Clueless. BFL takes BTC payments through Bitpay which means whatever coins are immediately converted to USD and sent to them. BFL does not have a storage wallet they keep BTC in, they only have the USD. If you had bought in May when BTC was $100-120 and refunded in Aug when BTC hit $70 you'd have done well.
This has already been debunked thoroughly. Bitpay will only convert the bitcoins if the merchant instructs them to. BFL could have kept all of their payments in Bitcoin without converting any of them, which they should have in case they needed to refund them.
Ah yes, here's the old hindsight is 20/20 routine. Obviously they kept all the BTC they were ever paid without ever converting it into USD cause they KNEW the price was going to spike.
I supposed they also kept all the rubles and francs and pounds and marks and yen they were paid without converting them either, IN CASE THEY HAD TO REFUND THEM AS WELL.
Businesses cannot afford to hold onto a commodity (Yep, I said commodity and not currency) like Bitcoin due to it's volatile nature. No business wanting to keep it's doors open would be that stupid. Sure, you have the luxury now of saying "BUT! See how stupid they were if they didn't hold any?!?!?" cause you KNOW what happened. BTC spiked back in 2011 at over $30 and then 6 months later it was $3. The price had only recovered to $5-$6 by the time BFL started taking preorders. Maybe you would be willing to take a chance at losing 1/2 your money, but that would be suicide for a business. In addition, your logic doesn't hold water. Let's get rediculous and say only 1/5 of all orders were paid for by BTC and BFL hedged and kept 10% of all the BTC and converted the rest to USD for their operating budget. Now we have to step into speculation, which I dislike doing, but it's the only option I have with no hard data. Using http://bfl.ptz.ro/ as a guideline, we can see 4951 orders totalling $10mil, which is unrealistic to begin with since it's based on the original pricing of the miners which almost doubled around April. These ~5000 orders represent only 7% of potential orders. 49 of these 'known'(I use ' ' because trust is vague since people could post complete BS on here) orders were Day 1. 10 Mini-rig, 90 Singles, 8 Little Singles and 36 Jalapenos 'KNOWN' to be ordered day 1 and this could be 1/1 to 1/6 of actual day one orders.. $298,990 + $224,910 + $9,968 + $5,364. $539,232 * 1/5 * 1/10 = $10,784 or ~1600-1800BTC. 2% is an extremely small amount to keep and we're seeing a minimal stash being worth $160k-180k from only a percentage of Day 1 orders, of which there could be 2-5 times as many of. By December over 14000 potential orders had been placed. 88 'known' minirigs have been ordered. This is from 1200 of a possible 14000 orders. BTC price end of Dec is around $13.5, so lets use that even though it shorts us on BTC. 88 * $29.899 = $2,631, 112 * 2% = 52,622.24 / 13.5 = 3897 BTC. In todays market almost half a million dollars if they had only kept 2% of total sales as BTC from 'known' minirigs orders from Jun - Dec. You have to at least doublt that to account for the other 'known' products. And this is from only 10% of the potential orders made! That's potentiallly 100,000BTC from only keeping 2% of sales from Jun through Dec as BTC.
April 5th BFL raises prices while BTC value is climbing. April 10th BTC tops $250 before plummeting to $80, climbs back above $150, drops below 100, climbs again to 130. Yea, let's ride the freaking roller coaster with 10's of millions of dollars FROM ONLY 2% OF SALES!
See, this is where it makes absolutely no sense to me... After receiving a potential 12,000 orders in March while BTC prices climbed from $20 to $60 and beyond, tripling the value BFLs BTC holdings in a single month, they double the price on all units.
We just became multimillionaires from holding onto a small percentage of all sales as BTC and we're so freaking greedy we stick it to the customers.
Dude, believe in your fantasies. I just don't see it.