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Court Order: Butterfly Labs Bitcoins To Be Sold
MrBingoBoingo writes In a new development in the case against Butterfly Labs, the court overseeing the case has ordered bitcoins held by Butterfly Labs to be turned over to the court-appointed temporary receiver. The order also gives the receiver authorization to convert the bitcoins "to cash on a systematic and reasoned basis." The justification for this measure is at least to ostensibly create reserves with which refunds for Butterfly Labs' customers may be paid.
I got in early on a bunch of their FPGA miners. Made obscene money mining and a tidy profit after I sold them and decided to quit mining.
Since TFA and TFS don't actually use any big-boy words to tell us who the hell Butterly Labs are ... what the hell are they and why the hell should I care?
Recognizing the value of an asset (e.g. stocks, bonds, paintings, sculptures and etc.) doesn't confer legitimacy as a currency.
If I had acquired my Bitcoins when they were worth over 800$USD, I would sure as hell prefer to be refunded in Bitcoins.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I bought one of these. It took a VERY long time to arrive, and only worked for a few weeks. I contacted them for warranty repair and they simply never responded after that. I am out around $3000.
I'm not a fool or idiot. When I ordered, the marketplace was quite simple and they were the most promising option. It was only after most of us placed our orders with BFL that the trend in the market for pre-orders (and incredibly late deliveries) began, took shape and gained meaning as a deal-breaker.
The current bad actor in this is Black Arrow - and their reseller, MinerSource. They are 9 months behind on delivering Prospero X1s, and if you call or write, they tell you, "you can cancel your order, but there are no refunds. Here's a link to our non-existant terms you agreed to, which did not exist at the time."
I actually managed to get my refund back from BFL, shocking as it seems.
When I ordered the Monarch there was no "6 months before you can request a refund policy", but they still denied me the refund at first. And then immediately flagged my forum account as moderated.
When I used info from their site to contact the AGs in Kansas and Wyoming (they claim to be a Wyoming Corporation on their site, though Wyoming says they don't exist as an entity there at all) I posted it to see what the moderator would do. Instant ban.
Still, on the day the 6 months was up I requested my refund and two days after they said it was wired I got it back.
I was fortunate. There were other fellows on the BitcoinTalk forum out as much as 60K versus my 2K.
Of course there are reasons why BFL is getting in trouble here.
My question is when did you place your order with them? I'm not part of that scene, but I know there have been serious questions about BFL for a very long time. My friend got kicked out of CES in January 2013 for causing a scene at their booth, basically accusing them of being scammers.
Was this for their ASIC or FPGA miners? To their credit, the FPGA miners worked well and ran reliably. Heard some grumblings about the bundled power bricks, but don't know about that since I ran mine off of a regular PSU.
It's built into the design of bitcoin. It automatically adjusts the difficult of mining up (never down) based on the rate at which coins are mined in heats. Every time a faster ASIC for mining comes out, the difficulty shoots up correspondingly. At best you can mine a good percentage of the blocks in the current heat with a new machine before the difficulty shoots back up and the new ASIC performance is the new baseline The new asics are still better than the poor schmoes running regular cpus or gpus, but it's quite difficult to "get ahead" with mining unless your mining resources are free, such as harvesting cpu cycles form a botnet.. There are a finite number of bitcoins, and with every block of them found the difficulty to mine the next batch goes up very fast.
I recently thought about getting some ASIC mining hardware, but after running the numbers and factoring the cost of electricity, and the current price of bitcoin, it was dubious whether the devices would even make back their cost even if they did ship on time and perform as advertised. Even just running mining software on cpus and gpus I already own is a losing proposition due to the cost of electricity. Not really a good investment, unless you're on unmetered power, such as college dorms.
The way that that the mining difficulty cranks up with blocks returned, the developers of any new fast ASIC hardware will reap the greatest benefit of the faster hardware during development, and by the time you get it in your hands the bitcoin ecosystem will have already cranked up the difficulty. It will still be faster than older hardware, but since the difficulty cranked up too, it's likely going to produce much less than you initially expected.