Topic: My Beef with BFL (Constructive Criticism Only) - page 5. (Read 21623 times)

Are they refunding when asked?

Didn't they say they actually had chips way back in Oct or Nov, and they worked, but they just want to make them a little better for the good of the customers and all that?  I thought they were claiming functionality, but some clock timing issues kept the chips from scaling to their potential.

To this day I have seen nothing which would make me know that they have chips.  I personally would be surprised if they have anything of the sort or any hope of having them (unless they bought some Avalons.)  But then I have not paid close attention nor do I care that much, and I give absolutely zero credence to anything they say or take pictures of and so on.  Nothing I have seen invalidates the hypothesis that these guys are a total scam, and if that were the case they would naturally be focusing hard on a variety of tricks to make it look like they were legit.

I almost ordered from them but the same thing which scares me off from buying some videogames at release scared me off from ordering from BFL.

Excessive advertising.

When a company advertises so hard that you see their ads constantly in the relevant places (in this case here on bitcointalk in the adbox and sigs) while also pushing themselves extra hard through their PR outlet and dissing competitors (in this case Josh) and topped off with a wave of fanboy forum shills... it's a pretty good indication that something is very wrong. Something went bad on the back end where we can't see so they step up advertising, step up promises, make it appear as if everything is at 200% awesomeness. Then deliver garbage or in this case deliver a year or more late in a situation where delivering late is almost as bad as not delivering at all.

They get rewarded for their failing though because they get the money first, that's why they haven't stopped advertising and still make it sound like if you order now you get your unit in a couple months (WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE, they are plainly lying about this). They get the money now and that's it, they got what they wanted while customers may not even get their units this year.

Just going by what got people scammer tags on here in the past it's sort of amazing that the BFL accounts don't have them. They are plainly lying about their shipping and have been every time they give us a shipping date estimate, we know this now because we know they never had any chips until just recently. They lied, they even gave us the evidence that they had been lying all along. BFL is obviously just stringing things along as far as they can go, constantly promising "just a couple more weeks, seriously guys!" for MONTHS now to wring as much money out of this community as possible.

The analogy could become correct, but for the moment being the plane is nowhere in sight. It is rather still in the black project stage.

Glad to hear, but...

It just occurred to me that as the price goes up, the difference in power usage between GPUs and FPGAs becomes less of a factor.  So, balls-to-the-wall hashing is king again for a while.  But I've never put a lot of thought into any of the aspects of mining.

I would suspect that the flexibility of FPGAs would tend to produce opportunities for different proof-of-work algorithms to be explored for alternate crypto-currency(-like things.)

That's not a fair comparison, because both the lambo and the jet exist. A more apt comparison would be a lambo racing the millennium falcon. Yeah, the Millennium falcon's specs are better on paper, but it's not real.

Sorry to hear of your pain.  Really!  Avalon beat my 2011 estimate of 2014 by a huge margin.  The bright side (for me) is that I never had any intention of buying any mining gear until ASIC became commodity, and that date should move up accordingly.

Your analysis is on the money.  But I made the same determination last June, and used that knowledge to aggressively build out an FPGA farm.

The bad news for me was that BFL's BS brought real engineers into the fray who are putting ASICs on the network right now.  Otherwise I think the development of ASIC solutions would only be starting with the current exchange rate ramp.

That is the problem with scams.  They often make losers out of everyone, not just the folks naive enough to be sucked in.

1.  On your first point.  Yes, this is likely correct.  They needed more money for development, but then we can't forget this supposed "venture capitalist".  Til this date, we still have no information about this person, company or transaction so we should just assume, PRE-ORDER CUSTOMERS are the venture capitalist unknowingly.   Regardless of being their offering being real or not, people should remember these tactics and make BFL hold their business practices to a higher standard.

2.  Thank you, the Ethics of Care arguments fits this discussion so well.  They took advantage by disadvantaging MINERS (Made additional investments in GPU, FPGA and ASIC inherently very RISKY) and CUSTOMERS (by taking all the coins).


Just to expand the venture capital statement, this was used in my opinion to make people feel like "they didn't need the money" and the shipment date was so close (June to Oct), it was right around the corner so they could justify giving up their coins to get a "place in line".  

On the other hand, if customers would of been told up front, delivery would be in 2013, they would of gotten order, not as many and this would of allow more FPGA competition to come into the market before ASIC.  THIS SHOULD OF HAPPENED before ASIC.  In the end, people would of still bought ASIC from BFL (best in class) but they would of been able to provide more efficient hashing to the network and  made more investments in getting coins.

Thoughts?

They stopped selling FPGAs 6 months months ago. They're living off investor (aka pre-orders) funds, which must be drying up since they've switched to "all sales are final" policy.

That sums up my beef.

Everyone is in this for money of some sort.   We all want it to spread and work but greed is also driving miners, not altruism.    So, I do not know why you hate BFL so much.   I LOVE THEM.   They take (and continue to take) tens of millions of dollars from suckers and people who are too blind from greed, to put one plus one together.   What you say Inaba or Josh or whatever you wish to call yourself?   Would you invest 20 Million dollars in a company run by a person that is a CONVICTED FELON and cannot leave the state of MO and seconded by a mouthpiece with a third rate education that JUST "by coincidence" goes by the same name (and lives in the same state) as a sorry assed loser that was stealing from directTV?   Come on, explain this to me.   You think Sequoia or Benchmark would finance losers like that?

Well, you all did.   And I am laughing my ass off at you all.   Thanks for keeping the difficulty low for me and all the people with half a brain that can use google to do a background search on people before giving them the equivalent of "venture capital".

There is a saying "pigs feed, but hogs get slaughtered".   you all have financed some pigs that have now become hogs by continuing to take more and more money.   what are you going to do about it?   Nothing?   I thought so.   you got what you deserved.  you all bought a lottery ticket from the dude on the corner......    ironic isn't it?

 

I wish this was the case. It could have saved me a bunch of headaches instead of tying up my money for 7+ months, not to mention given many initial customers peace of mind. This, of course, raises the question of "why didn't this happen?", and my initial guess is that they did need initial funds to cover some of the costs to develop ASIC chips (..existing profit from FPGAs probably wasn't nearly enough).


Couldn't have said it better myself. I remember a thing or two from my Business Ethics classes

Ugh, I keep seeing this pseudolibertarian bullshit. Look, it is not a free market. It is a monopoly. The two concepts are opposites.

Monopoly: it's my way or the highway.
Free market: people can buy similar products elsewhere.

Monopolies are generally bad, though that need not necessarily mean the monopolist is bad. As in this case, Avalon is the monopoly because they got their shit together and bASIC and (so far) BFL haven't, not because of any anticompetitive practices from Avalon (ironically, BFL tried the anticompetitive shit).

Korbman - First off, well thought out and reasoned reply.  I quoted the above statement from you just to ask the question.

Great for who?  You already know the answer but in the end, that is the rub.  We all support a business decision that was first and foremost a pure benefit to BFL partially at the expense of ourselves. 

The reason I say this is if they would of only taken a deposit that was payable when they were close to shipping, we would of had our coins to invest with.  The reason we did it past profit potential is because of how much the ASIC announcement changed the mining market over night, basically either support BFL or get out of mining.  So if you use modern ethics (college level) to see if their decision was ethical, it fails with you expand it past them being a business and fails of the Ethics of Care which looks at the overall affect the the action.   They did not care about enough about how much power they weld and instead used it to beat the GPU & FPGA innovation into the ground.   

This is my major criticism that I will not be satisfied until they publicly address this from principle ownership (president, ceo or chairman) addressed to the whole community.

Not quite on-topic, but Avalon/ngzhang had a track record of selling FPGA units too.

Ha, I suppose I was exaggerating a bit before. I totally agree with you on this one.


That's an interesting way of looking at it (on the incompetence part). It could surely be that they're only playing dumb, but I'm not sure what the purpose of it is...giving themselves more time overall, sure..but I'm not sure what else. People can say it's to pull in more and more money, but the vast majority of orders (that we've been informed of) so far have all been in the early months (June-September). After that, reported pre-orders have been slowly dwindling..which is understandable given bucket after bucket of bad news has been dumped on our heads.

And I agree that they couldn't have shipped before the end of 2012, even if they stuck with their original chip design.


Unfortunately I wasn't as involved in Bitcoin during the dawn / spread of FPGAs, so I don't have much of an opinion on that side of things. But what I can say is that premature offerings are a great way to build up a customer list (and massive piles of cash), especially since BFL was the first (IIRC) to offer a reasonably priced ASIC device for "pre-order". And as long as they keep pretending they know what they're doing, they can keep playing the "incompetent" card (or at least trying to) in order to fend off fraud accusations when shit hits the fan.


D'aw thanks Creative, and you're quite intelligent yourself

As for my orders, the early orders were primarily driven by the notion that BFL was going to ship first..which it did seem that way at the beginning. The later, more substantial orders, were the result of a mix between timing (it was either get into BFL now, or attempt Avalon Batch #2), power efficiency (ordering 8 Avalons would rape my power bill), and space considerations. Not to mention the gamble between which would ship first (at the time).

In short, you're not wrong (yet )


I partially agree here. He mostly responds to trolls with more troll-ish behavior and ignores people with valid questions or concerns. But you're right, it quickly derails the thread into a heap of garbage..usually to the point that there's just pages of "User Ignored" (as someone called it, an "Ignore Party") haha.

I think the thread is really knawing at the real issue.

Regardless of what clever responses that we may get from BFL.  The major issues do not change and I would like and official response to them.  It looks quite clear they had limited supply of their "best in class" FPGA chips, if I am wrong then they are they still shipping those quickly being that they are still profitable?   

It  does look like their pre-announcement about ASIC was mainly to be a shot across the bow of any potential ASIC competitors.  If it wasn't purposely done for that effect, we would of seen FPGA shipment time improve over the last 8 months while people waited.  They may think this is business and it is none of our business, but that effected many peoples plans including my own and in the end, they could of kept selling FPGA, developed ASIC and announced in Nov/Dec and not made people do many things that they might not of done like making funds available to order a product that was not going to come out for 8 months+ when it was slated for 4.   

I personally shut down my GPU farm prematurely because I trusted this product would come out near that time and it down make me obsolete and I didn't want to sell when their was a glut of GPU gear out their.  It was my fault but in hindsight, if it I knew they would be this late, I would of still been running, even at $15-20 per BTC.

I feel it just shows a lack of respect for others in the mining community that don't have much choice if they want to mine.  In the environment, you should use a light touch, not the iron gauntlet.


Thoughts?

Coming from a family of Electrical and Computer engineers pre ordering an asic from a company that has already provided FPGAs and has a decent track record seemed like a decent idea. I split a pre order on a jalapeno with my friend (poor college kids). While I do think that BFL with eventually deliver, I think they moved their delivery expectations as a form of advertisement and cut out any time for error on manufacturing. So far it seems as almost every single thing that could go wrong has, almost buying them time. If I could go back I'm not sure if I would still order from BFL, however I wouldn't have set my hopes so high.

Out of all the mistakes and troubles they had along the way hiring Josh as their PR was probably the worst idea. Even on their own forums he still is unprofessional.