Topic: CoinCanary.org [No Longer Updated] - All Known Vendors and Status - page 8. (Read 35062 times)

Re:  BFL


Remember a common phrase:  Past performance does not guarantee future returns.


So, even with a prior product it doesn't rule out BFL as being sketchy with the sheer amount of BS they spread from July '12 until now.

It seems what we need here is to voice the overall feeling of the community when it comes to whether a business is a scam or not, so I will begin generating community polls to reflect this over the color coded method.

I will simply otherwise only add relevant facts to the database as we come across them supporting both sides of scam or legitimate.

This should do away possible bias from me personally in deciding what status is declared.

Does this sound like the direction we should go?

EDIT the forum poll won't work for this, Im looking at another option

To note, admit to being totally wrong on that point, DragonASIC is moved to Under Review status. There are still a few fishy things about it to look into.

I have just implemented several changes, including thread name change to avert any company included in the list feeling accused of being a scam.

I don't have enough time right now to reply to your responses entirely, however you have all made very valid points.

Namely: what qualifies me to be the one organizing this at all, and on what basis is trust established that I am not hashing out backroom deals with the scammers myself for a cut, etc.

And am I a scam myself in requesting hardware for review.

The goal here is:

A fair review process to determine the nature and legitimacy of a hardware producer.

Full transparency in conducting this review with respect to the privacy of that business. (In Cloudhashing's case, I was presented with transaction logs and the like, I cannot reveal it without their direct authority, but that presents a problem in sharing it with all of you, I know, something to think about)

Establishing some level of trust that I am only a third-party individual only serving a role as a whistleblower on obvious scams, the end goal being protecting people against being defrauded in a highly lucrative and explosive new industry full of parasites who want to take advantage of it at our collective expense.

Yes, there is more work to be done here and I can see that, and I will respond in detail to your replys later today somewhere. This is a work in progress and I welcome your ideas and input to make it better and more transparent in a way that we can all agree upon is fair, and these ideas will be implemented. I would absolutely like to include others to help review officially as to not be a solo act. But someone had to start the process somewhere and no one else had, so I elected myself to take it on for the betterment of the community. 

Anything on here is not here because I think it is a scam, only as a database of up and coming vendors and some kind of verification they are not scammers that can generally be trusted. Though I have no influence or connection to these enterprises, and cannot be held accountable for their actions either.

I agree with creativex, BFL should be blue until ASICs are shipped and confirmed by users. Also, cloudhashing should be blue because although you say they are a legitimate business, they are nonetheless dependent on a supplier who has not shipped.

Lol, no way I'd agree on that policy operatr, you might too many freebies! On a serious note, many things can go wrong going solo (such as being a despot and you decide who goes on the list and not forgetting the risk of corruption), and I think you are trying to take this as a one man band like gpu-rigs is trying to say. I would suggest a democratic way of looking at things and I would vouch for user Micon to be part of maintaining this list as he is so far doing a good job in investigating BFL. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bryan-micons-butterfly-labs-scammer-investigation-including-josh-zerlan-136392

When technologies are being developed, you don't normally have one company or one individual dictating terms. Groups of companies called consortiums or expert people join to write up recommendations of how standards should be adhered. The same should be applied here; a group of reputable bitcoin members (with no affiliations to any company to remove bias) to investigate and decid if a company is a scam or not.

For some banter this could happen to a one man band:

Before:



After:

BTCFPGA also shipped FPGA products, but failed miserably at transitioning to ASIC mining products, costing their investors plenty.

Again, while I appreciate what you're doing, failing to differentiate between a company with actual ASIC mining hardware confirmed to be in the wild(Avalon) vs a company that's been selling pre-order vaporware endlessly for nearly a year without shipping a single chip is misleading. BFL should be blue. While they have shipped FPGAs in the past, they're not selling them now and they've shipped zero ASIC mining units.

It would seem all you are saying any company on your list has to do is send you one of their devices gratis and you will remove them from your list.

Just seems a little fishy to someone from the outside reading this thread anew and does not really lay claim to there being independent tribunal decisions if all I have to do is have our owner send you a free GPU Rig for you to say we are a legit company, then we can build one specifically for you, send it out, then the next 100 or so orders we get (as soon as you post we're a legit company), we will just run off with the money, never to be seen again...

It would seem any scammer can see the benefits of spending maybe $1000 to send you a basic free unit (in the instance of GPU devices) in order to get 100x that in 'fresh' orders and do a runner.

Anyway, its getting late, have to call it a night, hopefully we can determine a foolproof way of deciding how to discover legit companies from scam ones as this thread progresses.

You bring up a good point, whilst BitcoinTalk is primarily focused on BTC, what is to say that a company selling GPU Rigs (such as ours) or FPGA systems would ship products specifically to clients on this forum, but then if someone ordering a GPU Rig for mining of Litecoins, they get ripped off if they are from another forum, or not members of this or any community?

A full list of companies providing FPGA, ASIC and GPU systems is what is needed and community members here need to be able to add their feedback to the list as do the companies listed in a public forum, not behind closed doors (PMs) where literally *anything* could happen.

Neither is gpurigs.com an ASIC specific vendor; it is a separate company from asicrigs.com

The logic used here are the terms "hardware miner" and "seller": What makes a bitcoin miner? A mining hardware that can execute SHA256 and RIPEMD. Therefore I can argue that anyone who wants to purchase other technologies that are not "ASIC only" exist and other technologies can be used for mining; as an example, the UK company in your list selling GPU miners for litecoins and bitcoins.

A seller can be a manufacturer (like BFL) that follows the B2C and B2B approach. The aforementioned companies (Enterpoint and ZTEX being highly reputable) follow the same model as BFL; they can sell to businesses and individual customers.

In terms of hardware miner:
ASIC is-a miner (dedicated), FPGA is-a miner (has a wider set of applications), GPU is-a miner (gaming and mining), CPU is-a miner (though not very efficient). It is my understanding that Enterpoint are gathering market intelligence on what bitcoin miners want to produce future FPGA products; namely Cairnsmore2. When they stop selling for the bitcoin market, then you can take them off the list as time goes by.

So my suggestion is that if you want a more complete list of reputable/scam vendors for "bitcoin miners" (note I am not using ASIC only), then these two should be in the list; it would also help noobs get a glimpse of who is what.

Imo, for now, ASIC to me seems a vaporous technology (1 confirmed report from Avalon) and personally I would opt for FPGA as a sure bet. This can also mean that if people adopt FPGA instead of ASIC, then there is room for scamming bitcoin miners who invest in FPGA based miners.

One other thing I should have added in my post above...

Rather than asking the companies listed in the first post of this thread to contact you personally, ask that they post openly inn this thread, not behind closed doors where there is the potential of *anything* happening that could tarnish you, or their reputation.

Open communication is key here, if you truly are interested in allowing the companies listed the opportunity to present their case as to why they are not scammers.

By doing so you are allowing them to not only refute allegations already made, but are giving them an opportunity to build a reputation in the largest bitcoin forum, which can only help with their business growth if they are legitimate companies.

As the old adage goes, silence is golden.

You missed my point totally.

The 'real address' listed in the WHOIS database IS NOT that companies physical address, it belongs to GoDaddy, the company they registered their domain name with.

If you search Google for that address you will find millions of listings using it, because it the address of the Domains By Proxy service.

http://reversewhois.domaintools.com/domains-by-proxy,-llc/

GoDaddy owns that company, they are allowing other people to use (for payment) their address for the WHOIS information.

The fact the WHOIS information shows you the same address as millions of other sites, some scams and some legit, can not be used for you to say 'oh they are a scam' that just stinks to high heaven as a witch-hunt.

If you are legitimately concerned about showing which companies are and which companies are not scams, then you need to come up with a solid way of determining the distinctions, because right now, companies listed in this thread are being told they are 'guilty' without any means of proving otherwise (have you contacted the companies listed directly to tell them about your accusations and given them the opportunity to respond in this thread? I am guessing you haven't, just as you didn't us, we were informed by another community member here).

It would appear right now, you are proclaiming yourself to be judge, jury and executioner to the claims that some of the companies listed above may be scams, without any actual 'solid' evidence to either prove or, disprove your accusations (or accusations by others) you feel they are a scam and therefore, they are, period, end of story.

As a member of the BitcoinTalk community, that only registered some 9 days prior to me, how do WE know that you are legitimately interested in actually proving the companies you have listed are scams, you could potentially be someone working for Avalon or BFL hired to make their competitors or any of the other companies listed look good/bad (as an example of why you need a defined course of proving if a company is legit or not & incidentally the only 2 companies in green, so that could be a possibility).

Let the BitcoinTalk community decide if a company listed above are scammers or not, this is a community after-all and should operate as such without a single person (hiding behind a made-up name on a message board) throwing around baseless accusations besmirching some potentially legitimate companies reputations, ours included, that just leads to further speculation and false assumptions.

Avalon and BFL have both shipped products that are confirmed in the hands of end users, making them a safer bet than most. Again, safer. Not irrefutable proof they wont screw you. This is opposed to some random Easybake website registered by random people with no proof at all what they claim is true or ever will be. BFL has some issues with their new line, but they have shipped in the past, have a real office people on these forums have been to, etc.

As noted this page is informational only, if you choose to use it to influence your buying decisions I am not liable for the end result. This is to gather up all speculation and fact in one spot, make your own judgement.

This is largely opinion based by me, I agree. As noted any of these companies can contact me directly to clear themselves.

It isnt perfect but better than letting speculation run wild and be completely confusing to everyone, and mitigate "is it a scam?" posts.
It is not the registrar itself that raises plenty of suspicion, it is the real address it is attached to. A web search of it digs up a few examples of scam sites being generated by whatever it is, based on that I would not give them your money over BFL or Avalon at present.

The WHOIS information on DragonASIC is domains by proxy... GoDaddys privacy service, a lot of companies use that for a variety of reasons including political websites.

Because that whois information matches to other known scam sites, in reality, means very little.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domains_by_Proxy

They could equally be a legit company wanting to shield their business location or a scam company, the WHOIS information in this specific instance is basically worthless.

In effect, you have labeled a company as a 'scam' because you personally feel their WHOIS info is unreputable, despite there being millions of websites with the exact same WHOIS information.

U have PM, this is a good work u're doing here

While I can appreciate what you're trying to do, failing to make a distinction between a hardware vendor and a vaporware vendor is dangerous. By listing both BFL and Avalon as green you're steering those reading this thread to BFL as Avalon does batch shipping and is unavailable. The bottomless pit of orders BFL takes in makes it unclear how long one could potentially wait to receive a product ordered today.

A review is currently conducted by searching out whatever information I can obtain about the company to find proof or not of their legitimacy. This includes WHOIS information, business registrations, wide web search, and looking into the people behind the scenes and if they have been attached to other frauds.

In the case of DragonASIC, I found underneath that the domain registration address was tied to other known scams or very fraudulent looking sites, earning it a red status unless they want to step forward.

An objective, fact based approach. I am not after a witch hunt, just separating the good ones from the bad based on available facts so no one gets bilked out of their money and discouraged. This is just a guide to what is known, and general community consensus on these companies.

Let me know how your interactions with ASICRigs are.

Hi PM me

We want to help clear cloudhashing.com from the list

how are u making the reviews ?
i emailed asicrigs.com  support if its possible to do a local pickup, will see how that goes