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.
I said nothing of the sort. In fact, I said the opposite. This is yet ANOTHER straw man you are using to bolster your completely failed arguments. This is what I'm talking about... you pick and choose small points that either are outright fabrications (such as this instance), out of context or "mistakes" and then use them to demonstrate why your points are correct. This is a classical fallacy and you are repeatedly falling into it, even after I've pointed it out. There's only so much hand holding I can do here.
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.
So you've absolutely no experience in operating a business and yet you are somehow qualified to make pronouncements on exactly what is required? How does that work? Heck, I guess that makes me a particle physicist, since I've read up on the subject a little bit. I notice you completely gloss over the fact that I have in the past run several start ups and currently run a full fledged corporation OUT OF MY RESIDENCE, thus disproving your point. Hiring people most definitely does NOT require office space... and often it does not even require capital - you offer stock options/portions of the company. You will find many, many people in the tech industry willing to work for "free" to own a part of a company they believe in. I don't know what BFL has done in this regards, I am simply speaking from a) experience and b) in general.
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.
It's not my definition of the a scam, it's THE definition of a scam (feel free to look it up). It is the generally agreed on definition by the entire English speaking world; you are of course free to re-define it as you wish, but that doesn't mean people are going to agree with you. You know nothing of business and I have not seen any evidence you know much technical detail about chip fabrication and/or PCB design or FPGA / ASIC design, yet you are again trying to speak authoritatively. As a point of fact, power consumption does not rise exponentially - if it did, your board , CPU or GPU would burst into flames and your house wire would melt if you overclocked your CPU even a little bit. Power consumption typically follows an increasingly steepening curve to failure - eventually you might get into an exponential rise, but your hardware would have failed long before then.
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.
You can reiterate that I have somehow been "charmed" by these people all you want, but you have yet to produce any evidence or counter arguments to what I have said. You have produced a few straw men and knocked them down handily. You've provided some rhetoric. Produce something tangible by way of countering ANYTHING I've said so far and you can then potentially label me "charmed." I have reported exactly what I've seen, without bias and within the ground rules that were set forth PRIOR to the test. How is it that I've been "charmed" again?
Anyway, I'm done. I've said what I came to say and unless you have some form of rebutal that doesn't involve straw and rhetoric, there's not much point in continuing this line of discussion.