Topic: Open letter to Theymos regarding Butterfly Labs (BFL) - page 9. (Read 15329 times)

A few days .. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU WAITING FOR !?

Perhaps then it would be a good faith gesture to turn down any and all BFL advertisements on bitcointalk?

Seems fair given you folks don't believe BFL can deliver on their promises, the forum shouldn't be enabling more broken promises to be perpetuated.

Don't get me or the other mods wrong, we absolutely believe that BFL is mismanaged and is unlikely to deliver as promised, but that doesn't mean they are scamming anybody. Our personal opinions have no bearing on the matter.

Here is my issue, despite all of the signs, the delays, lies, bullshit, etc, you as well as it appears the rest of the mods and theymos are giving BFL too much the "benefit of the doubt".

Even John K is skeptical about being an escrow for BFL chip batches. Doesn't that say something?

I suppose not.

The transactions to Luke and Con Kolivas seem legit (even though some shade remain about the relationship between Luke and BLF).
I couldn't get an easy google confirmation about the EFF address, but didn't have that much time to look into it either.

All in all, I consider they payed off 15% of their bet debt.

It's progress. Proof that the money was given to charity can be provided at a later point within a reasonable time period. Charity organizations don't set themselves up instantly.

People who paid 2k bitcoins, expecting to get their product and make a ROI of 30 days or less for a $30,000 product.
Now valued at $250,000 worth of bitcoin, and make their original ROI in how long?


Seems like a pretty legit way to make some money, collect $30,000 in bitcoin, wait for the price to go up, refund in usd keep the $250,000 in bitcoin.

If I sell you something on Ebay and then take a year to ship it that is a scam. The product loses value, especially a competitive product like an ASIC miner.

Try an post criticism on their own forums. It will be deleted. BFL may not be a classic scam but it is absolutely, beyond an shadow of a doubt a disgusting company that mistreats its customers for its own gains.

1. So because they made a new website that they own and control and put up that they paid XX btc to Y party then it is all settled? Just take their word for it? Bullshit. Piratat40 could then easily put up on his website "PAID ALL MY INVESTORS BACK PLUS 7% WEEKYL INTEREST" in BIG BOLD letters and be free and clear of being a scammer right? Come on that is some fucked up logic.

2. So if they give customers the option to exchange their WORKING DEVICE ORDER for chips that may or may not be functional at all or even potato chips for that matter, that is progress?

When will you people in control of this forum start to take things a bit more seriously and actually do some research or better yet require that BFL cowboys prove the shit they claim is indeed legit.

I.E. that charity bet could be done through an escrow, say JOHN K.

Well there you go, you folks have all the suggestions you need to determine if BFL is full of shit or not...why am I thinking nothing will come of this?

Oh because so far BFL is going on 12 months without really doing anything in terms of delivering products to their customers. And no 40-60 devices shipped in 2 months time since they got their prototype working is not DELIVERING. It is fraud on so many levels given their initial and continual advertisements of their products from June 2012 until March 2013.

Not to mention concerning their chips you have to wait 100 days. The way I see it is they advertising to sell something as another pre-order after this past year of waiting for their "ASICs" should not be considered progress nor serious at all.

JUST IN:

BFL is now paying themselves in the form of a charity organization they created. No joke. They are literally paying themselves the 1000 BTC without any proof that any of it goes to any charity(s).

BadBear, you don't have to know what they are doing behind the scenes to know they have lied and not delivered on their promises.

"UNTRUSTWORTHY" might be an appropriate tag to give them BFL cowboys? No?

No, but shipping the first month's worth of Jalapeno orders (as of yesterday) does....


Exactly. Having management/PR issues =/= "scamming", it just = lots of pissed off customers, many of whom are too big of pussies to just get a refund if they can't take the wait.


Businesses are not required to serve as a hedge for you against exchange rate fluctuations. You paid Bitcoin through a service which converted your bitcoin into cash which was paid to them. The exchange rate happened to favor Bitcoin, so you consider yourself entitled to a return on that. Yet if Bitcoin had crashed to 10% of its paid USD value, and they'd tried paying you back the same value in bitcoin, you'd be pitching a fit. If you received a refund, you were given 100% of the value/purchasing power that you paid, on the day you made the payment. You're a fool if you believe that companies are responsible to hedge against exchange rate changes, and pay you the greater of any possible outcome.

Oh, they did. They did! They refused to honor full bitcoin refunds. They stole a dozen of bitcoins from me alone!

What's up with the Moderators and Owner of this forum to side with BFL so much?   Selling your soul just because of the ads revenue?

No honest company continue to advertise their products and accepting pre-order when they can't deliver their products within reasonable time frame.   They should have stopped taking pre-order long time ago until they can fulfill at least 50% of their backlog.

At this point, they are behaving like typical ponzi.   Using money collected from recent order to refund the past order customer.

Stamp them with a Scammer Tag until they can clear at least 50% of their back order.   

Otherwise, you guys are equally liable for assisted scamming.

Selling chips doesn't confirm BFL have chips in stock.

BFL labs announcement states: "Chip delivery schedule is approximately 100 days through end packaging once your order is placed."

Note the use of the word "approximately". Approximately can be interpreted many ways by a company that has little respect for ethics or values.  

What is more certain than their delivery schedule, is the concern that by the time customers receive a rig from BFL, that the difficulty level will be drastically higher, due to the glut of chips on the market from Avalon and others.


https://forums.butterflylabs.com/announcements/3014-butterfly-labs-announces-bulk-chip-sales.html

A lot of people are going to be cancelling their orders for mining equipment with BFL due to the very late delivery schedule.  BFL is not going to be too much worried about this as they have already collected tens of millions of US Dollars from their pre-order scam.  They are comfortably sitting on high-interest earning advance monies obtained at interest-free rates from customers, which would never have been obtainable from financing houses or banks.

Consider if you were a director of BFL, and assuming you have the ethics of which we have become aware, then would you care if customers cancelled a few orders.  Probably not, as you would be concentrating on using the millions of dollars in pre-order money you have collected for new Ponzi-type investment schemes.

So don't think of your cancelled orders as completely wasted... so not only will you have helped finance the creation of bitcoins by the four secret BFL mining farms in Kansas, but you will also have been individually helping finance director's holiday homes in Costa Rica.

It's ridiculous that we are still taking about this, at least it seems the moderators here have some common sense:
Being Ridiculously Late, Twisting the Truth, Being bad ad PR != SCAMMING

All this really is, is bad management of the project they started, nothing more.

Theymos is looking (has looked?) at that. I'm not sure where that is at. Personally, I don't want to have to look at it, since anything BFL-related is extremely time-consuming.

EDIT: It looks like this is resolved, at least for BFL:
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/content/134-butterfly-labs-donates-1000-btc-charity-bitcoin-related-projects.html

Yes, absolutely. It means they have at least the chips.

Its not just that they are "a little" late. It's several months. Difficulty has more than doubled.
Also, the Products being offered for pre-order don't exist. There's no Japaleno and no Mini Rig,
none of the products have the specs advertised for pre-order. And then this whole mess with
delivery costs etc.

If you order a mercedes and you get a toyota then you have been scammed. Its pretty easy to understand,
even for the BFL fanboys.

Visitors to the Forum may be wondering if it possible that BFL is a Scam?

Here is the present delivery advice verbatim from Butterfly Labs (BFL) website, written in 100% English:


http://www.butterflylabs.com/faq/

Could anyone suggest BFL is a Scam when delivery advice to it's customers is this goddamned precise?

That is apparently also okay. You can get away with it, apparently.

If I am wrong about that, no doubt, Moderators or Admins will see to it that it is clearly stated as "not acceptable" in this thread.