This is not actually true, I bought four Avalon units. (I didn't see any reason to whine about being snubbed in public, but since it's now being repeated as fact— I might was well correct it).

What a really bad choice of examples. Allow me to count the ways:
(1) None of the bitcoin developers are accusing Avalon of making a license violation.
(2) Bitcoin itself is MIT licensed, so it wouldn't be an issue for Bitcoin proper, for better or worse.
(3) Our build process is entirely deterministic and you can git a bit-by-bit identical copy of the binaries by following the process.

And yes— license violations are rampant and seldom enforced. But the GPL(v3) is farily unambiguous about what is required, and Kano is unambiguous that they would actually enforce the license— so, I assume, would Luke-Jr (seeing that he is one of very few people I've ever seen actually enforce a BSD/MIT style license!).

Come on. Don't be a prick.

If I misunderstood you— that's fine. But if you're not actually demanding that they put the code on a website, and you're not claiming they're infringing by not giving it to you— then what the heck are you posting on this subject at all for?  I certainly don't see any reason to continue to argue with you when you're just going to respond agreeing with me!  This has gone way offtopic and has basically nothing to do with Avalon's release now— I would have split off your and my posts already but didn't lest I be accused of burying them.

I hope you can forgive my misunderstanding, especially since you claimed that they "are breaking the license doing that." and have been demanding they place the source on a public website.  I don't know why I would have possibly thought that when you accused someone to be currently in violation of the GPL that you actually believed they were in violation. I'll try to assume less in the future.

Thanks for clearing it up— cheers!

It's not just— or even primarily about miners— what matters is what the users (all of them, including miners) of the network accept.

What you're suggesting isn't terribly hard, and things like it have been suggested before... but it would be a incompatible change and so for it to happen to bitcoin it would have to be a critical improvement. ....  and at the same time, you haven't really argued that its an improvement at all.  In fact, it arguably hurts security— a weakness in one POW  or a big farm of one POW would allow an attacker using it to create short term reversals. So you'd get a "worst of all" effect, to some extent.

Come on, be realistic— they're not going to send out a bunch of hardware to random people on the expectation that they'll get around to sending it in... even without any dishonesty, a lot of people will just lazy out of doing the return.  It's hard to get cross shipment of regular RMA computer hardware without putting down a deposit or a credit card number.  Too much fraud exposure.  Spread your caution— if you like— but try to be realistic.

To hell with BFL—  the gibbering insults, off-topic ranting, and random inanity are harmful and embarrassing to our whole community no matter who they're directed at or who they're coming from. The trolling makes it hard for people who have money extended to BFL to track whats going on and sort out the BS from the serious concerns. I'm not suggesting this at their request, in fact I'm suggesting doing what I offered to do that Inaba didn't agree with. (A blunt splitting clean sweep instead of a bunch of laborious manual message moderation).

For those of us who think BFL is a bunch of scam artists: the trolling is bad because the serious criticism is lost in the noise and made to look like just more of the insanity... for those of us who think BFL is an honest business being treated like crap the trolling is bad: it's insanely disrespectful would easily make someone think twice about doing business with the Bitcoin community. For those of us who don't care about any of this but want to pretend that we're mature and intelligent people: The trolling is bad— it makes us look like unruly children.  

The only people the trolling is good for is those who like setting stuff on fire— not because the stuff is good or bad— but just because they want to watch the world burn.

Who "deserves" what doesn't even come into it. Civil society isn't about picking winners and losers and treating everyone you dislike like shit. If your opinion of BFL's reputation is negative— don't buy their products and encourage your friends to do the same. Let them know what they're doing wrong.  There is nothing wrong with being frank, and nothing about it requires hostility, dishonesty, childishness, or disrespect.

Lots of stuff gets moved, deleted, etc on the forum.  Hopefully it's done with consideration and care— and if not then hopefully the users will find a better forum.  This kind of care isn't required to avoid censorship— it's required because its part of what differentiates a good forum from a bad one. But what of censorship? Freedom of speech is as much about the freedom to NOT say what you don't want to say as it is about the freedom to say what you want.  Censorship would be denying the forum the ability to self regulate— to force it to distribute and promote your views even when it is to the detriment of the owners of the system and the community that uses it.

This is not correct.

They have NO obligation to give you the source code. They have an obligation to give the source code (indeed, the actual code and not a 'cleaned up' version) to parties that they gave the binaries to, if they request it. That's it. Go read the license.

It's here, as linked in the message you linked.

No, none of them were deleted in that case. They were split off and the thread renamed. Jesus.

I _would_ have deleted your continued OT blather, but I didn't want to leave the inaccuracy standing.

Please don't bump really old threads. Someone should split at the bump point, lock the original, and delete this post..

If only it were true.

Not all of the interesting news about asic vendors comes from the asic vendors directly.  I've certainly learned a lot of things by reading the threads... but at times they're borderline unreadable to anyone who isn't ignoring half the posters already.

You _can't_ place an order right now— they aren't accepting any.

They can, — and in some cases have— started their own forums for all the value that a privately controlled echo chamber may provide.  I think there is value in having a wider diversity of views and keeping more things in a common discussion place... but the openness of this forum has invited people who are so viciously (and, sometimes, irrationally) negative that people actually miss the smaller number of genuine thoughtfully argued concerns.  I don't know how to solve it, but I do know how to make it so there are fewer messages to read.

I'd be quite happy if parties had announcement threads (I don't know that there is really any reason to keep them locked— I can simply split off old responses regularly without much trouble. I'd recommended this in the past.


I've deleted many of posts too.  Many of them very quickly so perhaps they haven't been noticed— crap like bazarro porn mashups with pictures of the family members of asic people.  Some of that is now moved off the forum.  ... some people here should be ashamed of themselves.

You can start telling me what I _need_ to do when I get the authority to ban people and when the overall forum adopts a policy which is less all-is-fair. Until then, it's going to be horrible... and when I see a particularly bad example that I can fix easily I'll continue to do so.

I'm not sure if you noticed but I did split & split/nuke jobs with the tails of both the avalon and btcfpga threads.  The difference is that I was willing to go back through a month of history in those and split off most of the tripe and I'm not willing to do something that selective with BFL (just because of the sheer size and low density of signal to tripe, as well as the high density of borderline posts).   I think the other vendors are already better but not good, but right now better is all I can hope for with the current forum culture and policies.  I believe that part of what Josh reached out to me is that he felt that I was being unfair by cleaning up the other threads, and he's right... though I'm not intentionally being unfair and I'd like to fix it.

My preference would be for the vendors to have stickies and potentially locked (or at least ruthlessly cleaned with no promise of fairness) announcement threads where they constantly update the top posts.  This has worked more or less well for the pool subforum in the past.  I've proposed this before but didn't get takers on it... and it's not just something I can impose since it would need people to actually update the posts.  I can, however, split off and lock dramafests unilaterally. 

If I recall correctly 1499 is lower than their original non-discounted advertised prices.

It's basically impossible to find any actual news about BFL amid the 130 pages of "LOL SCAM!!" "No U!" "I LIK UR DONGS".  Josh asked me to clean it up, but it basically an impossible task at this point. I offered instead to split the thread (e.g. break it at the top post) but he declined.  Well, regardless of what BFL staff thinks, I think it would ultimately be better for everyone to keep the polite, informed, and on-topic discussion in a separate thread from the madcap forum drama.

Does anyone have any sane reasons I shouldn't do this?

(Actual reasoned responses will count a lot more to me than poll results)

You mean the negative tax that early adopters with risky pre-orders had?

Perhaps the price should depend on the difficulty.

price = 1200 + 800*3249549.58448721/diff

Presumably if someone _else_ wants Kano to support it that person (or a collection of people) could cooperate to buy him one too. Which is right and proper: People who want his support can self-serve to get Kano whatever Kano needs to provide it.