If its heavy enough, no more than one meter, with the corner first; The KnC cardboard box isnt supported by anything there it really wouldnt take much to rupture it.
Why dont you try it? Take an empty box, drop a sharp square object, say a PC case or something on it from 1 meter at an angle, see what happens.

Not saying the UPS guys have treated it nicely, but the last time I ordered a printer from amazon, it was packaged well enough that I am fairly confident I could drop it from 5m on concrete with no damage to printer. They do that for a reason.

What, fabrizio hasnt finished packing his bags yet, is that why we have to wait?

Dont be silly. Its clear some other boxes were dropped on top of that one. Sturdier boxes I might add, KnC really should use better packaging.

Courts arent that easily deceived, thats not what its aimed at. Just saying you tried wont cut it, courts will need to see bookkeeping to prove you tried and spent the money in the company's interest. If the money is just gone with no accountability, its fraud.

Rather than at courts, this is aimed at the infinitely more gullible bitcoin investor who they may hope to prevent from pursuing legal action. Frankly, if they get scared enough, I wouldnt be surprised if they returned a non trivial amount of money to keep up the charade. Its probably a lot better to walk away clean with "just" 3000 BTC in loot than memorizing your 7000 BTC brainwallet every day for the next 10 years in a Hong Kong jail.

A chinese restaurant operating in china, no one sane would call that the US market. Its the chinese market and chinese laws will apply.

But a chinese company doing online sales of hamburgers, drugs, bitcoins or securities to US residents in the US, yes that is the US market and it doesnt matter one yota if its a chinese company doing it,  or if its from any other country.


Allowing illegal exchanges requiring no disclosures, no financial reserves, no safety guarantees, no nothing to compete with legal and compliant one's isnt exactly my idea of fair competition or even of a free market.

I like hotglue because you can always remove it later, but its not as stong as epoxy. Your choice I guess. If you go for hotglue, use generous amounts.

Think about it; their incentive is (pre)selling as much as possible for as much as possible. Selling more means increasing network hashrate,  screwing their previous customers, particularly the ones that havent received their goods yet (you ordered BFL, you know what I mean). They cant even really control the speed of this, since whatever they dont sell, KnC's competitors would sell, and then some. Thats just the nature of the beast, not something I blame KnC for. Add to that the fact that asics cost next to nothing to produce, so the price will just drop proportionally to difficulty for a long long time, and you can easily predict what will happen. Ever cheaper asics, ever increasing hashrate (at least until we get somewhere near marginal costs) and miners crying their tears out. Its gonna keep happening for quite some time.

IN theory KnC (or anyone else) could have priced their products not according to their perceived value, but according to their costs, from the start, spreading their NRE over far greater volumes from the start. But then you are asking a for profit company to forgo enormous profits, taking the risk of not recovering the NRE and on top of that, demand would have been so astronomical that they could never have delivered anyway.

Bitcoin asics are a weird market, I dont blame anyone for the dynamics of it, there never was a solution for this other than profit (and risk) sharing arrangements with the vendors, asicminer style.

ANyway, if you want to continue this discussion, we should do it in another thread.

Yeah, that looks more tricky. That would have needed a heatgun to reflow the solder instead of a soldering iron, but it doesnt exactly help that the traces have been ripped off the PCB. I would still give it a shot by soldering some wires to it, but thats just me


No idea..

Picking up some serious speed (or luck) now.

Last 120   10/10/2013 04:17   262680-262800   284 966 752   x1.51

Who knows, if this keeps up, that 300M may not be out of reach after all.

Of course not. But Im not going to buy them either. The only way I would consider investing in asics is through something like asicminer (shares), since their incentive is not opposed to their customers/investors.

Most of the ones who first found out about bitcoin have been amply rewarded, as have those who figured out the economics of bitcoin asics, either by developing them or staying clear from them.  Not to rub salt in the wound, but I figured this out before BFL even announced its asic, and its the reason I didnt even get in to FPGA mining.

GPU and CPU mining was profitable for such a long time,  because the hardware price had no relation with its bitcoin mining potential whatsoever. Thats why gpu's were dirt cheap for us and gave an ROI in a matter of months.
Asics otoh would be priced purely based on their perceived mining potential, and therefore would never be profitable to anyone else as the one setting their price.

Even if KnC voluntarily sacrificed its own revenue and profits for its old customers by halting or limiting production, it would hardly matter because Hashfast, Avalon, Bitfury, BFL, cointerra etc couldnt care less about old KnC customers' ROI. Its a race between vendors, and you are getting squeezed.

Can you post a picture? Ive fixed a few micro usb connectors with 4 relatively big pins, and that was really not that hard, its not like Im an expert. But I have seen other variants with tiny pins at the bottom that would be challenging to fix.

Either way, prevention is always better than curing, so everyone else: go get some glue.

Why did you get in to it? Serious question, its not like this hasnt been predictable and predicted ad nauseum.
You thought you would be the only one greedy?

But hey, maybe this will cheer you up:

Last 120   10/10/2013 02:07   262666-262786   270 514 499   x1.43
http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php

Looks like ~270M next difficulty. Could have been worse if that KnC datacenter was actually working .

Nice catch, and excellent theory.

Sounds plausible. Even more when I read that the non hosted machines seem to run with very high cpu loads and they sometimes work faster with 3 instead of 4 asics. Problem might be in the beagleboard..

Im at a loss what could cause apparently all hosted units to exhibit this problem, whereas nearly none of the shipped units have this.
Datacenter only has to provide:
-  electricity (which could cause all kinds of trouble, but is unlikely to cause extreme low hashrates),
-  internet,  with nearly zero bandwidth, not something that should be difficult to achieve in Sweden, and the webinterfaces seem to work, so thats not likely it either
-  Cooling. That could be a real issue, but these reported hashrates are soo low, I could only believe that to be the cause if its like 40-50C in that datacenter. Im sure they would notice...?

Anyone else have theories? Do these hosted machines run any software that the non hosted machines do not run?

(posted before I read the post above me, but that doesnt shed much light on it either, or does it?)

BTW, while SEC regulations might not be perfectly suited for the kind of securities we see on bitcoin exchanges, personally I have no problems whatsoever with forcing registration of these securities, giving us at the very least basic disclosure of the people, company and business plans behind  them. It would prevent at least 95% of all the scams, make it much more easy to invest wisely, while costing next to nothing.

Now legally operating an exchange under current laws would be another matter, and probably out of reach of bitfunder & Co, but even there I will not shed a tear to see them go and get replaced with much more trustworthy companies that do have the resources to operate legally, like Second Market. Its not like we were hurt to see the early bitcoin currency exchanges get replaced or regulated, I would love to see a similar move to more professionalism for security exchanges so we dont depend on amateurs (/scammers) running toy exchanges like GLBSE, Bitcoinica, Mpex, picostocks, and yeah, bitfunder. As it is, there is no snow balls chance in hell we could ever attract serious investment money and we are left gambling with our own playmoney on 50% scam securities on exchanges that disappear every 6 months, usually along with their anonymous operator.

No, but they do have jurisdiction over the US market. Just like a Chinese OEM cant sell RF equipment on the US market if it doesnt comply with FCC regulation, or illegal drugs for that matter, you cant sell securities in the US market that dont comply with SEC regulation. That the purchase happens over the internet doesnt change a thing.  If you dont like SEC requirements (which frankly are for the most part quite sane disclosure requirements that apply to almost any civilized country), sell your securities elsewhere, which is what bitfunder is doing by blocking US investors.

Country of origin doesnt matter, what matters is the markets where these securities are offered:
http://www.sec.gov/rules/interp/33-7516.htm