Bitcoin Forum

From the T&Cs at https://hashfast.com/checkout/terms-of-sale/

Bumping 'cos folk should be aware.

To be fair with the company not knowing how you are going to treat the hardware and the amount of over-clocking you will do, 10 days seems sufficient to make sure its mining.   With difficulty rising, people will be doing whatever that can to get the most out of their hardware and likely it would be things that would typically void a standard warranty.   

Maybe you should ask them for a official response to your question so we can read their perspective on why they decided to do this.


Question:  How long do you think they should warranty the devices?

Let me be the first to say "Fuck everything about that" and "Nothing speaks higher to the quality of your product than only warranting it for 10 days after delivery"

I think it should be inline with the other manufacturer's warrantee.  I think bitfurystrikesback is two years.  I think the shelf live of these machines are probably 6 months of profitable mining (being optimistic).  I would say 1year is a non insulting number.

With a 10 day warranty, HashFast is basically saying that they don't stand behind their product, so why should I buy it?

I won't buy it with that pitiful warranty.

   If miner died after 10 days of use then some buyers wont get ROI back.

I have no affection for BFL, however:


https://products.butterflylabs.com/homepage/50-gh-s-bitcoin-miner.html


https://products.butterflylabs.com/homepage-new-products/600-gh-bitcoin-mining-card.html

I'm sure the company sock puppet will be bumping the 92587495 hashfast threads sometime soon and may offer some very valuable consumer insight on this gaff.... ha

I'm talking with our lawyer right now about extending the warranty against defects to a more reasonable 30 days.

Will let you know the results when I have them. I'd expect that will be before the end of today.

Amy Woodward

VP Engineering
HashFast

No.  They're saying they have no reason to stand behind anything for which you've prepaid, but "warranty" is a buzzword the customer pool likes, so they had to make one up.

 You still don't get it, do you ?

 You're wasting all of our time if you don't at least consider a standard 90 days, or 1 year at the very least.

It really should at least coincide with the MPP. How else can you make ROI if the product stops working?

@Amy
Hmm... when you talk to the lawyer you might want want to run past them if they think it is a good idea to have a warrantee that is shorter than the terms of the MPP.  Seems like you have a disconnect there (90 days vs 10 or 30).

Oh, they get it, all right.  From the get-go, now for the third time I have to use the phrase "too clever by half."   They were going to see if they could slip 10 days by.  Got noticed.  Now they'll up the bidding, until the uproar fades.  

Hashfast is likely the last of the pre-order phase of the asic revolution. (I think cointerra won't make it out of the starting gate now.)  It's not likely they'll have an on-going business chance to return to the well again, so they have to pump as much out now as they can.    

30 days? How about 12 months, if you're so certain about your products? :)

30 days seems really short for a $4500 computer product - don't most warranties on computer equipment last at least a year??  Even if they offered to sell an extended warrenty it seems like a better idea then putting it at 10 days!  Seriously - if I had it for 11 days and it started on fire and they told me they wouldn't cover it (even though I was operating in all the "appropriate" conditions) I'd be seriously pissed off!  Thanks for catching this...

has KNC represented that you can overclock their chips?

Relevant to HashFast warranty how?

in the sense that HF would like to meet the competition.

by reading their 12 mo warranty it appears, to me at least, that you will not be allowed to OC in order to keep the warranty relevant.

i would like to know if it's even possible to OC one.  what have you found out?

the HF chip will be overclockable hence this is a risk that they have to build into the warranty.

I was going to ask the same thing, but he's off line now.  I hope the answer isn't that Hashfast has represented that you can overclock theirs. 

Because, then, in the context of the warranty, the logic would go:  we say you can overclock, but it will likely burn the chip or some other component, but that's not our fault, since you overclocked it, so we shouldn't have to warranty it. 

I hope I'm totally wrong on that.  That spin would just be, well, too clever by half.

Miner protection plan that provides raw chips and requires customer to pay more money to get them hashing (90 day MPP): check
Avoiding most consumer protection (which is funny they care about miner protection but not consumer protection, aren't they the same people?): check
10 day warranty for an almost 5k product to go along with all the miner and consumer protection: check
Full payment pre-order months in advance with no refunds possible until 2 months AFTER estimated delivery: check
Clsuter fuck with shopping cart launch (goddamn Kryptonite!): check

Yup they're just like the rest, carry on!

That makes no logical sense.   Also, it has nothing whatsoever to do with KnC.  Intel CPUs can be overclocked too, and they come with a three year warranty. http://www.intel.com/support/processors/sb/CS-009862.htm

sure it does. HF only needs to meet the competition in the asic mining space.  not Intel.  Avalon had no warranties whatsoever and that hasn't stopped ppl from buying their products.

and OC'ing needs to be considered as it is abusive to the equipment as we all know.

We can easily offer a one year warranty for the box, psu, and module (board).

The chip is trickier. We need some way to discourage overclockers from toasting their chips. Offering unlimited replacements for free would be a bad business model.

I'm not suggesting that people overclock this or any chip. But we all know - some people do overclock. Let's not pretend they don't.

I still pledge to have an updated warranty by EOD.

Amy

VP Engineering
HashFast

I think we should be a little more reasonable.  This is for the most part, experimental equipment that is going to be hacked and over-clocked by the nature of the Bitcoin network.  

Imho, one year is too long and I would say 10 days seems a tad short.  30-60 days is what I would expect.  When you get a one year warranty, you have to remember that the hardware was produced on a billion dollar production line.  Yes the chips are made on this type of line but the rest of the parts are mostly custom and hand produced before shipping.  

Likely this situation will only get worse as a dwindling supply of Bitcoins will be chase by more and more high powered miners.


-D

So I was right up at post #22.  Son of a bitch; this really is the other side of the looking glass.

You know what?  This is all -and I don't mean just Hashfest- getting to be too much.  

It was fun, interesting to watch the arc of the hardware development, the love affair with KnC, basking in the limelight of the one eyed man in the land of the blind.  

It was amusing to watch the pure scams of the spring and early summer get exposed and trampled.

BCCcoin's work, and the community effort, the spontaneous generation of the cottage industry of Klondike assemblers, was a thing of beauty.  I was actually blindsided by BitSynCom too; I didn't see it coming, although, after the fact, it's so clear with 20-20 hindsight.

But now, I've had it with transparent bullshit.  I've had it with the pre-order model. I've had it with the lies of the promoters.  I've had it with the nonsense they try to rationalize after the fact.

And I've had it with the push-pull of empathy and scorn for the vast pool of ignorant prey animals who are actually people who have hopes and dreams.  

I have to let it go.

I'm still going to be around; Phinneas Gage's investigative work, and the audacity of BFL, are so fascinating I can't let that go.  But as far as Hashfast, cointerra, even KnC goes: as Rhett Butler said better than I could ever hope to do:  Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.  

As a customer I'd be happy with 90 day chip warranty to coincide with the MPP and 1 year equipment warranty (case, PSU, cooler, etc.). Thanks Amy for looking into this.

Lolz.
"Chip Specifications

28nm custom ASIC
Hashing Output: 400 Gigahash/s at nominal clock speed
Power Consumption: significantly less than 1.0 W/GH at nominal clock speed
Designed to be underclocked for greater efficiency – better than 0.5 W/GH*
Designed to be overclocked for greater performance – better than 500GH/s**"

It's designed to overclock, but we need some way to discourage people from doing it.  
So we only guarantee our chips for ten days -- no matter what clock you run them at. 8)
Surprize!

You forgot Bitfury! Expensive with working product but not as expensive as Block Eruptors..

1yr Manufacturer Warranty is Standard across the electronics industry.

To be honest im not suprised...



Its a shame, i was actually rooting for them. At this point its blatantly obvious that hashfast has some issues that reflects the type of perception they have .. 10 days.. Thats laughable! Its almost pathetic.. Its a blatant spit in the face to people ponying up 5k+ to support them.
 

You can do alot better hashfast.  

I think these Asic companys are under the impression they can sustain a cycle of high prices, piss poor support, and products that are outdated when they get into customers hands. Its down right embarrassing, some of these venture's cant even put up a website with a half decent shopping cart. They cant even write a privacy policy or mission statements.. they are using templates and basically are under the impression that their customers are there to be abused.

Its not just one company.. its the whole lot of them! Its almost standard practice to have the website fail during purchase! Were are talking large purchase's and not some $30 trinket off ebay! These Asic company's have their nose so high in the air that they are not even responding to tickets or calls for support. Its not just Avalon who cant put up a simple site to take orders .. its Avalon, xcrowd, hashfast, bfl and between them they have set a standard of ABUSE!  

Look at all the customers who have basically been spit on ... Their requests for refunds fall on deaf ears, missing orders, no confirmation emails..  No reps making announcements. While you the customer do your part and pay dearly in btc and or cash to the tune of thousands sometimes tens of thousands, the companies are basically swimming in your cash and parleying it into multi million dollar ventures that are able to operate without YOU!

Once they have your btc or $, they will just use it for development and mine themselves! They have absolutely zero incentive to support or back their products. They have ZERO incentive to provide an even half way decent support system.

I am not at the least bit surprised at a 10 day warranty. In fact i would have expected it to be 3 days.. with a requirement that you need a notarized letter from hasfast accepting the return with a minimum wait time of 3 months and YOU pay the cost of shipping both ways!

Its really reflective not only on their perception of their position but its also reflective of their company, their standards.. and its a SIGN of whats to come! This wont be the last time an ASIC company spits in our face but until people DEMAND a standard of better behavior its not going to get better!

Maybe when need to have a sub forum of lawyers on site that are pro consumer and ready to take action for some of these group buy and even some of the individuals that paid and are getting the run around!


Imagine the kind of gut wrenching feeling you will have when your piss poor product blows a bunch of capacitors on the 11th day!!  

If its not a piss poor product than the manufacturer will support it with a decent warranty because they have faith in their engineering, materials and build quality!

But thats not the case here. What we have are a group of Asic developers who have standardized making products that have a minimal lifespan and they back it with piss poor websites, piss poor support, piss poor marketing and an overall feeling that after they take your funds you are going to be lucky if you ever see a product let alone find ROI!

While they on the other hand are swimming in profits and have no intention of delivering their promises!

https://hashfast.com/shop/babyjet/

See the bottom on the babyjet web page, the part that labeled shipping!

See how it says "Shipments "anticipated" to begin: October 20-30, in order of purchase"

I anticipate that im going to be a millionaire by 2016 but that doesn't mean its remotely going to happen! Your selling a time sensitive product that looses its purchase value astronomically if its not delivered on time!

We don't want "anticipation" we want a guarantee!!

I dont mean to be over critical of hashfast.. because i was over critical of KNC and i "may" have misspoken but and as it stands im not so sure buying an ASIC from "anyone" is a smart move as KNC hasn't shown a working product either. I had a lot of faith in Avalon and that has all but diminished. I think they let things get out of control and it may just be circumstances out of their control but the trail of blood from their chip sales tell a different story... Cointerra seemed like they were going to finally set the ASIC space straight but they are a rinse and repeat of the business models and practices currently in place!  


Until we have one company that will put us first.. Its "difficult" at best to take them seriously!

They are under that impression because there are enough optimistic buyers to support them.  Just look at the Monarch, it appears to be selling well despite all Josh and BFL have done to try and convince people not to buy their stuff!  Look at the numbers from an investment stand point, there is a very strong argument that simply buying and holding BTC is a much less risky investment than mining, and even if mining pays off as a better investment the margin of extra profit doesn't seem to correlate to the extra risk associated with it (again look at BFL for clear examples of how holding BTC would have been significantly better than mining).  For every person that doesn't like or support these type of companies there are 20 optimists waiting to take the gamble cause hey mining with ASIC will make you filthy rich now right?

See my signature regarding websites.

^^ Nice sig! Its spot on!!

HashFast are an utter joke.

Avalon has zero warranty.  Did it stop anyone then?  Maybe a few...

    The MPP isn't based on your actual ROI It's based on the ROI you should be able to achieve taking into account the network difficulty and nominal performance so if you did something stupid and killed your chip that's not covered so I don't see why the warranty length being less than the ROI time frame is inconsistent.

I'm not implying that HashFast is doing this but it would make sense that a mining hardware company that both sells hardware and mines themselves would offer an extremely short warranties.

They then could use extremely cheap components that have a mean time failure to failure measured in the days or weeks. They would then pre-sell as much hardware as possible before they ship. Then, after shipping the average miner would die in a month. They wouldn't get new orders because their reputation would suffer but it wouldn't matter because they would have pre-sold all the hardware they planned on making. Finally, and this is the key part, since all the hardware they sold is now dead, the difficulty would stay nice and low for their own mining operation.

We've spent some of the day hashing (!) over warranty options for those chips of ours.

As I mentioned earlier today, the 10-day warranty was legal boilerplate. And we can and will give a longer warranty for the box, psu, and board.

But for the chips, we cannot realistically offer even a 90-day warranty.

   Because with open source software, and overclocking we don't know what people will try and push these things to do.

What we *can* offer is a program to replace fried chips. You break one (after some initial period - 10 days?), you ship it back to us, and we will send you a new one. Probably including the motherboard, to be safe. Not for free, mind you. But for a helluva lot cheaper than a new mining rig.

We are still working out the details (logistics and price).

We're just assuming that someone, somewhere out there will push the chips too hard. And we are trying to do right by those people, without being chumps.

Check out the thread starting around https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=262052.msg2976145#msg2976145 for discussion of some of the technology that makes our chips run cool & fast.

Dear Amy,

You claim that your chip is engineered to be overclocked. 
You refuse to guarantee the chip for more than 10 days, because it could be overclocked.
Are you as delighted as i am by a peculiar ... je ne sais quoi this creates?

i have not seen one hint whatsoever that HF intends to mine.

Why wouldn't they?  Why would they tell you?

Nope, soldout quick. 

nope, they wouldn't.

you'll just have to trust my judgment of the situation.

Why would they mine when they can sell chips for more then they'd ever ROI at?. They'd be throwing money away!

Especially when their chips will blow up after 11 days anyway.

Because they can ROI at crazy fast speed when nobody else is mining.  You really think they are not marking up the price of those chips by a huge amount?  I would bet that they could ROI in a few days since they would have miners running before they even are thinking of shipping to customers.  Then they have the burn in test machines for a day or two to make sure they work  ;)

Sure, but they'd make more money by simply selling it then they ever would by mining.  It's called "opportunity cost", by mining with the chip they lose the opportunity to sell it at crazy-expensive prices.

^^^ STOP!  You're both right!  They'll mine *and* sell later.  It's called testing & burnin.

10 days to 30 days. :) It's like a addict telling you they *promise* to stop for 10 days. Wait, 30 days. You have 30 days free of addiction, guaranteed!

Hello Amy.
Maybe you guys should consider an extended warranty program for the chips, without terms, like intel does.

http://click.intel.com/tuningplan/

With the intel warranty above, I can do whatever the hell I want to a CPU, give it 2 volts under LN2 and kill it because my board got wet or because of electromigration and still get a new chip back.

No doubt Intel spent a lot of time making sure their chips don't blow up if you do crazy stuff to them, like blocking voltage that's too high and ensuring they shut down properly if they get to hot. Sounds like HashFast hasn't done that.

Why did Avalon ship Batch1 miners? Those miners made $100k. And why did they ship them instead of mining themselves?

Well, there's a lot of evidence they did mine for themselves, as well as sending them out. In fact, Avalons all came pre-configured to mine on a certain eligus.st account, which saw a lot of action.  Either from Avalon itself or people who forgot to re-configure it when they received their units.

FTFY. It's a smelly business, no doubt, but let's not exaggerate the facts and turn speculation into an absolute.

Are we talking of 10 days warranty for a chip In the working unit or bare chip warranty?

Its insane to have 10 days warranty for a complete product. Whoever accept this deserve to have problems!

Complaining about hard overclockers is an easy tactics BUT how can clients be sure Hashfast didnt use the cheapest components like capacitors, low quality, overloaded voltage regulators, PCB with too thin connections. Finally - how we will know if chip isn't already overclocked to provide advertised hashing speed?

Hashfast consciously disregards difficult questions (in main HF thread), make bold statements and finally come to this shieat.

People - don't be stupid. Unless HF clear those issues - don't buy vaporware. Especially if so many elements of this show looks so badly.

1. Before assembly/shipping HashFast chips/units should be well tested and subjected to multiple stress-cool-stress burn-in cycles.  But the more thorough the test, the longer we wait for delivery.  Perhaps a performance enthusiast line, akin to Intel's Extreme Editions, is in order.

2. The factory burn-in, plus 10-30 days of continuous end-user use, is long enough for the vast majority of manufacturing defects to manifest into noticeable problems.

2. Optional extended warranties are a good idea and will save ambitious overclockers much heartbreak.  The time lost in exchange provides adequate incentive against abuse of HashFast's generosity.  HF must cherish and support the OC community, which will provide invaluable goodwill, publicity, and crowdsourced data on yields/tweaks/etc in return.

3. It may be possible, through firmware and/or hardware temperature sensors, to establish abusive conditions which void the basic/extended warranty.  Expensive wine has stickers which change color if the bottle has been cooked, ditto cell phones and moisture (to use a notoriously bad example of doing it wrong).

4. Another possible model is AMD GPU drivers, which require end-user click-through before unlocking OC capabilities.

5. 2nd gen HF chips may have more advanced idiot-proofing (embedded thermal/voltage sanity overrides ala Intel), as focus shifts from being the first 28nm ASIC to being the most advanced, full featured one.

6. ASIC companies are invariably started by hyper-specialized EECS eggheads.  Expecting them to provide a slick site/cart/UX from Day 1 is totally unreasonable, exactly like when you ask the colorblind webmonkeys to pick the theme or graphic design and they just laugh at you.

So I just got a mailout from HashFast pushing sales - I thought I'd bump this for the sake of anyone who hadn't seen it and is thinking about buying from them.  It's worth pointing out that regardless of anything said in this thread by them, the HashFast terms of sale warranty clauses are unchanged.

Glad to see a dialogue between the community and the fabricators...

Warranty on any products for mining seem to be a real issue. Some of the DIY builds offer nothing more than best efforts and as is conditions for buying due in part to the very limited testing available and time frames that drive the project there is little or no time to actually do lengthy stress testing of units.

Can HashFast detail how it will go about testing the units it will offer?

Seems like people are asking for more of warranty on the chips as that is the core component and probably the focal point of failure. It seems interesting to offer the MPP but not as much "protection" on the basic chip.  Can you explain more about that reasoning?

another proof of who you are... today we know much about yours real intentions...  you completly screwed your batch one customers , you promised, promised , promised and alwals FAILED !

Who the hell fell for this garbage!! Ten day warranty because people may overclock, basing specs on overclocking.. Rofl

10 days is a fairly standard DOA warranty.  HashFast isn't going to pick up the tab for miners who run their hardware too fast/hot.

STFU troll. Nobody believes anything you say. Standard warranty? You're fooling yourself. Anything I buy in electronics has at least a 90 day warranty. Are you trying to compare these sales to the shit someone may claim as a "warranty" on ebay? That is not a warranty. Neither is this. This is a scam.

Standard warranty?

Uh. I may be remembering incorrectly, but I believe most states have implied warranties of fitness and merchantability which are difficulty to wave, and cannot be waved for goods sold as new with a duration of something like 30 days.

The rationale goes— "You sold me a Bitcoin miner, but instead gave me a device that works for 10 days and quit. That wasn't a Bitcoin miner, it's a defective Bitcoin miner", and no amount of hand-waving about contract terms changes that fact that what you purported to sell was a miner rather than a defective miner. When you sell someone a "bitcoin miner", for the purpose of mining bitcoin and you know what it's to be used for and they know whats its to be used for and you know that they know that you know what its to be used for— well then it darn well ought to actually be useful for that purpose and one that fails in 10 days isn't by any reasonable standard.

Of course, someone can write anything they like into a contract... but if the contract holds up or if their business can survive the loss of goodwill that would come from screwing people with a defective product— are both other matters.

I'd be pretty surprised if anyone considered ten days "standard"... and, in fact, it seems to be so unusual that googling for the phrase "ten day warranty" brings up this thread (amid a sea of other pages talking about 90 day standard warranties, with 10 days to return RMAed goods).

 ^*Citation needed

10 day money back guarantee...

90 day warranty...

Never seen a 10 day warranty on anything electronic let alone anything at all, most are 1 year right?

---------

Why not just admit what is being sold not unlike the BeagleBoard. Most ASIC's should come with NO WARRANTY to be brutally honest given the testing that is not done on the units being offered across the board.

The difference being that a beagle board is considered disposable at 150 bucks and readily available.  The baby jet is 50 to 60 BTC and not easy to come by a replacement.   Other than that, I agree.  

Even before the exchange rate jump, the pricing of the item was not in the disposable category.

Amy -

Did the easy one year extension for all parts but the chip get put into effect?

Especially since the chip runs @ 76 degrees *underclocked* according to HF. Combine that with their warranty statement on ambient operating temperature:


Also goes to show how much trust they put in their own thermal throttling system built into the chip:

Getting a year warranty which was mentioned as something they could do easily by their VP of Engineering on the PCB would be worth something.

A 10 day warranty on a new electronic device is bizarre, makes you wonder about the hardware.

Refurbished electronics typically come with a 90-day warranty and most new components come with a 1-year warranty.

Weird.

You have (perhaps intentionally) left out the key word from my post:


I've now put that key word in GIANT FUCKING RED LETTERS to better penetrate your jaundiced eye.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defective_on_arrival

It's too bad there is no way to detect that this chip has been overclocked. No warranty is unfortunate. I would like to hear more about this chip replacement program.

$5000 electronic devices are not sold with doa warranties assclown. Like I said earlier, only used equipment sellers offer that.

I like that ice has a glowing ignore button.

Ice -

Welcome back!  Happy Holidays....
I don't know if you are associated with HF or have any communications channels with them, but if you could remind Amy of her pledge to easily extend the warranty to one year for the non-golden nonce components like the hashing module, it would be greatly appreciated.



I have highlighted the important parts of the pledge.

Thanks...

Uhhh. If they don't ship with a firmware that enables this, very, very few people will perform the low level hacking to do so.

Doesn't Eurpoean consumer protection law require a 2 year warranty on electronic goods?  I believe HF offers their products for sale to European customers.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Apple-Warranty-EU-year-change,23072.html

Only if HF is selling from a European reseller or has a European division or department.

Stuff you import yourself through customs is not protected by this. Otherwise no Chinese company would ever ship to Europe.

Shamelessly self-quoting/bumping for visibility.lll



I have highlighted the important parts of the pledge.
Hashfast --- please follow through on your pledge and extend the PCB warranty to 1year.

Thanks...

Still no reply from HashFast about providing reasonable warranty of 12mo

No... it seems quite clear, that they won't warrant anything they have produced themselves for more than a handful of days.  Speaks volumes for potential future customers (among all the other shennanigans HF has been pulling).