Topic: Remember last October when BFL said they would ship by the end of the month? - page 3. (Read 2919 times)

Not everyone paid with bitcoin though. I think it was bitcoin-only for the very early orders, but certainly by Sept or Oct, credit cards through paypal were an option. And I don't see anyone would pay by bitcoin if paypal/credit card was an option.

Believe it or not, you giving up saddens me a bit.

I used to remember how you were right up there with Lab Rat in supporting BFL. I recall even Lab Rat had some doubts a few months ago. I see they made him a moderator on BFL forums.

Edit: ASIC J is also starting to fall by the way side. When even hardcore supporters start to fall away....it's more troubling than even the hardest troll turning into a total shill.

How much are you earning with ASICMiner?

A round estimate?

I've already given up,not refunding though..............They will never catch up this year.

Looking into spending my BTC & cash on the "home-made Avalon ASIC" devices    Or someone elses devices,have to wait & see who comes up with what.

& I agree they lied about most everything since the beginning 

I agree 50/50 at best... I guess I'm waiting until the bitter end on this one. If BFL doesn't ship, I guess no more mining for me.

... in other news, my asicminer shares are paying nice dividends

No charge backs.  People will quickly realise this often quoted advantage of bitcoin over other electronic forms of payment is only an advantage for the merchant, and never for the customer if BFL should go bust.  What's more, as bitcoins sit squarely outside the traditional banking system it's going to be difficult and costly trying to get any back through the court system. 

I honestly have no idea if I'll ever get my mid 2012 order shipped.  At the moment I'd put the odds at 50/50 at best, with a daily decline.  BFL has to be burning through large chunks of money to keep employees on site and pay the rent.  Every time they ask for a PCB revision or another batch of test chips I shudder at the thought of how much all of this is costing.

I just released... that if difficulty goes up high enough such that no one who has a pre-order would have a hope of making their money back and BFL still hasn't shipped, then people will begin to ask for their money back from their pre-orders.

If BFL refuses, people will request refunds from paypal or their credit card (unless they paid with bitcoins). Paypal will close BFL's account and they won't be able to accept new orders. Everyone else will sue BFL to get a refund if BFL refuses. The legal costs and refunds will quickly cause them to go out of business.

This could all happen very suddenly once we cross that difficulty threshold. It's probably in the couple hundred million range, maybe 3 to 500 million?

We could easily see that difficulty hit by the end of the year if Avalon and ASICMiner continue on schedule.

Just a quick correction. They haven't finished development on 4 of their 4 products. They are still messing with the chip design.

Given that it is now the second half of May and they haven't even finished development of 3 of the 4 of their products how could they have legitimately believed they were going to ship within a month at the time? Even if they had a working prototype they couldn't have done it. They didn't even have a working ASIC!

It should be quite obvious to anyone that that claim at the time (last fall) was nothing more than pure fraud intended to boost their pre-orders and scare off competitors.

Why are they not being investigated by state attorney generals or why is there no class action lawsuit being organized against them?

There is no way they can claim that they actually believed they would be able to ship a product at that time. No one is going to believe that a company was that completely ignorant as to the sechedule it takes to develop, test, produce, and ship an ASIC.

I'd like to see their e-mails and records subpoenaed so we can really see what was going on in the company at that time.

Now that Avalon Batch 2 is shipping, with batch 3 and the discrete chips not far behind, BFL hardware with be worthless when it finally does arrive. And a honest, fair estimate is about 3-4 months for just the first 10,000 units. Let's look at the schedule:

2-4 weeks for BFL to figure out the kinks in their single SC board.
2 weeks to order chips, assemble a couple of single SC machines, and ship them out to reviewers
2 weeks to receive enough chips and get the new PCBs made in large enough quantity
2 weeks to ramp up assembly
2 weeks to package and ship
10 weeks of production to make 10,000 units assuming they can make 1000 a week (it's ambitious).
Add in another 4 weeks for potential delays, of which there is always something

That's about 3-4 months just to get started making a dent in the backlog of pre-orders they have. By then we might even be seeing home-made Avalon ASIC machines out there mining.

If you don't believe it will take this long, look how long it's been since they got the first Jalapeno working and how many people have them? It takes a while to go from "prototype" to ramping up production to significant volume. And they don't even have a working prototype for the single SC/minirig right now.