It's an unwinable bet. One of the parties to the bet gets to judge whether the conditions have been met.

The whole purpose of the bet is to put the other party to the bet on the defensive. To prove.... nothing. People have opinions of other people, of how businesses are run. Some people win, some people lose. Some people like to stick it to the man. Whatever.

Josh, you have a habit of offending your customers. You feel slighted, and many feel the slighting is fair. You could use a good PR guy. When you get posted on slashdot and half the comments are criticisms of you personally, you might want to reconsider how you interface with the world. How you might do that, or if you do that at all is entirely up to you. You're responsible for your own actions.

Keltic, you have such a strong sense of injustice, but it'll get you nowhere. Josh doesn't care about your feelings. Josh is a businessman. His job is to get the money out of your pocket and into his coffers. He goes a little further than some might, but he seems to deliver the product eventually and even get it right most of the time. The business he is in is in an entirely new frontier - almost the Wild West. Adjust your expectations accordingly. He doesn't need your business. He's back-ordered - there are a dozen other customers to replace you.

To everyone else: BFL has a crappy reputation, and they've earned it. They delivered later than late on a major product line. Consider this: they sold many MANY more units than they imagined they would. The money was rolling in. It was only when they were deep in order-book trouble that they had any inkling of the fulfillment problem they had. It is HARD to scale up a production business. I know. I have had to do it multiple times. The main thing that had them in trouble was the pre-orders. With the Monarch they have repeated the mistake with pre-orders, but they have simplified the production cycle greatly in a learned response to the complexity of their previous product lines. Subject to ASIC availability, they'll be able to fire out Monarchs at an unprecedented rate. Getting to shipping will be hard, but once they're there, they (and their customers) will have a much easier time of it. If they get to where they can develop the next generation on this generation's earnings, there will be no need for pre-orders. They should plan accordingly.

Everyone, lighten up. Josh, no need to be so defensive. Keltic, take a deep breath. Let's wait and see what happens next.

Too much butt-hurt in this thread.