The guy who was saying he would do a chargeback apparently only came to the forum talk about it and didn't even bother to contact them, so...
I would say they are smarter than all the guys around here dicing on them. They are just letting you digg the hole.
It's also incredible how everyone in this thread "know" BFLs' claims are false, yet they don't do anything of their life with all the knowledge they have. Talking in forums is easier than doing something for real, ain't it? And you don't miss deadlines by just talking intead of doing.
What would you consider "doing something?" Our group has invested a lot of money in FPGAs, which would be tough to sell if BFL turns out to be real (3-4x greater performance per $ and per W). rph has done the same.
I'm certainly not claiming that I know BFL is a scam, but I do find it very suspicious. To summarize, here are the things that strike me as at least a little bit odd about them:
1. Incredible performance claims and insanely low price. They could have easily priced it twice as high and it would still be a great deal.
2. Doing business as Butterfly Labs, yet supposedly incorporated as BF Labs.
3. Came out of nowhere with a professional looking site and all sorts of implications that they have been doing business for some time in the cryptography field, although they have no other products. Actually, this is even more than an implication: "Butterfly Labs has more than a decade of experience in FPGA & ASIC stand alone system design."
4. In the same vein as 3: Gift store? Job postings? Consulting?
5. List drivers available for "medical imaging" and "computational research," yet they state it can only do 2-stage SHA256 hashing. What kind of medical imaging can you do with SHA256? By the way, in my real job I actually use FPGAs
and GPUs for medical imaging processing.
6. The mysterious "Rig Box" that somehow gets a 50% higher performance by clustering 32 of these boards together.
7. Accepting Paypal for pre-orders.
8. Very little communication with the public about how it works, who they are, and how they can do this for so cheap.
All of that still doesn't mean it's impossible, but it definitely smells fishy.
Not going to address your points just because you were not the one that spent the last 30 pages pretending to be the expert(you really are, and you DO something), yet you are probably one of the persons that most have to lose if it turns out to not be a scam... But if the hat fits in your head that's your problem, not mine.