Topic: Butterflylabs Huge SCAM - page 147. (Read 415663 times)

I have heard a lot about these people. I think the only good thing they have going for them is their nice looking website lol.

My friend ordered one. I'm waiting for his to arrive or not to see if its a scam. He is the test dummy, then I'll order one if they prove legit!

and the scam is even going on on ebay.  looks like people are selling their pre-orders for 2-3x what they paid for them

That's what a real company with actual capital would do.  What BFL appears to have done is collected a bunch of money premised on the concept that there was an actual device in the pipeline, then gambled they'd get enough money to actually get through the development cycle before people panic and start demanding their money back in droves.

That's not really a business model, so much as it is a scam.  That's even if they somehow bumble their way through the process of backing into delivering some kind of device at some point.

It's often a lost cause. Many see the dollar signs and fail to recognize the huge risks. Time to delivery is what really matters right now and BFL has been jerking everyone's chain for six months. Even when they(BFL) does begin shipping their huge backlog will ensure that months pass between ordering and delivery during which time difficulty will increase, likely dramatically until we reach the point in which ASIC miners are barely profitable. 

Woah, it's good to see others looking out for the community

That model was clearly described as a demo. 

Oh you

If you mean that they raised prices during April, no, they still charged you 100% of the price at the time. Half price means that the unit costs x and you pay x/2 at the time and you pay the remaining price once units are ready to be shipped.

in effect, they charged 1/2 price for the majority of their preorders

IMO, they are just teasing noobs in getting more pre-orders. Otherwise, like you said, it "looks" like a finished product.

It looks like a finished product to me. I see no reason why they cannot mass manufacture the ASIC they shipped to David. If they cannot, then it is fraud. Any further delays should be met with a very hostile lawsuit.

2 Jalaps to date. But sent to devs and reviewers only.

When dates are pushed back for several months at a time, I don't think people are willing to wait a year on 100% paid ASIC miners. I waited for about a month and I had to pull back as I was not sure what BFL was playing at.

However, I agree that setbacks can occur in Engineering projects; even more setbacks happens in academia research where the idea doesn't even exist! In this case, developing an ASIC device where they have no experience (previous FPGA experience in repacking them) and outsourced work from other countries to receive parts so that they can piece them together in an assembly line. In this example, they had unforeseen problems; late delivery dates of parts, power consumption problems, etc, that could be foreseen if they had the experience in developing ASIC products. BFL atm is an immature company developing ASIC's which is slowly maturing its own experience.

IMO, BFL is guilty in two aspects:

1) Being too optimistic and publishing renewed dates of delivery; I am always pessimistic when including setbacks in my projects and delivery dates, so I always try to give a conservative figure if failure happens. They are also guilty of publishing a product that was not even built; i.e. just plans or as we call it, half baked ideas.

2) Charging people 100% for a pre-order; this is also considered very bad business when nothing exists or is in the pipeline. BFL should consider adopting a 10% or 20% down payment IF people would get the miners within a month. This would sound more reasonable imo.

yes. here is a review

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6mmTRheUzg

Has BFL produced anything

I get that you don't like BFL. I honestly haven't spent a huge amount of time thinking about the inner workings of the company. I order a 300 dollar piece of hardware in March. I'll see if it is delivered. If not, then we'll have a class action and the CEO will return to prison for fraud. He overpromised. Round 1 is over. As for the difficulty calculations, you don't know the impact the GPU miners turning off their rigs alongside the price increases the bitcoin experiences will have. I agree the difficulty will go up. But it is a mistake to say no money will come.

Most ASIC companies realize they can mine themselves and spare the competition and only release their hardware once it is no longer profitable...

You seem fine with just discounting every lie BFL has told since June of 2012 and coloring them all as miscalculations and setbacks, but saying you've "scheduled shipments" of 1Gh/s/w mining gear nearly every two weeks for months on end is not a miscalculation. Selling dozens of 1.5Th/s minirigs for $30k and then cancelling the entire product almost a year later without ever delivering one unit is not an error.  


This is not some voodoo magic. Difficulty is a factor of network hashrate which is growing very rapidly and will continue to grow rapidly for several more months as more and more ASICs are deployed. ASICMiner has started to sell hardware directly to fill the ASIC hardware void(BFL) and has also said they'd deploy 55Th+ over the next couple months. Avalon will ship 600+ 66Gh/s mining units between now and May 5, when they will begin building batch 3 units. Most ominous however is the direct chip sales Avalon has begun to facilitate which will result in huge hashrate increases within months. All of this will ensure that anyone still waiting on their ASIC vaporware will be very hard pressed to ever see a return. This situation would have been bad enough for BFL investors if BFL had shipped what they sold(1Gh/s/w) mining gear, but that will not happen. Instead they'll ship gear that consumes 5-6x that amount of power, ensuring that their gear will become a net money loser and be unplugged much sooner. This fact alone makes it absolutely vital that your gear is in hand now, but that won't happen for months in the case of someone ordering from BFL now because of their backlog.

Did they refuse to refund you? I've seen a number of threads here and on the BFL forums by people reporting they had no issues getting a refund from BFL when they requested one.