The FTC just shut down Butterfly Labs, the specialized manufacturer of Bitcoin mining equipment. It turns out the company has repeatedly failed to deliver on the massively powerful computers it sold consumers.
The FTC alleges that Butterfly labs basically operates like a scam. In fairness, you would probably feel ripped off if you paid thousands of dollars for an absurdly powerful Bitcoin miner, and then only received the computer after it was no longer powerful enough to keep up with the competition. In fact, the computers were often not delivered at all.
Bitcoin mining is the computationally intensive process by which different users attempt to get new Bitcoin from the system. It pits one ultra-powerful army of machines against another in a race to solve what amounts to a number guessing game. There's some luck involved, but if your farm of computers can crunch numbers faster than the other guy's farm, you increase your chances of winning the race.
Butterfly Labs' computers had specifications that would make them some of the most powerful in the world. Or it would have. It turns out that in successive generations, the company promised to deliver miners with outrageous performance, only to stall on deliveries, or fail to deliver the machines at all.
The FTC complaint would seemingly confirm what some disgruntled customers have been saying for some time. Butterfly Labs' tech has been rumored to be non-existent for over a year.
Updating...
from Gizmodo http://ift.tt/1mKWvMH
via http://ift.tt/1mKWvMH
Blogger Comment