Hey SJ,

I don't know about "sponsoring" fracking but there *is* some fracking involved.

This is nothing like the documentary Gasland though; this is only 5-25 Barrels of water using a 15 minute bucket frack of 2000# sand.

It's like the difference between a firehose and a faucet.

Yes, we had to cancel the rigs (and a few rig orders).

Sorry, we didn't receive a couple key critical components in time and instead of dragging out the drama, we just did refunds.

If things devolve to forced arbitration instead of full BTC refunds - like they promised us, the DZ Miners Cooperative is down for teaming up with forum members for a mass action to help spread the pain of pre-payment of setting up arbitration, and any other follow on actions to get our full BTC back (oh,  and to make HF pay for arbitration and legal costs, for making us have to go through this instead of doing the right thing).

We have 2 upgraded BJs on order from Batch 1, 2 Sierras from Batch 2, and a whole bunch of disappointed miners. No update to my "support ticket", so far.

Interesting reading on the high costs of setting up arbitration and how it can all fall apart or cost a bundle (found on the CH forum):

http://www.citizen.org/documents/ACF110A.PDF

mazza you've got 2 in R1 and 2 in R2. Shoot me a PM to remind me of your upgrade shares if you bought those. I have 90+ pages of PMs so far (and we do hundreds of support tix) & searching through this PM system with that many pages isn't very fun.

Thanks.

When we do site orders, we refund in the form that was sent for accounting purposes, whether that was USD or BTC, as that's what's expected in the world of commerce, that you get what you sent. This *is* a special case however. I will take this under advisement with the other co-op leaders because I don't rule this co-op as a dictatorship among the leaders, even though I founded it; we'd have to agree on this. I can't promise anything and we'd need a majority vote for this to carry.

I'll also note a couple of things I mentioned in the R15/16 thread: we've already paid hundreds each out of our own pockets to get a battle tested legal team that's not afraid of HF's lawyer (who seems to intimidate people on the CH HF forum thread) to represent us. After half a year of doing this and offering the lowest cost GB shares around: It literally *costs* me money to offer these low cost GB shares to co-op members as the management fees that I've made on 8 rounds in 6 months of co-op operations don't even cover these legal fees I already incurred just for the refunds. I meant what I said about not price gouging my fellow miners when I founded the co-op, and I've purposely had a tiny cut of the management fee to help keep share price and hosting costs as low as possible.

If things fall apart and we go to arbitration those are also some massive upfront costs related to that we haven't tried to fundraise funds for. In this case, we'd probably team up with other forum members to do a mass arbitration action to spread the pain of this expensive proposition.

You have a valid point, but then I love how you just used a sample size of approximately half the size of my sample size as proof that my feedback isn't valid!  

All I can tell you, is that the dozens of Bitmains have been a dream to work with compared with the KnC Jupiters in our small sample size of 12 KnC miners, half from Batch 1 and half from Batch 2 ordered in about 4 or 5 separate orders. Our latest 4 Jupiters are *finally* working well, but it wasn't easy or accomplished in a very short period either. It's not like our guys don't know what they're doing either, these are veteran hosts with prior Jupiter experience, and at the moment, they're handling about 21 TH/s from a mix of mfgs.

Also: if any other US miner hosts want to take over hosting (and are willing to be vetted), there are Jupiters in-stock and on-hand now for anyone willing to try their luck. You're more than welcome to take one or two of these off of our hands SirWizz.  

I believe that it is the Tx ID, but Thomas would have to confirm.

Here's some additional info from a PM from someone asking if there would be additional compensation for under performance on R15/16 and the move cross country:

"bobsag3 says they were only down for 48 hours even while doing the move through Winter storm Hercules. He says that is all the compensation for the move because he's giving a 25% discount on miner hosting when the miners were down 48 hours or 6% of the month for the move, and the rest of the problems have been hardware related with the miners from KnC. He doesn't feel that he's responsible for guaranteeing hashrate from faulty or badly performing hardware, esp. when they're from what are nearly universally considered one of the top ASIC manufacturers.

I don't know if you caught the updates but we've had issues with every single KnC miner (6 B1 and 6 B2 Jupiters) hosted by the co-op and Miner Hosting LLC's hosting customers:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=368000.msg4401660#msg4401660

I had updated my own opinions/reviews on the various ASIC mfgs with this new info: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=403459.msg4437950#msg4437950

Not sure what else to tell you but that we *all* lost the same hashrate alongside with you because co-op leaders have our own shares in various amounts in this too, which is typical of these GBs. bobsag3 is so sick of these Jupiters that he's willing to let other miner hosts host these miners, if they want to take over the hosting.

...

Regards,
DZ"

UPDATE for R3 and R4: They're forcing USD refunds on people that didn't request them if you missed that in the CH forum yesterday. If this is forced on us, we are *not* cashing this refund check worth about 1/8th of our orig. BTC sent for R1-4, and will consult with our legal team.

It was a major PITA to get all the evidence in place, and in chronological order for our attorneys but HashFast heard from our attorneys yesterday and we have an official support ticket in the system, FWIW. It's also been a drain on the co-op's energy to have to fight this in the middle of the move/expansion.

We're doing our best to get full BTC refunds for everyone that bought into R1-4 with Bitcoin (except for R2, which was orig. bought via Wire Transfer by someone else so it will be in USD; the upgrade R2B was paid in BTC).

To fight to get this full BTC refunds for us and to make sure we were represented by a battle tested legal team, we plan on deducting the legal costs among the 4 rounds. We estimate this cost to be about $250-300 at this time (could go up if we go to arbitration).

That would work out to about $2.50-$3 per R1-4 share (which includes upgrades for R1-2). The upside is: for those that bought GB shares with bitcoin, if we get our full BTC back from HashFast, even with this small deduction for legal expenses you'd be refunded 6-9x your USD value back from your original BTC purchase amount(s) depending on when you bought your GB shares.

If you paid in USD, these refund terms and legal fees don't apply, and we will send back the original USD amount(s) sent when our full refund arrives.

All is not quite lost, Bakal. [Info From R1 below]

UPDATE: They're forcing USD refunds on people that didn't request them if you missed that in the CH forum yesterday. If this is forced on us, we are *not* cashing this refund check worth about 1/8th of our orig. BTC sent for R1-4, and will consult with our legal team.

It was a major PITA to get all the evidence in place, and in chronological order for our attorneys but HashFast heard from our attorneys yesterday and we have an official support ticket in the system, FWIW. It's also been a drain on the co-op's energy to have to fight this in the middle of the move/expansion.

We're doing our best to get full BTC refunds for everyone that bought into R1-4 with Bitcoin (except for R2, which was orig. bought via Wire Transfer by someone else so it will be in USD; the upgrade R2B was paid in BTC).

To fight to get this full BTC refunds for us and to make sure we were represented by a battle tested legal team, we plan on deducting the legal costs among the 4 rounds. We estimate this cost to be about $250-300 at this time (could go up if we go to arbitration).

That would work out to about $2.50-$3 per R1-4 share (which includes upgrades for R1-2). The upside is: for those that bought GB shares with bitcoin, if we get our full BTC back from HashFast, even with this small deduction for legal expenses you'd be refunded 6-9x your USD value back from your original BTC purchase amount(s) depending on when you bought your GB shares.

If you paid in USD, these refund terms and legal fees don't apply, and we will send back the original USD amount(s) sent when our full refund arrives.

UPDATE: They're forcing USD refunds on people that didn't request them if you missed that in the CH forum yesterday. If this is forced on us, we are *not* cashing this refund check worth about 1/8th of our orig. BTC sent for R1-4, and will consult with our legal team.

It was a major PITA to get all the evidence in place, and in chronological order for our attorneys but HashFast heard from our attorneys yesterday and we have an official support ticket in the system, FWIW. It's also been a drain on the co-op's energy to have to fight this in the middle of the move/expansion.

We're doing our best to get full BTC refunds for everyone that bought into R1-4 with Bitcoin (except for R2, which was orig. bought via Wire Transfer by someone else so it will be in USD; the upgrade R2B was paid in BTC).

To fight to get this full BTC refunds for us and to make sure we were represented by a battle tested legal team, we plan on deducting the legal costs among the 4 rounds. We estimate this cost to be about $250-300 at this time (could go up if we go to arbitration).

That would work out to about $2.50-$3 per R1-4 share (which includes upgrades for R1-2). The upside is: for those that bought GB shares with bitcoin, if we get our full BTC back from HashFast, even with this small deduction for legal expenses you'd be refunded 6-9x your USD value back from your original BTC purchase amount(s) depending on when you bought your GB shares.

If you paid in USD, these refund terms and legal fees don't apply, and we will send back the original USD amount(s) sent when our full refund arrives.

Gosh, I hope not. I was hoping for some "Swiss precision" for the Bitmine Rounds seeing as they had successfully launched Avalon clones previously, and that they "just" needed to get the chip done...

For those that haven't seen it lately: There is a point after they're two months late, where instead of extra hashrate, we get our refunds back +10%.  

http://bitmine.ch/?page_id=850

C'mon Bitmine, we're all pulling for you guys.

Thanks for pointing that out to the community. That's some good info right there for BTC buyers.

Oh, I updated my ratings a few days later once I learned how bad the problems were:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=403459.msg4437950#msg4437950

I had to move them down to #3 with this new info. I reserve the right to admit I'm wrong or to update things as needed.

Bitmain. FTW! 

This is a 50/50 mix of Batch 1 and 2 Jupiters.

KnC can be a little slow about shipping replacement hardware. I'm guessing we're not the only ones needing replacement parts. That's normal in the biz...the hardware issue rate of 100% our guys are seeing with our KnC miners is not normal for the biz. The Bitmains have proven to be much less problematic for us.

We're trying something new since we have hardware on hand.

There are certain manufacturers that are permabanned from the co-op, so there's companies that won't be part of this.  

Thanks for your patience everyone.

I know it's not much fun, trying to get things done on a phone.  

Ouch! I hate it when I have to cringe from past statements. These were from our first 4 GB rounds when we were still founding the co-op,  when I had no idea that our combined team hashrate would eventually outrank entire countries on BTC Guild.   (my name is on the team,but our team is just a representative of the segment of the market that would be considered Value and/or Team Miners; anyone that falls in these categories is welcome to join)

Suffice to say: we have not ordered any other HF miners and one more mfg. has been permabanned from our co-op.

In my defense, at the time their rep was stellar, else we wouldn't have done community fund raising for 4 miners. I was also happy to see that "the adults had shown up." /s

Current me would like to visit old me and say in dramatic slo mo: "Nooooo! Dooon't do it!"

They took us all for a ride and had no real backup plan.

Plan A= Hope everything works and nothing goes wrong with manufacturing
Plan B= pray
Plan C= pray some more

G'luck to everyone that was suckered in...

Oh noes! Better sell quick!

The Bitcoin skies are falling. Better get out while you can. 

Sorry, I don't handle that aspect (more of a head cheerleader nowadays and working on setting up deals in the cryptoeconomy).

I did know that as of today, there are/were shares available.

Oh BTW: the payment processor for our site is still being worked on; having some backend site issues here we're still working on. Let me talk to the guys later today, to see if we can set up a temp. workaround for R22.