Ok then Inaba why dont you buy 7k of the boards off them then? The problem is the money they got from the preorders went to finance the development of the product. If they cannot develop everyone just loses their money. Why not produce something that can make the numbers they claim? Well thats simple they obviously just cant. By showing any product they make it look like they are more legit.
Given that they seem to have told many untruths I have a hard time accepting any of their claims now. Yes there are legitimate companies that scam and you can buy stuff from illigitimate companies but that is another red herring. When you are hiring several staff members as they claim to be you wouldnt be running out of your house still. To me the simplest explanation is that they just cant deliver on their claims. They seem very dishonest overall.
You have never run a start up if you think just because you are hiring people you somehow require a office space.
You seem to be mistaken as to what a red herring is... all of your arguments are red herrings and I demonstrated exactly WHY they were all red herrings. Me pointing out that you can buy stuff from illegitimate companies and legitimate companies can scam you is a direct response to YOUR red herring and therefore can't be considered a red herring.
As to why I don't buy 7k of these boards, do you mean 7000 of the boards or $7000 worth of the boards? If the former, because I do not have the funds to purchase that many even at half price. If the latter, then again, it would be a matter of funding (though far more realisitic than 7k boards) - and I have, in fact, been considering my options. I am already heavily invested in GPUs, coupled with the fact that half my hashing power consumption is "free" (in so far as I already pay for the power at my DC anyway), it's hard to justify the capital outlay. THAT is MY primary motivator as to why I don't drop $7000 at the drop of a hat.
Now, to address your first paragraph, and believe me, I know that I should not be feeding a troll, but I will anyway; IF they were to fold up shop and take everyones money because they are unable to produce the product they believed they could produce AND they failed to refund it because it all went into development that went nowhere... THAT IS NOT A SCAM. That is poor business practice. I believe this may the fundamental flaw in your argument which I should have addressed last post. The definition of a scam necessarily includes an intentional premeditated act of deceit to gain the confidence of the mark(s). None - not one single point you made - apply under that definition. It may be many things, up to and including poor judgement and after the fact thievery, but I find it incredibly dubious that it is a scam. It would literally stretch the bounds of belief that so much effort, time and money would go into a scam of this sort when there are FAR, FAR better ways to produce the same scam with much less investment. That is not to say it's impossible, it's just incredibly unlikely and frankly, it would be incredibly stupid of a scammer that is capable of orchestrating a scam like this to not be able to orchestrate a better managed scam that produces better fake product.
I meant $7k worth of the boards. You seem to have been charmed by whoever they sent that has you absolutely convinced this is not a scam. I am going objectively based on what I have read and heard when basing my comments and am definitely not a troll.
No I have not run a startup but hiring people would require both income and office space. So far their only income is from the preorders and that money is bound to run out sooner or later. If they do fold and disappear, how much did the orchistrator take? They could have taken 50% and technically to me that would be a scam.
By your definition of the scam it seems they have made many attempts to deceive us by their power/performance numbers. Why not produce something that has the numbers they claim? Its simple because it would cost too much. That and they actually had to run a verification which seems to have revealed all kinds of performance issues so they just put out the best that they had. I can overclock my CPU to 4.8Ghz but then it starts calculating everything incorrectly and I get bugs. It sounds to me like they might be overclocking their hardware to get the claimed performance and that is why it is unstable. Power consumption also rises exponentially which again ruins the benefits of FPGA.
As for stretching the bounds of your belief I would like to reinterate that it seems you have been charmed by these people and genuinely want to believe it is legit because you probably like the people you met. Scammers tend to be nice people. They may not be scammers per say but they are dishonest people at the very least. Once they ship a board that meets their specs I will finally believe them but until then they have been too dishonest for me to believe them 100%. If you think that scammers would not go to that length then you have never met a good one.