Topic: I'm on BFL's Side (Read 2361 times)

I'm not sure how this qualifies as cognitive dissonance. I've never been interested in bitcoin speculation (buying, holding, selling) for profit. The feeble attempts I made early on we're pretty spectacular failures, lol.

I simply mine BTC and sell it as needed to make purchases (NewEgg, TigerDirect or mining gear) or pay bills. I do hold some bitcoin in my wallets now but that's mostly because I've stopped buying new mining gear. If the price goes up while I hold the coins, great. But I won't be suicidal if the price drops much further.

I also feel some sympathy for BFL because their equipment was so ambitious and completely unlike the chinese bulk stuff. On the other hand they were way way overambitious and at the same time incompetent and fradulent in other areas and therefore failed miserably. And they did it twice.

I also got profits from selling my 65nm BFL stuff away after mining with them.

But after all the things they've done, saying "I'm on BFL's side" is a bit like saying "I'm on Hitler's side" after Adolf has given you a lollipop. You got lucky from your selfish point of view. But a whole lot of other people got screwed over badly.

"But that would have never happened. I wasn't interested in buying and holding and I'm still not." <- Cognitive Dissonance.

I hate BFL as much as anyone. But in hindsight, I did ok...

- spent $1300 (credit card) on a Little Single and mined with it for about a month and then sold it on eBay for (I think) $3000. $100/GHs... crazy times!

- converted a Single and Jalapeño preorder (original purchase on credit card) on August 17th for a Monarch and bought 9 BTC on exchange for ~$100 each* to make up the difference.

- spent 3 BTC on Black Friday (BTC at $1100!) on a discounted Monarch and received a 5.5 BTC refund on July 1st.

- ordered 3 Singles on Black Friday for 3.7 BTC and received them the next week. The high price of BTC at the time made these decent purchases in hindsight. I certainly wouldn't have been better off if I had bought and held BTC at $1100, lol.

- received 600GHs of compensation cloudhashing for Aug 17th Monarch order on 6/24 which ran until ~ 9/1

- received 1st 700GHs Monarch at the end of August, 2nd 700GHs Monarch and 2.11 BTC refund a couple of weeks later.


* Sure, I would have been better off buying and holding the 9 BTC on August 17th. But that would have never happened. I wasn't interested in buying and holding and I'm still not.

OP is a loonie

The End

Which is irrelevant. The point is that BFL is crooked, and should not be defended. Some may have come out ahead. More came out behind.

Your both lucky and insane to support such activity as BFL has been involved in....

Seriously dude they fleeced the hell out of so many people with delays over a year and finally delivered product when it was basically worthless and refused refunds and that was round 1.  Then you have the upgrade scam where they put their hands back in their customers pockets for them to have any hope of ROI by making them pay to convert the order to a Monarch.  Then you have the free bonus Monarchs people now have to pay for if they still want them.

The tricks are endless.  They have made a fortune while some customers just broke even while others lost almost everything.

If there is enough money left to refund remaining customers the FTC will do it and if there isnt it was never going to happen anyway and someone was going to lose out bigtime while others got a full refund.  At least the FTC will spread the pain and stop the scammers at BFL draining any more funds out of the business for themselves to buy cars and houses.

And that's one of the reasons they were shut down. Those terms are illegal.

You got unlucky, you took a gamble and lost.  OP took a gamble and won.

That's because Sonny V (BFL CEO) is a criminal and already convicted as guilty in prior schemes. He had very few limbs to stand on at this point. So it was the last straw imo. Courts were watching him already.

Thank you! Someone with some sense.
I did the same with USA court documents, bitsalame. See link below


Headswim, read this post I made a few months back:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/sonny-vleisides-butterfly-labs-ceo-2014-court-transcript-the-tldr-version-682150


Maybe this will help.

BFL is a master of deception. They make it seem like they are following rules and being legitimately slow, when there is actual unethical practices at hand. Because it if was just ineptitude and bad estimation of what it takes to make a product, then I wouldn't be taking the stand I am. BFL has deceived and manipulated customers. This is why they deserve what's coming to them. I have compassion for an honest company trying their best-- BFL is not that. They are just masters at making it look like it.

If anyone was wronged by bfl, bfl deserve some slapping but it does seem that FTC are acting hastily here. I have seem much worse from other mining manufacturing 'companies' that never produced anything and issued no refunds at all. At least bfl have produced some products and given some refunds... so not sure what kind of ratios they have for satisfied customers v 'victims' but shutting them down seems excessive...

What we have here is asymmetrical information.

I bought a single in February 2013, with a promise of delivery by end May, expecting end August, delivered near end October.

The dates are somewhat unimportant, what matters is the quantity of hashes online, which BFL pretty much
knew and controlled.

I bought with ~37BTC and mined 17BTC. Had BFL delivered a month earlier, I would have broken even. That was more or less
either predictable, or within BFL's control, as they changed production schedules to the benefit of jalapeno customers.

Had I known the quantity of orders (PHashes/s) ahead of me I would not have bought, and their promised delivery by end
of May, given their production rate vs orders was a deception.

lol

I actually did ok with my year late arriving purchase from them too, believe it or not. paid in fiat waited forever got miner running just in time to make enough btc to exploit the bubble last winter just doubling my investment. made a little over 2 more btc before shutting down. Thing is, I'm NOT on BFL's side. I am of the belief that the sucess of the individual is the sucess of the group, and just because I lucked out by fluke of good timing, there are too many members of this community who were puit into dire straits thanks to the shabby way bfl did business. Anarchy means responsability in my world, if you cant do that you only invite the nanny state to do it for you.

This was only your 6th post, and you are sticking up for a scam company.

Ignore list +1

the people that are on BFL's side obviously didnt do their research, by the way its been well doxxed.
1) sonny V is on probation after operating a ponzi scheme involving a fake lottery
2) pre-orders should only be promoted if the delivery time is intended to be 30 days or less.
3) they fully knew that it would take atleast 6-12 months to produce
4) couple months ago they were warned by the courts to start honouring refunds/ shipping goods, and given over a month to do so
5) they did not honour that, and thus get what they deserve

the bottom line here is business management. it doesnt matter what happened not running yuor business, not researching your industry and to even expect the competition not to get cut throat was a huge mistake for them. they under estimated every single aspect in their business. It is not the consumers fault. however the fact that people are getting their coins returned against the value of the coins right now means they did enough homework that they exchanged the coins as soon as people paid. or trust and believe you would not be getting the amount based on current values, you would instead be getting exactly what you sent them without the value being factored in.

For the people getting paid back this could be a good thing, depending on the price of  BTC when the purchase was made some people may make out quite well. Let em explain, lets say when people purchased their order BTC was worth 600 dollars and someone spent 2 BTC on an order, in order for BFL to reimburse the fiat value they must refund 3BTC if the customer holds onto those coins in anticipation of the value rising they could make out quite well, especially if the value hits say 800 dollars. they would in a sense spent 1200 dollars but if they are able to hold and value hits 800 they will have made  2400 with a profit of 1200 dollars. not a big profit or the time and not something people are going to be happy about but there is a silver lining in there (kinda)

The problem is when BFL saw they could not complete things they should have STOPPED all orders, and either processed what they could handle or refunded the money instantly, it was their own stupid greedy mistake that got them here.  Now what they can ask themselves is would it have been better to stopincoming orders and just reimburse the customers their money , or do it they way they did and now face jail time.

If their reputation was what they worried about then they should ask themselves how does that reputation look now?

they made so many bad decisions and deserve what they get.

It is still, in theory profitable for people to mine, you just need to by the right equipment and have enough to invest.

The reason that CPU/GPU mining was so profitable is that CPUs and GPUs really never lost all their value in the same way that ASICs do. When an ASIC can no longer economically mine it will become essentially worthless while there are other uses for CPUs and GPUs therefore there is a market for them.

You are so gullible.
No wonder why they kept running for a quite long time.
It is either gross negligence or outright scam.
BFL is what is known as a selective scammer. It delivers some, and it scams the other half. And they leave the rest on the arena to leave all the satisfied customers to fight against the scammed ones. It is quite an effective method to build blind fanatics supporting the company.

Those who are scammed sometimes also defend the company in what in psychology is known as Cognitive Dissonance. It is the symptom of fanaticism and blind faith, also the denial is a powerful defense mechanism. And they exploited it.

I've been warning about BFL since day one, Vleisedes was extradited from Italy for fraud. I even posted here the official Italian documents stating it.

I'm not blaming anyone for my actions and as a self-actualized individual I accept fully the responsibility of my own decisions. I assure you I have no need to "wake up" because I am not asleep. Nobody forced me into this arrangement, and nobody did for you either.

I'm not saying I had a "blissful experience", but apart from basically giving a company a 9-month, 0% interest loan I wasn't materially damaged. At least, I had every indication that I *probably wouldn't* have been until the FTC stepped in. Now, who knows if I'll ever get the rest my money back. I already received a refund for one of my orders. There's no reason to suspect I wouldn't have for the others.

I'm not sure if you read the terms of your agreement to preorder, but mine did say there were no refunds. Even knowing this, I asked for a refund as well on the chance that I could have received one, but I can't fault them for saying no - I agreed to those terms when I sent them my money. I also never said they were honoring refunds always, but they did begin for all orders starting August 19th, and earlier orders before then.

If it turns out they broke the law then yes, I absolutely would like to see justice meted out. However everything that has happened so far seems like a new company failing at customer expectation management, not a scam. That was my point. Just because they're taking longer to deliver doesn't mean they're being dishonest. I didn't say they weren't, just that from my perspective a scam wouldn't have responded/partially refunded my order at all.



Good point. I didn't actually give Bitcoin serious thought until March 11, 2013 (the day of the chain fork on version .8, which happened minutes after I finished my all-day download of the core client!), so unfortunately those weren't options for me anyway, but you're right. At almost any point buying BTC would have been better than mining, except under CPU/GPU conditions. Again, didn't learn that until after my first experience with BFL, but I still made a profit, so I'm not upset at the lost opportunity because it's too late to do anything about it.

Buying in april would also mean buying at the end of a large price spike. If you had purchased even a few weeks (or a month or two) earlier then you could have purchased a lot more (with BTC=20 you would have purchased 65 BTC = ~29k today, with BTC=13 you would have purchased 100 BTC = ~43k today).

Even though you paid in fiat for the machine you could have used that fiat to buy bitcoin

Amazing. I used to think like you. I was so forgiving and so patient.

Until I finally woke up. It took me about 10 months to wake up.

I ordered on August 17, 2013 (day 1). And a year later, they still had not delivered. Sure they started offering refunds... 10 months later. They REFUSED me a refund no matter how politely I asked after month 6. I asked 3 times and got declined each time. So, no, they were not honoring refunds always. They play by their own rules. You perhaps just didn't happen to get screwed by them, but defending them is not called for imo. Perhaps read what they've done to other people before sharing your blissful experience. I think you may not realize the magnitude of damage caused to others.

Then to top it all off to learn of the massive misappropriation of company funds for personal purchases, you begin to learn that there was unethical use of customer funds as well.  I personally feel that there is a very good chance that the Monarch could have been completed WAY sooner had they actually spent the funds necessary to speed production to the point where the product was finished faster.

Actually it would be worth $5,200 (1300/100 = 13 BTC). Yes, a way better return (and had I known I would have done things differently), but I paid in dollars, not BTC, which would have been even worse from an ROI perspective. (5 BTC returned on 13 BTC invested, ouch!)

In fact, it would appear that it is not profitable to buy mining equipment using BTC at all anymore, since no miner will be able to recoup the amount of BTC it would cost given current price and network growth, no?

They were issuing refunds and delivering product. That isn't the behavior of a fraudulent company. I'm not saying they're a wonderful company with great customer service, just that your interpretation is that they are scam artists and I have not experienced any behavior along those lines.

Perhaps you received far less than you paid because you purchased your miner when BTC were ~$100 each? In that case, you paid ~50 BTC for a miner that may have broken even? Unfortunate, but not their fault.

The problem with your argument is that the reason you were able to ROI is because the price of bitcoin increased. If instead of spending $1,300 on a BFL miner, you instead bought $1,300 worth of bitcoin your investment would be worth well into the six figure range today.

You got lucky on your return bringing you more BTC than you paid. I got MUCH LESS than I paid.

You should ask yourself, "Why does this company force people to wait 30 days for a refund anyway?" Does any other company you know of do that? I know the reasons they gave (because they told me too) and they are all lies. It's just another example of the crookedness that is BFL.

I'm sorry but people who accept things like endless delays and "30-45 days for refund" as acceptable are sheeple who can't judge what is right and what is wrong. BFL has wronged people, and if you can't see that then I'm sorry but you need to take off the blindfold.

BFL is fraudulent and deceptive too often to ignore.

They deserve no defending nor any kind words.

Let the slithering snake die its slow death.

It has been coming a long time.

Good riddance.

hi what is bfl?

A lot of people are glad that BFL is "in trouble" right now. They believe it is and was a scam, and that everyone who ordered through them is getting what they deserved. I'd like to share my experiences with BFL.

I purchased my first mining rig through BFL in March of 2013, with the expectation that it would deliver in September. It finally arrived in October, and from my original purchase of $1300, I managed to mine about 5 BTC over the next ~6 months. Even with the delays in shipping, the BTC I mined were worth significantly more than the $1300 I paid for the unit, and even now had I not sold earlier, would still have resulted in a net gain of over 50% in 11 months.

It was for this reason, as well as the fact that I truly believed that the second time around BFL would have resolved their production issues, that I ordered some Monarchs. And I did so fully understanding and accepting that it was a preorder and that their dates were not guaranteed, like any adult who is responsible for their actions and has done their due diligence should. When production delays were announced the first time, it was understandable, but frustrating, but I had experienced them before and it was made clear at the time I placed my order that the dates given were estimates but may not be met.

However, as production delays continued, I admit was getting worried. In Bitcoin, after all, most people are aware that your money can just vanish at any moment. The day that Josh announced his final offer and they opened up refunds to all customers (pretty sure that was August 19), I requested an immediate refund for all of my orders. By the time they would have arrived, with the lack of performance they had promised, it was no longer worth it to own the monarchs. Many others must have felt the same. My request was handled virtually immediately, and I had a resolution promised within a few days.

I was quoted a refund time frame of 30-45 days, and on September 16 (less than 30 days) I received a full refund for the order I paid for with BTC. It turned out to be more BTC than I paid originally because of the USD price falling. The remaining orders I had paid via wire transfer, and should have been refunded in the next 2 weeks based on the 45 day timeframe. Now, their production may not be stellar, but every interaction I've had with their customer service team has ended positively for me.

Enter the FTC. Now, assuming the hearing on the 29th goes against BFL (and let's face it, it probably will), I may never get my money refunded. Not because of BFL, but because of the FTC and the actions of a few upset individuals. There was no indication that my money would not be refunded, and while I am disappointed at the production time of BFL, at no point have they acted in a manner of someone running a scam. I never would have received the first refund if that had been the case; it would have been easier to continually delay me. As far as I'm concerned there would not have been a problem unless I had not received a refund by October 3, which has yet to pass. I guess we'll never know how that would play out.

I would guess that most of the complaints filed were done so by impatient people who were upset that their orders didn't ship by the original estimated dates, and had BFL not been raided, their orders would likely have shipped over the coming weeks, just as they did with the gen 1 miners in 2013. From my view, the impatience of others has potentially injured all parties currently waiting for their products to deliver or their refunds to clear.


Let's put this in perspective. According to the FTC, there were over 2 million complaints filed in 2013 (http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/02/ftc-announces-top-national-consumer-complaints-2013). Assuming the same number are filed this year (likely to be higher due to massive credit card breaches at target, home depot, etc.), the 300 complaints filed against BFL represent around 1/100th of 1% of the total claims filed (.00015). And these complaints were filed over at least the last 2 years, not just this year. Yet this is sufficient to shut down a business that by all indications was acting on terms that customers agreed to at the time of sale? This is alarming and disturbing, and is setting a very dangerous precedent. Compare these numbers to banks and lenders, which received over 150,000 complaints last year, yet how many of them are treated this way?

This is setting an extremely dangerous precedent. While BFL has certainly screwed up with their ability to deliver a relevant product on time, they have acted appropriately according to the terms of sale everyone who ordered agreed to, and the FTC should never have been involved.