Quote from: dataphile on April 10, 2013, 03:02:48 AM

Quote from: creativex on April 09, 2013, 08:16:56 PM

Quote from: dataphile on April 09, 2013, 07:44:47 PM

Quote from: chiropteran on April 09, 2013, 02:41:23 PM

A lot of speculation about how they are bleeding money and losing pre-orders right and left. However, think about the basis of their business for a minute. If bitcoin fails, they fail. Wouldn't it be logical for them to make at least a modest investment in bitcoins directly if they are going to invest millions in ASIC development?

I'm guessing that BFL probably has tens of million worth of bitcoin stockpiled (remember, they were around back when BTC was a small fraction of the current price), and is in no danger at all of going under or failing due to lack of funds.

It's nothing more than speculation. Just because a handful of bitcointalk people are pulling out on orders for a few singles or even a minirig doesn't mean that there aren't many, many more whose investments are several orders of magnitudes greater than the sum of all requested refunds.

Also, we have absolutely no idea what their profit margin is like.

Please tell me you are joking. Just because one has no(unobtainable) incontrovertible evidence does *NOT* mean one must suspend their common sense.

22 employees(presumably with 22salaries) + 1 year with zero products to ship? Alleged respins, pushed back shipping dates, blown power estimates, etc...add infinity. Please use your head.

Even if you assume that every BFL employee has been given a full $50,000 annual salary, which is absolutely fucking absurd, it's less than the amount of money they've made from preorders alone. It's not even clear that all 22 of their employees are full time, forget getting paid an engineer's salary. In fact, given their inability to handle customer support and PR problems in a timely manner, let alone get their chips working, it's likely that they aren't full time. Plus, they have investors, no?

I used my head.

No clue what their 22 employees are being overpaid. Since they(BFL) acknowledge outsourcing basically everything on this project, there's no reason to have more than a couple employees until you're ready to ship anyway. The real cost of bringing an ASIC mining product to market is designing and fabbing the chips, which is massively front end loaded. BFL claims that they've redesigned their chips 2x already, the current failed chips are their third attempt...if what they say is to be believed. They've flown in two Bitcoin community members(one from Australia) to tour their facility and given them private airplane rides. They've ordered huge numbers of products to assemble products they're no longer selling(boxes of fans). They've rented, reconfigured, and refurnished their current facilities. They've ordered and apparently received reflow ovens and pick and place machines. They've done all this and more in the last year all without having any actual products to sell. The unproven claims of VC funding are dubious at best as anyone that knows anything about organized VC knows those guys don't tend to simply write blank checks and then walk away.

Oh and btw BFL claims they're not using any of their pre-order funds to fund development of their ASICs.