Topic: First BFL ASIC! - page 7. (Read 58260 times)

The conditions are there to prevent BFL from shipping a box of rocks and labeling it with ASIC DEVICE. Aside from the obvious shipping issue, the information provided was not credible. Whatever credibility Luke had before went out the window with this stunt. What a sad situation. I wish this much energy was put into actually making a product instead of using it to string people along and weasel out of bets. The most recent double penetration insult of lowering the hashrate and doubling the price is just comical. I'm more glad than ever that i jumped off this train wreck in December.  

http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=701


And besides the ability to collect a commision, WHY THE FUCK IS THIS BET STILL UP?

http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=1324


Let me guess: IT'S NOT UNAMBIGUOUS!

From now on we will make it easy for you to FORESEE unambiguous listings.

That's likely to be the case wherever the merry band of crooks over at BFL are involved.

But Josh supplying images he took with his camera at the KC lab after midnight local time (CST) and posted by Luke after 1AM his local time (EST) makes the bet true.

If there was a contest offering up a million dollar first prize to the first person supplying an image of two roosters fuckering with said images must be provided before midnight EST, any image offered up after the stated time frame would be null and void, even if this was the only stipulation of the contest rules. Hashing the semantics of what a rooster constitutes is mute.

Bottomline, I don't believe a scammer tag is warranted for any parties pertaining to this episode based on this debacle alone, nor believe Luke to be an employee of BFL, but something definitely is much more sinister afoot here.

That was ambiguous at the time however because it also says this underneath the title:

For this statement to be false, both of the two following conditions must be met:

Condition 1
Condition 2

That clearly excludes the title.

We agree that the bet was not a push regardless of what was meant by employee.

I don't agree with your logic that the IRS' definition of an employee should be used.  The bettors were from all over the world, the currency used was a decentralized digital currency, and betsofbitco.in is not based in the USA.  The service betsofbitco.in claims to provide is highly illegal in the USA.  It makes much more sense to me to use the English language definition of the word and to abide by the spirit of the bet rather than look for ridiculous outs through playing with semantics.

If I had a wager riding on the bet and it hinged on the word "employee", I would pay my debts.  I always pay when I lose a bet.  It's scummy to look to weasel your way out of a wager you lost.  Stooping to use of legalistic bullshit or otherwise actively going against the spirit of the bet is unethical.  I'm not a saint, but I do pay my debts.

What if the "customer" in question were a contractor who had been working full time at BFL for 10 years?  You would still insist, for some bizarre reason still not clear to me, to turning to the IRS' specific and limited definition of what constitutes an "employee"?  Remind me never to bet with you. 

Is Luke-Jr. a foreigner?  What kind of visa was/is he in the US on?  It's not even legal to come here on a visitor visa and perform work for compensation.  Does this matter for the bet?  Of course not, the IRS has nothing to do with the bet.

Turns out it is part of the bet, which is why I ended up switching my opinion in the end.

Shipping was not part of the contingencies of the bet.

It is.


Agreed

Don't understand the employee/contractor debate at all...seems like a sideshow.

BFL shipped nothing.

Last I checked, the bet was in reference to products made by ButteflyLabs, which is headquartered in Leawood, Kansas. Given that Kansas is in the United States (not sure if you knew that), the company is required to abide by all State and Federal laws..including anything regulated by the Department of Labor.

Bruno was correct. The biggest distinction between being an employee of a company and being paid by one (whatever the reason may be) is Taxes (though other aspects such as Benefits, Reimbursements, Workman's Compensation, etc can also come into play). By IRS definition alone, a subcontractor is not an employee of a company.

Simply giving another person compensation for their work does not instantly qualify them to be an employee. Don't you think using a dictionary definition in this case is a bit naïve? If you had a substantial amount of coins riding on this bet and it hinged on the word "employee", wouldn't you want to make sure it was correctly defined?

As I said over in the p2pool thread, the FPGA issues wont exist with the BFL ASIC on p2pool.
The FPGA issue is that it takes ~5s to do it's work and then only replies on completion, but p2pool LP is 10s.
ASIC at 60GH/s = ~72ms ...
Other issues? No idea. But certainly not the problem with the BFL FPGA.

Yeah, I was hired as a contractor one time and stayed at the same company for 4 years before they asked me to become an "employee".  They told me the benefits would outweigh the cut in pay, but I was young and single and already paid for my own health insurance so I knew that wasn't true.  Healthcare was a lot cheaper then too.  But if I had a family at that time it might have been worth it.

Anyway, it's quite clear that there are people called "contractors" who even the people in this thread who are hung up on an American "legal definition of employee" would call bullshit on.  BFL might have people working there for 10 years who are paid through an agency.  I guess it would be A-OK for them to be the "customer" because we are for some reason supposed to be using the American Internal Revenue Service's definition of an employee or something?

What if BFL had a policy of calling all employees "associates"?  And told their employees that they are not "employees", because that is too impersonal.  I guess then even Josh could be the customer.

It's silly to play with semantics when you can see that there was a conspiracy to steal the rightful winnings of this bet.

Yeah, it's a blatant conspiracy to cheat to win.  Luke-Jr., Josh Zerland and coinjedi are all scammers.

Why would we focus on United States Federal law in this matter?  Wouldn't it be better to just use the actual definition of the English word "employee", since this has nothing to do with United States Federal law, nor with laws in general?

It is pretty obvious everything tactic was done to try and circumvent this bet so they didn't have to pay. Having a person that has not even a proto-type that is directly affiliated with BFL shouldn't even be considered here. Conflict of interest here people. Take Luke out of the picture, which he should be, BFL clearly lost this bet without question. Why was it a draw? It is so leaning towards losing and then somehow marked a draw? Strange things going on we don't know.

in re. employees/subcontractors.

When I used to own drywall companies in Nashville and Houston, all my "employees" were subcontractors. Reason? Taxes. When my dad owned a hotel in SD, he had employees until he asked me to come up to straighten out the mess after his manager ripped him off in the tune of $50K+ USD. The first thing I did was change the status of all the employees to subcontractors, an idea the off-site paid professional accountant didn't like much, but I finally had my way with her (double entendre if you know what I mean). The staff didn't mind, for now they were receiving a larger paycheck at the same hourly rate, but it was now up to them to file their taxes accordingly, something most didn't do in the first place, hence cleaning toilets in a h/motel.

Damn, now you got me missing the great fishing in SD, you bastards!

~Bruno K~

Hey Luke, have you tested this on P2Pool yet? If not, would you be willing to?

Myself and a few others have got a total of ~270GH/s on order and intend to put it all on P2Pool, barring any BFL issues like with the FPGAs.

I wouldn't look to the dictionary to see what the word "employee" means.

I'll just leave this here... http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/01/art1full.pdf

Focus on the law [Federal] aspect..you'll be better off in the long run.

No, I don't realize that there is a "huge difference" between "being an employee of a company and being contracted by one".

I understand where you are coming from.  You are not the only ones to have heard these very specific usages for "employee", and this is a very common mistake for people to make.  I have worked as a full time employee for American corporations and have also worked as a contractor.  I know how these terms are generally used.  I also know, due to being a native English speaker, that the way words are used in various professions or even individual companies is not the only way they are used and in some cases can even be considered incorrect usage.  In other words, it helps to sometimes assign a more exact meaning to a word AS USED in a profession, or within a legal document, etc, but that does not change nor limit the overall meaning of the word.  

Here, this should help.  It is an example of ONE definition of the English word "employee" (first one that showed up on google):

em·ploy·ee  

/emˈploi-ē/

Noun

A person employed for wages or salary, esp. a nonexecutive.

Synonyms

worker - servant - employe - clerk


Now if we were writing... say, a Federal Healthcare Law, we would make sure that if we used the term "employee" that we assigned it an exact definition.  The act of doing so would NOT change the meaning of the English word "employee" though.  Does that help?

Reading the way the bet was written, there is no reason to believe that the intent was to define "employee" as a full time, salaried worker at BFL or some such nonsense.  It's supposed to be a wager between two willing, gentleman gamblers who are going to honor the spirit of the bet, not two slimy, scumbag lawyer types who say things like "it depends on what your definition of 'is' is" (for our foreign friends, that's an actual quote from arch-scumbag lawyer Bill Clinton).  Otherwise, each and every bet would have to employ "legalese", with all of those ridiculous run-on statements that attempt to cover each and every possible interpretation, eventuality, etc.

Read the bet.  Do you assume they meant to use the specific definition of employee which would preclude a guy who has worked as a contractor for BFL since 2012?  Your employer's official usage of "employee" is not the one and only "true meaning", although many people come to that conclusion concerning all sorts of English words.

My take on it is that there is no need to nitpick here.  A guy who is currently working for BFL in exchange for compensation should not be excluded from the definition of the term "employee" used in the bet terms.  Furthermore, Luke-Jr. has been doing work for BFL (at least off and on) since early 2012.  In my mind, it would be absurd to exclude him based on the use of the English word "employee", your own employer's usage notwithstanding.