Post
Topic
Board Mining
Re: Will BF Labs publicly reveal their new mining technology tomorrow (Nov 25th)?
by
wormbog
on 28/11/2011, 12:42:31 UTC
The deadline has passed and the official answer is "Last-minute bugs have pushed the deadline." That was the most popular choice with around 37% of the votes. Nice work everyone!

Now, what will happen next?

In my opinion, they would not have set a demo date if the software was not working. Maybe not optimized, but at least hashing. And they would not have delayed the demo if it was at least mostly functional. They also did not post an explanation to the message board, nor did they grant Inaba access to their own facilities. The product they showed him does little more than light up some LED's and the software is mostly repurposed open-source mining code.

Here's what I'm thinking:

They launched a quick site hoping to get a few pre-orders. Realizing that the pre-orders were coming in via PayPal rather than bitcoin, and were therefore subject to chargeback, they decided there was enough potential to make money that it would be worth running a long con. So they took some of the pre-order money and put together a few plausible-looking fakes. With orders still trickling in weeks later they decided to double down and set a demo date and show hardware to Inaba. If they could get him to confirm that he's seen the hardware and it might in fact be real they could hope for a flood of new orders, and maybe a rig-box order or two. If that happens, they'll use every trick in the book to delay while more and more chargeback deadlines expire.