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473 sats \ 10 replies \ @BITC0IN 1 May 2023 \ parent \ on: An Open Letter to NVK and Coldcard bitcoin
https://medium.com/@Fiach_dubh/rekt-crypto-hardware-con-artists-creep-into-bitcoin-8ad713198d3a
A hardware startup that falls slightly short of delivering what they initially announced their product would be is vastly different than a literal scam.
Just like contributing to a Kickstarter, anyone sending money to a team like this should do their research and understand it’s not a guarantee.
I’m sure the team who formed Foundation Devices has learned a ton from that failed experiment. On top of that, multiple generations of the Passport have been delivered and are in use. They clearly have no problem delivering what they promise today.
Calling the Foundation team scammers based on the “evidence” in that medium article says more about the accuser than it says about Foundation.
Aside from throwing around the scammer label and diminishing its meaning, the word “backdoor” doesn’t appear once in that article and that’s a major accusation. Care to elaborate on that one?
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I'd be interested in the backdoor claim being expanded upon as well (maybe this was in reference to their faulty firmware that ended up bricking a few customer ASIC's at one point)
what you call slightly short (3 months) is a lifetime in the ASIC game. Especially if those ASIC's are first generation ASIC's to a shitcoin market. Three months is a pretty long shipping delay for even current Bitcoin ASIC's.
Furthermore, the actual performance of these ASIC's were 2/3rds that of what was promised.
As a result, they were sued in a class action by their customers and lost on several counts.
They tried to bribe customers into not joining this suit by offering them compensation for the 3 month delay. They even credited compensation amounts to their obelisk accounts, showing up as a dollar balance. But they never paid these out, after promising they would.
They also forked an entire shitcoin blockchain to make they're competitors ASIC's obsolete.
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There’s a world of difference between being a few months late to deliver an ASIC that hashes 30% slower than initially promised, and a literal scam.
It does seem like some poor decisions were made after that, trying to minimize the damage, but nothing worse than many early Kickstarter hardware projects that had honest intentions but blew the entire budget too early to deliver anything at all, despite having the best intentions.
That article linked above seems to attribute the worst of those decisions to the Obelisk CEO, whom I did not find associated with Foundation Devices, although I haven’t done an exhaustive search.
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Maybe not a scam, but a grift?
It's kind of hard to tell a scam from a grift when all you have to go on is intentionality, which is impossible to verify. How's that phrase go?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions?
It was a failure of significance at the very least. The management of the failure was largely done by Zach in the aftermath. Vorick took a back seat after things went south.
The promises surrounding payment of compensation, and encouragement not to join the class action were made by Zach.
The false advertising of the ASIC hashrate was made by Ken
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Completely agree the behavior of the Obelisk team was unprofessional, embarrassing of them, and offensive to most everyone else.
The mining project sounds to me like a group of kids who got excited about building a cutting edge hardware product, and overpromised what it would do, probably by optimistically extrapolating some basic results they had produced already. Since they hadn’t actually run a hardware business on their own before, they underestimated the requirements and costs involved with producing at scale. Like many hardware projects by less experienced teams, the result underperformed at a higher cost and was also massively delayed.
Because cryptocurrency boom, there was a lot more money involved than there otherwise would have been. People who did insufficient research made expensive business plans based on this brand new startup delivering 100% on their original promise. Everyone was mad and some filed lawsuits. Then there’s the whole altcoin mess, and hopefully if anyone committed actual fraud or something then they will eventually be discovered and held accountable, but otherwise it sounds like typical degen crypto shit.
Ultimately they delivered some working miners, which it seems like some are completely overlooking.
This should all be taken into account when judging members of that team in the future. To me it’s a far different history from a lot of the bullshit financial engineering and other schemes I see that are generally accepted in this space. An honest person is unlikely to ever want to repeat that again, so they’re likely to go out if their way to perform better going forward.
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Give the internet a search. It's not my job to convince you and if you spent any time caring you'd find it in the resource already given. If your take away is "falls slightly short" then your bias is showing and I don't care to engage further. My knowledge of these scammers go way further back than a medium article that summarizes some of it.
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FWIW I engaged with the Obelisk team for a prospective hardware project collaboration after their failed miner project (unsure how much it was still going on, I was only involved in a technical capacity), and long before Foundation was founded. They clearly knew their way around embedded systems, which is the area where I started my own career many years earlier.
Today I own more than one of their Passport devices because it’s an excellent hardware wallet with a great UX. I also own multiple generations of Coldcard, which I used to consider the best but is now inferior by every measure.
Honesty and a positive attitude of the people behind the product is icing on the cake, especially since NVK started throwing tantrums about open source.
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Heh, I did try searching but came up empty, and I’m not the one throwing around baseless accusations…
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I'd be interested in hearing your story on this
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+1, you are the internet now @TonyGiorgio ... tell us your story
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