Yes. I can confirm they did tell us customers they would use the testnet and not the live net. There is no excuse for this. For anyone who is not "in-the-kno

Yes. I can confirm they did tell us customers they would use the testnet and not the live net. There is no excuse for this. For anyone who is not "in-the-know" of Bitcoin, that testnet is absolutely a thing and reversing their position on that promise is absolutely a violation of trust. As a customer of a company that sells mining equipment, you don't ever want your supplier to be in the mining game. When you own 1st-gen equipment, you'd like it if the 2nd-gen equipment is delayed as long as possible because when it comes out, your equipment is almost immediately going to be made irrelevant as new investors have 10x equipment with significantly reduced marginal (electricity) cost. Some manufacturers I'm sure are forthright about their conflict of interest because they do mine (openly, like I believe KnC does), so their customers shouldn't be shocked to find out. If they tell you they won't, that's a benefit to you because you, the fulfilled customer, are usually incentivized to give up some of your profits to get the next generation of hardware, to protect yourself from irrelevancy in the coming years. You are trusting that your order will be delivered in the order of purchase and that the company does not have incentives to delay your shipment. Owning 2nd-gen hardware, I always knew that the arrival of the 3rd-gen (28nm Monarch) would signal the end of my operation if I couldn't secure one. After the horrible experience of waiting for my 2nd-gen hardware to arrive, I was not biting again. It's been clear to anyone with a stake in the game that there has been something fishy at BFL and that most people were getting screwed, even when their equipment was finally delivered. When I heard that Vleisides was involved in a "multi-million dollar lottery scam" pyramid scheme before, pled guilty to mail fraud, and was barred by court-imposed restrictions from any business that "solicited funds through pre-order"[1], I knew it was time to start getting the popcorn ready. [1]: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/digging-for-answers-the-strong-smell-of-fraud-from-one-bitcoin-miner-maker/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/digging-for-answe...