The boards look legit; or at least, they look very much how I'd expect a board to look, given the power demands for the claimed ASICs; and is consistent with the previously shown PCB layout images, and

Interestingly, rather than design their own voltage regulators, they have gone with pre-packaged modules (the big rectangular modules along the top). Probably sensible, given that building high power VRMs is a bit of a black art.

That said, if their wafers are finished, then they must have taped-out when they said they were taping-out (the July update) as 2 months is the shortest realistic time frame from tape-out finishing to wafers going for processing.

Based on other manufacturers experience, it takes about 1 1/2 weeks from wafer completion, to chips "in hand". From there, you should allow 4 weeks for assembly, testing, tuning, firmware tweaks, before shipping, and that's optimistic. KNC sent their titan wafers for cutting and encapsulation in early August. They shipped in last week of September, but early results have not been good - huge numbers of DOA miners, firmware incompatible with multipools, and loads of stability problems.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Customers have started to receive their KNC titan's and have started to confirm that they hash.

If you are looking for debt collection, AND you have a court judgement, then you may want to consider asking these bailiffs: http://thesheriffsoffice.com/.

I once had them come after me (well, not after me personally, someone had given a false address) but they were very persistent and very professional (when I gave them evidence that I wasn't the right person).  It might be worth approaching them.

The big problem that people have, is that as alpha is a limited company, you can only go after the company's UK assets (of which there are likely none). You cannot go after the people in alpha.

I really think the only option left is for someone to file a petition for involuntary bankruptcy against the company, because this is the only option that will actually hurt the people behind alpha. While you can't force the people to pay up personally, because a bankruptcy penalty is so damaging, they may well pay up personally to avoid the personal consequences.

It's not. It's less resistant than scrypt, by virtue of dramatically reducing the memory requirements, which was scrypt's "difficult to parallelize" feature.

The only reason that it's likely to be FPGA/ASIC resistant is obscurity.

If you have a judgement, then the defendant has a set period of time in which to pay. If they don't, then you can go to court again and ask for permission to enforce the judgement.

There's a description of your options in this newspaper article:
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/nov/20/small-claims-court-enforce-judgment

The next step is to apply to court asking for a warrant of execution instructing bailiffs to visit the business address and seize goods. In practice, this rarely is useful, and if the office is empty, then it is difficult to see how it will do anything.

The only viable alternative options that I can see are:
 - to apply for a 3rd party debt order through the court - if granted, the court will issue a warrant to freeze the debtor's account. This will only work if there is money in the account; money coming into the account after the order is given is immune. Note that you need to know which bank the account is with; and you can only freeze the company account, not the director's personal accounts.

 - bankruptcy - you can ask the court to close down the company and seize all assets. The minimum debt is £750 and there are big fees (nearly £1000) to apply. This is the "nuclear" option. However, it will only work if the company has assets in the UK. However, this option does bring with it significant penalties against the company directors - they will be disqualified from acting as a company director, have their personal credit trashed, and if they are accounts, they will usually have their chartered status or certification revoked. If the liquidator (official receiver) discovers or suspects fraud, attempts to offshore assets, or trading while insolvent while tracing and selling assets, then he can apply even more penalties to the directors in person. Note that if you request for bankruptcy you do NOT get priority over other debts. You get pooled with every other creditor for access to the company's carcass when the assets are divided up.

A charging order won't be useful, as you can only use it against company owned real estate, and you can be pretty confident that the shop is leased. Similarly an attachment of earnings order won't be useful, as you can't go against the director in person, only the company.

Given that the ring-leaders of alpha are accountants, I wonder if anyone has considered advising the accountant's professional society about the scammy behaviour of some of their members.

For example, MJ Akram is a member of the ACCA- who apparently take a dim view of their members getting involved in scams and unprofessional behaviour.

Do bitmain have any chips?

That press release says they still have simulations, which means that they haven't even taped out yet. If that is the case, that means they won't have chips in hand until December.

I'm guessing that this can only be KNC titan, or equally possibly MAT (their cloud mining service opens tomorrow).

400 GH of scrypt hash-power just appeared out of nowhere - that's nearly 50% of yesterday's total hash power.

Someone, somewhere has just taken delivery of some serious scrypt ASICs which work. I'm guessing that this is not alpha.

I suspect, being accountants, the alpha team will have made sure that there are no assets anywhere. Indeed, their entire business model was to outsource everything to India, and to keep no cash in their bank accounts (which was how they foiled charge backs so effectively).

If you want to try to further steps to get your money, some of the legal processes available do require proof of non-payment (for example a petition for bankruptcy) - in the event of a court judgement, that means a statement from a bailiff say that there were insufficient assets available to seize.

A charging order can only be applied to land or property (i.e. real estate), or in exceptional cases, certain types of shares. The bigger problem in this case is that any claim is against alpha T, and not the directors personally. In other words, a charging order can't be used against the director's personal homes, only the alpha's business premises (assuming it is owned by alpha, and not leased or rented).

I wish people with court cases pending luck.

I'm just wondering how easy it will be to enforce payment, if you guys win in court. If they fail to pay, you can reapply to court to get a bailiff's warrant to seize goods, but even then, if the bailiffs can't find any goods to seize, you aren't going to get your money.

One possibility to consider is making a petition for involuntary bankruptcy against the company. There is a court fee of £750 (a group of credits can split the costs amongst themselves) and you will need to prove a debt exists (if you've already got a court judgement which is unpaid after 28 days, then this is good proof). If a bankruptcy order is given, the court will appoint a liquidator to seize the company's assets and bank accounts. Even if you don't get your money, because none is left, being a director of a bankrupt company brings personal penalties. One of which is a ban from working or seeking work as an accountant....

Having spoken to some people experienced in ASIC design, is that it's at least 8-12 weeks from tapeout to delivery of first silicon, and at least another 2-3 weeks will be needed for PCB assembly, testing, shipping between factories, etc.

This means that when they made the announcement of 27 May, they must have already known that their tapeout had failed, and there would be a delay of months for the design to be modified and to go through the full sign-off verification process.

It's quite brazen really. They even had the cheek to ask for final payment in July stating that shipping was on track for July.

The overall project seems catastrophically badly managed. At this point, they should have mechanical samples of the PCBs for testing in the enclosure (same mechanical shape and size, with the same heatsinks, etc.) It's also been nearly 2 weeks since they had the ballout for the ASICs, which means that they should have a completed miner PCB design, in order to ensure that production delays don't compromise manufacture after arrival of the ASICs. They've been making a big song and dance about completing the power distribution PCB design - so I'd have expected the completion of the miner PCB to be being broadcast from the rooftops.

Heck, even the case design shown looks like a joke - there's no way that you'll get 2 kW of silicon cooled in that. Again, they should really have had some test PCBs with dummy loads on, for testing the thermal situation by now.

Please can you post a video showing the ASIC miner mining on a public pool. Please show the CGminer connected to a public stratum server, and the stats page for the pool showing that the hashing is real and valid.

A bank is permitted to close your account at any time, for any or no reason. It isn't good customer service to do so, but it is their right to choose who they do business with.

They do appear to have treated you fairly by giving you 2 months to find another bank.

I would suggest that you ask them for a specific reason; and in particular which clause of the terms and conditions, they are invoking to close the account. I would recommend that you do that as a formal written complaint to their complaints department, sent by recorded delivery.

If they still won't give you a reason for closing the account, escalate the complaint to the financial ombudsman service. In practice, the ombudsman will only intervene if the bank have treated you unfairly (e.g. closed the account immediately, without giving you time to change payments over, etc.), but you may be able to at least get a reason.

Bear in mind that if the bank is concerned over money laundering e.g. through bittylicious, then they are legally obliged NOT to tell you under any circumstances. If the bank is being evasive and refusing to answer questions, or they seem to be making up false reasons, then this can suggest that they suspect money laundering.

I wish the new owner luck. This comes at the time that I could no longer sustain my mining - even with leaserig prices, I couldn't cover my electricity costs, so my rigs have been sold.

I'd like to close my account and recover my security deposit, what's the best way to do this?

Because insiders have large balances, and they want to protect themselves.
By also protecting the smallest customers, you minimize the total number of affected customers, and therefore minimize the risk of lawsuits.

The thing about the "provably fair" algorithms used by sites such as satoshi dice, is that they work by hasing the TxId with a nonce and a daily secret key.

The key is revealed the next day, so that the previous day's betting can be publicly inspected.

Even if the TxID can be manipulated, this should not be an advantage to an attacker as if the hash function used is secure, then it will not be possible to predict a priori what transaction ID will result in a win and which will not.

This is not a difficult problem to fix. Instead, it is one that doesn't need fixing. However, there Mt Gox and blockchain.info did develop a workaround for users that want a non-malleable ID.

The transaction hash was used by Mt Gox as a way of tracking transactions. This is calculated from the transaction inputs/outputs and signature. However, it is just as easy to track the transaction inputs in the blockchain. In fact, as the blockchain contains the transaction inputs directly, and the transaction hash must be calculated, it is actually easier to verify the transaction inputs than the hash.

The flaw in bitcoin is that the transaction hash has become known as the "transaction ID", when perhaps it would have been better termed the "transaction hint" or "transaction hash".

Mt Gox in their final days did develop an alternative ID - they called this NTX ID, and at their request blockchain.info implemented it for searches. This is just the hash of the transaction inputs/outputs, which can't be manipulated. For users who are only tracking IDs, not the transactions, then this is a usable option, and it does provide a simple to use reference for support purposes.

Exchanges accounting systems can get out of sync, if they follow the "transaction ID".

A customer issues a withdrawal request. The exchange system initiates a bitcoin transaction and records the TxID for audit purposes, and to show the customer for tracking purposes. In the event of a malleability attack, it is possible for a mutated version of the transaction to be accepted by the blockchain, and therefore the original transaction ID will be rejected and never confirm (but the transaction had, in fact, completed under the new ID). In this scenario, exchange software may see the TxID has failed to confirm on the blockchain, and treat it as a failed transaction, and give the customer the option of trying the withdrawal again (allegedly what happened at Silk Road 2 by a completely automated system for re-attempting withdrawals).

In the case of Mt Gox, it appears that in the event that the TxID didn't show up in the blockchain, a customer could contact support claiming not to have received the transaction (even though it had arrived), and support would issue a new transaction.

In this case, the exchange thinks that the withdrawal is still pending, but it has actually completed. Good audit and reconciliation practice should mitigate this significantly, because the books wouldn't balance as soon as a new transaction was issued and a customer got double paid.

However, if an exchange didn't take care to check their wallet balances on a regular basis, then they could easily end up losing coins. (Mt Gox claimed that they had suffered losses over a period of years. This would suggest that they had never checked their wallet balance against deposits/withdrawals ever over a period of several years - either they are lying, or the negligence is beyond comprehension).

In general, you would only pay tax at the time you converted the bitcoins to GBP. The decision as to how much would be due as income tax and how much as capital gains is not clear to me and expert advice should be sought.

Things are slightly different if you are getting a significant income as a business. If you are VAT registered, then any income for a VATtable service, must have the VAT paid based upon the transactions cash value on the day the transaction took place, even if the transaction was a barter transaction.

E.g. you run a website, and receive 15 BTC advertising revenue per month. You would be required to register for VAT, and you would need to submit a VAT return for the equivalent GBP transaction value on each day that you received any BTC.