If you don't think a board can work without
visible traces on the top layer can you explain how the bitfury H-board actually works, when there are no visible, top-layer traces between the chips and the capacitors or anything else, except for closed loops that connect back to themselves?
My apologies if I'm wrong, it would be a good thing if I was. But the board you presented has a few things that the ones posted by Labcoin do not, such as:
- Soldered chips (optional)
- Other soldered components (optional)
- Chips have traces running from their pads, visibly (optional)
- Vias visible showing the board is clearly multi-layer (optional)
- Several components around each chip (optional - could be Labcoin are super pro and don't need anything outside the chip package or they are on the other side/other board)
- An interface array of pads where power connects (required - they only show one power pin per each chip)
- An interface array of pads where the other board connects (required)
If those things are real and they work, that's quite an efficient and breakthrough design that nobody so far has made for bitcoin.
Right. I have said all along that the PCBs look strange to me. However, I was only pointing out that you can't actually say that the chip pads are
completely disconnected from the rest of the board, with the implication that Labcoin is a total scam. While there are some visible traces on the H-board, they're only on one side of the chip, the other four sides aren't
visibly connected. (Of course, on that board it's possible the traces just can't be seen because they're under the chip and connected to visible vias.)
As far as external interface headers, they may just be on the other side of the board.
Anyway, people have speculated that this was somehow a botched job from the PCB fabricators - that either Labcoin or the fabricators themselves somehow messed up. That seems entirely plausible, and if so all Labcoin needs to do is fix the screwup and order new boards. I certainly hope that's all that's wrong, and if that's the case labcoin
isn't actually in all that much trouble.
From reading your posts it seemed as though you thought there was no way the PCB could possibly function, like you didn't think there could be any vias hidden under the solder pads (which there could be) or anything at all on the other side (like headers for communication)
It was kind of annoying to see a post from someone who didn't know the difference between vias and traces and seemingly unaware of the fact that you can put things on both sides of a board acting as though they somehow had the ability to definitively declare that the board couldn't
possibly work.
(If we saw the other side of the board and it was blank, we would be able to say that. On the other hand, if it has data output headers that would show how it could work – all the more reason why it's annoying they refuse to show any more pics, which is just completely ridiculous, IMO. )
True. I could make a fake design, get a board, find some tray of 44 pins chips to match the board, and post some hand-shaky pictures with an old DSLR that can't clean dust off the sensor.
But if I did that, there would be discrepancies between real designs and my fake design (me being incompetent at this as demonstrated by the users of this forum in reply to my posts) . Such as bad layout, unconnected pads, missing pads, missing logic connectors, oversized elements, undersized elements, non-standard design choices, that could totally blow up my fake design pictures.
Sure, but it's hard to imagine that anyone who knows enough about PCB design to successfully send a Gerber file to a PCB fabrication place would be able to come up with a much more "normal" looking PCB.
What annoys me about the "labcoin is a scam" people is that they act as though Labcoin is just some random person in their mom's basement doing nothing at all other then photoshopping pictures of chips and boards and everything else, and that the whole thing was a scam from the beginning. And while there clearly are actual problems, a lot of the stuff that the FUDsters have been saying has been total B.S. Someone was saying that the photos of the board were photoshopped
Now, on the other hand - it's possible that a company might start out legitimate and gradually shift and become scammy over time in order to cover up mistakes, rather then admitting them and losing money. And for now that is a real risk with labcoin, given what we've seen so far. It's especially worrisome that Labcoin (the user) is directly asking people to buy shares, saying they're cheap and so on.
I am not at all trying to defend Labcoin here. They need to present the technical information about their boards and chips (In fact, I think they should share the gerber files for those boards so we can see exactly what's going on)
But, the most plausible explanation is just some screwup with the PCBs, and that they are working to fix it. Not that they are a bunch of scammer/trolls who don't know anything at all about electronics, yet somehow managed get circuit boards manufactured with no actual connections on them.
