The news agency Reuters has just reported that a U.S. court has shut down Butterfly Labs, a Missouri company, which the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleges for deceptively marketing Bitcoin mining hardware.

“The FTC’s complaint against Butterfly and its corporate officers alleges that the company charged consumers thousands of dollars for its bitcoin computers, called BitForce, but then failed to provide the computers until they were almost obsolete, or in many cases did not provide the computers at all.”

“Butterfly sold its computers from $149 to $29,899 based on the machines’ purported computing power. The FTC said that more than 20,000 consumers had not received the computers they purchases as of September 2013.”

At the time of writing this the Butterfly Labs’ website is still online and there is nothing official coming from the company as a response to the court ruling. We can’t say that we are surprised from this development as Butterfly Labs as one of the first makers of Bitcoin ASIC miners probably was not ready for the overwhelming user demand and a for months and years they literally failed to gt a hold of what was going on with the Bitcoin market and continued to take pre-orders of hardware that they were apparently not capable of delivering. We’ll see if other crypto currently mining hardware companies would suffer the same fate.

– To read the complete Reuters report on the court ruling for the company Butterfly Labs…

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