Oh, please do not assume I kept silent all the time. No, in fact I bombarded Avalon through any communication channel I am aware of - up to the point where I realized it is a waste of resources writing monologues.

It is just that allowing your emotions take over and start ranting publicly helps noone. The other aspect to consider is: the first batch was only 4 weeks late, the 2nd maybe 7 weeks. Sounds like a lot, but given that no single vendor in Bitcoinland so far kept his schedules (with some customers waiting for over a year ), it was reasonable to just hope for the best. I still hope and noticed there are some fresh movements (refund requests processing), so maybe not everything is lost yet.

Before this starts to get personal, I'll tell you how I am f*cked.

From those 8 batches ordered, almost half the chips are mine, i.e. ordered by and paid by me for my mining operation. I am not only the organizer of this group-buy, but also its largest participant. You do not really expect that the profit I made by selling 7k chips to Bitmine covers the loss of the remaining 30k, do you? Needless to say that with that your estimate on how much I earned organizing this is way off.

As for the manufacturers and designers, how can't you see how they are f*cked? Burnin found a company to work on this for months, invested tons of own money for development and paid for PCBs and components upfront to minimize lead times. Everyone bailing out will leave him (and other manufacturers) sitting at a ton of waste and a huge loss.

Update: Endgame

With ASICMINER today announcing blades for as low as 3.5BTC, it appeared that Avalon chips that do not mine today are not going to break even any more. While those blades went already out of stock after some hours, the new price for mining rig is officially set. Essentially this means that if Avalon does not ship the remaining chips fully within the next two weeks, they become worth less than their shipping costs.

Driven by this event, today I was flooded with refund requests that built up a queue of ~2000 chips. I do not expect any takers for this and it is realistic to assume that there will be no further refunds.


I am sad to admit that I do not believe in a fast and complete delivery of the remaining batches. This stopped to be a game the moment this group-buy alone funneled $500k to Avalon. Although we have only a small set of 'no BS rules', we still have a written commitment to deliver in time as part of the ToS. With so many community members taking a loss directly or indirectly through Avalon failing to meet their schedule, we (together with other customers) need to consider taking serious actions to end this tragedy.

At this stage our options are as follows:

• A. sit and wait
  That was my tactics so far, assuming that civilized and respectful behavior will ensure to get our chips as fast as possible. This in fact might have been the reason why so far our group-buy got more chips than others, at the same time with a delivery of one batch per month our last will arrive mid 2014 - ready for re-direction to the Bitcoin museum
• B. demand full refund
  The majority would be fine with getting their invested coins back and let this chapter pass into oblivion. According to Avolon's ToS, there will be no refunds. But if they really care about Bitcoin and its community and realize how much harm they caused to so many of us, they might consider playing fair and send us the coins back. This implies that you do not want your chips any more.
• C. negotiate for compensation
  While refunding all orders might exceed Avalon's capabilities, they might prefer offering a compensation in form of free chips or free upgrades to next-gen ones. This implies you would like continue dealing with Avalon.
• D. legal action
  Leave the polite arena and sue them into ground; make an example of them and put an end to the pre-order madness in Bitcoinland. This implies you are willing to throw more good money after the bad - for a very limited expectation. Your money would feed some poor lawyers and Avalon if needed will declare bankruptcy (they said they do not control the collected funds any more).

I personally will approach Avalon with options B and C for now and consider combining forces with other group-buy organizers for D if we do not hear back within a reasonable time-frame. If you have a different opinion you'd like to share, please do so either here or via PM.

Dude, what are you talking about?

Noone is offloading risks here. I bought  and paid my chips as everyone else - and as everyone else I am free to do with mine whatever I like. From those 8 batches in my group buy, I paid 40k chips and I am not going to ask you or anybody else what to do with them.

In fact, over the past weeks my customers offloaded their risks on me by asking for refunds. Naturally they did this for their late orders while keeping early ones active - very fair. So far, I served all requests to make everyone happy in this mess, but if this is your way to say 'Thank You' for that, I obviously was wrong.

I already wrote in my own thread that the author messed up the numbers here - the correct quantity is in the 7k range.

The long story short is this: I have tons of Avalon clones in order with bitmine. 35% of chips from the first two batches of my group-buy are mine and contractually agreed to be converted to clones. Since customers and miners became more impatient with time - up to the level to freak out, Giorgio asked me to provide them the chips planned for my own Avalon clones. So instead of adding 22 more devices to my mining operation by end of this week, I agreed to sell my chips to bitmine and enable them to satisfy their customers.

Obviously I have been compensated for the potential mining profits I could have made with them as part of the trade, i.e. bitmine paid an reasonable premium for the chips to keep their promise and to fulfill their part of the deal as best as possible.

With that in mind, it is really sad to see how some members and customers in this thread fail to honor those efforts but instead now moan at bitmine for their reached ability to deliver

They obviously got one digit messed up, but besides that, the report seems accurate. Even BitSynCom was cited correctly, since 2 batches, while the least possible number, can be described as 'tens of thousands' chips.

Oh, sorry, I thought it was clear by my statement

So, to clarify: packages were sent on Saturday. Due to the smaller number of shipments within EU and the not-really-much-better delivery times with DHL Germany, this time I sent them over Swiss Post as registered airmail. I am preparing the lists for manufacturers to be sent out today or tomorrow (including tracking numbers).

If you look carefully at the above picture, you see the date code printed as 1332, so two weeks ago, whereas the chips have a date code from week 26 or 27.

Update: Batch 2 delivered



2680+3368+3478+294 = 10'000 chips, someone had a hard time counting them all


I took a snapshot of my shipping data on file today at noon and forwarded to re-packaging, so everyone who entered his shipping destination before epoch 1377259200 should receive his chips either personally or at his manufacturer next week.

Hard to say what's the issue without knowing your system, but the compiler not knowing standard integer types looks more like a build environment issue than a bfgminer related problem.

Are you aware of the build process required to follow (pre-reqs, autogen, configure, make)? If not, be sure to read the READMEs.


On a side note: there is lots of activity with bfgminer currently as preparation for the upcoming release. As a result, the HEAD in fact does not compile right now, so better wait until the release.

Update: ASICMINER BE blades now fully supported by bfgminer

The problem with the blades observed earlier was caused by the blades requiring a minimum size of the response packets and was fixed with the latest commits to bfgminer. With that, you can operate your blade pointing to a bfgminer instance ran with
and enjoy all the unbeatable pool management and job scheduling features provided by bfg/cgminer.


The GW server feature is built on top of Libmicrohttpd. On Debian based Linux systems install it with
and rebuild bfgminer from GIT sources.

BE blades (or GW clients generally) are identified by their username. If you have more than one blade and configure individual usernames, each will have its own statistics. If otherwise all have the same name, they will show up as one SGW device with cumulative statistics.


Happy Mining!

Yes, exactly.

I am currently looking at it, but it is a PITA to go through protocol traces of JSON-over-HTTP-over-TCP traffic

Update: Batch 2 shipped

There is light at the end of the tunnel - overnight I have been notified that the second batch has been shipped (including DHL tracking number)

If not delayed by customs, I expect them to arrive early next week, so everyone with orders in batch 2 please ensure to have entered and locked shipping destinations.


I am truly relieved by the news and understand you feel the same. Therefore, I am temporary locking this thread to prevent the update to disappear behind pages of 'Hooray!' posts . It will be reopened soon, meanwhile please PM me your concerns.

Swiss DHL is not providing this information for security reasons. Anyway, it won't speed up delivery, so let's wait and see.

Refund Demand: ~800 chips

While no news from Avalon, I received several requests from users who want to buy more chips. This adds up to a total demand of ~800 chips.

I'll process refunds in a FCFS order, please PM me your request including the signature for this single CSV line

The address needs to be the one on file, i.e. that one you paid the chips from. After verification of the signature I'll refund the coins to that address.

Please note that partial refunds are not doable, you can only refund the complete order.

Luke-Jr implemented the getwork server / proxy functionality, which is now upstream in BFGminer master branch. Bounty paid.

Proxy works as specified and was tested with multiple cascading instances of BFGminer. There are some specific issues with the BE blade open, which will be addressed separately (since they require access to a blade).


Thanks a lot!

Looks good!

So you have an Avalon unit pointing to BFGminer and serving as GW proxy? Then it is basically done

I'd need to check if the AM BE blades' GW implementation is working similarly well, so please let me know when the branch is ready for testing.

Thanks for your time and efforts.

By 'last late batch' I meant that one that was first canceled by Avalon (due to delayed payment) and was restored afterwards.

As for the refunds: I always wrote that I process refunds on a goodwill basis. So far, I bought back from people who gave me good reasons to support them (family, failed design, ran out of coins to produce boards, etc.), which implies that I am not going to process refunds for customers trying to offload the initial risk at me.

Right now, the chips are still worth more than their face value - but this will soon not be the case any more. Then the free market will take over and find a fair value for the chips - which might be 75% or even only 5%

Update: new Manufacturer added, Chip Refunds / Re-Sale, Shipping and Handling Payments

I received a call from DHL customs department notifying me that the sample chips for my last late batch were held back due to improper declaration. While for itself not a positive news, it implies that there is some movement at Avalon side again. We might get all remaining batches in bulk once the issues are sorted out (yeah, I know, thats pure calculated optimism, but let us keep some faith).

As for the other updates:

New shipping destination: nekonos
As requested, I have added nekonos to the list of shipping destinations for those who want their boards manufactured there.

Chip refunds / re-sales
Due to the chip delivery delay, I am receiving an increasing number of refund requests. I bought back as much as I could afford, now I am approaching my liquidity limits. Therefore, I can offer refunds for only a limited remaining volume. After that, I will refund only if I have someone interested in buying more chips. The re-sale process will be as described before: bought-back chips are put into the back of the queue (8th batch) with the following orders shifting up in the queue. Those re-sold ones are always from the last batch.

If Avalon ships all batches in bulk, this is irrelevant, otherwise please be aware of this fact.

Shipping & Handling Payments
The first batch of chips made it to Switzerland declared basically worthless (<$100), which resulted in a low payment to DHL. This might be different with the next batches (see above: sample chips kept back at customs), so it is hard to estimate that cost component for all future shipments. At the same time I understand that those of you who already received their chips would like to pay S&H and be done with it. Therefore I need to ask for S&H based on uncertain data as follows:

There is one common address to send S&H payments to: 184g4gAJqtM1BTDmDwRPB4AokXbqtZ2wnG

For each shipment, after receiving the chips, please pay S&H of

• 0.3 BTC if you had shipped
  
  • up to 20 chips to your private address
  • up to 100 chips to a manufacturer
• 0.4 BTC if you had shipped
  
  • up to 100 chips to your private address
  • up to 500 chips to a manufacturer

• 0.5 BTC if you had shipped more than that

If you don't like the fee schedule or don't have the coins to pay, you can get S&H costs donated. Just state so publicly in this thread.

To identify your payment, please send from the address you registered for shipping. If your client does not support sending from a specific address, pleas PM me with your payment details to assign it correctly.

As already written: I will share any news about the chips I get from Avalon immediately in this thread. Me remaining speechless just means there are no news