To keep the smoke screen up, they had jody seemingly post that orders were going out. They had everyone agree that they wanted their order or a refund. Then they kept people in the dark about how many orders were going out each day. This is what is called blowing smoke up a customers ass.
Josh was forced to acknowledge that the [total] stream of 35 prototype orders came to a grinding halt no sooner than it started.
Now they tell people (new false hope) that they have an incredible 100 chips coming in "soon". Followed by unspecified "hundreds" "next week".
OMG, how people can be strung along with hope...
Excellent summarizing...
This is typical behavior of fraudsters. They spend peoples money to keep the appearance up that they are for real with prototypes or other parts etc. and at the point everything is starting to fall apart (i.e. too many refunds or not enough preorders) they disappear.
When BFL ships in quantity and they can keep the production levels nice and high and run through their order queue at a decent speed...then I will put money down. Not before. Right now, BFL is a time bomb where everything that can go wrong, has. In light of that reality I am letting common sense take helm and not misplaced hope.
I doubt that they'll ever start mass shipping.
Even if they are genuinely trying, they will most likely go under being so unexperienced running a business and having missed the race completely, hit by massive refund requests or wasting the money they still have on yet a bunch of other screw-ups.