They attorneys taking it on contingency on the amounts above and beyond the offered settlements sure don't seem to agree with you. Everyone can also see the clear and explicit promises of 1:1 Bitcoin refunds both in public and in private communications. By all means, anyone who somehow didn't get the message that 1:1 refunds on failure were part of the deal and didn't make their purchasing decision because of it: take the settlement— leave the assets for the recovery of those of us who relied on the original terms.

The antminer graph I posted above has considerably better latency than the Avalon batch 1s (which still happily get me 100% eff).

Work absolutely fine.
also work fine.

(My selective quoting is only of the hardware that I'm personally running hundreds of GH/s on P2Pool with but given that you're outright wrong about those, I assume the rest of your list is equally BS)

Single blade antminer S1, Works fantastically on P2Pool:


And if there are non-trivial numbers of people with miners that don't respond to LPs then you sure as heck don't want to be sharing a pool with them. Higher latency or the lack of LP will ding (severely!) you on P2Pool but these things increase orphaned blocks generally. With other pools that aren't so critical amount miner timeliness that cost is shared by the miners. If your setup isn't screwy you're paying for other people's screwyness. Not on P2Pool.

Usually when the presentation of a matter of fact is contested you can usually make a version which everyone agrees is acceptable simply by adding a bit more information.

Instead of  "Their 28nm product is already 2-3 months late and no silicon in sight so far", you can say something like:

For their latest 28nm product BFL originally advertised a target of X, but when they also said "this timeline is not a hard and fast timeline and is not meant to be the bible of how we will be rolling out this product." and "This is our current projected timeline. It is subject to change." they weren't kidding around: It's now X past that "target" and the network difficulty is now Y times higher then when they started taking orders, and they haven't yet demonstrated a working chip much less shipped any to anyone.

As far as criticism goes, I think this is even more effective (e.g. tells the reader why they should care), avoids the rat hole of arguing over what "late" means which some readers may use as an excuse to justify ignoring your complaint ("I read elsewhere that it was just a target, this guy has an axe to grind!"), and avoids sounding too whiny.

When you've really got a strong position you can usually concede every ambiguous point to your opponent and walk away all the more convincing for it. Getting into knife fights over every last issue makes you look weak, desperate, or biased (something some of the vendors around here should learn!).

Testing on the public network is actually a really poor test, in fact.  It doesn't test a gamut of difficulties, it doesn't test large block sizes (most pools are only generating 250k blocks right now), it doesn't test large coinbase transaction sizes, it doesn't necessairly tell you that your devices have severe latency problems (isn't obvious on the public network with a short test, but kills you if you want to merge mine with a fast chain).

Several miners have shipped from hardware makers with firmware which had severe problems with larger blocks as a result of inadequate testing.

I'm also of the opinion that testing should generally not be done on the public network, and that any "testing" done on the public network for demonstration or burn-in purposes should be limited to small amounts and ought to be 100% paid to the customers. Anything less creates creates a conflict of interests.

But hey, in a free decentralized system no one can dictate the terms from the top down. So if we want good conduct from hardware makers we're going to have to demand it as a community, or just hope that they'll adopt it on their own to foster goodwill. ::shrugs::

In any case, great to see that CoinTerra has hardware up and hashing.

Of course you have a choice.

Anyone who doesn't think you have a choice: please PM me your address, I'll be sending you $1 payments for the purchase of your homes.  (or better, if you happen to know the address of any person who doesn't believe they have a choice, please PM me their address, and I'll split the income I get buying their home for a dollar and flipping it with you).

FWIW, there doesn't seem to be a way to even place an order via the rather seedy seeming HF motherboard selling page.  My best, totally speculative, WAG is that someone is fake-selling those not to scam people buying them but rather to either produce drama for their own amusement ... or to convince people to take refunds.

If someone does have working 400GH/s mining boards, that price isn't actually bad. I'll buy a bunch of 'em at that price, if you don't mind me coming to pick them up and inspecting each unit. Alas, it doesn't seem to be real.

Secure by design is great and necessary.

But I don't believe what you've suggested actually advances that.  You're trying to close off an avenue for hiding data which only exists if an unjustified and obtrusive form of conspicuous data hiding is already used.  I think this is pointless and does not contribute to security in any meaningful way.

Moreover, Bitcoin mining asics are not some hypothetical. They exist and we know how flexible they are and are not. What you suggested is not compatible.

Except that wasn't the deal here. If the BJ's had shipped on time assuming a 2%/day hashrate increase they would have been a 10% loss before accounting for the MPP, the MPP was only a correction back up to break evenish.  Actual hashrate growth since the batch 1 orders happened and now has been much greater— more like 2.3%/day. You could say that the BJs had a reasonable potential for some upside if delivered on time and to spec, but massive profit? No way. They wouldn't have made a massive profit if they were delivered to spec.

Thats what was crappy here... the prices were high, the projected revenue wasn't great. The _only_ thing the HF batch 1 offer had going for it was a layered stack of assurances that it was reasonably unrisky— refunds, mpp, (near)state of the art process, an experienced design house, located in silicon valley, a late announcement with near impending shipping (they initially seemed to be saying they weren't going to take preorders, but ultimately they did). I think this contributes to people not being happy about the current situation: We weren't promised unicorns and rainbows and so didn't expect the risks that comes with chasing them.

Though I suppose some customers used crazy optimistic hashrate projections and thought they were going to make a mint... though I don't understand why anyone doing that hadn't already sunk their money on KNC. It certainly wasn't the case for everyone. I saw it as a moderately low risk way that I could upgrade my mining farm to 28nm and continue mining as increased hashrates drove my avalons into non-profitability over power costs... and now they're asking people to lock in an 86% loss. ... perhaps even trying to force it, if that unsolicited refund check wasn't a one off fluke.  (Easy for people to jump to that conclusion, since there is still a fighting chance that batch 1 + full MPP will be somewhat less of a loss than taking that refund check; assuming hope upon hope that this time the delivery timeframes are correct)

What you really want is a generic validatorvalidator  to act as a fixed point, then you can feed it to itself and once it passes, feed the normal website validator to it.

Or you could not do high value crypto in an environment where its the norm for people to replace the code out from under you at any time.

What was clear from the beginning was that refunds of the full amount of BTC paid were promised— this, combined with MPP and the sounds of very short term completion, made the deal appear rather low risk, which was necessary considering that the prices were 2x (and later 4x) higher than the competition. Nor was the expectation of that unreasonable: they had outside investment, taking preorders fills the sales pipeline, makes inventories easier to manage, locks in coin earliest when people will pay the most, and keeps customers from going to the competition.

There are plenty of reasons to take (and pay) pre-orders that has nothing to do with wanting investomers who will take a bath on non-delivery. The prospective returns on the HF devices even if they'd delivered on time would have been at a _loss_ for the single units, then made up for (probably) by MPP. Thats not the kind of prices return anyone would have signed up for if they thought it was a high risk investment rather than selling a product.

(You also don't see e.g. complaints like this for cointerra (yet!) because they were a fraction of the price— while not offering the kinds of assurances HF offered, initially offered Dec/Jan (e.g. not much off— HF customers weren't pulling out pitchforks in November), and when they realized they couldn't make their deadlines they called up their December customers and offered to refund or add capacity to their order to make up for it.)

That article seems to have swallowed some marketing deception whole cloth. Hashfast was saying they would ship before the end of the year up to the 30th of December. Come a week into January and they sent out a message saying January 28th.

If they "have the inventory" they'd be shipping it, instead they've just sent out some engineering samples one of which has been reported here to have reliability problems (the sierra where apparently 2/3 boards don't work).

I really doubt they're mining with it, since I don't think any of them want to go to prison. Catastrophes happen in business, and even if you think that HF is a bunch of fraudsters they're simply not likely to do something that would remove all doubt.

(Though if you want to speculate, there was a pretty large hashrate bump a couple days ago...  http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-10k.png looks like an addition of another 100TH/s per day to the network since the 6th over and above the background growth)

This is a preorder, it will not ship within a week.

Semiconductor process is only one variable. KNC's prior 28nm product was exceeded in power efficiency by some 55nm devices. The actual power performance is matters, not the lithography.

Transactions over 100k currently fail IsStandard(), but otherwise, no.  There are (near) maximal sized transactions on testnet too.

You'd propose a risky change that moots millions of dollars of deployed hardware to address a theoretical implementation of a theoretical weakness?

...A implementation which requires hashers to voluntarily sign up for using services which hide extra data from them? That that an attacker wants to hide because it doesn't want hashers to know that they're beginning to perform the aforementioned theoretical attack (which can't really be hidden once its actually happening actively, as miners will see their solutions being delayed and the network will see orphans). ... and yet hashers are somehow not going to be smart enough to realize that anyone asking them to switch software/firmware is doing so because they want to perform that attack?

Existing mining software (BFGMiner) already validates the sanity of prevblocks in requested work, e.g. validates that a pool isn't asking the miner to fork its own past work. I don't think there is any risk of anyone sneaking this in on anyone.

So you spent 13.95 BTC on block erupters which later sold for .35 BTC, so 13.6 cost after accounting for the sale. How much Bitcoin did you mine on them?

It would be super helpful to summarize you expenses and income on the first post.

I am giggling right now. Best of luck to you.

Unlike your crappy unicorn miner, BitMain's products are sold in stock and ship right away.

Sorry, kickbacks from vapor-mining competitor UNICORN were greater, moving to offtopic.

Not sure if I should move to offtopic ... or sticky.