Said without a hint of irony.

Observing Xtians arguing over who has the 'true' interpretation of Xtianity is like watching a dispute over exactly how many angels fit on the head of a pin.

Anybody who wants to learn more is welcome to see what's going on over at the SuperNET Slack channels.

Just send user 'noashh' a pm for an invite link. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=175147

No, your accountant is far less likely to risk being caught and destroy his career than the snake-oil salesmen to be found in many parts of the cryptocurrency world.

Besides, have you seen the smallprint in the ToS for most of these GAW products? They could collapse the whole house of cards overnight and spend a tiny fraction of their loot on a top-notch team of lawyers to weasel their way out of responsibility based on those terms.

Given the sums of money involved, many formerly-decent crypto firms (KnC I'm looking at you) have willingly sacrificed their reputation for riches.

The practice of continually offering restructured 'products' and investment vehicles, while at the same time announcing that, as a result of the 'new' product, people who had clicked to cash out would now find a button magically appear to cancel their withdrawal and 'transfer' over their investment to lock them into the new 'product', coupled with introducing cumbersome KYC hurdles to overcome if you really insist on cashing out, is not just typical of Ponzi-like schemes but also 'boiler-room' penny-stock scams.

If it looks like a duck . .

So he's selling Proof-of-Stake staking as a 'cloud' service? WTF?

Why would anybody choose to centralise their wallet on his 'cloud' service when you can easily download a PoS wallet and just have it running on a regular PC and staking as it should?

That's the whole point of PoS coins, to eliminate the need for constant PoW mining. It makes no sense to run a PoS wallet on someone else's server, unless you were trying to convince people you were selling them something they were quite ill-informed about and didn't realise the absurd nature of what was being shilled to them.

Because a US citizen, intent on committing a massive ponzi-style fraud, would seek to cash-out his illicit BTC through US-based exchanges and bank accounts, right?

People who are devious enough to keep a ponzi scheme in a state of ever-changing shape-shifting promotions and marketing wouldn't be dumb enough to cash out to fiat in the US.

Grammar police! You're nicked!

Just for clarity's sake, the details above are applicable to the relationship a customer has no matter whether they be classed as a consumer or business customer.

Consumer laws, FWIW, would never accept KnC's 'No Refund' screech as acceptable terms in the first place and consumer law also allows a customer to cancel simply because they changed their minds.

I believe there will be an announcement soon about a major change in the coin's platform. The technical details are being finalised and then it will be be put to the community before implementation.

It is pretty creative and unique a proposition, so it needs to be prepared as, once announced, it can be put live quickly.

The 'Litecoin-miner'v'scrypt miner' is clearly bullshit when for most of the year all you ever see them promote is: "our first product dedicated to scrypt mining." with no mention of something they later attempted to call a 'straight-forward Litecoin-miner'. I imagine if their lawyer asked them to show him evidence of how they promoted this device, he would have told them to drop this absurd claim because the evidence to the contrary is damning.

There are two issues at play here, one of them a classic KnC spin, the other being the cold hard truth which is supported by evidence.

https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-79
19th March 2014
"Minimum 100/MH/s of performance"

If your order is dated around this time, prior to their next announcement, they will hold you to an expectation of 100Mh/s. Any complaint you make about the Titan unit suffering from performance issues or limitations, has to compare to this minimum spec. You can't complain about it mining your scrypt target at even a single digit above 100Mh/s when it arrived, because that would be faster than the advertised minimum speed and any subsequent speed improvement they announce has their devious little 'gift' to their existing customers of awarding said performance increase 'free'. Meaning you paid for 100Mh/s and anything above that is not a contracted part of the sale.

https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-80
27th March 2014
"the minimum specification of Titan will be 250 MH/s. "

If your order is dated after this point, you can clearly assert that your decision to commit to buying this device was on the basis that the minimum performance speed they clearly specified is 250Mh/s. The performance increase that has been announced is not 'free' to you because your decision to buy involved you comparing the price with the newly-announced minimum specification. You did not get your 'free gift' until they later bumped up the spec to 300Mh/s and you are all better off for that fact because now you *can* hold KnC to that 250Mh/s performance minimum.

Although, if a failure of the unit to mine at or above this speed was due to hardware issues unique to your specific machine, this is considered a fault and KnC have the right to attempt to repair this fault that has occurred in your unit.

If, however, the failure of the unit to function properly applied to all Titans and was only resolved, if it has been, by a subsequent firmware release and KnC were aware of this limitation on its use before they shipped your order to you, then they have not shipped you the product you paid for, they have not shipped you the product that they promised to deliver in return for your money, therefore, they are not entitled to keep screeching their beloved phrase, "The Titan is a No Refund product", because what they have shipped you is not a Titan at that point, it is a 'not-quite-a-Titan' which, whilst they *might* be able to refuse order cancellations while they are manufacturing it and nobody is aware of the performance limitations, absolutely ceases to be their entitlement when they are demonstrably aware of inherent performance limitations but ship the units anyway.

Example:

1. KnC have not despatched your order yet but existing users are citing serious performance problems, prompting KnC to make announcements and forum posts saying that they are attempting to resolve these issues by designing and releasing new firmware, which means they have confirmed at that point they know the Titan has limitations on its use which were not disclosed at the time of sale.

This is where they should have done the right thing and declared that people could cancel their orders if they wished to do so while they completed the specified build of the Titan, instead of digging themselves in even deeper and showing themselves to be, well, we all know what they are in this regards.

Customers who attempted to cancel their order after KnC confirmed the unit was not able to perform as promised at the time of sale and cited that as one of the reasons for their cancellation, are legally entitled to cancel and KnC are obligated to refund the money paid in full due to an essential breach of contract, namely, shipping a device which is not yet fully manufactured and, as a result, suffers from performance restrictions.

2. KnC had already despatched your order but it can be proven they were aware of the limitation on use that they intended to address after delivering it to you.

Whilst there is evidence literally littering the place, concerning KnC's awareness of the limitations this unit had after they reached the hands of their customers, when it comes to proving they were aware of it prior to shipping, well, that would need to be argued, if KnC attempted to claim they were not, as a failure on their part to properly test that the machine could perform as fully as originally promised at the time of sale. You could argue the case that, if it is assumed they were aware of the problem, the above 'not-quite-a-Titan' shipping of a known-to-be-limited-in-performance breach of contract applies but, for that matter, if KnC attempted to claim they did not know of these performance limitations, you could assert breach of contract due to their failure to properly test that the unit could, indeed, perform as well as promised at the time of sale.


BUT, whichever conditions appear to apply for you as a customer, there is always one over-riding fact they cannot dodge:

Even, for arguments sake, if the device were only being evaluated as a Litecoin-miner, the fact it could not mine on Litecoin's p2pool when such a limitation was certainly never declared at the time of sale, no matter whether KnC tested for every fast-block-coin or profit-switching-multipool in existence, KnC's failure to ship the Titan in a condition to function properly on this pool above all else, would render them guilty of knowingly shipping it in this condition or, equally as bad, being so incompetent that they didn't even test it on p2pool before they shipped.

So, KnC, which is it?

I look forward to your inevitable next word-salad announcement attempt to avoid accepting the truth which is fully supported by evidence, particularly evidence which your firm emailed to people in response to specific questions, giving explicit confirmations about known performance limitations.

Just in case you're still not sure KnC, check your outgoing email records for an evidential example: Anna (kncminer) Oct 30 08:32

I see KnC are still intent on rewriting history:

Doesn't quite gel with the user reports that it didn't work with p2pool or, for that matter, KnC's own confirmation in that regards:

When asked at the end of October (Q4) to confirm if the reports that the Titan didn't work with p2pool were correct, Anna replied, "Unfortunately, our firmware doesn't fit this pool yet.
But you can check with pools were[sic] tested in our latest news: https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-115 "

OUR firmware doesn't fit this pool yet.

OUR firmware doesn't fit this pool yet.

FWIW, I'm happy to wait.

This is one of the few projects currently in crypto that I don't doubt is going to come through in the long run and I would rather you don't feel pressured to rush out solutions to problems.

To be honest that issue would have to be handled as an entirely separate lawsuit and I'm not sure what basis you could challenge their right to mine with their own equipment. Unless, of course, there was solid evidence proving that they had been mining with their customer's equipment before sending it out and that it was to the the detriment of the hardware inasmuch as relegating it to that of being considered used equipment when it was being shipped as new.

Not saying it couldn't be done, but it would require some significant supporting evidence.

Otherwise any claim about how 'wrong' it is for KnC to have their own mining operation is nowhere near a legal argument.


I prefer it when KnC have already incriminated themselves and admitted shipping out an unfinished product after being told by their customer not to.

There's not a lot of wiggle-room for them after that.

"So, KnC, you sold the Titan miner as being fully capable of mining any scrypt coin on any mining pool, yes?"
"No, that's not what we meant, we actually meant for people to read through all the promotional posts we were making where we explicitly said those things and know that, actually, what we *really* meant was that it was intended to be just a straightforward-Litecoin miner"
"Can you define what you mean by 'straight-forward Litecoin-miner'?"
"Yes, it means whatever we need it to mean in order to avoid being held to performance specifications we didn't meet"
"So, whilst your own forum shows proof that your firm were promoting the Titan as your first "Dedicated scrypt miner" and boldly asserting that it would mine "all scrypt coins on any pool the customer chooses", you actually want to pretend that's not what you meant and that you'd rather it be accepted your description was merely that it would be a Litecoin miner?"
"Yes"
"So you shipped the Titan with it being able to mine Litecoin on the Litecoin p2pool, then?"
"Erm, no"
"Oh, was this a fault with the device?"
"No, we hadn't actually finished developing the firmware yet that would allow it to function on the Litecoin p2pool"
"Yet you shipped these units to customers anyway, even though they weren't fully-functional 'straight-Litecoin miners'?"
"Yes, but we told them we'd eventually be done building it and it could then mine on p2pool"
"So it wasn't a design fault, so much as a design fact? The device would be able to mine on p2pool, but only when you had completed building it by supplying the customer with more firmware updates?"
"I don't know about admitting that, if we could call it a fault then we'd be able to legally take our sweet time in 'repairing' it after having shipped it"
"Did you confirm to any customers that it wasn't complete and could not mine on p2pool prior to you shipping their units?"
"Only after we'd managed to ship a bunch out in the dying seconds of Q3, before that we didn't mention that it wasn't done being built yet, we just said we had to 'tweak' it a little"
"So you did confirm to customers, eventually, that it could not mine on p2pool?"
"Yes, yes we did, in forum posts and in emails"
"So, after the customer had been informed that you were intending on shipping them an unfinished product, what did some of them seek to do?"
"They said we weren't shipping what they had paid for and that they were cancelling their order and required their money back"
"What did your company do"
"Shipped 'em anyway"
"Even when told not to?"
"Some might suggest it was *especially* when we were told not to, but that wouldn't be true. We just shipped 'em out no matter what the customer said"
"You shipped an unfinished product even when told not to?"
"Yes, yes we did"
"You are aware that the evidence from your own forum and emails fully incriminates your firm in this illegal behaviour?"
"No Refunds! What don't you get, norefundnorefundnorefundnorefund. Because we say so!"
"That'll be all, your honour, prosecution rests".

Oh, did I?

Maybe KnC have got the message by now and I won't need to keep repeating the details of how they shipped a product out with inherent LIMITATIONS ON USE that evidence proves they were fully aware of when they shipped, yet chose to force them on their customer anyway and finish building them after they had already been instructed on multiple occasions not to ship a product which they knew to have LIMITATIONS ON USE.

Maybe I won't have to keep repeating how these LIMITATIONS ON USE, which basically forced their customers to have to USE the Titan in a LIMITED way until KnC finally managed to fit that fourth wheel and finish building the product the customer actually paid for.

Maybe I won't have to keep repeating how, the moment KnC decided to ship a product they KNEW to have LIMITATIONS that were not intended to be in the finished product, is the moment they were legally obliged to honour cancellation instructions from their customers who did not agree to accept a product that did not meet the specifications detailed at the time of sale.

In choosing to ship Titans out before they were finished making them, most likely to not breach the Q3 deadline they had promised, they breached a different element of the sales contract and, in doing so, meant their 'No Refund!' condition did not apply because such a condition, even if a court were to accept so onerous a stipulation, would only apply if KnC did not breach the sales contract in the first place.

Which they did by knowingly shipping the Titan units out UNFINISHED and . . .

with . . .

LIMITATIONS ON USE.

Then it looks like you'll have the most success with having ARN take on your case seeing as KnC already had their arse spanked by them over wrongly declaring consumer customers to be businesses and, on top of that, unfair and onerous terms and conditions of sale.

http://www.arn.se/English/English/

What is in that box is not what you paid for. It is an unfinished Titan that KnC shipped to you in full knowledge that it had LIMITATION ON USE that was not disclosed at the time of purchase.

That they are frantically trying to make features work, such as p2pool, is not a 'fault' issue it is an unfinished product issue.

The inability to properly function on certain pools and coins when they chose to despatch your miner is not as a result of a design fault but, rather, a design fact.

Simply put, they are still trying to build the product you actually paid for AFTER having shipped it to you.

They are not allowed to do that. A fault discovered after delivery is one thing, an unfinished product that is knowingly being shipped with design fact limitations in its firmware is akin to shipping you a car with three wheels and limited performance when you paid for one with four and they knew that what they were shipping you was not what you paid for, yet they chose to ship it anyway with the intention of completing it after you'd had it in your possession for a period of time.

If you cancelled your order on the basis that the product was not what you paid for and they claim it was, all the while knowing that it had a limitation on its use that was not originally intended to be in the finished product and is not intended to be in the finished product, then it is not a finished product and they do not have the right to finish manufacturing it on your premises and on your time.

They certainly do not have the right to force delivery of goods that they know are incomplete and their continued intransigence on this matter is going to trip them up big style. If I were a VC company recently invested in KnC, I'd be *really* worried about the chance that all those millions handed to KnC were going to be pumped into legal fees in a vain attempt to dodge responsibility for a fact that is already proven against them.

Here's the facts:
1. KnC's own staff confirmed that the Titan would mine all scrypt coins on any pool the customer chose - the explicit evidence for this was posted by them on their own website back in March.
2. There is no evidence to support KnC's recent claim that the Titan was being promoted as a 'straight-forward Litecoin-miner' and, even if we were to generously accommodate that baseless assertion as though it were true, the inability to mine on Litecoin's p2pool is a limitation of use for a 'straight-forward Litecoin-miner'.
3. Evidence posted on their own website AND in email correspondence, proves that they knew it to have limitations prior to shipping, such as an inability to mine on Litecoin p2pool, let alone all the all limitations related to the, previously promised, 'any scrypt coin any pool' functionality.

No company is allowed to ship a product they *know* to be unfinished or incomplete and they certainly are not entitled to keep parroting "No Refund!" when, even if such an onerous condition of sale were allowed to stand in a court of law (doubtful), it would only apply to the finished product, you know, the one you actually paid for, not the one they decided to ship before they were done building it.

That.

Given the guarantees and bold claims made about these Hashlet things, day trading has never been mentioned before and is a hugely alarming element of this structure. If GAW were able to present a product which made its money from mining and hash rental, then you could count on there being a calculable degree of risk/return.

Throw in day-trading and you've now reducing a measurable degree of risk to that of all-out gamble that can only be mitigated if you are planning on profiting from dishonestly manipulating the market.

Unless, of course, the "No" answer you are giving to the ponzi-indicating question, "Do any of the payouts come from a return of capital (i.e. a return of a part of the original hashlet costs)", is only tecnically a "No" because the money paid for a hashlet is first sent for a quick day-trade before making its way back to the payout queue.

That way, you get to say it isn't Ponzi because its not directly paying sums received from new investors to pay old, because you are classing it, instead, as merely the movement of capital from your currency 'trading' operation.

For the Titan Terms & Conditions of Sale to be applicable KnC have to deliver the product that was originally specified, which is a device capable of hashing on any scrypt coin and on any pool the customer chooses, as clearly defined by KnC's own staff back in March. Hell, even their attempt to rewrite history by claiming they were promoting and selling something they are now try to define as a 'straight-forward Litecoin-miner', falls down when there is evidence online showing that they knew it could not function on Litecoin's p2pool yet continued to ship anyway.

They didn't ship a faulty product, they shipped an incomplete one with KNOWN LIMITATIONS ON USE, so the T&C's don't apply because what they are delivering to customers is not what the customers contracted KnC to supply when they sent them the money earlier in the year.

Essential breach of contract.

At the point a customer cancelled an order after KnC explicitly confirmed that the product has LIMITATIONS ON USE, KnC is obliged to honour the cancellation and fully refund the customer because they are not shipping them the product the customer paid for.

To make matters worse, KnC threatened customers with penalties if they did not accept delivery of this incomplete product.

They knew it to be incapable of functioning as it should prior to their customers cancelling the order and they knew it to be incapable of functioning as it should when they forced shipment of it onto their customers, against their customers explicit instruction not to.

The more they hold out on fulfilling their legal obligation to honour their customer's right to cancel, the more they expose themselves to potentially serious charges related to fraudulent misrepresentation.

+10% was that the default refund amount they were told to give you or were they just being nice? 

Do clarify, though, this must be for a different miner than the LIMITATION ON USE Titan scrypt miner?

Nicely done, by the way, congratulations for finally getting it properly resolved. I will make sure my friend's company is made aware of these developments, they are currently determined to hold KnC to account for misrepresenting the Titan's capabilities and shipping them out a product with a LIMITATION ON USE, even when they knew it had a LIMITATION ON USE and they had been instructed to cancel the order on the basis of KnC's eventual confirmation regarding its LIMITATION ON USE.

By the way, did you know that under Swedish law if you report the Titan as being faulty, you have to wait until you receive delivery of it prior to reporting it as faulty and, even then, the seller is entitled to attempt to repair the faulty product. Kinda means KnC get a free pass to dick everybody about, right?

But, here's the thing, the LIMITATION ON USE Titan they shipped out wasn't faulty, no, it works exactly as KnC knew it would work when they decided to ship 'em out quick-smart before the clock ran down on Q3. It runs as designed, with a LIMITATION ON USE that was previously undisclosed by KnC, who made no mention of this LIMITATION ON USE, when they were promoting it back in March and their staff were eagerly informing enquiring potential customers who were asking whether it would be able to mine on other coins than Litecoin and were told, in no uncertain terms, that it would be able to mine on any scrypt coin on whichever pool the customer chose to use.

Except it can't. Until they've finished making it, the product they actually advertised, the one that could be used on all scrypt coins whichever pool the customer wanted to use. Turns out KnC shipped out a different product, one that they knew they were shipping with major LIMITATION ON USE as part of its design. Your Titan is waiting for KnC to finish building it.

Steeeeeeeeeeerike THREE KNC!!!! You. Are. OUT!!!!!1!1!!!!!!11eleventy!!111!1!

ORLY?!

I did not know that was yet another LIMITATION OF USE issue. Pesky things them limitations. Sort of thing you'd be needing to disclose prior to taking your customer's money, especially considering your firm is promoting the Titan for pre-order as being something more than capable of mining anything scrypt anywhere the customer wants.

Somewhat counter to the entire notion of these device being sold with known limitations if, you know, you haven't actually said ANYTHING ABOUT LIMITATIONS OF USE, to your customer. Well, to be fair, you did eventually acknowledge that there were LIMITATIONS OF USE, right about when customers started receiving them and reporting how they appeared to have very LIMITED range of coins and pools they could actually function on.