Actually I find it strange that everyone is ignoring the fact that FC didn't place a wafer order before his disappearance. He was supposed to have chips in hand in February so the order was supposed to be placed in December or early January. This never happened, yet nobody is complaining about this. If we ignore all the recent facts the problem is still there. They never intended to have miners with BE300 chip. Not on this financial situation.
Right. The order should have been placed in the 2nd week of December 2014 after the BE300s had been successfully tested in single and multi-chip board configurations.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=888260.0Chips weren't ordered because there was no money to pay for the order. Attempts at securing necessary funds failed. So the order was never placed due to the lack of funds.
If this is true, the game was up last year already. All this shady disappearance / empty office / stolen farm business is just kabuki theater.
Phrased differently, at what point did the board members all start to dump their shares? Lots of constant imports since December to Havelock... If the board was aware that there was no money to place a BE300 order, why even bother with sample chips... and did they use the information to dump discretely?
My guess is that Bitfountain had no need to 'dump shares' as they already controlled the wallets per se.. Did any board members have the opportunity to bail before Friedcats disappearance became 'Public' information?