Bitcoin Forum

Today I finally received my units from Feb. 2 order. One unit was almost clean, while other one is moderate dusty. After checking all connections and desoldering F1 fuse, I started to configure units. First unit has been tuned to ozco.in and that is not surprise, cos same config was on my unit from batch one. Second unit has more interesting config:
http://puu.sh/3hrak.png
As you can see, first pool is eligius.st and most important is address: https://blockchain.info/address/1AYdAw8CcrQ2wx55LTbFHRn5bxgNZhaRLW?offset=0&filter=0
716.40851602 BTC was mined from April 22 by various units. And only gods know, how much was mined on ozco.in.
So, regardles what said Yifu, the answer is: YES, Team Avalon is mining with customer units.

PS: I'm don't have any problems with fact, that Avalon is mining with my units, if this is burn test and not introducing shipment delays.

thank you for information  ;)

this is really serious, I've thought that BFL was doing this, now AVALON just went to my red-zone as well, it seems that ASICMINER is the only honet company (but with extreme prices)

Avalon is making a killing on those...darn, wished I had one.

Some of the biggest payment are not newly generated coin. How to explain that?

Batch 1?  ;D

Honestly I feel these companies  that insist on "testing" on the main chain should donate all bitcoins mined to a charity/charities.
Especially in the case of Avalon and BFL where equipment is built on customers pre-order money and not from VC funding.

it would help raise bitcoin awareness even further and clients with overdue orders would be less annoyed and suspicious that the delays are purely profit driven.

Thanks for sharing.

Some of the transactions lead to this address: https://blockchain.info/address/18d3HV2bm94UyY4a9DrPfoZ17sXuiDQq2B (https://blockchain.info/address/18d3HV2bm94UyY4a9DrPfoZ17sXuiDQq2B)
Even more received coins: 7,650 BTC ... mostly from newly generated coins.  :o

[conspiracy_mode_on]
This might explain where the mysterious Sunday seller comes from.  ::)
[/conspiracy_mode_off]

All the best!

      one4many

Maybe this is some eligius.st-specific payout behavior?

LukeJr washing his dirty coins :P

honestly, this is not surprise for me and also most common cause of delays of any mining HW.) if you imagine, how much they can earn, if they delay 100 units for a 2 weeks for example..

hope that knc/metabank are professionals in this and really send device once they will test it (24hours)

hey, they're just making sure they get your money out of you first.

Uh, ASICMiner also mines with their blades. They openly have a farm and continue to expand it.

Apparently, all three companies do this. Which is surprising coming from Avalon.

Probably only Yifu can answer this claim's? I doubt he will answer this though ;D

Now what they are doing is it ethical? since all 3 are doing this .. hopes the new ones wouldn't

not suprised at all.every company will test their machines.maybe one week,maybe few month,who know

Can they finish the 'testing' before I can still make my money back?

I'm not sure if they care about your money, if you already placed and paid the order.) usually, you don't have any lever or legal power to push them for ship it..

Things are getting not-so-good for batch #2, and quite ugly for batch #3. Hope they can speed up the shipping process or there will be a lot of people mining at a loss :(

It was something that everyone supposed. Now it is confirmed. :(

actually, you have. At least in some countries like Germany. It is forbidden to use customer money to speculate/gain any profit until you deliver the goods the person paid for. E.g If you fail to refund money until a given date you have to pay all the profit you made with it to the customer. Also, you have to take care that all actions regarding the goods don't lessen it's value prior to shipping.

There's a few Avalons hashing away :)

http://eligius.st/~gateway/stats/top-contributors





*I am not suggesting this is Avalon themselves doing the mining

You can get some precise stats on this eligius "account" here:

http://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/userstats.php/1AYdAw8CcrQ2wx55LTbFHRn5bxgNZhaRLW

The graph looks more like burning tests than continuous mining...

Wayne you have a great point, weeks and months in the name of Testings, common guys is it really necessary??

Interesting!

"RLW" was noticed in the Eligius pool thread a few weeks ago as having brought in 3.5 Th/s for a few days.  Then they (Avalon) left, and came back a couple days later.  There were several pages of discussion speculating who it was.  I guess we know for sure now.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=23768.msg2276814#msg2276814  

It does kinda look like testing to my untrained eye, but ethically they should be sending the coins to the payment address.
Having said that, I'm not completely naive...

ASICMINER aren't mining with other people's hardware after they've sold it, which is what make's Avalon's actions unethical if this is true.

Agree. I heard several persons said that the ASICMiner blades they received are shinning new.

lulz ...

*Blastbob is using a word that used alot these days*

SCAM! hahahahahaha


Maybe they are being used while waiting for snailmail. I guess someone is milking every bit.

+1

The peaks indicate they're testing only modules (22GH/s) and one goes up to 180GH/s, maybe complete units, but that's like 3 units max. Not much to cry wolf about.

Yepp ... they were.
However they had also a pool in it.  ;)
I might still have a screen shot of it ... on my other laptop though.
I have a look for it, when I'm back home tonight.

    one4many

You're just looking at a graph of the past week.  The 3.5 terahash jump that took place was continuous for a several days, and that was in late May and early June.

I stand corrected. Would you have a pic?

Nope, but I am sure wizkid057 or Luke-Jr can pull those stats if they wanted to.  Also, you can sort of get a feel for the dates and how much they were mining based on how everyone was talking about "RLW" in the Eligius pool thread I linked to above.

Maybe friedcat just have a better air blower: with a good one I can make one two year old Icarus shine like the sun

or better assumption is to say he runs the farm in one appropriate clean enviroment suitable to sensible equipment

either way, good handling and good hosting may help to explain why he is leader ATM ;)

I remember I think at the conference they said the units are dusty because they don't have a clean room where they are doing the burn in. I don't know why users should be so upset at the idea of them doing a burn-in on the real network. They need to be sure the machines work, and it's not like if they had used testnet they would have been able to complete the testing any sooner.

I guess you could be pissed that the difficulty has gone up because of this, so I guess you could make an argument that Avalon "stole" your early ASIC adopter advantage. However I'm not surprised.

ASIC 2.0 anyone?

Aren't you off by a factor of 10 in your valuation of BTC?

798 * 101= USD 80k

Yes that's why I deleted it promptly, but apparently you'd gotten there first! Damn you for being quicker than my mental arithmetic in the morning!! ;D

If they stole something , that thing was stolen from everybody out there if we agree that they now enjoy a vast economic advantage to produce next gen chips, leaving, not only the asic 1.0 early adopters but any other competitor, in the dust.

Why we have not seen more open, auditable, crowdfunded projects to build the bitcoin asic that truly benefit the masses ? I dont know.

But ASIC 2.0 should be like that, and since Avalon dont plan a batch4,  maybe we could finish the next gen first and rent their SMT, who knows, who knows?!  I think the improvements will be huge next time they advertise something.

Don't have a pic per se, but I blockchained it.

https://blockchain.info/charts/received-per-day?address=1AYdAw8CcrQ2wx55LTbFHRn5bxgNZhaRLW

Revenue is quite irregular and May is not the biggest earner. If indeed Avalon is mining, I'd say they're getting ready to ship (as Yifu hinted, if I'm not wrong). I would think they'll do a batch shipment.

Here is another thread discussing the 3.5TH/s enigma on eligius a few weeks back.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=214010.msg2280383#msg2280383

Avalon farm of 50+ units seemed unlikely... but not impossible.  Looks like confirmation.

I guess the good news is that the mining difficulty won't go up much when those units ship to their new owners  ::)

It's not a farm, the payouts would be much higher. Testing is still possible.

Agreed.  They are in the business of manufacturing genies.  It is hard to complain if you still get at least 1 wish.

I think everyone is totally cool with Bitsyncom testing against mainnet.  It is just that it sets up a conflict of interest/temptation to extend the "testing/burn-in" time rather than shipping completed units. 

The 3.5TH/s spike a does imply that a week before the end of May their were 50+ B2 units being tested.

Can somebody please wake up Bitsyncom again? I really would like to hear his comforting explanation.

I can't say I'm not wondering what's taking so long to ship those babies...

They should be using a testnet or sending the coins to the purchasers bitcoin address.

it's the most obvious thing to do once you have access to the hardware, see:

Interesting.

Dear Bitsyncom, I'm a good miner myself, I know how to run hardware and I'm good in spotting hardware related problems. I already own some "Lancelots" based FPGAs and I know how to Jtag your hardware.

I propose myself as hardware tester, for free. No wages, no insurance, anything.
I'll be happy with just the coins I mine while doing "tests"

Looking forward to hearing from you,
Jimmy3dita ;D

The root of all these problems -where and if they exist- is a hundred dollar bitcoin.  When BTC were ten bucks, then the decision to sell spades to the miners was no-brainer; the "mine" only produced $36,000 a day total.  But now the mine produces over a third of a million dollars a day.

If one has a room full of the tools to grab a big chunk of that bounty for a few days, well... The kids have been waiting so long already, whats another week or two to them?

Yes, what you are talking about is reality. But as a company selling products, it is really suitable?

If they wanted to test,  they would have used the test network.  If they are on live, real network, they are mining for profit.  Nothing wrong with that. 

I bet Gen 2.0 ASICs will not be released to the public.  2.0 ASICs will be used to mine privately.  They already have the resources to do it.  Maybe they will sell shares, if they get bored or BTC price drops back to $10.

we would all be doing the same thing if we could: get customers to crowd-fund our fancy hardware by selling pre-order to them, and then use the hardware at a time when difficulty isn't yet prohibitively high, so that you get paid twice for your efforts ... if they're being really smart, they'd even talk fellow competitors into joining their cartell in order not to blow up each other.

Of course, it's not.  It is not ethical.  In tech ventures, there is something called The Producers syndrome.  It is named for the famous Broadway play (which, if you have never seen, I recommend you watch the funny video).  The plot involves men who take money to produce plays which they know will never be able to be successful.  

Then they accidentally make one that works, and they have to figure out how to deal with that success (and can't).

To some degree, I fear, the hundred dollar bitcoin is, to the existing hardware manufacturers, the play that was greatly successful when it wasn't supposed to be.

nice analogy

oh well...

go ask for a scammer tag...

:)

Likely, the big miners/chip design owners will not have to do anything overt, like an OPEC style cartel.  Game theory dictates an equilibrium will occur among a handful of huge players and many smaller ones.

I'd be shocked if someone actually thought they don't mine with your Avalons tbh..

No, they will release it to the public. If they mined all themselves they would kill bitcoin and they know it.
Us spectactors having any kind of ROI from avalon 2.0... that's another story.

Ya, I would volunteer as well to be a tester and let me test them for a couple of months .. the longer the better ;D

Devil's Advocate:

Suppose Avalon discovered that the best way to ensure a working system was to clone the software from an existing working system, and so what you see is a direct copy of an existing configuration that they were using for their own personal mining.

Is that so wrong?


I can't figure out why people want to jump to the "he's a crook" conclusion.

It would be wrong as their selling point was always the line that they don't mine and that none of their employers don't own a single Avalon.

And, so what if the working configuration wasn't from one of their employees, or wasn't an Avalon.  Maybe they shipped the first unit TO A CUSTOMER (or to a famous Bitcoin developer), and then decided to clone his configuration.

It's just not that hard to come up with a plausible explanation that does not involve any sneaky, underhanded cheating.  And, it seems to me it's best to think "innocent until proven guilty", before throwing around "scammer" accusations!

We'll see, I guess.  

re: Them killing bitcoin with 2.0?  

Do you think ASICMiner guys will sit and watch?  They are probably finishing work on it right now.  So forget 51% boogeyman.
Judging from what Yifu crew have experienced after Avalon Batch#1, they know what 2.0 will be capable of, chances are pretty high that they will mine the shit out of it.
Bitcoin will not be "killed" because someone has faster hardware.  Mining by little guys will be killed for sure, but not bitcoin itself.
It is already happening right now, only people with deep pockets can stay in the mining game.  I think this trend will continue and maybe even accelerate.

If you want decentralization, you need to release the hardware and the chips.  The prices of both will plummet, but at least you'll have more democratic, decentralized hashing power.
BTW, if they do that, the payback times will move to 1-2 year plus.  So don't expect getting rich mining bitcoins.

Seems like no need to find a "plausible explanation". sometimes the simplest is the truth. I've said this in other threads, people really need to re-evaluate their idea of a normal business interaction when it comes to ANY vendor in the bitcoin world. This is a cutthroat business of fast money, which brings out the worst in people.

At least the good news is that the difficulty won't go up more when everyone receives their units.

Which is, IMHO, where it ought to be.  Then, only people who have a commitment to the concept will be involved.

Kids who pencil out that their new asic-based rigs can buy their Aston Martin by Christmas don't do the concept any good.  And, of course, Aston Martin sales haven't gone through the roof because of bitcoin.  From oil fracking, yeah.

;D ;D

This, this and only this.

Haven't seen so big concentration of utter human failures anywhere for some looong time like it's the case with bitcoin and overall cryptocommunity.

I have a feeling people would eat kids for few bitcoins sometimes.

And yet everyone swear about network, new better free world, bla-bla-bla, lol

Gold out there, out in Californi'.  Get you a map to da Dutchman Mine. //
Pickin' up gold with our bare hands, baby.  When we got there, it was stone, bone dry.//
Easy money is a hard life baby; easy money is a hard life, after all.
- John Stewart.

I'm new around here, and relatively new to BTC, but I'm an old man.  Across my life, this little play has been performed in lots of venues.  Most recently, the dot com pre-2000, the US real estate bubble '02-'08, and now, besides BTC: the US real estate bubble, '13 edition.

That's not the point. ASICMINER is the only one shipping immediately, you pay and you get it few days later. The others are mining with hardware that was pre-ordered typically since months, that's completely different.

 ;D

Yeah, it surely happened before, it's only I haven't seen it.

I've been around blackhat community for years, I've seen lot of cunts out there but lot of them are babies to what I've seen here. Most of them are genuinely screwing the big guys and their rules only but here... grrr

716 btc is not a burn test. It's $100k, and it looks like fraud to me. 716 btc. Oh really. So lets see. April 22 to 30 (10 days), all of may, and say a week in june. Quite the burn test. More like fuck the customer test.

If I ordered a new-batch ASIC unit and discovered it premined almost $100k USD before it got to my door I would be a lot more than livid.

No, they don't.  They haven't breached any legal agreements.  They're "testing."  

And anyway, this hardware is coming from China, which is as much the Wild West any day of week as bitcoins is.  There's no telling who was sneaking those boxes (if it actually happened on the scale alleged here) off to do a little moonlight test driving.

honestly, is there even a single person here who wouldn't be doing the same thing ?  :D

I'm already working on the hay-and-pitch torches.  So don't you try to front me on that.

Exactly this.  Prove malevolence or GTFO. 

Expecting Transparency?  GTFO.

Expecting Professionalism?  GTFO.

Expecting an ASIC?  GTFO.

for months though?

Does your tracking information tell when the unit left Avalon's control?

Vendor:  This device will make all the money you can ever spend.
Bitcoiner:  I need two.

Is it not a bit suspicious that if they were mining 700 BTC for "testing", something they should have made public and is not for us to find out, that they would have deleted the default pool information? This all seems too easy to come out.

Or Avalon just doesn't care or is ignorant against customer satisfaction.

Or they simply missed a spot.

Honestly, I wouldn't mine with units that were crowd-fucking-funded. Some of us have a minimum of ethics and principles. Some of us would have some empathy towards the folks that risked their hard-earned money to make this project happen.

Yeah, I guess all of us would try to maximize the profit and build a % of units that we would keep for ourselves and mine with them. But mining with customer's units, taking away from them the possibility of achieving break-even? Because that's what's going to happen to late batch #2 and all batch #3.

Because of the above, I don't think Avalon is mining with customers units. Yifu really seem a guy with ideals, that won't fuck with people like that. Thus, until definitive proof is given, I will believe they are just incurring in unfortunate manufacturing and shipping delays, I will believe his word and I will keep thinking they never mined with customers units.

May 24

Thats what the BLOODY TESTNET IS FOR!

 >:(

Since they are still the most ethical company in the game right now I will give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe they only pre-mined with some of the units. OP's unit just happened to be one of the most used ones.

I feel that they should be mining on the testnet if they were going to be mining for an extended period of time. If they were going to be mining on the mainnet to do testing it should be no more than 24-48 hours at most. After the short test period as long as the unit did not experience any issues it should be shipped out immediately. It is unfortunate that they are mining and profiting off the customers units that have been crowd funded.  :-\

I don't know, except for pretty much anybody else, they have actually delivered something, so the temptation must be huge once you realize that most of your competitors underperform, possibly also because they're realizing how much profit you can make by mining extensively and delaying hardware delivery, because of the exponential increase in difficulty.

Did you do the math?

If they have 1200 units in batch 2 and 3, and they are currently generating about 3 BTC per day (and more back in April), how many Bitcoins would have been generated with a 24-48 hour burn-in test?

Hint:  A lot more than the 716 BTC mentioned here!

That seems like 3 weeks that are unaccounted for, when many units are able to ship in a matter of days.


I don't have it together enough to compete at making Avalon clones with the chips they are selling.  However, I doodle with different ideas of how I might change the design.

Some options that came to mind are:
1.  A GPS unit that sends it's location to a well known database.
2.  IPv6 with a MAC based address that puts it's identity into a well known ntp servers logs.
3.  A "power on" log across the AC power, similar to what lots of high end lab equiptment has.

if they got it, why all guys who ordered them not yet received them?.) and yes, they should use more addresses/accounts/pools etc..

So is that most likely the smoking gun?  Let's do some back-of-envelope here.

Say the network was running 100 Thps at that time, and somebody came with 3.5 Thps.  Not counting the bonus from front-running the difficulty, they'd be looking at around 3600 * 3.5% = 126 BTC per day from that.  

So the 700 BTC being talked about is maybe 5 days of such shenanigans?  I'm not a YiFu fan boy, but somehow that seems too small and one-off for him to mandate.  

..

This is the issue with pre-ordering and paying full price up front. It is a crap shoot.
Until there are companies that can deliver existing inventory at the drop of a hat, there is nothing to hold these ASIC companies honest.
At least ASICMiner is up front about it.  :P

Ab.so.lutely. But it's only been two three (time flies  ;)) months since the BTC exRate has been sufficiently high for guys who don't have to bootstrap it to get attracted to it.  

I'd be real, real, surprised if there weren't a fully legit, USD 20K / Thps, collect-on-overnight-delivery vendor appear by autumn.  The first one is going to make a fecking ton o' money in a two-step (sell to recover NRE, then mine in shares to make it a business).

ASICMiner is such a company. You get your order delivered within a few days.

Yes, for an amount of BTC that you will never ever mine back.

Agreed, it wouldn't even be particularly difficult to have a "hard-coded" serial number and encode it as part of transactions, including successful mining (so that the complete history of a hardware node would become transparent) - but it isn't really in the interest of vendors obviously, just think about how pissed customers are going to be if they were to learn that their hardware had been running for a couple of weeks and was responsible for >= $1M USD profits at a time when difficulty was comparatively low.

You didn't mention them being affordable. ;D

The high prices are a direct result of them having no competition who can deliver quickly. They can set the price as high as the market is willing to accept.

;D ;D
Lunch time in the US Mountain time zone.  Out.

The MAC address in the TP-Link 703n router is a hard coded serial number that is already in place.  It can be published very easily.

I think a vendor that supplies this level of transparency will attract quality customers, so I think it is in their interest.  

Until somebody comes along who understands what a demand curve looks like in a bubble (as formed by greedy geniuses), and also understands the concept of pricing to sell all the way down to where marginal cost = marginal revenue.  And when the risk is sufficiently controllable (or controlled) they will come.

I suspect you are someone who knows the real answer to this:  is not any MAC spoof-able at the firewall level?  Or is it that at the router, it would actually have to entail firmware hacks that would be virtually impossible?

MAC spoofing is a fairly common thing, even without having access to the hardware, like you said.
Transparency would be a good thing, and I do agree that a company providing such a degree of transparency could attract quite a number of potential clients

They could always use a ethernet-relay in between that will spoof the MAC

To narrow the question down to OpenWRT, which is the router software running on the Avalon, I believe, but have not verified, that the MAC can be spoofed.  I think this is a standard feature of any commercial "router" today.

In a larger scope, I run lots of software inside a virtual machine.  Those MACs can be easily spoofed.  One of my VMs has completely cloned the original hardware environment, including the MAC addresses on the original hardware box.

The Cisco and Linksys routers can spoof the MAC address of a LAN side computer.

Very easy to spoof a MAC.

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/lucid/man1/macchanger.1.html

So, then, when you say "The MAC address in the TP-Link 703n router is a hard coded serial number that is already in place", that doesn't necessarily imply there might be some way to establish identity of a router instance unambiguously?

Oh, I know.  I'm coming to you over a spoofed MAC right now.

EDIT:  Not because I'm Evil Hacker.  It just makes it a bit harder for the boys at GOOG to keep up with the ad campaigns they have in mind for me.

AM Didn't set that price, the greedy free market did during AM's initial blade auctions.

That's right.  But, as a guy named Edward Miller described way back in 1970's in Journal of Finance, when nobody knows what something is worth, it is the optimists who set the price. 

The median consensus, which is where a real business needs to tap into to really make money, is somewhere below that.  That's why there's a gap in the market that's going to fill, IMO.

I thought that the Eruptor Blade sale was a one time offer of a fixed number of blades. It sold out, and now ASICMiner is not offering more blades yet.
The USB sticks are gimmicks that don't really add much to the hash rate (and are horribly overpriced).

You can forge (spoof) an identity.
You can use the existing MAC as a serial number to identify a specific router.

You can forge a driver's license.
You can use a driver's license to establish identity.

I was onto it in February, when they first began to surface.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137534.msg1548544#msg1548544

3 months later, AvenG confirmed my suspicions with this post.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137534.msg2176000#msg2176000

The conspiracy to centralize or shut down Bitcoin is plainly evident to me now.

The asic promises and gpu sell off of 2012.. The gpu diverting alt-coin craze.. I wonder what phase 3 has in store ?

Why should the MAC address from some device in the network matter at all? The MAC address reaches as far as the first router (normally your default gateway), 1 hop beyond that it is not only totally irrelevant for getting TCP/IP packets from A to B, but also UNKOWN!!
So what do want to prove with MAC addresses here? MAC addresses are on layer 2 (in the ISO/OSI layer model) and TCP/IP is on layer 3 and 4 ...
The higher layers don't know anything about the layer below them.

MAC addresses prove nothing expect when you are connected to the same PHYSICAL SWITCH or ROUTER where the device with the MAC address in question as also connected.
I highly doubt that you PC/Laptop/Mac at home shares the same physical network with any odd Avalon Box in Testing somewhere in China.

MAC addresses were probably brought up because "some" OS actually used them to come up with hardware-specific keys for registering your product, to be eligible for free upgrades. I think they used a combination of hardware-specific serials and mixed everything up to ensure that Windows installations would not be prone to double-spending  ;D

I am not particularly a fan of these "Big Brother" type monitoring/validation schemes.  I seem to recall Intel in the 90s wanting to put a unique identifier in each chip so that they could validate the identity/location of a machine on the internet.  Privacy folks went ballistic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_III#Controversy_about_privacy_issues

When you come right down to it, commerce is based to some extent on trust... you either trust your vendor or you don't.

If you don't trust them... then don't do business with them (or don't do pre-orders at least).

also heard this backdoor in tp link routers http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Treacherous-backdoor-found-in-TP-Link-routers-1822720.html

Real shame. I'd be so pissed if I had some pending orders with them.
I'm waiting to the official reaction from them, if any, with a lot of curiosity...
Thanks BTC for the transparency, things like that get noticed sooner or later!

Almost certainly, your cell phone will do all of that these days ...  ;)

I think you should never underestimate the force of good ol' private enterprise, petty corruption.

Here's an analogy.  One of my good friends is a retired Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (USA ATF) agent.  One case he worked on as a young man was at the Marlboro plant in Virginia.  Truckloads of Marlboro cigarettes, hundreds of cases, thousands of cartons were loaded into containers and sent to the Navy at Port Norfolk.  Tax free.

The guy whose job it was to seal the container, certifying that the seal was not to be broken execpt overseas, would spoof the seal on certain trucks.  The driver of that truck would exit on the way to Norfolk, stop, pull out a couple cases into a waiting van, and then press the seal.  When the cigs got to Japan or Europe or where ever, nobody even noticed the shortage.

They got busted.  Mafia?  Nope.  International cigarette smugglers?  Nope?  A couple guys who had the motive (money from free cigarettes to sell), means and opportunity.  

aha  8)  .... you made it to the point ... this is a bad idea!  ;)

He was an ATF agent. The power that comes with that title is huge. Not just "a couple of guys"

This is just bad... If they needed to put them in test like that they could have made it public and give mined coins to person who paid for it. They would made much more of that as it would be PR move of the year

It's not even relevant to wonder if they sould use testnet or if they should use main net. It just does not make any sense to test them more than few hours max. No reason to test chips for weeks, no reason at all. Testing is not a valid excuse, period.

No words for the amount of pure shock / disbelief I'm experiencing. I almost brought in on a batch 3 order and to see them do this with batch 2...  its so unethical that it makes me want to puke.

I think the ATF agent was the friend who told the story about the "couple of guys".

I think I saw a documentary on this, called "Beverly Hills Cop"....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL1d7QmGDo8

Given the reputation of Avalon, I am sure they'll not just respond here, but rather provide a public announcement on their website, hopefully addressing all open questions. Bottom line being, while we may not agree with the whole issue, the whole thing proves that they're much more legit than most other ASIC vendors, who simply keep on making promises, rather than delivering  any hardware at all

Given their reputation I think they will not say anything.

We are not "special".

There are probably quite a number of folks here who have pending pre-orders with them, so there's the buying-power effect - consequently, if these people were to team up and request a formal announcement be made, it will probably happen...

No, that's what happens to the cigarettes on the other side, when organized crime is involved.  But then, because of volume requirements, whole containers "disappear" from, like, Port Elizabeth due to paperwork glitches.

I forgot about that scene in the movie.  I think the best scene is when the Captain says "Is this the man who wrecked the buffet at the Harrow(?) Club?"   I guess they needed to get their chase scene Jones satisified up front.

Doubt there will be any measurable fallout.  Somewhere above, someone commented, in effect, "shit, I wish I were them." 

If Lucifer himself were to come and offer the right asic hash technology for just a little piece of one's soul, there'd be a queue.

This all day!

it is a neat scheme, and seriously: why sell a product at a price that is exceeded by its recurring output

Because trust of customers, impacting future orders, will bring more incomes than immediate greed?
But you need long-term vision to see things like this... To me, above all, this episode clearly shows that they don't plan on lasting long in the scene. They could as well run away with pre-order money, that would be just even shorter vision than the current one but fully consistent with what we see.

becasue they don't sell the product. they SOLD the product, and therefore are obliged to deliver without delays. In most countries you will find a law describing the time a company has to deliver a product which they sold and have in stock. Germany has a limit of 30days, after that you can sue the company for your losses, if they are a direct consequence of their unwillingness to deliver (note that natural disasters, strikes etc. don't count).

What buying power effect?

"It's the lure of easy money..it has a very strong appeal."

/namethat   8)

The exchange rate didn't sky-rocket until after the batch #2 pre-sale concluded.

The only thing I underestimated was the scale of the theft(s) involved. I saw this coming soon after I began mining last October, when the asic pre orders and gpu sell-off, were reaching thier peaks even though deadlines were being missed.

Riddle me this.. BTC person...

What will happen to the legitimacy of Bitcoin if we determine that 30% of the new coins mined, since the asic dream began, could be classified as stolen assets/ property ?

I guesstimate its more like 50% if you were to factor in the BTC used to buy the pre orders.

If I were waiting for one, I would be demanding that ALL pool operators find a way to verify that the asics at thier pool are all legitimately owned.

To be honest... I think most Avalon purchasers wouldn't care if Bitsyncom test on main net vs. testnet, as long as it doesn't impact the speedy delivery of their completed units.

right, there's going to be a breakeven point once the BTC/USD ratio adjusts or once diffculty raises even further - which is almost certainly going to result in more hardware being shipped all of a sudden, it simply makes sense  then ;D

I never meant to imply that we would need a registry or licensing for high hashpower users.

Jesus that one is scary...

Does it still work if you update the firmware to OpenWRT/DD-WRT?

Governments have a problem with bitcoin, that works to the scammers' advantage short term:  if they were to allege fraud -under US law, it would probably be Civil RICO- then, by definition, they would be accepting the legitimacy of bitcoins as something of value, and -worse- would have to assign some value to them to finish the allegation.

I have no doubt that there has been systematic use of Avalon equipment since the March/April price run-up.  I don't believe it has been done by team Avalon, except to the extent that their poor control over their fulfillment processes is responsible in an overarching, "buck stops at the top" way.

But prior to April, I don't believe it was worth it.  I'm not so sure that BFL has done it, or is so loosely organized that it would go on without knowledge; I don't think that's part of their script.

What you are really saying, probably, is this:  If 30% of the new coins minted were done so using the money of those who pre-purchased asic "dreams," only to have those dreams turn into nightmares of difficulty-induced futility, then a lot of people - maybe a critical mass of early adopters - would abandon the concept and it could die.  

Yeah, that's possible.  But as long as the "scheme" regardless of the ethics of those around it, continues to produce 400 thousand dollars worth of something every day, there for the taking for anybody who has the right piece of electronic gadgetry, there will be those to replace those who drop away, if someone promises them that gadget.

The governments and the Central banks might, ultimately, kill this.  But right now, they haven't figured out how to attack it effectively, and, frankly, it isn't big enough - yet - for them to worry too much about.

I don't know why this comes as a surprise to anyone.
For political purposes, it makes sense that BFL decided not to mine mainnet for burnins, but other than that, why would a company want to basically throw away potential revenue?
The pattern here certainly does look like testing/burnin to me, at least - if someone wants to bother, they can plot when people received units against the hashrates seen on Eligius (that data is public, I think).

Besides, didn't someone at Avalon say outright that they were mining on them before shipping?
I seem to recall reading that somewhere...

Care to explain me your logic here? Aren't the "political reasons" linked to "business reasons" and therefore to "projected revenue reasons"?

Or you intend to say that BFL is after some kind of greater good?

What he meant was, they didn't steal because they put up with enough bitching from people, and wouldn't want to deal with even more.

What that actually means is, BFL would only steal if there was low risk of being caught.

There is low risk of being caught.

Doing burnins on mainnet is not in any sense "stealing".
The burnings have to be done anyway, no point throwing that away.

Thing is, that they mine bitcoins with the hardware of their customers! So they are stealing revenue! The amount of dust inside of the avalon cases indicates that they do ''urnins'' for days and not hours!

What the fuck is this shit?  >:(

Burn in is one thing, mining them to the point where dust can actually collect on the internal components is another.

In a business like mining where each past second is more valuable than the future one, I'd say that could be expected that "burnins" would be done against the customers address, especially considering that we are speaking about preorders. I guess the *promise* of profit in ASIC mining its been huge for a limited window, and the companies could get away with it. This is going to change. ROI is going to be very tight for everybody.

@Luke-Jr:

Here is the difference;

Throwing away would mean that it would otherwise be wasted. Stealing means that BTC earned by a machine during "burnin" paid for by a customer not given to them is a loss to the customer / a gain by said third party; its called stealing. What part about paying for equipment and having someone else use it / earn profit (real money) don't you understand as stealing?

BTW I should point out that no other company / group / collective of BTC FPGA projects ever burned-in on the main net. Even Ngzhang didn't do that with the Icarus / Lancelot project.

Jumping in to this from the reddit thread.
I prepaid for a batch 2 unit, I got that unit delivered (finally). Thats all I care about and all the business of Avalons I have the right to be involved in. If they didn't scam me of exactly what I paid for then I'm fine with them. However they chose to run their business before I get my box is their business and there was a very likely risk I wouldn't even see my box that I accepted. They don't owe you anything, they haven't committed fraud regardless of what your layman's grok of law makes you think.
Upset?

Hire a lawyer sue them, otherwise stop wasting everyone time with your complaining. When you bring a product to fruition and ship as promised in 9 months beating your competitors maybe then I'll have some sympathy for your opinions. For now you just sound like a whiny rabble.

Vice: You aren’t doing any mining at all?

Yifu: Nope. Fun fact: none of the Avalon team have their own mining units (outside of test units).



http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/engineering-the-bitcoin-gold-rush-an-interview-with-yifu-guo-creator-of-the-first-asic-based-miner

F what the government and it's legal system thinks and lets get on with damage control.

Just follow the BTC and alt-coin trail.

Maybe the burning income was counted in the original pricing of the units...? Same net effect as trying to "rebate" via a burnin later.

And in the case of burning, it would otherwise be wasted.

This sounds to me like he's talking about their own personal mining, not what goes on with burnin testing of units they're selling.

Perhaps, the questions specifically does ask if he is doing any mining at all directly, to which he answer's, "Nope", before adding the fun fact, so I figured it is worth adding to the convo.

In any case, if Yifu is a man of integrity, i'm sure he will explain.

Would make a great gift to charity if it was used to encourage the main well known charities to openly start excepting Bitcoin donations. No one would deny Bitsyncom that. Plus would make a wise PR move...kind of like a modern day Robin Hood!

So basically Avalon is stealing from all of us using preordered unit. GG scammers

Someone is.. Still waiting for proof as to who..

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIC_Pre-Order_Scam_2013_(BitCoin)


(check back in early 2015)

So 1200 units in Batch #2 and 3# combined?

65Gh/sec * 1200 = 78,000 Gh/sec = 78 Th/sec

Current difficulty is 19,339,258.  Their mining was prior to this.  It was as low as 10 thousand Again, ueber conservative, use this 19 thousand difficulty

78 Th/sec generates 2028 BTC per day.

If they test each unit for 24 hours, at this difficulty they would have made 2028 BTC.

We see ~780 which is something like 9.23 hours-per-unit average.

Take into account the difficulty is lower, and you have more like 7 hours per unit of testing.

take into account they probably are only testing say, half of their units, that's 14 hours per unit of testing.

Now, if there's a second pool with the same amount of coins, that's 28 hours per unit of testing.

Doesn't seem outrageous.  People are forgetting how much fucking hashing power they have.  78 Terahash.

Wait to see what their response is.  But for shipping 6000$ hardware, you want to run some basic tests, it's just good engineering.

Yup, they are driving up difficulty while testing, so you get less BTC when you receive the device and start mining.

Testing should be done on testnet.

How does the equation for difficulty adjust if they 'spike' say, 30 units at at time or 1.95 Th/sec for 1 day of a 7 day week?  Does it just get calculated as an integral/average hash rate/block time over 2016 blocks or something?  I thought people sometimes back off mining prior to diff adjust to artificially lower it?

iirc it doesn't look like they're running these even close to full time.

Also, does testnet have acceptable difficulty for this much hash power?  or would it just find blocks every few seconds.. not familar

there's also the chance they're the nicest people ever and donate their BTC from testing to everyone who ordered.. seems like that would be a fair thing to do if this is the case.

Don't forget, this units came from China and it could possible that a dishonest staff could have done the mining himself/herself.

This is dead easy... any mined Bitcoin on a machine paid for by you should be forwarded to your wallet - less the cost of electricity if you want to be fair. These machines and the benefit they provide belong to the owner. No one else... not even the builder.

Imagine if you were mining gold and bought a bulldozer or some heavy machinery, and the company that built them went to your site and used the machines you paid for, then delivered the used machines at full, as new, price. Would never happen.

Dudes are stealing bitcoin and need to return it to the rightful owners.

Many ways this, if true, can be considered slimy, but this isn't one of them.  If the test add to network, and then drops off, it is difficulty-neutral except for negligible averaging effect in the next reset, and not at all after that.  Even though it hasn't been observed recently (if ever?) in bitcoins, it is possible for difficulty to drop.

Also not sure but if testnet is normally say, maybe 100 Gh/sec -- if you mine with terahash the difficullty skyrockets, when it goes away, nobody can mine blocks and it takes hours if not days to find them, to get to 2016 and readjust takes forever

some of the shittier scamcoins (altcoins) had this, hashrate jumps from 50 MH/sec to 2500 MH/sec, difficulty goes up orders of magnitude, prices drop, everyone stops mining, nobody can get blocks and the coin is fucked until enough blocks are mined that difficulty readjusts.

No, "if no block has been found in 20 minutes, the difficulty automatically resets back to the minimum." (source (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Testnet))

You just have to mine n blocks where n is the difficulty retarget window (i.e. 2016) to get the difficulty to a descent level for the hashrate you are testing with. As far as I am concerned I don't see any point *not* to use test net for testing. If a company or individual wants to earn mining revenue while testing on main net, it should be in the contract with the ones who finance the production, i.e. the owners. I thought this would be obvious to anyone without having to justify why it should be so...

Now if another company who did not finance its production with pre-orders wants to do that, and that the goods are not sold as 'new' but as 'used', I'm okay with that. Or that would really need to be just testing purposes (like testing for 2 hours, not 2 weeks), and that using main net vs test net is their "cherry on top" to lower the price tag, it would at least need to be transparent and clearly stated.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/9148/do-these-new-asic-miners-really-pay-for-themselves-in-5-days?rq=1#comment12016_9149

... or you just fire up your own bitcoind and lock it into it's own network ...
Took me a couple hours to do it last time I needed it ... I'm sure anyone with experience can do it in less :P

We have yet to hear from Yifu's half but honestly, what is going to happen? He could basically just shrug and say "What are you going to do about it?" Caveat emptor for the "supposed batch 4"

Jesus, what's with all the apologists in this thread?

Once upon I time, I needed to dig a big hole, as a foundation for a building that I needed to build in a timely manner. Unfortunately, all the excavation equipment available at that time was not powerful enough to get the job done in time. Thankfully, along came this company called Mavalong, who said they were developing the next generation of excavation tools. All they needed was for me to pay in advance and they said they would be able to deliver my excavator within a few weeks. They had even proved that they had these new machines by delivering a few to early customers, but they needed funds to continue production as planned.

A few weeks go by, the originally promised delivery date has passed, and my Mavalong excavator still hasn't arrived. I tried contacting Mavalong several times to see what the hell was going on, but they ignored every attempt I made at contacting them. Other Mavalong customers all around the world had the same experience. The Mavalong CEO ignores everyone's attempts to contact him, but he still attends trade shows where he publicly promises that Mavalong is NOT using their customers machines to dig holes of their own. He ignored any questions about his business, but sometimes he would respond to attacks on his personal character, because heaven forbid someone calls him names on the internet.

One day, more than four months later, my Mavalong excavator finally arrives. Only, it's covered in mud, the tire treads are already worn, and the excavator scoop has been weakened from months of use. I use it to start digging my hole, but the deeper I dig the less efficient the machine becomes. Now it looks like it will never even be able to finish digging my hole. Meanwhile, all original financial projections I made are ruined due to the behavior of this company, and my competitor down the street who decided to go with another excavator company (run by an enigmatic CEO known only as FriedBat) has already completed his building and received all the business contracts in the area.

How can one argue that Mavalong did nothing wrong? Sure, you can say that I was just buying their excavator machine and that they eventually delivered, but I look at their lack of communication, missing of delivery targets, the fact that I basically loaned them the money to produce the machine, that they used the product that I paid for for their own personal gain, the fact that the financial calculations I did when I purchased it (even when accounting for potential shipping delays) were now totally off-base, that I purchased a new machine and received one in used condition, etc., and realize that I have been screwed over.

But still, some internet trolls will try to tell you that Mavalong's CEO, Beefu Doe, is a hero who deserves to be commended for his great work ::)

If this was BFL you people would be all torches and pitchforks in this thread, but everyone is making excuses.

+1

Bought in february, was expecting units mining in my basement at least between mid april and mid may.  That's a lot of coins I'll never see the color of..

I also believe Bitsyncom when he told us about production delays out of their control, so I think we dont have to be mad against them.. They seem pretty loyal to bitcoin AFAIK, and I like their philosophy as told by Yifu !

Go Avalon team, after all, you've been first to deliver Asic to customer, you still the winner, and hope you'll be winner again for Asic v2 !

We all know they deliver about on time for the 1st batch, but 2rd and 3rd some delays. Now they were found(until proven guilty) using our miners for their own mining, not days, but weeks and months. The most you need to test is 3 days on the average. If they are using for their own mining would they tell you? Yifu seems humble and honest but you don't know the inside and those around him?

Are you saying in opposite or are you just a 50 cents of Avalon team?

I am sure he has already received his miner, so he couldn't care about those that haven't

to a certain extend we understand Wayne frustration, because he is probably from China where the Avalon was built and assemble but others have a later order number than his and not from China but already got their Avalon Miner happily mining,  now you could imagine how he feels.. very mad

Some time ago I was trying to estimate ASICs impact on difficulty in time (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=227792.msg2461310#msg2461310)
I ended up with conclusion that a lot of unknown ASICs are mining starting from March. If this unknown miner is Avalon - then half of batch #2 devices are already used for mining. And recent difficulty jump can be caused by batch#3 devices, like 75% of them.

Assuming that Avalon is only one company that produces ASICs, and CPU/GPU/FPGA total power remained in average the same starting from February, then Avalon's impact on difficulty could be following:
http://s20.postimg.org/afe4p3ke1/avalonimpact.jpg (http://s20.postimg.org/3oxnfnx8d/avalonimpact.png)
(just keep in mind that BFL and any other company can do the same, so this chart cannot be used as ultimate proof)

I never heard any issues with the bitcoin FPGA suppliers on using their customer miner for their own evil deeds maybe the monetary rewards is not there, compares to Asic where they could get much more, is all because of Greed

Thanks for your understanding. In fact, I am not the only victim. Many people paid on Feb-2 and 3 are also waiting. Some of them even have no order information in Avalon's web page.

Saying I'm disapointed it take so long to be at my doorstep, but I also think Avalon have been the best in the Asic scene so far !  Whitout Avalon, no Asic for me in summer 2013, except maybe few Jalapenos who will never make their BTC back..  Batch 2 Avalon should at least return me the BTC invested, and some more.. This is fine.  Jalapenos that is a complete lost forever, this is not fine !

Avalon = the best so far.. I hope some other company will make good stuff for the Bitcoin Asic, maybe KnCMiner if they can produce and deliver enought.. and I hope several more asic seller, within a year or two, the market should stabilize, and it will be more fair for everyone.

No Avalon at all yet... comming soon, I hope !

As one of the first to accuse BFL of shenanigans and take a very hard line to Josh I have to say.

Im disgusted with Avalon, they are purposefully delaying beyond agreed delivery time client funded and owned hardware for their own gains.
Thanks Avalon, you just gave the worst bitcoin business (besides bitcoinica) something to be proud of "Hey at least we are not delaying your delivery so we can kill your ROI like Avalon".

I Hope to see them labeled as scammers unless all mined funds are shared among the pre-orders.

Now Avalon is getting messy, very messy, my my they can't even get all their orders in sequential number, even 8 year kids could do that .. all their email and orders have a date from all the orders were received, talk about support and admin work they are probably at par with butterfly. Don't tell me engineers can do simple support and admin work? The delay was blame on this and that but now should blame it on your guys doing the mining on your customer miners. in future every customers of yours should provide a unused pool accounts for you to test the machines, so all the benefit should go back to them.

Have to agree.  And his stating (not quoted) that the pattern "discovered" looks like burn-ins to him carries some weight with me.  

And what I keep coming back to is this:  if you're smart - and both BFL and Avalon are smart guys - you don't want to get caught doing something that can cost you way more than you make on it.  It's one of the most effective things to keep people honest.  

That said, really bright people can do really dumb things.  President Clinton is as smart as they come, and he nearly got impeached over a blow job. *

*EDIT: Actually, he did get impeached.  He didn't get convicted and removed from office.  There'll be a civics quiz tomorrow.

I thought they were going to ship in payment order, not by order number.  I haven't found any list of block number vs shipping date anywhere so I can check this.

Alas, there is a thing in law, not only in the USA, but in Europe as well, termed jurisdiction.  One of the implications is that the same thing can't happen in two different places at once. *

EDIT: And given your handle, I'll add: presumably, Canada as well.  It's essential for Federal systems. 

Is there an SSH key in dropbear?

No. Nothing unusual but WiFi Network named something like "AVALON_???"

this seems quite a fair deal.
They use things that don't belongs to them to their own profit without the owner agreement.
also they use it in a way that it loses value when you receive without advertising it when they have other option (testnet would be the way to go)
I do not care about any law, for me it is clearly robbing.

Is that really true though? If you buy a custom built car- the guys building your car can drive it around can't they? It's not like you would require them to drive it on a treadmill. As long as it came to you in new condition (dusty units aside- they said they don't have a clean room) wouldn't you be happy? In my mind the units are only yours once you get possession of them.

Transfer of ownership should come with tranfer of funds.

Your hypothetical sports car's back-seat is covered with load and used condoms... 'Oh well, it wasn't mine until it was mine'

When you buy a car, you know the mileage BEFORE you pay. The mileage and condition directly affect the price.

Your analogy is not 100% correct. What if the guys instead of just driving it around would somehow produce money with your car, for instance by renting it?

Oooh, what a BIG surprise!!!  ;)  ;)  ;D  ;D

then you hoped that one who manufactures machines for "generating money" sells them immediately without using them before?

how cute you are!  :-* :-*

The best is give them an unused pool mining account, and they can do testing etc.. but all the coins they mine goes back to you ...

The thing I haven't seen anyone mention (don't care much for Avalon so I haven't read all 11 pages) is the systematic cashout we've seen on Gox over the last so many weeks.  The price went down from $130 to $110 and has been hovering around $100 (all USD) in dramatic sales that have been unmatched by buys.

My guess is that both Avalon and AsicMiner are cashing out (your shares, your Avalon pre-orders, they're 2-10x on your money to make them rich) with no real care for the industry.  They were there first with ASIC's, they have the obvious Asian connection so reduced shipping times, the buddy system, etc., and now before we see a lot delivering from both there are HUGE cashouts. 

Now you can have your product with BTC down 25% in value and the difficulty screaming up.

Not a conspiracy theorist here, I've got a BFL order in since early 2013 and I'd hope alongside their mass production they're test-mining units, but I agree entirely that since all these operations were and are effectively crowd-funded they should return testing profit to the community.  And not just by being assholes and selling it off to "put the BTC back into circulation", aka what people say when they want to cash out for fiat.

If Jalapenos won't make their money back then there is no chance in hell for anyone with a batch #3 Avalon ... Zero.

What does a Jalapeno cost? $300?
Say difficulty was 75million - it would take 83 days to get ~$300

What did an Avalon batch #3 cost? ~80BTC?
Say difficulty was 75million - it would take 178 days to get 80 BTC ...

Then of course there's the fact that the Avalon uses 1.5 times the power per MH/s that a Jalapeno does.

Maybe Batch #2 is OK, but not a chance for anyone in batch #3 while Avalon mines away on the hardware pushing the difficulty up.

People seem to forget the ongoing comments about how BFL keeps missing their deadlines but Avalon met their deadlines ...
So assuming that Avalon being on time wasn't all complete bullshit, then what have they been doing with the hardware they said they could make 8 a day back in January ...

These guys are pretty smart, right?  If they were going to mine for profit don't you think they'd do it solo rather than on a pool where everyone can see?  They certainly have the hash power.
Having said that I still agree that testing profits should go to the people that bought the miners.

It seems impossible. What would have made any in place? As long as your customer reach ROI.
With the chips will not, because they will not soldering and desoldering. But send delayed until the batch 3.

all those analogies are nice, but they often tend to ignore time-decay because of increasing difficulty and because of increasing ASIC adoption rate.

So if you are really into analogies, it's more like selling a farm of cows or chicken even though you perfectly-well know that they have reached their EOL, because their past output (eggs/milk) is higher than their likely future outputs. Basically, they got their efforts sponsored through crowd-funding, and were consuming subsequent output as a freebie while delaying pre-orders. Now, unlike custom bitcoin ASIC hardware, chickens and cows can actually be sold after their output drops, to become hamburgers and chicken-burgers ... but I have never heard of an ASIC burger yet!  ;D

jajajajjaja

+19,339,258   Diff today

IMHO the real point is: Avalon (or whatever) generates blocks with your hardware "for testing" on the normal network, bumping difficulty up and giving you (once shipped) a device with less value - for the exact amount of BTC already mined by them.

This is even worse if we think that every discovered block lowers the asic value, so timing is critical.

Anyone that's doing tests before shipping must use the testnet, no matter what.

And yes, this "pay months in advance" s**t should end by now.

Mining on main net using an address provided by the consumer would be fair too. These coins belong to the person who paid for the machine, since the machine is ready and delivery date is (largely) behind.
In the first place, the consumer who paid in advance took the risk, not the crowd-funded company. He/She is the person to be rewarded for this. Avalon should seek long-term costumer satisfaction so people would order a second machine in the future, rather than immediate profit they steal to the pre-orders customers.

You guys are funny,

Dont bother fcking complaining because at the time of ordering your batch2 and batch 3, you accepted no QUESTIONs term.

We also accepted delivery date which is far behind. With on time delivery I would be probably hitting my ROI by now,

Yes, admittedly BitSyncom broke the terms of agreement first; therefore there is every right to complain, it's not as if it's being done as viciously as that directed towards Butterfly Labs.

this is another sad day in the history book of Bitcoin. What I had wanted to doubt for so long seems to be con-
clusive now. Add they continue to just trickle orders out - only 10 units this month
(https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AluBwkoeuzdndG5GRk10Qk8wU0FDWU1DLUxCVS1CV2c#gid=0)

Avalon price s/b adjusted to reflect adjusted Diff levels - probably bring it back to 45-50 BTC per Batch 2 unit;
even less for Batch 3ers. After all, they are more than 2-3 months late on Batch 2 (2nd original ship date for
Batch 2 was April 15).

Just issue a rebate/refund to the same address order payment was sent from.

yes and same situation will be with chips. first zefirs batch was ordered 16/4 and they promise to deliver chips in 9-10 weeks. so next week we should expect delivery?.) I don't think so..terrahash, bitmine and other groups ordered one week earlier then zefir. Why they don't have their chips yet...?

There are not even 60 orders on that spreadsheat out of 600.

I myself am not entirely convinced that Avalon have been mining maybe there is a rouge employee that is switching them to pools when 'no one is looking' (after work hours?).

But Avalon stated in one of their first announcements that they use their own custom software to test the chips.... Like all chip manufacturer would have. You do not need to have it mining on the live network to know of they will work.

We still do not know what their 'security issues' were… how do we know they didn't have a load of chips/machines robbed from them? Damn easy and highly profitable crime to commit, especially in China…

people usually only disclose once they receive their order

Genuinely, with all the best and fairest intentions on my part I don't believe that, sorry.

Wasn't aware Terrahash (who I'm pretty confident of), have released any details or proof of any bulk chip order from BitSyncom yet...

Disclosure: I don't have any pre-order or interests related to avalon hardware. I don't think I am the only one in this thread. Still I do "fcking complain", as you say.
Being in the BTC world does not give right to a company to behave like an ass-hole, or worse, to behave illegaly. And being a BTC customer does not mean you should behave like a sheep, not rising something you consider a very serious problem.

https://terrahash.com/sample-avalon-chips-and-klondike-16-boards/
https://terrahash.com/terrahash-assembles-the-first-klondike-16-board-for-testing/

I believe them, but don't believe Avalon, so only reason, why I will not order anything from them is, that they are waiting for Avalon chips..

Xialia, I'm well aware they have sample chips, but there has been no statement with regard to *when they made their order through BitSyncom, and as of yet they have been entirely evasive when asked.

I do believe Terrahash have the best intentions, but I think they may have ordered later than most people would be comfortable with, maybe...

Never have I ever had such a pleasant response from someone on the internet. I was genuinely expecting some flaming from that one.

Hats off to you sir!  ;)

Haha, no worries, I'm a polite guy, and I sit back and observe before commenting in any heat of the moment. Plus I'd rather we all get a piece of something, than a few get most, I don't want to see anyone scammed...;)

Thank-you for the polite retort!

Looking at the hashrate, and knowing who ASIC hardware producers are, it looks like Avalon currently has about 50% of total hashrate. They are sneakily distributing hashing power in many different pools trying to conceal the fact.

According to my calculations at this time they have made at least 1500BTC on customers' hardware.

Do you have any idea how many KILOWATTS you will need to run 50% of the Bitcoin network ?!
I'll help:
1 Avalon unit realizes 66Gh and uses 650W.
The network is 156418Gh, 50% is 78209Gh, so you will need 770 kilowatts of electricity to run those 1184 Avalon machines.

770 kW isn't very much, it just depends on where you live and if you have access to cheap/free electricity.

http://www.platformonomics.com/2013/05/press-releases-wed-like-to-see-iceland-embraces-the-bitcoin-economy/
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-bitcoins-are-mined-and-used-2013-4

It would be great to get some clarification.


The impression from the letter was that Batch3 was priced high enough so they wouldn't have to deal with these conflict of interest with the customers shenanigans.  The implication of the "vs." was that this was going to be an either/or situation   ;D

Anyway... I still believe Bitsyncom are the good guys (at least compared to the other players on the field).  But it would sure be nice if they could communicate and pick up the pace so they don't have to deal with this anymore.  I am sure they are anxious to focus on their private future endeavors (i.e. the farm/Gen2/chip sales/etc.).

Agreed. If you have a factory that runs SMT production line as Avalon claimed, 770 kw power supply is not difficult to gain.

I'm not sure how much electricity costs in China, but I think it's a lot cheaper than in the West. One factory can easily consume 1GW depending on what they do. One large warehouse is enough to set up all the hardware. Or they might be using several locations with 10 or so GW. That's not that hard to pull off considering how much money they can make.

If recent increases in hashrate don't come from Avalon, then who else has almost exactly the same amount of hashing power they promised to deliver almost exactly the same time when they promised to deliver?

http://static.blockchain.info/pools.png?format=png

you "just" need to control a bunch of pools for >= 51%



while being fully tax-deductible  ;D

Right at this moment total hashpower is over 150TH/s. With AsicMiner 20TH/s it's possible that Avalon is hashing right now at around 70TH/s. They might have less, something like 20%, but it's not impossible that they have over 45% if they have all the batch 2 and 3 and a lot of chip orders delivered, assembled and hashing.

Batch 3 promises on delivery quantity and time schedules coincide with recent hash rate increases (last 2-4 weeks).

*If* they have been doing this, in total contrast to what Yifu has led everyone to believe about his character, this is a low blow.

Greed corrupts, and my faith in humanity, that Bitcoin was restoring, will be at a new low...

Bitcoin itself is stronger than all of this early-ASIC drama.  Greed is just one powerful driving force behind the whole concept, too. 

While it's very upsetting for the customers of various companies not treated well right now, it also makes a lot of room for a good company to stand out and succeed, and the positive feedback loop for them from previously slighted customers may end up making them more profitable overall than those companies that sought shorter-term profits.  AM seems to be a good current example of that.

I agree and disagree. AM are straight profiteering which is also not cool...

Without greed, this would be a damn lonely place, we wouldn't just be losing all the scammers, but also pretty much anybody else who's hoping to make a fortune by being an early-adopter...

ok tinfoil hat time:
Chinese govt has contacted their own local bitcoin ASIC producer and told them to start hashing with all power for corrupt govt officials China.
The race is on, lets see how the the rest of the world handles china's aggressive attack / attempt to control bitcoin.

Poor Yifu - someone might wake him up from his slumber again to comment on this :P
Must be tiring scooping side profits from crowd funded ASIC buiilds  ;D ;D ;D ;D

IF this is true, it is complete and utter bullshit.

I did not give Avalon a free loan to mine a million Bitcoins on top of the millions of dollars they made from hardware sales when they got greedy and jacked the prices up for Batch 3.

It was a fair price IF they delivered it when they said they would, but they are now over a month and a half late...

Your customers deserve some sort of recourse, especially if you've been mining on our hardware. That is totally unacceptable.

If this turns out to be true, I will never buy anything from Avalon ever again.

If this is true, I demand Yifu give me any and all bitcoins mined with my Avalons. (They are pre-orders, hence the "no refund" policy, but that goes both ways, it means the products and every internal component are 100% mine and thus any income derived from them is also mine.)

I support this.

I think you will be sorely disappointed when you receive a 0.65BTC refund per machine for the coins that Avalon "stole" from mainnet ::)

(780 BTC / 1200 miners ≃ 0.65 BTC/miner)

That is if it was only 780 btc... This was just one machine.

There is another payment this morning.  Do you think they are still mining this one machine after Vicus has control of it?

The term did say clearly, no questions, no refund and no guarantee. So thats a big F U in your face. Good luck

There are plenty of reasons to be upset (especially if you're like me and you sent in your trade-ins about two months ago...) but what is obviously a burn-in test (look at the peaks and troughs on the Eligius address) is not one of them.

Thats BS coinedBit. The world would be freakin awesome without greed because NO ONE WILL WANT TO EXPLOIT YOU.

We must rid ourselves from that greed mongering mentality. A fair and just environment is what Satoshi had in mind when he/they first began to code Bitcoin. Asics and $100/BTC caused most of us to forget.


Keep dreaming..

The amount of BTC scammed is staggering when the coins used to buy these pre-orders are added. 100,000 ?? 500,000 ??

Show me where term says no questions and no guarantee ? Please stop spreading bullshit and find other thread to troll.

Sorry for being the one to break it to you, but that's simply not how humanity, and life in general, work.

And concerning "Satoshi's" motives, it is easy to speculate what he had in mind - but keep in mind that he's almost certainly the one sitting on ~BTC 5-6M since the early days of bitcoin as being the role-model of an early-adopter and bitcoin miner, which would currently translate into ~$600M US. So please stop telling us BS about how noble his motives were and how he was going to improve humanity  ::)

http://www.sikharchives.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/satoshi_nakamoto.jpeg

TL;DR? It doesn't say that anywhere.  :)

It doesn't even say that they will be mining with the machines.

Edit: I find this line especially interesting since it backs up the point that the units are the original owner's and that BitSynCom recognizes that the purchasing party has a right to the units

Maybe.

I'm basing my assumption on what proof I have (admittedly, it's not much), but if I were you I wouldn't get worked up on ideas not backed by facts, It won't do you any good. if you think they have scammed so much, search the blockchain, maybe you will come up with something relevant.

This is just another example of all us little guys getting screwed again and again.  We gave these ASIC Companies Millions of $$ and now they go ahead and use the equipment we paid for to make themselves untold amounts more under the guise of "burnins" on the Mainnet and "delays"!

Avalon should have had all of these Highly overpriced Batch-2 and Batch-3 products to their customers long ago.

I sure hope greedy companies are not Bitcoins downfall because it has so much potential if the Common Man doesn't get "priced out" of Mining and creates a "Centralized Network" like the Lovely Paypal...

Watching. Bumping.  I would like a response from Bitsyncom.

This sucks!

I've had no problem telling people that I'm greedy. Not something I'm proud of but I do try to
control it and diminish its influence on my outlook.

It's when greed turns to dishonesty, deception, and outright theft that really pisses me off.

Hope Avalon makes a quick turn around on this mess with no more justifications on this
poor behavior.

Yes Sherlock, you've figured it out - from the date that bitcoin was released, until he disappeared from the scene, for over two years Satoshi had 100% of the network hashrate.

Well technically and somewhat ethically you could argue that using the public net for burnin instead of testnet DOES cost the customers money, as it in fact does drive up difficulty by adding hash to the network.

right, if you were to order 10,000 ASIC units from a company, it would make a huge difference to the end-customer if these were "live-tested" for 6-8 weeks or if they were just running on testnet and directly shipped.

Hey Bitsyn feel free to comment or clear up any of this confusion.  An official response to this development would most likely improve pr standings.

You must be mentally challenged if you think BTC mined for 6 -8 wouldn't affect the bottom line of any customer who ordered ASIC mining equipment. Especially if it was a large number like 10,000.

Here here.

If this is indeed true, this is a massive breach of trust in the bitcoin community. I remember watching a youtube clip of Yifu at the Bitcoin 2013 Conference, he went on about responsibility and seemed to have ethics. A perfectly reasonable explanation seems hard to come by here - by all means mine with my hardware until the shipping date I expect, but to do this 1.5 months after the expected delivery time is just bad business!

FUD everywhere by people who can't do math.

1. these are not batch #1,2 or 3 units.
2. all the openWRT firmware is burnt from a single image in batches,
3. the openWRT is used in more than just production units.
4. all burn-in is 24 or more hours, you all think we seriously only would have 700+ bitcoins if they were mining? LOL
        I can't believe I'm repeating myself by saying we are not mining with batch #2 or #3 units.
5. complains will just lead into refunds, since clearly people are not happy with Avalon ASIC.
        personally I'd love to issue these refunds so these people can go find the next thing to complain about and I can get some peace n quiet.
6. I'm going back to deal with trade-in and damaged orders.

He just confirmed that units have been burned-in for 24 hours. Was this done on the testnet or the real network?

OK
But maybe give us some sort of estimated shipping date?

+1. Is the production pace already 50units/day ? How many left from batch #2 ?

HEY, I'm so glad I defended you guys!

(https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=236348.msg2500298#msg2500298
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=236348.msg2500395#msg2500395)

Looks like my reasoning was exactly correct - that it was a copied image.

Again, I will not complain if my order gets moved to the top of the stack, as a non-whiner!   ;)

at least, we've got a statement now - you can now do the maths: 24hrs hashing per unit vs. 700 resulting bitcoins  :)

I have to say ASIC's are damaging bitcoin.

The reason for this is the manner in which all the companies that have been manufacturing the devices have rolled out the technology. All it has achieved is empowering a very small minority which is no different to having a central bank. The people that get their hands on them first make such vast profits they can then expand exponentially which makes it extremely difficult for anyone without very deep pockets to get involved.

The entire point of bitcoins was to empower the people not a select few corporations who in essence will become just like the banks.

It is a very dangerous game that is being played here. The only reason Bitcoins have any value is because of the community that supports it. If you alienate that community what will happen to the value??????

I realise it is a new technology and it takes time to ramp up production but maybe it would have made more sense to stock pile and then release to even the playing field. Maybe the manufactures should have got together to discuss the issue of releasing the technology.

How many people as percentage of all miners actually have asics - I imagine well under 5%, yet they are probably generating 70% of the network hashrate.

Bitcoin has arrived where it is today because anybody could get involved. Maybe ASICminer realised this and hence the reason they are selling massively overpriced ASICs that are available next day delivery - the kind of throw the dog a bone mentality.

But alas as always GREED is the driving factor as opposed to the ethos of the currency.

If these asic companies put themselves out of business they only have themselves to blame.

I really would like Bitcoin to be the success it deserves to be but I have a bad feeling.

This may be partly the reason why there has been no Government interference because they can clearly see it will destroy itself at this rate.

If MTGox start trading LTC it will be very interesting to see what happens to the price of BTC.

All this testing of devices on the live network WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE COMPANIES. If these businesses want to use them to mine then they should not have taken anybodies money and just used their own investment - instead they have used us as an interest free no risk loan and in my eyes that makes them as bad as a bank - basically shafting the little guy. All the risk of an investor with none of the return.

You don't see Ford testing customers cars on the public roads, or Intel testing their processors in their office PC's before selling them to customers. All it achieves is brining the currency into disrepute through bad business practise.

It's like the saying goes the money is only as good as peoples faith in it.                                                                      

What does this have to do with math?  FUD doesn't necessarily apply here either, since there is no obvious connection to the OP and any competing company.
1.  People say a lot of things, this isn't necessarily proof, so please stop acting like we are idiots because we don't take your word.  It's failed us plenty.  Proof?
2.  Very reasonable and believable, sometimes when people say things there is logic behind it that makes it easy to believe.
3.  "
4.  Again this is just on your say so.  However people have been wanting to hear this, so I'm sure many will find this comforting.  You might need to put someone on part time media control, just so you can keep up with these types of discussions.  It's very reasonable for people to start questioning when things don't go as planned.
5.  This is horrible business practice and should be stopped by any company that cares to maintain the respect of the consumer base.
6.  Awesome, hope some press releases make it out into a wide enough audience that you don't need to constantly waste your time with us.

This is pathetic.  If you're still able to retrieve your nose, I'd recommend it.  I'm not saying you need to attack them, I'm still of the opinion that what they are fairly honest.  Hold them responsible for their promises though.

lol @ BitSyncom threatening to refund for customers that complain.

Like... wtf... how dare you threaten your customers like that... you are no better than BFL when you start doing that kind of shit, that is just wrong.

You realize most of my orders are not even mine? Some people have payed up to 2.5x what I originally payed just to get shares in payouts of the equipment I ordered. Do you realize how pissed these people will be when I tell them that BitSyncom cancelled my order and they now get <however much they payed> divided by 2.5 back?

Not only would they be quite mad, but I would be seeking any legal recourse possible for loss of income, the negative impact this would have on my reputation, and also on behalf of all the angry investors.

Customers have the right to complain, especially in this case because the complaints stem directly from your false promises and inability to deliver.

Buddy you may not like it  but welcome to Deadwood, gonna be like this for a while in the BTC world IMO.  The market gave these companies the power to behave like assholes, operate like sketchy/shoddy organizations (possible illegal?)...  LOL Avalon even basically had a LOL FUCK YOU type term (ie no bullshit iirc was how they actually termed it on the website...).  And they seemingly see customers as an annoyance. Miners are still doing it this second (KnC, Bitfury etc).  The power is the coins and the consumers have them, once the companies have them out of your wallet and into theirs you become so much less important.  The consumers have the power they just choose not to use it.  I have and I will not be buying ASIC hardware for quite a while if ever because I prefer to deal with legitimate professional organizations of which there are currently exactly 0 IMO (at least according to my criteria anyways).

This. The childishness of Yifu's responses is getting old. This is from someone who used to call *me* unprofessional in the DCAO. Why don't they hire someone to do PR for them to help them on the front side? There is nothing wrong with customers wanting to know more, the attitude of "goddamnit, why do I have to answer so many questions after taking all your money?" is a sign of a scammer, I'm sorry. Try to remember Pirate and tell me that you want to be remembered like that, Yifu.

I disagree there is a huge opportunity for a legitimate business here. Yifu maybe young, but I sincerely hope he is not greedy, or naive, because he may well be turning his nose up at a genuine once in a lifetime business opportunity right in front of him. Integrity is everything...

I totally agree - can you imagine Intel saying that to their customers.

Personally I feel this is the beginning of the end for Bitcoin between massive mining pools and the most unprofessional roll out of any technology ever (ASIC's) bitcoin is about as empowering as a slow roasted dog turd.

I am going to liquidate my hoard unless someone can convince that coin generation is NOT going to end up in the hands of a few companies.

Avalon only have themselves to blame - If you bought a mobile phone that had some random telephone numbers saved in the contacts what would you think?

It is very sloppy and unprofessional and hence the reason they now have to spend time trying to clear the air.

If I purchased a Cisco switch that had some random config loaded - it would be going straight back to Cisco demanding to know why I have a second hand item.

I don't think any actual customers are asking for a refund. Its not like we have suddenly lost faith in Avalon's ability to deliver. The vast majority of the people complaining here seem to think the Bitcoin protocol needs to change, which just goes to show you how few Avalon customers and actual miners are posting in this thread.


Thanks, much appreciated. Again, I doubt any of the trade-ins want a "refund" because we haven't ordered anything yet, we've just lost two months of revenue on our Icarus devices is all. Obviously that's going to pale in comparison to having Avalons, but it happened all the same. Additionally, we were originally told the trade-ins would be handled first, prior to the other Batch #2 orders. You can imagine our surprise when folks from the February 2nd orders started getting their units. Perhaps they should be sent to first, given how much in BTC they paid for them, but if this is the case, I think we would have appreciated an update on it, since the conditions had changed.

IMHO, that's the only real complaint your customers have, the rest of this thread seems to be just nonsense you can disregard.


Aside from the obvious fact that you shouldn't be hoarding something you don't believe has any value anyway, Avalon is one of the few companies that is selling shovels, not doing what ASICMiner is and consolidating mining control under one entity.

Do you even own *any* Bitcoin?

The only possible people I can imagine that could be upset about ASIC development would be Silk Road customers that spent 100+ Bitcoin on a bag of weed in November 2011 and are now pissed they didn't hold onto any of it. The rest of us have been anticipating and expecting ASIC development since at least the first FPGAs were being sold. It was the inevitable progression of things, after all.

See, I told you guys to stop bitching lest we get pwned. He's doing his best, we can't do much right now.

So let's review the bidding. 

BFL is deemed, variously, to be disreputable, unreliable, or a flight risk.  Nobody trusts, or equally important, nobody likes them. 

ASIC miner is seen as a gouging monopolist, the Edison company of bitcoin, and unless you want to pay bubble prices for shares, it's nothing but a tax of 25% on the available bounty from mining.

Now YiFu has come across as a supercilious twit when faced with the most serious challenge to Avalon's credibility to date.

Yesterday I said I didn't think there'd be fallout from this.  I think I was wrong.  The hubris in his response, and the sharpness of the reactions here, strongly suggests that the only visible  "star" in bitcoin has, if not fallen, entered a dangerously low orbit. 

Mr. Cole?  OrSoC?  bitfury?  You-all paying attention here?  Nature abhors a vacuum.

Oh, and new pre-sale scammers with 1.75 Thps for $10K?  Don't even bother.  There's pitchforks and torches on the land tonight. 

Oh I agree that there is a HUGE opp for a legitimate company. I think a real company could do phenomenal (seeing as the shoddy ones are cleaning up a good one should conceivably be able to do even better).  I just don't see one ATM or in the near future (based on my personal criteria).  The reason I don't see one is because the market is not demanding it, if they did we would almost undoubtedly have one already or in the near future at least.  Until companies are no longer able to get interest free, low risk OPM it makes very little sense (business wise) to do anything differently, thus my expectation it will continue for a while.

Well Einstein until I can actually buy things with my Bitcoins that I actually need - what should I do with them. Give them away??????

And where did I say I that I believed it had no value. Did you even read my post.

Have you even read the whitepaper on Bitcoins? Do you actually understand what the point of their creation was or did that bit completely slip by you?

I don't feel a promise has been broken.  Never have.

I placed an order, knowing that it was risky, including delivery time.  I fully expected the delivery schedule to slip.  And all signs are that he's busting his butt to get work done.  That's cool by me.

I know stuff happens, and I would much rather have a business relationship with an ethical, smart, hard-working person who isn't on the forums all the time, than someone who is unethical, not smart, or lazy.

So far, Yifu has earned the benefit of the doubt, and I don't feel the least bit let down.   When it comes, it comes.

Buddy I envy your tolerance but the issue is this - it's not a playstaion its a business tool.

People invest based on what return they are going to get - nothing more nothing less.

Let me give you an example - my company builds out data centres - when asked on project time scales we have to deliver in the time we say - because they factor that into the equation of how quickly they can go live with their infrastructure and hence how quickly they can turn a profit.

If we say 3 months and then we take 9 months. Number 1 we would have the living shit sued out of us because they would be unable to make their projected profits and possibly not have the capital to sit around for six months scratching their nuts. If we had told them 9 months at the start they may have never ventured down that road. On top of that - if their business was time sensitive i.e. the longer it takes to get to the market the total they could earn diminishes it would be catastrophic.

This is exactly the case for the ASIC miners. None of the companies have behaved in what would be considered a professional manner in any other industry and this is fact. I will say though in Avalon's defence  they are by far the best of bad bunch.

+1

Absolutely agree with the bolded.  And to further your analogy I am assuming your company doesn't get 100% payment for the job before you do a single fucking thing LOL at best I am sure you get a small deposit and possibly a substantial payment on substantial completion (if your lucky and the deal was structured like that).  If the BTC world isn't the modern wild west ATM then I don't know what is!

Totally correct - We invoice on completion and then the customer has 30 days to pay. Only a new client would be required to pay a 30% deposit. I think that is called normal business!

Well, basically, some time is needed to get BTC hardware building companies that are more professional. At this time the market will be based on price vs performance of machines, and not as until now the sole fact to be among the firsts possible opportunities.

Do the current companies aim at being future actors on the scene middle-term? To get a glimpse, just look how they place themselves on the trade-off between
(i) long-term customer statisfaction, and
(ii) immediate optimization of profit.

If they go for (ii) (that might be a caricature, but say they just go a bit too much for (ii)), they will just keep existing as long as getting pre-orders for next batch (or generation) brings higher profits than just running away with current money. Many ways to run away smoothly: for instance "create" whatever financial problems that leads to official bankruptcy, then just keep remaining machines to mine for yourself. You lose your reputation but happily enjoy the rest of your life on some heaven islands. What's happening here with avalon, if it's confirmed, reveals exactly this lack of long-term views and therefore it brings the possibility of the island scenario, sooner or later.

Just curious, but in what way has Asicminer/Bitfountain acted unprofessional?  High priced?  Sure, I'll give you that, easy(Clearly not too high though, hence selling out).  But unprofessional?  I heard of one guy who emailed wanting to buy and didn't get a prompt response, right about when they sold out.  That's the most unprofessional thing I've heard of from AM.  Did I miss something?

What a terrible way to respond to the situation at hand here. How old is this guy again? I would think he is old enough to provide some customer support in a professional manner. I don't understand why he would represent his company like this. We need more manufacturers/developers to step up it up in this game so Avalon is not one of the few companies that we can go to for product. This is why competition is always good in any market. We need more competition to stomp these guys out. Great product + customer service goes a long way.

Ah so it's here everyone is hanging out now, I was looking in the BFL threads but didn't find anyone. So what's the deal and who has an extra pitchfork?  ::)

this is page 15 of the the thread, meanwhile pitchforks have been turned in for flame throwers since page 11 already.

(never bring a pitchfork to a good ol' flame thrower BBQ)

You are right I was probably a bit too broad there. My gripe with them is this - Bitcoin is about decentralisation and they are heading in the opposite direction. Part of the reason you me and everyone else is here is down to the current FIAT currency systems and the centralised control and generation of money. ASICMiner are establishing themselves as just that. This is not what Bitcoin was about - it was all about removing power from a few individual PRIVATE organisations (which central banks effectively are) and giving it to the people, so we won't have a repeat of 2008 as was stated in the white paper on Bitcoins.

A further bit of speculation and it is just that - What would stop BFL or Avalon or any of the other manufactures creating another company (if they have not already) selling / giving their devices to the other company they own and then mining? That way you can plead innocence but the truth is quite the opposite. There have been so many delays when devices have been available for quite some time it rouses suspicion.

ASICminer may have just been a great deal more honest in that respect but still does not help anyone else.

I see your point from a mining perspective - Asicminer definitely has a massive share of the network mining power - But I think Asicminer is actually better than Avalon and BFL about removing power from a few individual private organizations.  Asicminer is nearly 40% publicly owned, and pays its shareholders, thus distributing funds back to the masses.  Avalon and BFL are both privately owned.  100% of their profits go directly to the owners, creating a new set of private organizations in control.

OK fair point! But do the share holders actually have a say in anything? Or is that just down to board members? Barclays bank has a large number of share holders but you don't get to say anything about how they run their organisation. My issue is not with the distribution of what profits they make (which in all honesty can be manipulated by exaggerating costs) it is to do with control. There may be only a couple of people actually who are the actual decision makers and that is where the problem lies.

Aimed vaguely at a reply I can't find right now:

I know the difficulty is increasing but if they run it for a day and you run it for the rest of its/your life, is it such a biggie? Maybe your break-even gets pushed back a day or two because of that. It's gonna get pushed way further out when all the rest get delivered.

And regarding the various manufacturers collaborating on deliver times, how do you know they haven't?

FD: I have 20 chips on the way. If I get one block reward before the next halving I'll be happy. Maybe it'll find another one one day if I'm still running it and the stars align. If I do I'll probably need it!

It is a biggie to be honest - because they did not pay for them at the end of the day and technically it could be considered theft as it is your property. I have never know any company ever that test their customers products in a live situation - Do Cisco run the switches you have paid for in their Data Centres generating revenue for themselves before handing them over to you under the guise of testing? No of course they do not because they are a respectable organisation.

Unless every test is identical using the same data sets - it can not really be classed as quality controlled test can it? How would you know when you look at the results if there were discrepancies between devices if they had all used different input data - all the output data would be different and no one would be the wiser.

Anyone that has ever undertaken any software testing will tell you this.

They are just blatantly using your fully paid for device to make themselves a quick bit of cash on the side.

So not only have you provided them an interest free loan at no risk to themselves to develop the device they are then delaying shipping under the pretence of testing - when mining especially now with the rapid increases in difficulty is extremely time sensitive and every hour you do not have it  - is money you can never make due to the limited number of blocks.

By that argument, should the 100BTC batch 3 customers go before the 75BTC Batch 2?  Clearly that doesn't make sense.

The 75BTC batch#2 was paid 2 weeks before 55BTC batch#2.

LOL

If that is true and have no reason to doubt you - I can only assume the price difference was down to the change in Dollar BTC price. So in essence everyone has paid the same.

Lots of people say the same think but I bought this miner to get more BTC not more $ otherwise I would had kept my BTC. Some customers that paid 2 weeks later with less BTC are now already mining and will get a better ROI in term of BTC than those that paid earlier with more BTC.

I really don't care about $ I'm only thinking in term of BTC.

When you purchase hardware with BTC and it has one single purpose to mine BTC LDO, you can ignore the exchange rate as the only way of assessing ROI is by measuring ROI in BTC the device will produce.  ie if it produces less BTC than you spent you should have held on to the BTC as it would have netted you more profit, if it produces more BTC you've made a good purchase and netted more profit than holding.  This is what these guys are complaining about and that is why you can ignore the exchange rate.

I totally agree with both you guys - if they were charging in BTC they should honour it.  Otherwise what is the point of BTC it then might as well be called Dollar Mk 2.

Avalon has only ever accepted BTC (at least for their ASICS, not sure about their FPGA's) as payment AFAIK.

Well in all fairness at least that would help support BTC - where as BFL would accept payment in minge mops if they thought they were worth anything!

The software can be tested on the test network on one machine once the unit tests and integration tests (such as they may be in this case) are done. Software Developer here :) I would imagine that more likely reasons for the burn-in of some or all is to test for heat issues. I see no reason to prefer the test network in this case so why no generate coins? If Yifu wanted to mine so badly he could leave a few in a corner for a month rather than mess about rotating them. I mean, if there's one thing he probably doesn't need any more of it's Bitcoins.

There may be other forces at play as well. There's no standing still in the ASIC space and Yifu will now have a better idea of the details of his next generation chip. If securing that ambition may need funds and those funds can be made from burning in machines then that would be in the interest of the community in the long-term.

CISCO wouldn't have any reason to do something similar and don't even let you read their documentation, never mind support a group-buy of their prize components and release full specs for anyone to build their own. Does Barracuda install backdoors in your security gear? Does Sony distribute rootkits? Reputation takes time and Avalon are only just shipping their first full-scale product.

So I'm happy to cut them some slack for now, especially until I see an order of magnitude jump in hash-rate. I'm sorry you're so angry about it, if you've got a lot on the line it must be stressful.

Hi BitSyncom

How would the refund work? I am actually looking to sell my batch 3 as my family in visiting my small apartment. I would rather get a refund immediately than deal with escrow and all those issues?

Thanks!

Update:
A friend from the forum "yantis" asked me to cancel the refund ticket and bought the unit from me. I cancelled the ticket and we had a successful trade. He paid in full ^_^!!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=237710.msg2514804#msg2514804

open a ticket and pick the trouble type as REFUND.

support.avalon-asic.com

I just want my machine and be able to at least get to mine 2btc for two months straight... is that wishful thinking...

I am also a software developer with over 15 years commercial experience in financial trading systems and I have never seen a QA test run made with different sets of data - ever.

You can not just test the firmware / software on one device - the entire point of the test is to ensure the software has been correctly deployed to each machine. When software is deployed to a cluster do you only test one node or do you test them all - how would you know all files copied correctly and the configuration is correct?

"Cisco would not have reason to do anything similar" - If Cisco has no reason to do it nor do Avalon, Cisco fully test each device before it leaves to the customer - how else do you gain a reputation as good as theirs? There is more documentation on any Cisco device than there will ever be on any Avalon device as Cisco have an entire department that is dedicated to this.

The burn in excuse is not going to cut it there are numerous ways this could be achieved without creating such an uproar on this forum - It was a very bad decision on their part.

"Reputation takes time" and a great way to get a bad reputation is using your customers equipment to make money.

If he does not need any more BTC why do all this damage by testing on the live network which would then add to the difficulty increase further reducing the amount of money his customers can make. Given there are only a set number of Bitcoins you can NEVER make up that loss.

Honestly it is so unprofessional the mind boggles. The lack of public relations inside Avalon is not encouraging in any shape or form.

I have a feeling you guys are on the younger side early 20's maybe hence the reason you are happy to turn a blind eye, I have been around the block a few times and can categorically tell you it is not acceptable.

I am not angry I am just highlighting unacceptable business practises.

Thanks a lot BitSyncom, I just submitted the ticket :)

Update:
A friend from the forum "yantis" asked me to cancel the ticket and bought the unit from me. I cancelled the ticket and we had a successful trade. He paid in full ^_^!!

I think everyone agrees, that if mainnet wanted to be used for testing/burn-in, I think Bitcentury's approach with their Bitfury service is pretty smart.

They mine against eligius with the bitcoin sender's address, and they might take a small hosting fee while this is going on. 

This is great for everyone:
1) The unit gets tested on mainnet which is where it ultimately will be used.
2) The customer feels good because
  2.1) they can see their unit is in the final stages of preparation and they know that shipment is right around the corner
  2.2) they get to earn a small amount of btc while still waiting for their machine to ship
3) Producer can earn some additional hosting fees from the customer during the testing phase
4) Lastly and probably best for newbies... it becomes truly a turnkey solution with eligius miner address already configured for customer!  Talk about customer service!

Any ASIC manufacturers out there should be learning from this experience (maybe Avalon Batch3?), as this is how you can make get a reputation as being a customer oriented bitcoin company.

They don't believe a single iota everyone wrote about them and they totally don't admit their mistakes. Now they say if you want refund let them know, so it means they don't give a shit about you and they don't plan on selling batch 4 and for their chip sales they may discontinued anytime and it all means is that   they don't need your business, Now they prefer mining and couldn't be bother with the customer service. At the end of it all, they will say thanks for funding my project with all the pre orders  ;D

I think this is good policy.

It's good what you focus on important matter.

But PLEASE don't forget about FIRST problem happens in Feb - tickets with "Order not appearing in Store" some amount of customers waiting for resolving this issue for MONTHS, and new tickets seems ignored again so You seems don't have enough time to confirm what our orders (yes, including my order) really exists and our coins not just... disappeared? It's really take more than 1 minute per customer?  ???

You know, such a small problem REALLY worry me like another customers of 2nd batch with BLANK order page on Avalon Store.
And now this "burning?" thing come out, with continuous delays in shipping It really pissed me.

I think you underestimated proper customer service, proper customer service calm down people and at end save your time, its cost penny but if you don't know how to do proper customer service it's resulting in money loss and what really a matter in HUGE reputation loss.

Please reconsider.

So if it is not regular batch, what it is then?

If you used one master image, then please explain, why two arrived units has different pool configs?

24h burn-in is ok. But we talking not just about this 700+ BTC... Can you reveal ozco.in accounts income?

You repeated this before with no exceptions. Now we know, at least burn-in was made on main net... Why this is not the same for you? Can you explain earlier that you do burn-ins on main net?
 
Besides that, don't you think, that money earned on "burn-ins" should be managed in special way? For example donate for child charity?

Ooops.. I meant any pre-order paid to any company. We should also tack on a (10.. 50.. 100,000BTC ??) guesstimate for all Thash/s that were taken offline when all the trade ins were gobbled up.

I can know this is a huge scandal, without having to spend time on the blockchain to know it. The rounds of "Problem, Reaction, Solution" are clearly seen when you look back at the way the Crypto movement has been, and continues to be, manipulated.

Thank you David Icke. ;D Long live David Icke !! ;D

Software developer here too.

Given the different difficulty of test net compared to main net, one has to run on the main net to be sure that the customer will not receive a malfunctioning unit. (And yes, I have looked at the Cgminer source code to see how the validation of a block works if the hash is calculated on a CPU, so I know what I am talking about).

I am sure Yifu will come up with a proper destination for the BTC generated, he is not in it for the money, remember ?

And to make the picture complete, I own Avalon units.

Yifu, are you refunding BTC paid or USD equivalent? thanks.

I bet they refund the day after everyone else's ships ;)

What does that even mean - Please explain how using different input data for a QA test run could produce any kind of meaningful results?

How can you compare the output of the test runs if that is the case?

Butterfly  did a refund to a customer who wouldn't shut up .. a drama play out between Garr255 and Inaba, aka Josh, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=236794.80

Better shut up or you don't get your Miner seems to be the trend .. kind of scary ;D

edited: Garr255 apologized to Inaba/Josh and he get to keep his order I presumed..

What a night...

I recognize it's not a playstation, it's a business tool.  Obviously I bought it expecting a certain ROI, and I realize that every day delayed is delaying "breakeven day" by more than a day.

But I built in those assumptions into my expectations.

People complain that the ASIC companies aren't being professional, but frankly this isn't a professional environment.   Look through this topic of 300+ messages and compare how many messages are of the variety "they're crooks" vs. how many are professional, level-headed posts.  Frankly, if a customer comes screaming into my business that I am a crook, I feel less of a need to reply, until we can get the conversation to a reasonable, business-person to business-person level.  And if they spew venomous attacks on internet forums, any response of mine wouldn't be aimed at them, but aimed at the level-headed customers and prospects.  I have "fired" customers whom I can't make happy - they're just not worth the trouble.

I have been a part of buying IT equipment and software as business tools for 35+ years.  (and on the contrary, I have never touched a playstation in my life!   :o)  In every case I can think of, the business tools were purchased because it was believed that they would provide a certain Return on the Investment.  MANY weren't "off-the shelf" products, but instead had to be built to specification.  Back when mini-computers broke onto the scene, it was the same way - those early customers knew they were taking a chance with delays, potentially stuff that didn't perform as expected, etc. But I saw very few customers with pitchforks in hand (perhaps because I only dealt with top-tier start-up vendors, if there's such a thing)!

Regarding traditional contracts of not paying in full until the goods are received... I chose to accept the terms being offered.  I could have walked away.  But those terms (including price, risks, and 100% prepayment) were market-driven;  Had I not agreed to them, someone else would have!   So it's somewhat pointless to argue now that somehow we are being screwed because we had to pay up-front.

Frankly, if my choice up-front was to (A) pay in full (and expedite shipment), or (B) pay 30% down and receive an email when it's getting ready to ship, which would trigger my 70% payment (plus an extra fee to cover the cost of this overhead), and then it would ship upon full payment, I probably would have chosen the former anyway.  But the market didn't even demand this sort of pricing.  Avalon's "no BS terms and conditions" pretty much said it all - that this is not for people without intestinal fortitude.  "Here are the terms, take it or leave it."  I took a deep breath and sent my Bitcoins.

I knew what I was signing up for.  Yes, I'm anxious and disappointed that I don't have it yet.  But, no, I don't feel this is much different from my expectation.

TL; DR? Disappointment is par for the course when working with greedy libertarians. ("Fuck you, got mine!")

Suppose there is a bug in handling the third and higher words of the target which are all 00000000 on testnet and not all 00000000 on main net ?
This would not be discovered when only running on test net.

And to answer your request for explanation:
If the machine generates a block and the network agrees with it, it is probably ok.
If the machine generates a share and the pool agrees with it, it is probably ok.
So feeding different input data is not an issue for Bitcoin hashing QA if you have a whole network validating your "test" result.

I would still also create a testset (and a program that processes the test data) with known input and output and nothing tells me Avalon doesn't have such a program and runs this test on every machine too before connecting to the main net for their final(?) test.

And maybe they also run against the test net as a second test. The value of this test will be limited, given the few machines running here, which is logical, testnet BTC have no value.

Without word from Avalon we're not sure what they do for testing, we can only speculate, just like what I am doing here.

That was a good explanation and I see we are meeting in the middle here and that a test harness with known variables is the only way.

The real issue is not the testing lets be honest - the issue is they are using hardware that has been paid for by customers and they are generating revenue from it.

If the devices were unpaid for and the property of Avalon then they have every right to do that - but they are not the property of Avalon. They should have considered this before taking full payment.

Asked and answered... next problem please.

If they are mining for a day or two, I don't see the problem, that's a test in my mind whether it's live on the network, or not. It's only *if* they are deliberately delaying shipments to maximise mining gains for their own ends, over delivering completed hardware to paid and waiting customers that is unacceptable...

In what scenario is a manufacturer able to get only enough parts and labor to ship a only handful of units every few weeks?

http://www.butterflylabs.com/ ...;D

I don't understand why everybody claims that things are going to get so bad that people will be "mining at a loss".

If you plug in the numbers for an 66 Gh/s avalon unit, at 66 Gh/s, 600 W power draw, and about $8000 unit cost (depending on when you got it, btc value, etc...approximate), at the current difficulty of 19.2 million, you're making $180ish a day for 2 weeks.

Change that difficulty to 25 million, that is still $140ish/day. For two weeks, that's almost two grand.

Change the difficulty to 30 million, that's still $117is/day, depending on power costs, for two weeks, that's about $1600ish.

You add all that up, even with bumping up the difficulty by 5 million, every two weeks, and your ROI is somewhere around 2 months.

Granted it's not a 3 week ROI, but you can't have everything.

I think that's pretty good, as long as you didn't get raped on the up-front costs. Now, if you include waiting time for the unit, and the money you COULD have been making, that changes the formula.

Including the full waiting time into the formula changes things, but I don't think that's entirely fair, because nobody really knew how this would all play out. Surely, the earlier you mine at a lower difficulty, the greater the ROI, but nobody really had any control over that, not even Bitsyncom.

So, if they mined with their units for 2 weeks,or even a month, that probably made up, in their minds, for whatever project delay, and it served the purpose testing the longevity of their units out. They should be thanked for that, not criticized.

Look at the positive side.

Seriously, there is too much negativity around here sometimes.

Issue is - Only a set number of Bitcoins can be mined. When they are gone they are gone.

So the manufacturer is kindly decreasing the available bounty for their customers.

If you bought a bottle of spirits and the store clerk takes a swig from it after you had paid for it claiming he needs to test it.

a. Would you take the bottle and put it somewhere the sun does not shine.
b. Feel reassured that the bottle of spirits has been tested even though you receive less.

Answers on a post card please

Agreed... it is the temptation and potential conflict of interest that is causing all the drama.

I believe Yifu to be an honest man of integrity.

I also believe that Vicus' node truly was delivered with an eligius address that was pushing 3.5TH/s 3 to 4 weeks ago.  I think the simplest explanation is that someone in the supply chain seems to have gone off the reservation.  If it won't slow down processing and shipment of the current backlog, I would recommend that Yifu, as CEO and face of the company, do an internal investigation rather than dismissing it out of hand.  

Also maybe put up controls so that this PR issue won't happen again in the future.  As stated before, I think Bitcentury with their testing/validation methodology for the Bitfury products is well conceived.

"Good artists copy, but great artist steal." - T.S. Eliot jspielberg

No, seriously, in what scenario is a manufacturer able to get only enough parts and labor to ship a only handful of units every few weeks?.

Also it needs to be pointed out the total cost of development of an ASIC chip is around $250,000 for something as established as SHA256 encryption. They did not have to develop the encryption technology all they did was take an existing technology and put it on an ASIC chip

Add all the revenue received from pre orders and you will see that it was basically a no risk venture for them.

You the punters took all the risk and now they are rubbing salt in your wounds.

Also just checking http://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate there has been a massive drop in hash rate.

Would someone care to explain this?

To me it looks like a significant number of ASIC's have just gone offline


It's amazing that they would actually sh*t on their own doorsteps and then take issue because we are complaining about the stench.


Average block time is heading towards 20 mins at the moment - so whoever was responsible - NICE ONE.Now we are all going to be sitting around longer trying to generate the same revenue. This is a classic lesson in how to shaft everyone in the Bitcoin mining community in one go.

So not only are their customers being denied revenue - everyone else that was mining is now suffering.

Hate to say that, but that is actually good news for all folks who are waiting for their Avalons to arrive, It means that current difficulty will stay a bit longer, and current asics owners will generate lower income due to lower number of blocks generated.

What about that promised update they have mentioned in newsletter? they promised picture of a ton units ready to be shipped. Can't wait to see them, with little explanation which batch are they.

Forget the newsletter. I just want to receive my Avalon machine.
I saw someone with 21XX order number already received. But my 13XX order still nothing updated.

Buddy what you are talking about their is MARKET MANIPULATION so in that light it is fine to punish everyone that has not bought an Avalon?

So now instead of Bankers and Market traders manipulating the stock market we have someone doing the same with the Bitcoin Difficulty.

This is really going to help the project as a whole?

Guys with these attitudes your Avalons are not going to be worth shit when people decide that this behaviour is reprehensible and stop trading bit coins and move onto the next thing.

It is basically I am OK Jack but F**k the rest of you and the project as a whole.

How do you not see this.

Did you follow the instructions on how to open the ticket? Exactly how it was written?
Just wait now, you are in China probably wont get the tracking number

Somebody said that before they ship they will give you a call to confirm your address if you are in China. But till now I received nothing. No inform mail, no tracking# and no phone call.

Approximately half is due to AM.  The rest can be attributed to variance.

http://www.asicminercharts.com/

I haven't been following the AM threads (as I am not a shareholder). 

Did FriedCat provide an explanation as to why AM cut 1/2 their hash rate since the last difficulty readjust (not that I am complaining!)?

Thanks for that it does clear things up.

But then what the hell are ASICMiner doing - this is a perfect example of why the network needs to be decentralised.

Is this a new form of attack to squeeze out the smaller players? Increase the difficulty to such a point and then reduce hashrate to dramatically increase the time between difficulty adjustments. Hence making it impossible to pay the costs.

A similar thing was done to Bytecoins and it destroyed it - plus it was shite anyway but the fact still stands.

Is it possible that they met insufficient power supply issue because of high temperature in south China?

This is actually cool.

I'm not an apologist for BitcoinEdison, but there isn't any way to know if their reduction caused the network drop itself, or if their reduction was in response to other capacity moving offline, leading them to cut back to maintain their [1/6 ... 1/4] of total network hash rate level?

"I'm not an apologist for BitcoinEdison",  :) That was a good one.

It just shows though they have far to much influence on something that was supposed to be decentralised. Either way this is not a good omen for Bitcoins if I am honest.

If there was a fire in the Data Centre where they are hosting and all the equipment was destroyed it would have a massive impact on the amount of time transactions take to process.

Maybe is best to file a support ticket with your details  :)

Can you spell 500 Ghash ?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=237710.0;topicseen

Are these some of the fpgas the miners were conned into trading away ?
http://img.techpowerup.org/130619/IMG_20130618_171440.jpg

Yes I can Five Hundred Gigahashes. Not really sure what point you are making.

How is the mining going at BTCMine? Enjoying your 10 day stint for 0.1 bitcoins?

It also indicates why the stepwise linearity of difficulty is a far less important metric when massive swings in network capacity can and do happen, and how the centralized operations can and will game that.

For example, right after a diff. reset, a big operator can bring a chunk of capacity online and jump BpH up to around 8 or more.  In fact,the marginal small unit isn't going to contribute in that enhanced bounty, only the centralized power is mathematically positioned to extract that "bonus."

Gaming abounds.  With regard to this network drop, though, something happened somewhere, I don't think there's any question, and that goes right to the point you made.
  

I am glad to see I am not the only one with concerns.

To me the writing is already on the wall I am sorry to say - this is a fatal flaw with Bitcoins and will come to fruition.

All anyone would has to do is take down a couple of the big players and that's it - everything will grind to a halt. Happens continuously with the alt currencies.

I wonder if the technical solution is to set the difficulty based on the previous 1,600 or so blocks at the time the mining is performed. 

One idea could be - instead of changing the difficulty just change reward - leave the difficulty at a fixed level so you can always mine solo, and make it fully resistant to ASIC's by using a random algorithm for encryption (no idea how this would work but it needs some element of randomness which will make ASIC development impossible)

The key elements are this - anyone should be able to buy the hardware next day / same day (this will stop the likes of ASIC miner grabbing such a large share because of proprietary technology)  - It will only run on off the shelf hardware. Discourage mining pools by removing the difficulty issue which is the only reason people join mining pools.

The reward should trade places with difficulty so only a set number of coins are produced in the given period.

This is the only way to discourage centralisation of coin generation and transaction processing. Its the difficulty changes that have created this problem - and it is only getting worse - even with 200ghs you are looking at between 10 and 30 days to solve one block. That is monster no one can do that solo.

On Slush's pool one round was 90 million shares - that is just insane.

I imagine there is going to be a cull of the smaller mining pools in the very near future as they are now taking too long to make payouts which will then further centralise the coin generation.

umm.. BFL rigs = network hashrate flux

WTF does the pool I'm at have to do with this ? Get a better calculator and stop trying to distract others from the matters at hand.

Regardless my 1.4 ghash earns, I was having a freaking blast, even during this dry spell, thanks to having the peace of mind knowing that ITS AN HONEST 10 DAYS PAY. I say 'was' because these revelations have made the plot to centralize Bitcoin and rip off the miners, BLATANTLEY CLEAR.

For you or ANYONE to justify any company's burnin policy, implies of a conflict of interest. THEY MINED BTC WITH THE MINER'S PRE PAID PROPERTY. THEY, WHO EVER THEY ARE MUST BE HELD TO ACCOUNT.

As a show of solidarity to all those who have be taken advantage of, I'll will be taking the rest of my 2.2 ghash offline, when the current round is completed.

WE ARE THE 75% !! Soon to be 99%. :/

That's what's currently happening. The difficulty is no about difficulty, it's a ratio of the hashrate and block discovery time (difficulty = hashrate/(2⁴⁸ - 65535)), it ensures you only get x number of coins every 10 mins, re-evaluated every 2016 blocks.

Terracoin and others have been on that ride for weeks and likely months.

Well you felt the need to act like a tool with your comment of can I spell - you get treated like one.

And to further the matter you have just made yourself look like rather idiotic. You obviously have not read any of my posts as I was the one ARGUING that using customers equipment to mine is unacceptable.

Man don't just steam roller in mouthing off like a cretin without reading the thread. Only one outcome you look dumb.

As someone else pointed out the fluctuation was due to ASICMiner nothing to do with a couple of 500ghs BFL units - as the change was huge but unsurprisingly you did not bother to check that either.

Also using the same username across multiple sites is not clever either as you can be easily identified.                                                                                                                                                                         

You missed my point - I understand how the difficulty currently works - but if you swapped the 2 around instead of difficulty changing the reward does - end result same number of coins produced but you would still be able to mine solo.

The difficulty is causing the centralisation of the network nothing else.

HOw would you go about block halves? And getting to an end number?

I don't know to be honest - but I do know the difficulty is causing the centralisation of the network and this is the issue.

Twenty-something? I'm flattered, really. Not all software is tested like financial trading systems. From your statements about deployments you've maybe never used puppet or chef -- are you a Windows guy?

I've been on the receiving-end of plenty of unacceptable business practices, most of it extortion by estate agents. Inflation has annoyed me for years, watching the prices march up faster than wages were rising. Negative equity left one family member up the creek and that was upsetting at the time. Hearing about share prices for huge companies double and crash overnight, affecting millions of people's lives, always for the negative, makes me furious.

I'm happy to wait for my chips if there's a chance some of these things could be fixed in the long-term. You invested in four young guys doing something experimental and potentially world-changing. Also, CISCO have awful business practices. You have to pay a huge tithing every year to move up the greasy pole and miss it just one time because you're too busy to do the exam and you're right back down at the bottom. Ain't nobody got time for that!

Meanwhile, many Avalon customers got their shipping notices ... and the bitcoin network dropped over the last couple of days ...

Centralisation is ... single places mining large hash rates ...
Difficulty is an effect not a cause.

I've shut down my GPU farm  :-\

http://www.asicminercharts.com/

I'm sorry, but comments like these seem so defeatist. Are you up for changing bitcoin if we find something that makes it more "fair" and decentralized (invulnerable to a rich group controlling all mining)?

Yo, looks like you can all chill: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=238391.msg2524247#msg2524247

Is there any logical explanation why would ASICMINER reduce it's hashing power so drastically?

LOL yes I am a windows guy :)

I apologise if I seemed demeaning but you are so tolerant :)

Business does not care about age - you are either professional or not - there is no middle ground.

These guys have not done anything world changing they are just riding off the back of a world changing idea - decentralised currency. They have take two existing technologies and put them in one box. That is all they have done.

The fact is this - the manner in which this technology is being rolled out is causing the real damage. The smaller mining pools are now taking forever to get any kind of payout from because of the massive increase in difficulty due to the chosen few with asics, so they will end up closing down as miners move to somewhere where they can get a payout once a week. The network then becomes more centralised. As the difficulty keeps rapidly increasing mining pools may end up merging to get regular payouts.

The profits being made by people with ASICs at the moment are astronomical so they will reinvest further strengthening their position making it impossible for the little guys to get involved because by the time they are readily available you will need to order 20 units just to keep your head above the water.

The reason this did not happen when people started mining with GPU's is because anyone could buy them next day - this is not the case with ASIC's. I have the money but can I go onto avalon's site and buy one. NO is the answer to that.

Everything about it stinks - it is honestly destroying the entire point of Bitcoins. How can it be called a decentralised currency when it will be a few mining pools and ASICminer.

I am sorry but these guys are damaging bitcoin to satisfy their own personal greed.

Man you have got that so backwards - why would I join a mining pool if the difficulty was only 1000? The only reason people join mining pools is because they know with the difficulty as high as it is - they may NEVER solve a block solo mining.

The difficulty is the cause of the mining pools and centralization

So is basically every profiteering nutbag running the largest businesses in bitcoin. Do you think they're all interested in bitcoin to succeed for any reason other than to increase their own holdings off of suckers? Is there anyone left in this community who tough-loves bitcoin, enough to support it but also smack it silly when it needs it, or is it all corporate dick sucking cultist airheads and their MLM marketing meeting manager sociopaths who are too busy giving interviews, filing lawsuits against competitors, and begging the community to not let them fail because they're too big and important for the "cause"?

Screw big business, screw people with propaganda and agendas, let's use bitcoin and vote with our bitcoin, not with a subscription membership to self importance, or ass kissing to false prophets. Bitcoin may be a "money game" by its nature, but it is no better than fiat if we keep giving people control over it for us.

:) I like that response

Hat tip to you Sir

No man but they did a great job in causing a massive spike in difficulty and then causing block generation times to increase when they went offline.

Perfect example of why they should not be doing what they are doing.

If I chew through the power cables feeding their Data Centre and they go offline for a while the rest of us would be up shit creek as there would not be enough hashing power left on the network to process transactions in a reasonable time given the current difficulty.

These cretins are going to destroy this currency - I only hope they take themselves out with it.

Chill out man. Who are you to speak like that? You've no idea what is the reason behind this, might be power shortage or things that cannot be controled. Anyway they are the most reliable company in the BTC hardware world, so they bring some value into the currency, not the opposite. Next time you think somebody is a "cretin", I suggest you think about it twice; no wait, I suggest you just shut up.

I can't believe you took the 'spell 500 ghash' comment personally. lmao Did you wish there was a smile face ? ;D Lighten up.

So.. plz explain why AsicMiner would suddenly show as 'other' ?  ??? ???

I saw how easily you agreed with that and felt I had to call you out on it. Your response is quite telling.

If you would like to discuss this .. then by all means do. Or.. sign in with one of your alter-egos and I'll try to guess if its you again. :P

I use the same name because one is all I need. Pretty stupid huh ?

Very interested to see if any of them will contain more logs...

Do the owners know how to look ?

If you can not see the problem with one company that can impact the entire network when they have a power outage on what is supposedly a decentralised currency then you do not understand what the entire point of bitcoins were.

They have gone totally against the whole ethos of the coin.

Read the whitepaper.

I am actually going to apologise - I was out of line sorry.

I have been arguing with people all day long - I totally agree with you and your stand against ASIC;s we are on the same side here.

But the ASIC miner chart does coincide very nicely with drop in Network hash

As if it wasn't expected.

Get everyone to pay you for developing.
Mine.
Mine.
Mine.
Mine.
Ship everything to get the hype up, so everyone buys next batch.

Difference between all these manufacturers is simply the length of Mine.Mine.Mine phase



props to Vicus (OP) for detailed post

Brilliant mate - mine mine mine - some turbo mining - followed by more mining and then leaving the unit fully rapped in a ditch ready for the customer.

Getting DDOS'ed?

Bitminter has been going down and up a few times in the past week.

No worries. ;)

pEACe

rovchris you need to extract yourself from the bitcoin picture and see the big picture there at work.

And sadly I will have to remind you that you and me are slaves to technology.

Just like we are ultimately in the hand of governements-we are all slaves to nuclear bomb and they can trigger it.

Technology will one day enable us to go to space though, so I am in.

ASiCS are freedom.

Some people need to see the thing with their own eyes before buying their first bitcoin.

When will they be available in timely manner or correctly priced? Never. Get used to it. Avalon's chip will only ROI if ready to mine for september.

Greed is good, it is what made bitcoin what it is today after all :) More obvious is price manipulation...

All slaves to SHA256 and transistors! (wikipedia:In March 2013 American researchers at Stanford University announced they had built a transistor out of DNA and RNA molecules)

IMO, things aren't that bad.  Certainly not bad enough to mandate fundamental changes to bitcoin.  Everyone has known that astronomical network hash rate would arrive.  But it's not going to run away until Moore's Law limit or until the speed of light is reached (a barrier that the High Frequency Traders in the stock market are actually facing, BTW; GOOG Reuter's preannouncement release 15 milliseconds Chicago New York).  

It'll stop because of mathematical - game theoretic - reasons.  If Satoshi didn't foresee that, then they weren't so omniscient after all.  But it's not fatal.  The next-Thps-online soon be very cheap for the big concerns, but it's never going to be free.  So that will, itself, form the backstop limit.

It sure looks like something happened in terms of power. The decline (see here, e.g.,  ) is so linear, it sure looks like uninterpretables and backup systems running until one by one, they had to shut down, too.  

Maybe it is all a plot, but then, tell me the motive.  

And no, I don't want to put on the tinfoil "it's Avalon unplugging the boxes to pack and ship em" hat.

G'night.

Pretty sad when Avalon team adamantly declared that there is no reason to use main net for burn-in.  Which is true.


So, Avalon calls shame to BFL.  Then they do it themselves.  Sad, but not surprised.

regardless of the cause, it's a significant flaw / limitation / vulnerability, that should be addressed.
What was the percentage of (HR) power lost to have such a significant impact?
What about a temporary outage, how long is too long before the damage is done?

It is 03:00 UTC, and the network hash rate is again over 150 Thps.  Since the bottom of the trough, at about 106, the restoration path has been essentially linear and the rate nearly constant.  Something broke or needed systematic changeout/fix, which required as much as 50 Thps to go off line.  Some of it could have been defensive, with miners going off line when network rate fell below implied difficulty (Bph dropping significantly below 6).  

EDIT: Here's a graph: http://bitcoincharts.com/

Yifu dodging direct questions again:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1gonqe/avalon_claims_to_have_started_mass_shipping_via/camdqk3

How is "I don't do it" a dodge?

do people even read? I think I need to explain things like everyone is 5 years old in the future.

He has finally answered  the specific issue I and others have, namely a client receiving a machine that had apparently been mining.

The excuse provided is that is not from a clients machine but from a "test machine" and that the firmware was copied without the setting being removed. It is plausible, but still raises the question what is test hardware vs clients hardware.

He is still most likely lying out his ass, but oh well.


Queue Josh style tantrums for not believing him @ his word, hell it only took ~10 forums pages before we got a direct answer !!!!