I'll bite too.
If the boards were being built by a contract manufacturer for VMC, how did they come - and I've seen pictures of several this way - to have all the different rev stickers on them?
The boards were built by a contact manufacturer for VMC. They were not used for any sort of mining by hashfast other than a test of a few minutes per board. The reference design that VMC was building off required multiple sequential reworks, each tracked with a sticker. That doesn't make it a very good reference design, but it was the best working design at the time. Engineering and production were happening way too fast with too much overlap so that's the way it had to happen for the timeframe involved.
You seem to think that all the employees and management acted in good faith, except conceding that the liquidbits deal was "surprising", but those millions have to be somewhere. A lost wallet is a little too convenient and, to me, implausible given how damn hard Eddie must have been looking for money in the last several months.
I really don't know, I didn't have access to the finances. I do know it was pretty obvious that things were a mess and the accountant was overwhelmed. There should have been a CFO and strict procedures on dealing with BTC from the start. They did take action to get finances in order and bring in proper controls, but by the time things got rolling the cashflow issues were so bad it sort of didn't matter. It is also possible they might have just overshot the market and were way too optimistic on how much money was allocated to chip production as opposed to board and box production.
Do you apply the same cheerful outlook on employees' intent to the porn crowd? And what is the origin of the relationship, and nature of the relationship. with Scrotum and company?
Sigh. So professional around here...
Certain individuals bore the brunt of initial flack as they were the most public face of sales for the company. Whatever industry they worked in previously is not particularly relevant. Said individuals have actually not been involved with the company for some time. You might be surprised how sympathetic some of those individuals were to the customer concerns being raised in this forum and it may have been part of the reason they left the company. That's all I can say about that.