Everyone keeps asking where the picture came from... has no one seen this part of Avalon's website yet??
http://launch.avalon-asics.com/

Thank you jgarzik. But wouldn't it be really easy for someone from Avalon just to take a photo before shipping, its kinda weird and smells fishy - selling something with no pic.

I would have thought any asic company would be thrilled to show off a working demo unit mining away. Absolutely thrilled to share in their hard work and amaze everyone. But i guess i live in bizarro world. Go figure. Marketing and common sense treatment of customers and future customers is harder then being an engineer. Two diff types of people i guess.

Yea, a scare is right. I admit to not checking these forums much these days because I'm tired of the trolling but I did take notice of the stickied thread the other day and the link to the btcfpga forum posting of 'everyone do a chargeback now!'. To turn around within a week and say 'Heh, sorry about that.. ' is unbelievably crap and casts serious doubt about the sanity of those in charge.

I never did hear anything from Dave about the refund emails I sent, so I did CC chargeback and have the credit from them back to the card already so hopefully that's the end of it. If they turn around and ship after scaring off their customers that ordered and waited from them, then that's really crappy - not that I feel like making another order with them.

What's that phrase, 'fool me once, shame on you' .. 'fool me twice, shame on me'.

Dear Friends, Lovers, and Enemies,

First off. Sorry for the scare. and believe me it was a SCARE - we had to refund over 200k and we were happy to do it because we claimed from day one that we will honor any refurequest until we go into production and we meant it. And  As crazy as fuck as it is to say so , we will sill honor it. We took multiple 20k+ refunds left and right without batting and eye lash because we believe in this project and we know we will be releasing our bASIC Bitcoin mining units sooner than everyone else, especially our good friends BFL.

Love us or hate us, I have some good friends who are original Bitcoin "old money" and they gave us the additional funding we need to finish the chip fab / packaging and take this thing into production. (THANK GOD!)

we WILL be shipping bASIC bitcoin mining devices in March 2013 and I am willing to put my own money against anyone who says otherwise.

The Design is done baby. The chips will be state-side as soon as Chinese New Year is over and for those who could not stomach the wait I don't blame you but I'm sorry to say you lost you place in line my friends.

March may seem a long time away as we all have ASIC blue balls right now, but its really not that far away, and I salute and congratulate all of you who have had the testicular fortitude to stick it out with us because you my friends will receive the ultimate reward. Sure Avalon may get some units out before the Chinese new year but that is sure to be a very limited number. On the other hand our assembly house has an unlimited assembly capacity and as soon as the Chinese new year ends we will have 16,000 freshly fabbed and packaged ASIC chips and we will be assembling those PCB's at FULL CAPACITY !We will be shipping ALL CURRENT ORDERS IN THE MONTH OF MARCH AND WE STILL HAVE ROOM FOR MORE ORDERS SO Get IN WHILE YOU STILL CAN! I stake my personal name and word on that. So hold on tight my friends because its going to be a wild ride in the month of March.

Now Let's Get ready to mine some serious coins
your friend always "cablepair"
Tom

Libel and Slander- while standard fare and par for course on the internet, is a serious thing.

This point has been made before, but if Avalon is not trying to get people to send them money, there is not a real good reason to expend a lot of effort on proving that they actually have something.

Under the hypothesis that they have gear and a pretty anticipated production rate going forward, a good psychological strategy would actually be to let doubt and accusations build to a crescendo, then just go ahead and make their early deliveries without a lot of fan-fair.  The effect that would have would be to quash a lot of future doubt in whatever projects are to come.

I, of course, have no idea if Avalon is legit, total scam, or something in between.  I hope they are legit because I am starting to feel that it might make sense to get into mining (although not particularly for an immediate profit) and the basic design these guys elude to is compelling to me.

I do wish Avalon were more forthcoming with information, and that they are not counts as a negative to me, but as I mentioned it could be the case that there is not a compelling business case to be.  And they are likely fairly busy.  If they do not take the time to work on transparency at some point I can be pretty confident that they'll not count me as a customer.

Mine also hit this morning.

BTW - For those idiots who are complaining that they should get the same # of BTC  back...
NOV 25 NOV 26 BTCFPGA 3155140269 NY  Foreign Currency¯USD 2,229.98 Exchange rate¯1.023363   $2,282.08
Jan 12, 2013    BTCFPGA 3155140269 NY  2229.98 USD @ .9566       2,133.36

This is the standard for any exchange between currencies.