Minternj is right on the money.  The kind of statements he is citing, and the overarching commitment of the MPP are exactly why I invested in the 1st batch, and exactly why Hashfast is going to have a big fat fucking problem if they don't rectify the situation for MPP customers.

I also bought an upgrade, which will never ROI, but I'm not complaining about that.  It was at-risk, not under the MPP pledge.

But... the way they have structured it, we just have to wait and see.  Maybe they make their 1st batch customers whole, maybe they don't.  I still wanna hope that they are good guys, although Ninja is scaring me considering his flip-flop from the positive attitude he had after visiting them.

I was saying weeks ago, and am still pretty sure, that if there's any litigation here, it's going to be about the MPP, not delivery dates per se, especially in view of statements about being 'on track' and whatnot.

But still... we have to wait and see.  Maybe they will do right.

If they have a decent order book going forward (who knows) and have kept some BTC, I still wonder if they might not collect enough cancellation requests to refund Cedivad and others that want it, and use those chips (we're only talking 550 or something total) to ship faster machines for remaining batch 1 orders.

I don't know if I'd call US $676 a "crash".  More like minor correction.

I generally agree with you, Icebreaker, especially WRT cedivad, but that last post is a one from a little too great an apologist for Hashfast.

Really, they are substantially behind their 'expected' shipping dates, legitimate questions have been raised about some of their statements about being "on track", and they've recently said very little that wasn't first coaxed and then carefully parsed.  They also haven't directly acknowledged the biggest whopper issues with the MPP - that at 400% their first batch customers may still lose, and later customers may ironically do better.

It's legit to want them to be more consistently communicative.

I don't think it's that, I think it's that they just kinda don't know what to do, and the missteps with Taco and the silly (and ill-timed) drawing for people putting ads in their sigs show the lack of a coherent communication plan.  

Dealing with this situation is different than selling bondage or fisting pron, as our marketing man is probably finding out!  I don't mean that too meanly, after all, it's a really strange situation, and I can't think of any especially valuable prior experience he could have had to help deal with bitcoin miner preorder fumbles, so I guess pron sales are as (in)applicable as anything else.  (Except maybe crisis communication.)

I don't think they have to come on here and respond to every bitchy post, but having said that, Amer has a number of good suggestions, even if some of them veer too far into the "promotional" aspect rather than providing information.  Hashfast can certainly do a better job getting the facts out there, and doing so with some regularity. Personally, I'm not so much interested in success stories ... except maybe new information that shows how they are addressing and overcoming delays.  Data points. Stuff that speaks for itself.  Not any spun items. Why not commit to a factual update every week, with some of the industry-specific insight information that Amer suggests (i.e. for those of us that aren't personally into hardware design)?

If this takes off among a broader crowd, I think it'll be like hyperinflation in reverse.  Some South American and other countries used to periodically lop a couple or more zeros off the end of their currencies.... One million Peruvians soles became one Inti, and the like..

For BTC the same thing will happen, but backwards, and although people will know in the back of their minds the place of the "real" decimal point, in practice it will shift right as bitcoin value increases.  So:

BTC0.01 would become 1.00 in day to day notation (a new symbol will be needed), then with deflation, BTC0.001 becomes the "new" 1.00, etc... until you reach the end, which I guess is when BTC0.00000100  becomes 1.00.

I don't think these millis and micros, reliant on "advanced math" and "weird symbols" are going to work with a general population.  Assuming a general population eventually handles bitcoins or, well, very small pieces thereof.

We need Mog's spare bedroom to stay in while we come up there to check out the facilities and see if things are real.  

Also, how does Señor Customs Agent in Keflavik react to a padded box containing mining hardware?  (As luggage, I'm thinking, but it could be by courier.)

It seems that not even the mods, who apparently deleted it, got my wafer receipt joke.

When I was boy going to Sunday school, they taught me to kneel down to receive wafers.  

I've got the business card of a good barber here in Austin.  Msg me.

What I wonder is if they have a chip yield higher than the number sold (the waiting list machines can bump to batch two), plus they have a certain number of people demanding a refund (especially very early buyers) ... would it be possible to strike a balance enabling the batch 1 machines to ship with more hashpower?  

Of course, as soon as people heard refunds were flowing, a large proportion would rush to refund...

At the same time, if people heard the machines were going to ship with 800 gh/s, plus MPP boards later, fewer might want to refund ...  

Not interested in a refund myself yet, but interested in the response.

This is a valid question.

Although if HF ultimately does right to the MPP customers, perhaps it's moot.

Yep.  Everybody's getting 1+4 boards per BJ plus any upgrade boards paid for (which I regrettably did).  This, as I was pointing out a couple weeks ago, makes the BJ hardware nothing more than a PITA.  One hopes that Hashfast has enough non-MPP BJ orders to use up the BJ boxes and whatever else it entails that they already have, and to just friggin' ship, as I was pointing out a couple weeks ago, all of Batch 1 in equipped Sierra cases... either that or just provide 3 of the 4 MPP boards in the form of a complete Sierra.

Before some self-acclaimed tech guru intervenes to diss this idea saying "Oh, dude, you're so lame, you can't go out and buy a power supply and case and fans?" Yadda yadda... Think about how marginally profitable, if at all profitable, Batch 1 will be. What's better, satisfying your PC mechanic manhood by spending money on that stuff, or reasonably insisting on HF servicing the MPP in a manner that facilitates actually using the MPP boards?

Well, call me old-fashioned and naive, but my impression is that the folks at Hashfast have more moral fiber, more mature personal goals, and most importantly, more self-respect than Josh, and I think that matters.

People were essentially blindsided by BFL's perfidy - no experience with dishonesty on the BFL scale before.  They didn't know what to do, especially the arrested development libertardian geek types who can't reason well enough to wipe their own behinds.

Check the other thread for people, already burned once, rushing to man the barricades to sue HF.  If HF fails on the MPP, some of that won't be just idle threat. People have learned, the community has learned, through experience.

Hell, I haven't mentioned this before, because it's totally not my frame of mind.  But for one thing, if Hashfast screws its MPP buyers, they'd have me to deal with. I f@ck with companies and large institutions for a living... done it professionally for 20 years. Companies a lot bigger than Hashfast, and projects with a dollar value mucho más grande que US $3m worth of ASIC hardware. You win some and you lose some, but I can f'n guarantee you that I'd cause them public relations and legal pain. Not cheap show-grousing on an internet forum.

Anyway, I don't think I'm going to need to do that.  BFL kind of assholery won't go on.  To survive, if the whole model of the citizen-miner survives, these companies are going to have to do things differently and develop non-hateful relationships with their customers.  KnC seems to be leading the way. HF is working to follow. At least that's my bet.

I wouldn't put the limit for Batch 1 customers at 4 modules.  Hashfast is in a complex situation for sure, but the MPP's underlying pledge is cost recovery in 90 days.  Yes, there is verbiage about "up to 400%", but that should be contextualized bearing in mind the promise to double any shortfall in hashpower.***

At the point that the MPP kicks in, if Hashfast remains a viable entity (and I certainly hope it does), the boards themselves won't be costing them a hell of a lot. I sure hope they are upping their orders now.

So when late January rolls around, I think that rather being in the position of having dragged their first customers through this painful process for months, only to have the MPP not achieve ROI and have us screaming bloody murder at precisely the time that they finally will probably have significant hardware in hand to sell, the decent and relatively painless thing to do, if necessary, will be to quickly toss in additional boards so that people at least break even.  

It's kind of death or glory for them.  If the MPP fails, they are BFL 2.0.  If they do what it takes for the MPP to at least leave its customers breaking even, they go down as the good guys that protected their early customers through an incredibly turbulent time.  Earned goodwill.  Imagine that.

And they will probably hew as close as humanly possible to promised delivery date on non-MPP Batch 2+ orders, because who can fault them for the network hashrate?  Those machines were bought wholly at-risk and, if delivered on time, nobody can reasonably consider them not achieving ROI to be Hashfast's fault.

Goes without saying that the MPP is dead for future sales.  I also think they will exit presales ASAP.

Basically, as I see it, the MPP customers are now going to form a pretty special class of 'stakeholders' in Hashfast.  Although I think we should remain wary, instead of bashing them, we should really hope they make it, because I think they will make us whole if they survive.


***  From Hashfast MPP page: "You buy a Baby Jet for 50 BTC, and we ship it on October 25th.  January 23, 2014 comes and goes, and it turns out that at the Baby Jet’s nominal hashrate, it would only have generated 25 BTC during that 90 day period.  Calculated out, it would have taken an additional 400 Ghash/s of capacity shipped with your Baby Jet on October 25, 2013 to generate 50 BTC. We can’t go back in time to give you that 400Ghash/s. Instead, HashFast will double that and give you 800 Ghash/s in additional capacity. In this example, HashFast will give you two additional Golden Nonce ASICs, each with 400 nominal GHash/s."

Yes and yes.  HF has stated that they will offer "competitively priced" hardware to go with the MPP boards.  They have also stated that the upgrade boards will require nothing more than "beer and a screwdriver" to install (i.e. come will all necessary hardware).

Doubt my upgrade module will earn much, though...

Okay, so somebody do the math and post a nice graphic.

For one first batch Baby Jet, MPP retroactive to October 30th, hashing on 20 December, what do the curves look like, with hi/lo assumptions for future difficulty increases, assuming MPP modules ship exactly Jan 30th.

Thank you in advance,

Moocher.  


PS: Wonder what this means for upgrades and 2nd batch shipping dates.

My bet is that after this experience they move as fast as they can out of pre-orders altogether.  The degree of inducement necessary to get people* to buy preorder potentially threatens their bottom line.

*sane people.

Hashfast has planted a virus in your laptop cam, Cedivad.  They plan to post the update just as soon as you go to bed. 

And it could be $100 tomorrow. I'm, err..., eagerly expecting some better communication from them too...

but this business about them self-mining and sending customers used equipment months later?  This is whackjob paranoid fantasizing. Doing that would certainly be legally actionable, not to mention ethically bankrupt.  Yeah, I know, there are questions about BFL's "burn in", but you've probably got your head up Alex Jones' ass if you seriously believe that HashFast would 1) do that, and 2) get away with it.

I think you are right that there is a certain percentage of the population - here and anywhere (think conspiracy theorists) - that are going to be disgruntled about *any* statement.  OTOH, if information is clear, honest, and lends the impression that problems are being dealt with responsibly, it should be reassuring for most people.  What they need to explain is that there's plan, it's realistic, and it's being handled as the utmost priority of responsible, qualified adults.

I think the 'legacy' of BFL weighs heavily here.  As the great George Bush said, "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."  

Well, I guess IceDrill didn't get his answer, or he didn't post it.  

I retain a positive outlook, but I'm adding my voice now to those saying that HashFast needs to step up to the plate with improved and more detailed communication.  

HF doesn't have to publicly engage every itchy customer with 500 repetitive and pedantic questions and demands, but statements clarifying the state of affairs and the company's plans are in order.  

It's important that these statements be specific and unambiguous.  They should not be laden with squishy qualifications or conditions that cast doubt on the meaning of what's being said.

Crisis Communication 101.  They teach crisis communicators some underhanded tactics, but some good stuff too. The cardinal rule of crisis communication is to get out in front with the facts.  Not getting out in front with the facts leads to rumors, conspiracy theories, anxiety and a disgruntled public... sound familiar?