Someone out there made a mega fuckton of BTC off this little fubar'd situation.

Ok guys...
A. I'm an idiot (as is evidenced by my buying an x3)
B. I'm not comfortable swapping for chips as I wouldn't have a clue where to build/buy/etc.. to make working miners and I'm pretty sure I'd screw that up somehow too (get stuck with them or something)

So,.. because of that AND because I'm a total glutton for punishment, I'm going to wait for the x3.
Is anyone swapping for chips that has a power supply they want to get rid of?
I'd like to buy one and help someone out BEFORE buying one from BA if possible.

Preferably at a discount,.. if so let me know, If the price is right I'll just paypal you for the unit and shipping.

I've built a few oil cooled PC's in my extreme overclocking days.

As long as your thermal load calcs are right you'll be fine. You'll want SOME kind of heatsink on it to allow the oil to cool it easier (more surface area n all that)

Do your themal load calc (should be online resources, that's where I found mine), then add oil, small pond pump (circulation), Isolator plate for the temp difference, peltier coolers, cold side in oil, hot side with box fan,.. done. Temp monitor with SMS alert, then Chill till the pump eventually dies/freezes then replace. Putting the pump RIGHT on the center of the hot zone should keep it alive longer and a pond pump may not die as easily (we used aquarium pumps)

And our profits,..

Scenario A.
Lets just use the a small scale example using x-3's for this little adventure... (obviously the numbers are bigger, but the shoe still fits).

Lets say it takes $3-5M to get through the design and initial products phase (as it's outsourced, lets just call it a direct cost)
You sell miners at 5K each,.. You only need to sell 400-600 x3's to cover your expenses. (easy enough based on making insanely inaccurate promises)
You plan to have them done and ready to ship by the first of the year but then think,.. "If we keep these in house mining we'll make about 10K each off of them, so lets get them done, and then keep them in house till feb." (double all these numbers and it still works out logically)

You create your miners, (maybe they even show up a little early) and have them up and mining, and delivery time comes and someone says "Yknow, mining companies have issues all the time. I mean sure this is pretty much proven technology now, it's like saying we're making a PC that "somehow" isn't going to work right, but people will believe that because all the guys before had problems, let's just kick it out a month or so and say we had manufacturing issues. They all must be kinda stupid for pre-ordering stuff like this anyway, so it's not like they'll catch on or do anything about it. There's a TON of reasons we can invent for things not shipping "till next week."


Another 5K(ish) per unit rolls in (because now difficulty is going up).
The initial "sell" of 400 units has now minted $6M if every initial sale was at 100% cost mitigating.
BA thinks,... "Shit we still haven't shipped and all they do is piss and moan and take it out on the poor sap resellers we suckered in. We really aren't at any risk at all and we just get to keep printing money, why stop?"

"Let's just keep it going till the very last second (when we actually get some calls from legal reps, and after these things are costing us more in electricity to run than they make) we'll ship them out and say "Oh golly sorry it took so long but BTC could go up to 10K each, and then you'll ROI, and we DID deliver them so.... so sorry, no refund you have a fully functioning miner now, please buy our other products, we'll do better next time, promise,  here's a coupon.""

Or now that they've sucked all the life out of the miners, they actually WILL do a 100% buy one get one match and STILL make a mega killing of our hardware.
And they'll fuck you on delivery of the PS's because it only costs $20 to deliver those, and They probably only cost $15 to begin with so...MOAR PROFFIT!(volume discount + aggregator which is what most Chinese tech companies do)
And they'll prefer doing that over giving you hosting as comp because they have to pay the electricity to run those now ROIless units.
Oh and lets give them some coupons for our other vaporware shit, not 100% off coupons (hell no) but something like "%25 with payment up front so we can ride this pony all over again. Maybe this time we really will just keep them in house for a few months then ship. We really should go legit as we're all rolling in cash now."

And that alone 100% justifies everything we've all been through because they sell a product that will go obsolete and they know it, BTC products at this scale are no more. It's a business that can't last and non SHA-256 coins will be the future, so why not risk it all to get it all.

Everything above is based on "guesstimating" really shitty sales numbers. Based on order numbers I'm guessing they have at least 1K X3 orders minimum, plus all the X1's and hosting. (roughly $15M profit worst case minimum in this scenario)

I could walk into a lawyers office tomorrow, lay this scenario out, in this market, hand him $2M and be 100% assured that I would never lose another dime on this venture if I didn't want to and he'd be correct. Fledgeling market, international buyers, China, pre-orders, precedent of other companies etc.. etc.. ZERO chance of winning a lawsuit with a multimilliondollar firm VS "the best we all could come up with"


Or,... As some people would still try to believe this happened:
Scenario B.

Technology company who has already gone through large scale IT/Tech products gets into market.
Apparently they look at investing millions without doing a lot of research across the board (they don't pre-engage their manufacturers, they don't use existing manufacturers or engage companies who have any kind of time turn vs pricing guarantees.
Prototypes weren't ordered for testing and when they were the production models were miraculously completely different and caused craziness.
Communication that could have saved time/effort/woe was negated from inception to this day.
Ties to major scam/confidence companies exist but have NOTHING to do with any of this.
Products are pre-sold before they do any of the *real* design or research outside of CAD drawings despite having specs available day 1.
Then at EVERY SINGLE potential point of failure between design and delivery, something amazingly goes wrong at the last possible second injecting a new delay, despite them having and giving assurances to the contrary at every stage.
And somehow simple basic design things were completely left out of the process until "the week before shipping was supposed to happen"

Occam's razor.
It's way more likely that these guys took "Massive Profits" with almost zero risk, as opposed to doing honest business and seeing a tiny fraction of the same money.

Hell, truth be told, if most of us were honest, we'd do the EXACT same thing if we knew we'd get away with it, be anonymous, and make millions of dollars. I'm honest enough to say I would.

Yep,.. never attribute to malice what can easier be explained by stupidity or incompetence. (Both of which BA seem to mine considerably faster than bitcoins)

You've missed the point entirely.
Mining with versus selling,.. Yes selling is more money faster.
However,..
Selling, THEN mining with that HW until the last possible second and THEN shipping same (now useless hardware) = best of both worlds. I get my profits AND your profits and the "risk of repercussion" is minimal.

Ok that calendar might make up for a little bit,... Just saying, something to consider.
It cracks me up that people even *hope* that they're going to be ready.

When they start asking people who opted into the 5 day burn in hosting for a wallet address (as of yet no one has been asked) THEN they might be within a couple of months of shipping,... until then nothing.

I am starting a BA shipment date pool though.
Closest date without going over wins.
I've selected October 1st 2014
Add to pool here:
15xRVSMGx6bBkf8m6vuRFzXTnuzBRtpc2Q

*note, I keep 5% off the top and no one affiliated with BA, resellers, or people from China may play*

Too bad we had to be the canaries in the coal mine for a company to learn how to do correct compensation eh?
*gasp,..choke,..tweet*

I knew the risks,..
I took the gamble and bought one x3 as a nice little investment into bitcoins.

At the time I had the extra money and it was an acceptable loss.

Since then things in my life have 100% gone to shit.
Breaking even on mining (never mind the $11K that I *SHOULD* have right now) would have completely changed my families life at this point.

Most sickening "if only they'd done their job/honored their promise" moment ever at this point.

I wonder how fast they'll deliver miners and legitimate compensation once someone has hindsight sickness when they're in a situation worse than mine and just end it all? Maybe that's what they're waiting for to get those miners (that they're not mining with (yeah right) out the door.

but then I can't blame them,.. in my current condition if I owned a company that printed money, I might have to keep them at home minting away and screwing us all too. I'd just take some of the pictures from the early production days, (months earlier) develop a timeline of "last possible moment to ship w/out 100% order cancellation vs how much I mine (lets just assume they're at 11K by now, that's well over 100% profit over retail per unit, why not see how much more I can squeeze out before someone does something to make headlines and/or I know the highest % of refunds would be demanded. No one would catch on,.. I mean sure they'd call me on the lies about shipping dates but they could never prove I'd been mining the whole time. All the employees are under lock and key aside from my resellers so I can control the information 100%. Easy as pie.

Hell, deliver oct 1 with even a crappy compensation and *SOME* people will probably still keep them thinking that BC prices could skyrocket. Yeah,.. that's what I'll do,.. Oct 1st seems like the perfect time to just ship those things out, after all they're just taking up space at that point. I keep mined money, only have to refund a large % of orders but I get to keep maybe 25% as sales. That's the sweet spot.  Just like GM *NOT* recalling cars they know will kill people,.. you just have to find that sweet spot between max profit and most acceptable damage until people take serious legal action, but in China that second point is non-existent so... just max profit and ability to put in plenty of nice sound bytes that say despite the negative things you may have heard "we finished and shipped those x1/x3s and now have our process 100% perfected" That way I can sucker scrypt asic customers into funding all our new products on that line, and of course I can do it all again and retire on the money we'll make this time so if it completely destroys the companies rep, who cares I'll be so rich I'll just buy some reputation.

Fuck,... I wish I'd chosen to be one of the bad guys in life early on,.. they get all the money.

Seriously? This is China, not Japan. Chinese crimes against the Chinese government are serious, Chinese crimes against Chinese people are considerably less so, but Chinese crimes against foreigners are a badge of honor. You could get the best class action lawyers in the US to look at this and I'll bet he'd tell you. A. It's China we can't win, B. It's China they'll never face any kind of justice, C. It's China, the US laws backing us are useless, D. You're SOL

 

Because at this point, that would be (IMHO) slightly less than fair (providing there aren't more delays.)

"Compensation" is about finding a balance between the hurt to the customer and the hurt to the seller.
We're hurt b/c we lost out on all the mining that could have been done if shipped on time. Making the least assumptions that has a calculable dollar value (in the case of a x3 about 8-9K)

BA is hurt b/c they're a business that needs to make a profit, they will make no additional profit on anything they give us. But as their business model is essentially making machines that print money, certain allowances have to be made there as well.

So the original cost of the pre-order unit (which funded BA's Asic existence which is a HUGE deal) and another full unit (now with a street value of 3-4K would be a good compromise which shows that they actually want to have customers buy from them in the future b/c they will have a good track record of doing what's right.

"full compensation" would be the original X3 and the exact quantity of BTC the machine would have mined if shipped on time. and some kind of discount on BA stuff for future purchases (as there's no way to know when people would have bought/sold, the only demonstrable case would be, if you had the unit on time, and it mined up to *today* how many BTC would you have in addition to your unit? OR an acceptable allowance for the market. I haven't calculated the Min/Max you could have made if you sold every BTC earned at it's max potential high, vs low (mainly because you'd have to say "On day 3 when the price was highest, the max I could have sold was x coins, then I could have sold qty y at the next highest/lowest etc...  If you calculated that (more power to you) that would give a number that would allow you to calculate the only fair "by market" BTC return as the difference between the two would be the payout.

But as to 2x *period* I think it's a "reasonable" middle ground, it could easily be argued that either side is getting a better/worse deal for it but there's no clear "loser". And in theory (based on the posts I'm seeing) this would probably buy them the most PR/Goodwill/potential repeat business/least people screaming litigation etc.. This also give the added benefit of *EVERYONE* getting compensation, X1 and X3, without having to have been just lucky enough to have bought the correct amount to make everything work out, or having to buy another unit, or having to buy powers supplies etc.. If you bought one you get one,..simple, works for everyone.

Here's my take..
To "save face" as much as possible at this point, they need to double the hash hardware and ship the additional components LCD or not (and if they ship the LCD later THEY need to pick up shipping) Ie, compensated fully with no out of pocket expense to the customer.

I understood going into this that this was a risky proposition. I actually didn't expect that if things went wrong there would be any compensation and some of us would get miners, some people would get refunds and some people would litigate.

As things went along I got pretty pissed off at the 4-5 missed dates, the lack of basic business acumen etc..

But they announced (as did the industry) compensation for delays. And the compensation changed as circumstances did...
At that point I resolved to wait till final ship dates/announcements/compensation was announced before I went ballistic or started looking into their scrypt stuff.

(Yeah I'm considering it if all goes relatively ok, and here's why:
BA got in way over their heads, that's obvious to all of us. But they just had one of the largest "Learning lessons" any company could have on the verge of producing a second similar product.  I'm guessing BA's next effort (if they can make it past this one with reputation in tact) will be a million times better. We've also seen that they're legit, have relationships with mfg's etc..
(How many people said only until recently that this was all 100% a scam and there was no hardware)
BA still REALLLY needs to fix their communications and PR but I think the next "thing" they make has a good chance of going very well.

Seriously, I'm going to be out about $10K and will most likley never see ROI, but at the same time, I knew this was risky getting into it.
There are only 2 things that *really* bother me about this experience in hindsight (so far).
A. That anyone would have to pay *anything* additional for their "compensation"
B. The fact that BA absolutely undeniably knew WAYYY early on that dates weren't going to be hit and didn't manage customer expectations from the start. I'm guessing it was to prevent a mass exodus that would have potentially have folded the entire project, but I still think it could have been handled differently.

Now I can speculate that the fact that no one at BA has sent a mail to pre-orders asking for their miner/wallet addresses for their 5 day mining at this late point in the game could equate to massive delays ahead. And I would love to know more details about the 5 day. Will the 5 day cause an additional delay (over the 5 days) for the people who selected that? Is it ship date +5 days then ship, or is it ship date, plus 2 days to setup miner 2 days to get my account info 5 days to mine 2 days to pull from farm 1 day to package then ship?? These are rather important things to know the question has been asked many times as to "how much hashing" will be done on the 5 days with the compensation package... It just makes me sad that information is still so insanely hard to come by after everything that's happened.  But again,.. until it ships I'll refrain from "Making a scene"

If *ANY* units are shipping, shouldn't they have requested pool/wallet info by now for people w/5 day hosting?.
Seems like that's a bit of info that needs to be gathered in advance, but I haven't gotten a mail or request yet.

Also would still like to know if the 5 day is at full power or not, and/or an update on how to get the PS shipped installed in the unit already.

*sigh* just.... so many FAQ 101 things completely left out.

Especially considering when you register you GIVE them your e-mail, that's the one sure communication point. They should be *pushing* information and e-mail is the only way to make sure every customer is up to date (minus a phone call or visit of course)

So,.. if I don't buy the power supply until after I get my physical machine will my 5 day hosted "burn in" only run on 2 PSU's?

Shouldn't someone be asking for worker IDs to set our miners up at this point?

Like I said before,.. I feel really sorry for anyone who isn't a "forums savvy" person dealing with this situation. I can see where they would be totally freaked out and bombarding BA with mail/tickets.

My experience in Manufacturing (and indeed that for the my experience across the industry as a whole) has been the exact opposite.
Any time there's a product like this being produced (especially for the first time) there's going to be a project manager(s) in the mix (although not having one would explain a lot in BA's case) Someone who operates at the 20Kft level who sees where all the pieces come together and holds each party responsible for meeting the deadlines. (In my world this is me many times) Having a punch list of major deliverables that the "ship date" is dependent on, and with a realtime a %complete, target date up/down is already part of the job. Pushing that out to anyone who needs a status update is a business 101 process that takes all of 1 minute to publish. In my case I usually do/can do reporting for projects that are based on milestone, phase, and date (or any combination of the three)

Some people want to know when "the next important step" is done no matter when, others want to know when the next group of steps are met, some only want to know what's done by the next due date (which is the route of the BA weekly updates) I have some customers who get a daily update EOB and it takes me little or no time to update this daily (on multiple projects) And I capture down to the "work in seconds" on some projects.

If BA couldn't get a detailed update out with some level of certainty about what is/isn't done and if there will/won't be delays on a daily basis, then they shouldn't be in business period. I'm sure they CAN,..it's simply that the weekly format simply allows for a lot of "noise" to cover mistakes, and conversely lets you emphasize anything good that happens through the week as the emphasis for the entire update. But when your biggest problem is a customer sat issue,.. one where "Your lack of communication is abysmal" is the single biggest thing that's been screamed for months,.. to not go the extra mile and KILL people with info, is just another key indicator that while these guys may be smart engineers/designers etc.. they aren't a "good business".


This is simply another case of how this forum's perception and portrayal of the time/work related to real world events is hilarious. I saw someone say it took them months to migrate a customer DB a while back in this thread.. *LOL* We've migrated (and repaired) DBs (SQL, Oracle, hell even DB2 DBs with mass corruption (millions of XR entries) all fixed in several days, with only one person working on it part time. A DB noob with access to Google could learn DB admin, fix a med/large cust database, export and import in less than two weeks if they were full time on it.

The only thing people are going to measure against is "What would I have today if you had delivered on time" That's the line in the sand, be it in BTC, or in USD. You can't really say "what if I would have had your miner and exchanged BTC low on day 4 and then sold high on day 16 of not having it" b/c that's all 100% theoretical. What you can say for a fact is, if I got this on time I would now have X BTC. Or I could cash them out today for X USD. And even that scenario works against us as the price has been dropping, but it's the only real measure I can think of that isn't complete theory math.

I personally would like to see a menu of compensation packages to choose from comprised of different ratios/combos of:
A. Discounts on scrypt hardware (which is great for BA b/c they're making this stuff, so it's a win for them)
B. Time on Farm hashing
C. More hashing hardware. If profits are there,.. eventually throw me an X1 or some minions along with my X3.
D. Pool payouts (Setup a "Founder" pool that does nothing but kick some coins back to gen1 "Founder" orders forever) Am I wrong in assuming everyone would like a 100% constant free trickle of small amounts as an option? (this would allow BA to "be the good guys" and turn the amounts up/down as their profitability allows.) Sell it as a "share" that we can buy or sell from each other within the pool and let BA take a per trade comission like some of the new profit share pools do. Again,..win/win.
And yes,.. I sent all this to BA as part of their survey.

Considering that you're only compensating the people who initially funded the effort g1'ers, (assuming BA sales continue and they don't botch another pre-order) at some point, it's going to be a trivial thing to "pay off" or even god forbid "overcompensate" those people for their investment.

That's the one thing that I haven't seen any mining hardware mfg do on their pre-orders,.. Lay it out like it is and say "Hey,.. without your amazing willingness to fund/support a new (risky) product,... We wouldn't be here,..so YOU deserve a reward,. for that alone if nothing else. But I guess I'm biased, I've run several startups and I give away the lion's share in order to fund the next big project every time, because I know it's the people who "take the leap" with you, that deserve a huge part of the credit for any/all success.

That or they should do a kickstarter type deal where they flat out tell you, "Give us money, you're buying into our dream, you're funding our startup, when/if we make money you'll get a bigger kickback than regular Joe retail, also we'll give you a BA shirt that you can either wear with pride or wear with a sense of irony depending on how things shake out. We may soar, or we may crash and burn, but now you know." I kind of assumed that anyway (based on the industry and the pre-order setup) but it would be a nice up front warning for all the people (and based on these forums there's a ton of them) that don't know that going in.

I have to admit I raged pretty hard when I got my e-mail, but we all knew this was a risk going in, I've come to terms with it, soooo having said that, it seems to me that the "Big list O' Questions" would be something similar to the following:

1. Can you please assign someone to be on top of these questions and concerns in an expedient manner? It's been made obvious this is a absolute customer requirement.

2. Refunds/Rebates/Discounts/Hardware etc..
It's obvious (based on the competition, the delays, etc.. that the 25% for 4 months isn't adequate compensation for Batch 1.

Was that a first draft, proposal? Would you consider the options listed (1 additional unit per unit ordered, 100% of hashing power in additional months to equal missed hashing power since missed date, direct BTC compensation from the BA farms, credit against the scrypt miner in development/BA products etc..)

Some people will be adamant about a refund will this be possible (if wired/if paid in BTC?)

3. Previous information released.
I'm not an engineer but it seems a few people who actually understand the manufacturing timelines are saying that you *had* to know there was in issue well in advance of telling us. What was this, why weren't we informed that there were "issues" at all etc..

4. How much internal hashing are you doing "for BA profit", how many BTC have you generated in testing units prepping for sale?

5. For the people worried if this is vaporware.
Can you work with your assembly/mfg's etc.. to provide an immediate "proof of work" that this is a "real thing"?

6. Can you just give me insane amounts of BTC for being so rational (hey it's about time SOMEONE got rewarded for it!)
13nSo7DNVL6yZg5V4WoE1tikpW43yVphvp

Anyone else want to add some stuff? (PLEASE, no matter how much you hate on them for whatever reason good or bad, can you just hold off on replies to this, so we can get some answers. Even if you think they're pretend,.. please let US get some info.

Same thing happened to me,..
My balances were cashed out, and then my wallets were changed and new ones were added for any coin I had a balance on.

Looks like we're all on multipool,.. so how? I can't think they did a brute force against names, my password was like this:24c4rr0ts!! and I didn't install any new software (keylogger) so I'm baffled and afraid at this point.
Just set all my autopays low and put all my balances from other sites on a paper wallet.

All told I'm out about $300 

Here's the addresses:
BTC   16CFa5N9ekAKaASUJKAPQnw3Zdfjkw4EJw
Doge   D5mRXNc8MWWoB3nGDpRx5Eea6DJEax46zr
PPC   PU9VFFpGxB6yJ98vMQGrGHzpEu3jiwMpwe
TRC   1HAU9Yhj9otEzmBGejS3SUaTAZArcnDSAV
WDC   Wb6Uso9D5p9s3Ywpd9NjVqBJvh8pmPquCL
zet   ZVPwuFq2XYTHG5FsichkYcUJWotjaX1wZX
Lot   LyDPD2D3eyADHt33mRYfhWYJgnBnyshzBB
frc   19zPdoe64gfEwrnoNj1TXmuoLPo1xza4MA

Not like there's anything I can do.
I can't imagine what kind of person can do this to other people who don't deserve it,... just a sociopath I guess.