If you can't beat them…maybe you should just buy them? The long beleaguered and often criticized Butterfly Labs has purchased the humorous Bitcoin centric blog/spoof site Buttcoin.org.
The first order of business? Scrubbing the site of critical content. One of Buttcoin.org's articles, previously titled “The $22,480 Butterfly Labs Bitcoin Mining Rig is a Huge, Broken, Unstable Piece of Shit” is now titled “The $22,480 Butterfly Labs Bitcoin Mining Rig is a Sexy Bitcoin Mining Machine” which, in addition to being horribly redundant, is obviously significantly more positive.
Butterfly Labs has a notorious reputation among the Bitcoin community for failing to deliver on their promises. The company admits that it shipped out hardware much later than it originally planned and its customers were unable to recoup their investment because of the increase in Bitcoin's mining difficulty.
Butterfly Labs has since continued to sell hardware, although their newest set of miners is late once again. All this has led to accusations of fraud both online and in the courtroom.
So it comes as no surprise that the company would want to improve their reputation. One way to go about that would be to start consistently shipping hardware on time. If that proves too difficult, then another good way would be to buy the sites that criticize Butterfly Labs.
- Sonny Vleisides, the co-founder of Butterfly Labs, showing off the company's newest bitcoin miner.
The former owner of Buttcoin, Evan, says that he didn't know it was Butterfly Labs purchasing the site, and while he did seem to figure out something was amiss by the unusually high offer, he said he did not expect to be shut out of the site completely, as he is now.
At least two other articles critical of Butterfly Labs have been modified to appear as positive articles rather than warnings about less-than-optimal experiences.
The article remains one of the top results in Google for “Butter Fly Labs is a scam” and while the content of the post remains largely unchanged (other than the last line) potential customers doing a quick result are now less likely to be scared off by the previously critical title.
Butterfly Labs has been trying to improve their image as of late, but maybe trying to improve their interactions with the community, rather than suppressing the results of those actions would be a better business strategy.
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