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.