Thanks for the link to the Ticino Bitmine business page. It looks like they have not filed any financial reports for a while.

The timing of the increase in capital invested 6th February 2014, and 1,000,000 Swiss Francs
might make some believe that their refund is "invested" in Bitmine AG.

The business seems to be turning fiat money into bitcoin via electricity,
and that should make for interesting reading sometime soon.

The news reports provide nothing new, though :
"Technically, the currency is absolutely safe and neither states nor companies can influence it.
Therefore, it has a good chance of long-term as the standard in Internet payments. "

Just as long as you are not waiting for a refund ...

See here :

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=602501
http://www.bitminerefund.com/

@crocko - did you get an incident number from interpol?

@Valzador - depends where the street is ;-)

For one THz maybe 3BTC in a year, =maybe $1000

and maybe 1KW x 8760 hours  = 8760 KWh

how much does your electricity cost?
In some street it is about $0.20 per KWH

so about $1752 dollars for electricity!

Maybe you will pay me to take it away?

 "BF Labs Inc. has no idea what cans of worms they've opened up"

Maybe that prompted the SEC's & FinCen's recent initiative that is "exporting" various bitcoin businesses.

@TonyT "Was it like an abandoned lobster trap, sucking in new, hapless and unsuspecting lobster victims?  Or, did they (as I speculated in my post) have good low prices? "

Nobody knew (except BFL) how well (I use the term loosely) the preorders were going. Even after it became obvious that
there were too many orders to deliver ROI and that deliveries were delayed and that difficulty was going through the roof,
people still kept buying. Like the way people are still defending BFL.

US District Court
Western District of Missouri
Western Division

Case NO. 4:14-cv-00815-BCW

FTC vs BF LABS, INC.

http://ia802308.us.archive.org/32/items/gov.uscourts.mowd.117531/gov.uscourts.mowd.117531.110.0.pdf

Also this - see list of documents

http://www.woodlaw.com/cases/butterfly-labs-and-bf-labs-inc-bitcoin-miners?page=1

Alleged Consumer Fraud.

Hiring a lawyer would be cheaper for me, so I wish you be best of luck, and congratulations on your first post.

As an aside, if you have followed the BFL threads, it seems that BFLs contributions to the pool of miners has stopped.

It is hard to tell for sure from the outside whether BFL's business model is broken but if it is, the US government
is unlikely, imho, to resume selling miners.

That means the difficulty growth rate is slower so my expectations for ROI are now probably too low, though I doubt that
a rate of 2.5 BTC per THash per year would be exceeded without further changes in the bitcoin space. As in any
venture, be sure to do your own research.

"If bitmine fails, he doesn´t get any money back."

If bitmine fails, as a creditor in the company he still has a claim on the assets of bitmine,
and (is ahead of the investors holding equity) in the queue to get paid.

Pay the refunds already or at least get better lies. On second thoughts, just pay the refunds.

RE: suing the forum

Hmmm  .... and from this day on any newcomer can rely on every promise advertised as true and valid?

I do not think so. That logic is the same as attempting to prove a negative. It will not work. That said,
at some point the forum has to refuse advertising. If they continue to accept copy when a criminal
prosecution is in progress, then maybe there is a chance of successfully suing for return of some of the
money stolen, but not otherwise imho.

What part of caveat emptor do these newcomers not understand?

@macfarlane801
At today's rates, and projecting present rates of hardware in production, I expect ~2BTC per Terahash
to September 2015. If you paid in dollars, and have free electricity, good luck with that, as you have a
bet on the future value of bitcoin and hashing rates.

If you paid in bitcoin, then depending on your timing, you may be lucky enough to break even or slightly better,
but this is not the refund you are contractually due.

For those who paid Bitmine with bitcoin and have gotten nothing, I *think* I have found a "button"

Have a look at my post on the Unofficial thread ;-)

Another thread reported that the Australian government is asking questions about who owns bitcoins.
That got me thinking about the coins I sent to Bitmine. Was this a donation, a bad business decision or
was it theft? It matters because I may be able to offset losses against taxation.

However, if I say my coins were stolen, the first question is going to be : "did you tell the police?
have you an incident number?"

I *think* the email address of the local police was posted earlier on this thread. I'd be interested to
read what others think. 

Guilty M'laud. My mining app cares nothing for paragraphs, even those in '1984'. I
delete paragraphs from my archived material unless I have a good reason to do otherwise. 

The real question, Mr Pot, is the correct shade of dark for the kettle, and whether
MinTruth is merely reporting the facts though biased eyes, or preparing propaganda?

I would submit that, absent any evidence that ISIS has used Dark Wallet to launder
money, what we have read is propaganda. In the interests of truth and transparency,
the article could have pointed out that Dark Wallet merely provides Bitcoin with some
of the attributes of fiat currency, and that the accusations made could as easily be
directed at the Bank of England, or the Federal Reserve Bank.

just another perspective from a potential employee of MinTruth ...

“HedgelessHorseman: On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming of guns — after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Al-Qaida had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Al-Qaida terrorists who were to be killed in drone strikes on the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces — at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Al-Qaida. Oceania was at war with ISIS. Al-Qaida was an ally. There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that ISIS and not Al-Qaida was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with ISIS! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed. The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax. But at the moment he had other things to preoccupy him. It was during the moment of disorder while the posters were being torn down that a man whose face he did not see had tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Excuse me, I think you’ve dropped your brief-case.’ He took the brief-case abstractedly, without speaking. He knew that it would be days before he had an opportunity to look inside it. The instant that the demonstration was over he went straight to the Ministry of Truth, though the time was now nearly twenty-three hours. The entire staff of the Ministry had done likewise. The orders already issuing from the telescreen, recalling them to their posts, were hardly necessary. Oceania was at war with ISIS: Oceania had always been at war with ISIS. “

What we have here is asymmetrical information.

I bought a single in February 2013, with a promise of delivery by end May, expecting end August, delivered near end October.

The dates are somewhat unimportant, what matters is the quantity of hashes online, which BFL pretty much
knew and controlled.

I bought with ~37BTC and mined 17BTC. Had BFL delivered a month earlier, I would have broken even. That was more or less
either predictable, or within BFL's control, as they changed production schedules to the benefit of jalapeno customers.

Had I known the quantity of orders (PHashes/s) ahead of me I would not have bought, and their promised delivery by end
of May, given their production rate vs orders was a deception.

To any Scots under 40, my condolences and best wishes for your future.
I doubt you will get another chance in your lifetime.

A summary of my latest discussion with a lawyer:

1. To prepare and launch action via the Swiss courts will cost 1000-1200 Euro.
Their courts do not provide for class action, hence even if a workaround is
found (see below) it will not scale well. My Bitmine order is simply too small to
make legal action profitable.

2. One way around this is to buy up refunds from Bitmine's (ex-) customers.
Before you get too excited about this, from my reading of the threads,
at best the expected payback is of the order of fifty percent of the refund.
Deducting for risks, costs and investment, if I were to go down that route,
well, ten cents on the dollar for your order seems about the market value.

Just my opinion, and my interpretation of some advice. I'd be happy to hear
differently, and this is not an offer to buy your order, just by the way.

A summary of my latest discussion with a lawyer:

1. To prepare and launch action via the Swiss courts will cost 1000-1200 Euro.
Their courts do not provide for class action, hence even if a workaround is
found (see below) it will not scale well. My Bitmine order is simply too small to
make legal action profitable.

2. One way around this is to buy up refunds from Bitmine's (ex-) customers.
Before you get too excited about this, from my reading of the threads,
at best the expected payback is of the order of fifty percent of the refund.
Deducting for risks, costs and investment, if I were to go down that route,
well, ten cents on the dollar for your order seems about the market value.

Just my opinion, and my interpretation of some advice. I'd be happy to hear
differently, and this is not an offer to buy your order, just by the way. 

A lawyer has visited Bitmine, and it seems there are some proposals emailed.

Here, no-one seems interested in a refund. Go figure.

@collider

IMHO at some point Bitmine became a criminal organisation. I'd be happy to let a judge decide exactly
when that happened.

As to a refund in hashing power, *today*, eight times my ordered hardware would be fair, I might accept
five times if I thought Bitmine would (a) honour the deal and (b) survive more than a year. 


 

"Not really, as you are not being (intentionally) scammed."

The Terms are still on their website and Bitmine knows they cannot deliver as advertised. 

Here, all I see is huffing and puffing, but nobody is willing to blow their house down.