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: