Thank you for posting this Owen. 

Yesterday I posted a WTB in the currency exchange forum.  Alexsandr contacted me right away.  We were in the middle of working out escrow with John K until you posted this.  Even if he's on the level with my deal (which is possible, I mean what kind of scammer agrees to escrow?), but he's still compromised his account (at the very least).

I believe you misread it.  They're not shipping any units at all Dec-Feb, but when they do start offering new hardware again it will be priced with the overall network hashrate taken into consideration so they can still make a good profit, but leave enough on the table to make purchasing from them attractive to customers.

How to do it properly (just received this from KNC):

 KnCMiner Network Protection Statement


At KnCMiner we are aware of the service we are providing to our customers. We are also aware that we need our customers to have a return on their devices in order to purchase form us again. With the scale of the supply chains, agreements and factories we have access to, we need to be cautious we don’t ship too many devices and therefore reduce the return to our customers.  So with that in mind our plan is to do as follows:
 
We will ship no devices in December 2013, January 2014 or  February 2014. Meaning that once we have taken the difficulty up at the end of November we will not release any more hashing power for 3 months. We will then release our new generation of devices, which will begin shipping in March 2014. These devices will also have a much higher GH/$ rating than any of our current offerings.
 
We would like to state that If any of our competitors continues to add large amounts of hashing power to the network during December, January or February. We will continue to release our devices as competitively priced as we can to protect our customers share of the network.

Thanks
KnCMiner Team

It's not profitable (unless price/demand goes up), but LTC is in that same boat right now too.  Right now an alt coin mining rig would really just be a way to crank out some hashes on promising new alt coins.  It likely won't be profitable as a pure LTC rig unless their value goes up.  

If LTC is all you want then buying $4k worth of LTC might be the better way to go.  (look at it this way:  for $4k you could buy 1,333 coins, or you can spend 300 days mining 1,333 coins (don't forget cost of electricity)).  It would take 10 months or so at current $ values (+ difficulty) to break even on your proposed rig (not including electricity, it adds up FAST for GPU rigs).

What's the best way to contact you?  This thread or PM?

Edit: Found seller

Is there any method of withdraw available?

 I have never heard of any of the coins in your survey  

(primecoin ftw)

I'd invest a bit in the CPUs as well (the more cores the better).  If you're building a mining ring you might as well get the best CPUs you can as well so you can swap over to any new coin that catches your eye and not worry about if it's better to mine said coin with cpu or gpu.

You could also cpu mine primecoin VERY efficiently while mining your LTCs.

I asked about the previous auctions.  Seller claims non payment (that they didn't realize he accepts BTC only).  I politely insisted on escrow (I offered to pay fee of any agent of his choosing), he politely declined (claims being burned on a bitmit escrow deal).  We mutually agreed to cancel the transaction.  He has re-listed the avalon pre-order (http://www.ebay.com/itm/Avalon-ASIC-Bitcoin-Mining-Rig-65-Gh-s-BATCH-2-/171075052430?pt=CPUs&hash=item27d4de238e).

Even after all this I can't claim it as a definite scam.  He has great ebay rep, prompt replies, is patient, nice guy, and speaks perfect english. 

Also I have yet to hear from anyone who has given this guy money.  I'll update this thread if I do.

Guide you mean?

I'm in but I'd rather call it Bit By Bit, or Just the Bit.

Lol Dx if you have any popcorn left head over to the scam forums for the scotaloo/tradefortress drama.

1MHKhfiC7AgZdErt9b8xkXbcKoWSxPjJgG

 

You're right about the ship dates.  Some of Krater's competitors have shipped, but some are in the same boat as them.

Hypothetical time.  Even if Krater had a machine this very second, at your door (lets assume you tweak it to the max 90Gh/s), would you pay $12,500 for it if you could start mining with it today?  Would you pay $12,500 usd for it in August, or September, or October?

I must disagree.  Their price isn't just higher than their competition, it's ludicrously higher than their competition.  And they won't even ship until after their competition has.  

-Megabigpower (Bitfury) 400 Gh/s, $8000 usd October shipping.  
-KNC 400Gh/s, $7000usd SEPTEMBER shipping.
-VMC 256Gh/s, $4000usd November shipping.
-Krater 60 - 90 Gh/s, $12,500 USD (125B).  Nov? December shipping.


But Krater won't even ship until after their competition has.  How is that not a ripoff?  I know they want to make money as a business, but I think they're confused as to what kind of business they should be.  

If they want to price their hardware so high that their customers will have no hope of ever getting their investment back then they should just not sell that hardware and mine with it instead.  If they want to be a legit manufacturer, and distributor, of custom cryptocurrency hardware in the U.S. then they should price competitively.  

Krater get back to us when you make up your minds.  You can cash out on Bitcoin mining and forget selling your ASICs, but remember Bitcoin is just the start.  There's LTC, and a dozen other coins jockying for popularity.  Those coins will need hardware to mine them.  Do you want to provide it?

I won this auction:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=171071581415

(Thought I could talk him into escrow, or even paypal and I'd pay the 2.9% fee) - The escrow suggestion was ignored and the paypal offer was politely declined.  So I've been slowly bank funding my wallet, and that was pretty much the only reason why I haven't payed him yet (until now at least).  

Anyways the deal started to smell bad so I did the googling which I should have done in the first place.  I found:

-June 24th - 53 bids, winner: $7225  (http://www.ebay.com/itm/Avalon-ASIC-Bitcoin-Mining-Rig-65-Gh-s-BATCH-2-FEB-2013-/171061899242?pt=CPUs&hash=item27d4156fea)

and

-July 3rd - 26 bids, winner: $6,600  (http://www.ebay.com/itm/Avalon-ASIC-Bitcoin-Mining-Rig-65-Gh-s-BATCH-2-FEB-2013-/171068822272?hash=item27d47f1300)

He could have gotten unlucky with a string of flaky buyers, and re listed after the deals fell through (and I actually do have reason to think that's possible.)  But that sure does get the alarm bells going though right?

From the wallet address he sent me 1H6wVtLkvNXZWTWRt7UqkNUiubqBNtsLqq (http://blockchain.info/fb/1h6wvtl)  I can see on July 3rd (average price $83) he received roughly $6400 worth of BTC, but then two days later returned the BTC to the original wallet.  And there's no transactions at all that match up with the first June 24th sale (could easily have been a different wallet though).

I'm looking for advice, but I'm especially looking for anyone who has payed this guy.

(and obviously I will not proceed without escrow).


Edit:
I asked about the previous auctions.  Seller claims non payment (that they didn't realize he accepts BTC only).  I politely insisted on escrow (I offered to pay fee of any agent of his choosing), he politely declined (claims being burned on a bitmit escrow deal).  We mutually agreed to cancel the transaction.  He has re-listed the avalon pre-order (http://www.ebay.com/itm/Avalon-ASIC-Bitcoin-Mining-Rig-65-Gh-s-BATCH-2-/171075052430?pt=CPUs&hash=item27d4de238e).

Even after all this I can't claim it as a definite scam.  He has great ebay rep, prompt replies, is patient, nice guy, and speaks perfect english.

Also I have yet to hear from anyone who has given this guy money.  I'll update this thread if I do.

Pretty much this.  At Krater's prices you should just mine with them and forget you ever offered to consumers.  You're leaving zero profit on the table.  Why would anyone buy?  If you won't go below $5k USD for 90Gh/s then just stop offering your units for sale and mine with them yourselves, otherwise you're just ripping people off.  

With the amount of computing power coming online I doubt very much that even $5k for 1TH would provide a profit (above ROI) after December of this year.  (200m difficulty in Dec, 275 in Jan, 400 in Feb.. etc).

Xcrowd - build a LTC (scrypt) miner instead, or also (pretty please ).

Is all of batch two shipped? (except a few problem cases?)

 Sorry hehe

IMO It is a good idea to actually do some of the mining on your own for sure just to get a better understanding of what's going on & how to use pools/wallets etc..  It's just that it's going to cause heartache in the future when the gaming rig dies.  If it wasn't going to be his primary computer then it wouldn't be too much of an issue.