Do you demand to see the passport of every individual you do transactions with in person?
dude, this in not case, when you buying few gadgets from dealextreme. here will be hundreds or maybe thousands people involved from around the earth and in game will be thousands and thousands of dollars.
..and yes, I think, that in this special and delicate case makes sense to know, who is the guy behind forum nick. next point is common natural skepticism around bitcoin community. This place is like a magnet for cheating, fraud, scam and this kind of acting.
Dealextreme also does thousands of transactions with thousands of individuals, which amounts to thousands and thousands of dollars. Hmmm. Do you demand to see the owner's passport, before you allow other people to freely do business with them?
I want to start this out by saying I think burnin is entirely legit. I can't imagine he has anything to gain by taking Avalon chips without having a use for them like, I don't know, the expertise to make them into usable hardware? If he was truly running a scam, I believe he would have more incentive to 'order' the chips for his customers in exchange for more bitcoin/fiat.
However, this argument is so full of bullshit that I just can't help but argue. Dealextreme has already served hundreds of thousands of customers, and nearly always delivers. When something goes wrong, Dealextreme makes things right when products arrive broken or don't arrive at all. Dealextreme's name itself has value because of this, and that's how they get most of their business.
If I were to open a site that was a clone of Dealextreme, with all of Dealextreme's products all priced $1 lower than their price, than I'd still have close to zero customers until a few customers ordered and(if I delivered) I started to prove I was legitimate. With that, the name of my business would gain (or alternatively, lose) value accordingly. Dealextreme had to prove this too, and I'm sure the day they published their site they had very little business, but after years of reliably delivering, they have built up their client base.
burnin's name has value on these forums, too. This is great, as burnin is going to get more business for it and won't be flamed to hell if he bumps into a problem or two while making and testing the boards. The value of burnin's name, however, is completely subjective. Many people are thinking about sending burnin thousands of dollars worth of hardware and, for many, 30 posts on a forum doesn't provide much evidence of his desires to deliver a finished product to his customers. For that reason, many want reassurance that burnin is legit. I don't agree that asking for photo identification is the proper route, especially with asking for information as sensitive as that found on a passport, but it isn't a completely invalid request.
TL;DR: Unless you have conclusive evidence that burnin will deliver, you probably shouldn't dismiss everyone who has a different opinion than you.