Pizza was thousands of bitcoins, so look at it this way: you [may yet get] a 5 GHash miner for way way WAY less than a pizza! Plus a free single included! What a deal!!!
-MarkM-
The guy who ordered his pizza got it promptly.. If he "pre ordered" his Pizza a year in advance then it is a comparable transaction.
Amen.
This guy gets it.
It's not that BFL hasn't delivered - It's that they promised to deliver IN OCTOBER OF LAST YEAR and when they didn't make their date rather than giving their pre-order customers the option to get their money back, they refused refunds until JANUARY at which point they only offered refunds for the USD value rather than the number of bitcoins paid.
I paid 24BTC for a jalep, got back 11BTC in January and I'm glad I did because even with that 40% refund I could buy 10 Jalep once they're actually manufactured and shipping them.
It's fine if the plan changes - Shit happens in real life, and manufacturing products is hard. But to give a release date and take peoples money is just wrong if you're not absolutely sure you're going to hit it, and the fact that we're now more than 6 months past that original ship-date and they're still popping out a few units at a time is just embarrassing.
Add to that the continued pre-sale of units when the UNITS THEMSELVES RELY ON BEING RARE TO BE VALUABLE is insane. At the point they figured out they weren't going to hit their deadline they should have stopped accepting pre-orders until they were sure of a release date, but that didn't happen. In fact you can still pre-order today.
Bitcoin is self adjusting, I'm not really sure why more people aren't upset about this - By increasing the number of pre-sale units, every buyer who came before and paid a higher price (relatively speaking) is having their investment devalued because the block reward "pie" gets split up between more and more power, meaning whatever they bought last year will earn less and less.
If they had released on time, again - not a big deal - This is the normal progression of Bitcoin, mining gets harder, rewards go down relative to power.
But by selling all these pre-orders, BFL sucked up the money that would have otherwise gone into building or buying other mining equipment - It shifted that money into whatever point BFL actually releases product to all the pre-orders, at which point there will be a HUGE spike in network power, we'll burn through the blocks until the difficulty resets, and then it'll be just like we never moved to ASICs except there will be more people getting a share of the same size pie.
Again, compare to releasing on time where the equipment is in use, there is a meaningful bump in network power but it's more gradual for new people to come in over time. Difficulty goes up more gradually, so people who bought early are able to earn rewards to accomodate their risk.
BFL just needs to learn to communicate with its customers rather than making promises they aren't sure they can keep, and then deflect until it gets so bad that it can't be ignored, and then deflect some more. Manufacturing product is hard, so if you're going to take peoples money in advance you need to be a professional. That is clearly not the case here, and based on their continued behavior both from official representatives who are combative at best and downright insulting many times (not to me, from my observations) it appears they see no problem with their behavior.
That's too bad.