Butterfly Labs demo is literally just hot air
Last week the annual International CES was held in Las Vegas, Nevada, where consumer electronics manufacturers could display and demo thousands of iPhone cases and televisions. Somewhere amongst the unloved and unwanted entrepeneur projects, we found our Bitcoin friends shilling for Bitpay and Butterfly Labs, a “company” who has in the past manufactured FPGA mining rigs for the Bitcoin elite and now promise an even more efficient miner, containing ASICs, making it absolutely useless for anything aside from turning electricity into heat and play money.
Of course their delivery of said product has been hounded by delays and broken promises. Despite this, at CES BFL had an exciting new product to show off: a demo unit of one of their new FPGA miners!
As can clearly be seen here, it contains an Android tablet (a Nexus 7, to be exact) showing some sort of diagnostics or progress. Bitcoiners were understandably excited, they’ve been promised this machine for ages and its original ship date was to be some time in December. Those who have pre-ordered one of the expensive mining rigs could finally see what was in store for them. Before we get to that, let’s take a look at the booth on a busy day at CES:
It looks popular, right? In actuality, only three of these people are not employed by BFL, Bitpay, or otherwise involved with the booth. Can’t say this is terribly shocking.
Moving on, anybody who was the least bit observant could tell something was up with BFL’s demo. The tablet’s display didn’t change, leading to speculation that whatever it was showing was only a screenshot and that the device wasn’t functional. This was confirmed later on during the week:
This is an empty box made of fans. Enjoy these related upcoming Bitcoin products:
May 26, 2013 @ 7:52 am
I was going to buy the Jalapeño, even though the price raised from 150$ to 274$ but after a proper research, I’d have to say they’re fucking awesome to scam people, I’m impressed, they almost got my money, which is something hard to achieve.
June 8, 2013 @ 9:44 pm
Yeah too bad they are starting and ship all the products out now lol A scammer would never show up in person ever. They care about bitcoin and the ones who paid for the CES Booth. I like how you dont post about the BitCoin Conference cuz they had a live set up of the 50 Gh/s unit. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BKkzoJTCAAEo27o.jpg:large Have fun with this worthless website. Never ever being able too start mining bitcoins or buy any ASIC cuz you are poor and a dumb sheeple lol While everyone else in the BitCoin/LiteCoin economy is making money off it. Just shut down the website its just making you look like a complete ignorant republican fox news watcher who thinks the only money exist is the american dollar even though the entire economy is debt based. We dont even have ANY GOLD in the FEDERAL RESERVE china has it all cuz we traded it. Thats why BitCoin is so amazing cuz its not dept based and nobody owns it or can control it. cuz the government wish they could shut it down but they cant.
May 19, 2014 @ 1:04 pm
When you said the demo was “hot”, I thought we were about to find out just how much heat their prototype was going to create. If they’d demoed a working prototype, the carpet would probably have caught fire.