I feel like YC would have enough snake oil radar to detect if this was bogus before backing them. They don't back just anyone after all.

This is a little more difficult when knowledge moves faster than product delivery. "Snake oil salesmen" did their thing because they could move from community to community and stay ahead of the news about a fraud coming through.

I have no idea if this battery thingy is all it's cracked up to be, but the group won't last that long if they don't deliver.

The graph doesn't diverge from the "standard" lithium battery pack for 3-4 years. The buyers won't know if they are "snake oil salesmen" for a relatively long time.

Even if you do accelerated cycles on the battery, it will be a while (1 year? 2 years?) before you can say "snake oil" and it will be around two times longer before you can confirm the claim.

It isn't a halting problem, but in terms of the pace of electronics, it's close in that by the time you can confirm it isn't snake oil, it may well be irrelevant.

Pre-ordering solves that problem. The product is delivered to everybody at once, before any knowledge can spread.

...and two to four years before fraud can be detected.