since he is not paying out refunds on fridays, as he promised himself, it is proven that he is holding on to it
What's more likely is that one sizable portion of the money has gone to :
- the rent for the place where bASICs were supposed to be tested, packaged and shipped from,
- employees salary (at least Dave)
- chip design and prototype
Tom has claimed to have invested some of his own money in this.
He said recently that he was using BTC from his own mining operation to refund people.
This makes me think that the money he invested was most probably less than the aggregated costs above.
But anyway, what's more likely:
- he sits on a pile of BTC that skyrocketed since preorders which he could use to refund everyone right now at the current USD value and keep the rest but choose to keep all of it and wait for jailtime?
- he doesn't have enough cash to refund anyone at this time and is still in panic mode?
But what I believe or what you believe is still speculation and will get nowhere.
The only thing people can do is ask for an independent audit of Tom's books to find out for sure if he profited from this or not. If he did and doesn't refund everyone he is in deep shit, if he didn't and doesn't refund, remaining customers are in this shit with him and they (in fact "we": I have 2 bASIC01 pre-orders) lost their money without recourse (lookup how debts are handled when a business fails if you still believe in Santa Claus).
