk away with millions of dollars in preorders, treat customers like shit, and pretend it's all gravy. Someone somewhere will track Josh down and give him a good smack in the head, it's only a matter of time.

So you're saying shame on BFL if they make enough of these so everyone gets one and you don't get rich because the difficulty went up so fast? It sounds like you would only be happy if you got one and others didn't. BTC is a game of diminishing returns. If you aren't first or you don't go big, it's not going to pay off like you want it to.

Seeing as they have shipped some of the Jalapenos to a few writers, we know they exist.

If they actually deliver them (and when), is the only question.

Fixed for you

Everything they have done indicates that they are more interested with promotion and media presence, not so much with fulfilling orders.  But it does seem that they cater, and will eventually do what's necessary in order to continue securing the obscure "pre-order".  Hopefully that upgrades to actually ordering, where you still have no idea if you'll receive the product in a year.  Seems like they want to secure their career before they actually become a manufacturer.

They are shipping a handful of orders per day, at most, currently. I suppose they need to do a lot of retrofitting by hand just to get the Jalapenos out the door. It might change when they finally manage to get new PCBs for the larger models, which account for the higher-than-predicted power usage and heat dissipation...

Avalon is the only company so far who have managed to get working products out the door en masse.

Are we really expecting the ship date to be by the end of 2013?  Considering they're already shipping, shouldn't all orders be fulfilled within the next couple of months?

So there's a lot of hate going round for the BFL ASICs.  Does anyone know of any other reasonable alternatives that can give the similar level of (promised) power at the same price?

Are there any good competitors, basically?

Pretty much anyone without a significant hashrate investment near the end of the year (when BFL might be close to finished shipping the current orders) won't be making much BTC. Caveat emptor of course, but if DIY Avalon chip boards start becoming online around august, difficulty will skyrocket by then.

It is hard to say, but it seems like we might go through another phase where we have to pay for power at some point.  It might be possible that people will take on litecoin as btc 2.0 because of all the shit associated with key-BTC players.  I could be totally wrong, but I like speculation.

anyone know what the estimated difficulty will be once all there orders ship out apparently tho if you didn't order big your gonna be sol?

As a newbie who has done many hours of research, I can't say very much about BFL in general.

What is pretty obvious is that these things probably won't be worth the investment by the time people start to actually get them, assuming they do ship.  We can debate whether they are fraudulent or just incompetent, but IMHO it really doesn't matter one way or the other.  If I invest some money into a BFL device and actually get it someday, the mining difficulty will have risen so much that it won't be worth running for anybody other than the very first few who get them, except of course for the 'cool' factor.  Whether they are legit or not, it seems that either way I would lose.  At least, that's what I have gathered from the last week or trying to catch up on the issue...  Am I wrong?  Why / Why not?

Two factors that drove my decision (sofar) against throwing any money at BFL were the highly unprofessional conduct of the poster in this thread (like it or not, you represent the company)- his arguing, name calling, and refusal to simply post links to the answers to many folks questions.  All because he claims these questions have been answered many times and the answers are out there for all to see.  Nobody is asking that he sit there and type out the answers again, but posting a link would be far more effective both for the company as a whole and for his position in the discussion while requiring much less effort on his part than arguing with people.  The more links there are out there to the same answers many people seek, the less people will be asking, and less people would be speculating on the alleged shady nature of their operation.  Not to mention that it is just bad customer service to make folks go out and search for those answers when a simple copy/paste would make many readers happy.  Secondly, these devices are bitcoin specific and won't be much good for mining others like litecoin.  So assuming I did get a unit and mine with it, once the maximum amount of bitcoins have been mined I now own a really fancy paperweight.

It's worse than a ponzi scheme because people who aren't investors are profiting off of investors money.  lol duh.

It is classy how they are doing it in front of everyone's face.  Here's one for public copulation.

I think many of you are confused as to what a ponzi scheme is...in order for it to be a ponzi scheme, initial investors would be making money off of later investors money. Being that no one is making any money (other than reviewers), it's not possible for this to be a ponzi scheme.

Here's how it would have to be for BFL to be a ponzi scheme:

BFL wouldn't sell you a product...they would have to charge you to build and operate one for you. This would be a "magic box" that makes you money that you don't get to examine (it just "works" and you have to trust it).

Group A invests money into it.
Group A is given some of their investment back.
Hearing the news that people are making money, Group B invests.
Group A and B are getting returns off group B's money.
Group C invests.
Groups A, B, and C get some of group C's money.
....
....
....
The scheme works until they can't find enough new money to pay out the profits of everyone before it. ( Hey, doesn't Social Security work this way?   )

That is how a ponzi scheme works. Being that no pre-orders have made any money, there is no possible way for this to fit the description of a ponzi scheme.

A ponzi scheme is a type of fraud, but not all fraud is a ponzi scheme.