Not bad if you can pick them up for 2-2.5btc. I am planning on picking up 2. Hopefully I don't get screwed.
Why? You are going to go through a huge amount of risk and hassle to spend 2 BTC and maybe receive 2.5 BTC back, only if everything goes correctly. If anything goes wrong you will lose BTC on the entire transaction. Why not just go to coinbase.com or some other site and purchase 0.5 BTC today. Zero risk and bother, and you end up with the same amount of BTC in the end (2 BTC that you did not spend plus 0.5 BTC that you bought). My point is these devices are barely going to return a few BTC before it makes economical sense to turn them off. That is so little I just can not see how it is worth the time and effort at this point. |
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I'm "officially" the cutoff customer, as per SB's email. The "official" refund request is "16/09" (between " " because I *think* I submitted it before, but hey, I might be wrong).
I got an email yesterday saying I would get a refund for 450 chips (I ordered 904) and saying assembly is starting - but I also have 54 miners, fully assembled + hosting, paid for and still no news regarding the amount of the refund for those.
If anyone is interested, PM me with a reasonable offer. I'm looking at min 1BTC per miner, chips for free.
That's rough, I also had a large order (485 chips 30 miners) and feel for you. On the bright side at least you got the 450 back so that's some recovery. Given the amount of hash power coming online soon from KnC, CoinTerra, Bitfury, etc., etc., etc. I'm beginning to think that mining will become unprofitable in the next 6 months for ASIC chips of any efficiency. Not just ROI on the capital cost for a miner, but breakeven cost with electricity. If the hash rate goes up another 100x from here even 28nm ASICs start to operate at a loss. At that point I'm not sure what will happen, even the large professional mining pools are in trouble. I think two things will happen: 1) ASIC vendors will will not be able to sell and stop producing chips, and 2) Many people will sell miners on the cheap. I'm beginning to think that this is the time to get back in, buy unprofitable miners on the cheap and then either run at a slight loss or just wait for a BTC price spike and turn on then. Unfortunately, I don't have anything back. I don't know what's the hold out either, as "refunds have been processed". What happened to your order, did you get a refund? Yes, I received the refund for the chips (you can check the refund tracking thread), but like others am in limbo over the assembly cost. So, so far only 45% recovery... Still shocked Yifu bothered to ship the chips at all instead of refunding everyone, considering how inefficient Avalon ASICs are compared to other designs it won't make sense to even turn them on a little bit. My hope is SB runs another group assembly run with Bitfury or other chips. I just got 1 Drillbit board from that groupbuy, not much but I wanted some hardware for fun, doubt it will ever pay off. But at some point an ASIC chip vendor is going to sell worthwhile chips at a reasonable price, and I hope to use my assembly components/etc from this canceled order then. |
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I'm "officially" the cutoff customer, as per SB's email. The "official" refund request is "16/09" (between " " because I *think* I submitted it before, but hey, I might be wrong).
I got an email yesterday saying I would get a refund for 450 chips (I ordered 904) and saying assembly is starting - but I also have 54 miners, fully assembled + hosting, paid for and still no news regarding the amount of the refund for those.
If anyone is interested, PM me with a reasonable offer. I'm looking at min 1BTC per miner, chips for free.
That's rough, I also had a large order (485 chips 30 miners) and feel for you. On the bright side at least you got the 450 back so that's some recovery. Given the amount of hash power coming online soon from KnC, CoinTerra, Bitfury, etc., etc., etc. I'm beginning to think that mining will become unprofitable in the next 6 months for ASIC chips of any efficiency. Not just ROI on the capital cost for a miner, but breakeven cost with electricity. If the hash rate goes up another 100x from here even 28nm ASICs start to operate at a loss. At that point I'm not sure what will happen, even the large professional mining pools are in trouble. I think two things will happen: 1) ASIC vendors will will not be able to sell and stop producing chips, and 2) Many people will sell miners on the cheap. I'm beginning to think that this is the time to get back in, buy unprofitable miners on the cheap and then either run at a slight loss or just wait for a BTC price spike and turn on then. |
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Delivery schedule is still looking good for late Oct / early Nov. Batch 2 shouldn't be very far behind batch 1, and potentially even ship at the same time if all goes well. I'm currently making efforts to ensure that we can do both batches together.
Is batch 2 ordered? Or does it require all of the boards in that batch to be ordered and paid for first? Sorry if this was mentioned earlier. |
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We all knew Avalon's ASIC chip design & fab process technology would be poor compared to current state of the art, but people (including me) were interested in their chips due to the time to market advantage.
What was not understood was just how poor and low performing Avalon's design was compared to Gen2 ASICs from other strong design teams. KnC, Cointerra and other groups are now coming out with designs that render anything Avalon is offering completely obsolete, even Avalon's gen2 is behind by a wide margin.
I think Avalon might be out of the game soon, it makes little sense to buy an Avalon based system at any price due to their higher Watts/GH requirements. Avalon self mining with their own gen2 might not be very profitable either. If that is the case where does that leave them? Sure they made a ton of money in the past year, but did they blew the money on a Gen2 design that they can not recoup?
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Still no refund. Submitted 9/16. Anyone has the same situation?
I've submitted a refund on the 18th, but couldn't sign as my PC which had my walled was down. Got an email from SB asking me to sign it. Found a wallet.dat backup after few days of searching (wallet had 0 coins that's why I didn't care about it). Sent a refund request again on the 23rd and replied to SB's email confirming that I've submitted a signed refund. Never heard back... No Coins, no reply email, no chips and no shipping email. I have a mate who submitted a correct refund on the 17th of September and he's on the same boat as me. I think this refund is more like a lotto ticket, those who were lucky enough got a refund, but people like us will be receiving a pretty expensive paper weight. Looking at SB's post below, we were all under the impression that THERE IS NO DEADLINE FOR REQUESTING A REFUND, so not sure how in hell SB decided that post 16th of Sep orders are not eligible. Update:
We have confirmed with Yifu directly the eligibility of all batches ordered for a refund, to be processed when requested. Additionally, there is no deadline for requesting a refund. As such, we have begun processing all requests for refunds of orders placed with us, which will be submitted to Yifu upon each batch being requested in full.
The deadline was before YiFu finally shipped chips. Once Yifu received a batch and shipped that batch, that batch was no longer eligible for refunds. Given how late thing were Yifu should have just canceled and refunded all batch orders. But he is the type of guy that would rather ship very late and unprofitable product than make things right with people. |
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I don't get the purpose of this thread anymore. Gox has become completely irrelevant. It is merely a slave to bitstamp. There is no fiat entering or exiting this exchange - it's merely a game of bots and traders who bet against eachother on price movements - which originate on Bitstamp. Bitstamp is where the fiat flows in an out of the btc economy now.
That is only the perspective you have gained after being off bitcointalk for several days. Now that bitcointalk is back up and we can log on constantly all day to check for updates every 10 minutes, the purpose of this thread will become clear to you again. |
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904 chips
batch 4
refund requested 16/09 (before 16/09 in fact, but don't have the exact date anymore - possibly around 10/09)
54x K16 assembly+testing+hosting
no refund for chips received (and possibly no full refund at all either). I'm pissed off.
What happened? You're getting chips when you requested a refund? Were you notified that chips have been received by SB? Yes, something like that, some chips some refund, with the added twist that I'm the "cutoff customer" while others have actually requested refunds after me. That's BS. Sorry to hear that. The problem is it made 100% financial sense to refund all 6 batches. Even Yifu stated in his communication 3-4 weeks ago that he could not recommend taking chips and it made clear sense to request a refund. Additionally Yifu offered a refund for all chip batches. The responsible thing for SB to have done is to have requested a refund for all chips at that point, since that was the choice that absolutely made the most sense. But his own financial interest clearly got in the way, which is why not all batches were immediately refunded. This conflict of interest seems problematic to say the least  |
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Yifu made it pretty clear during the chip fiasco that:
1) He was not in control
2) He had zero influence over whether or not the guys in China shipped parts
Basically he is a glorified reseller only, and reseller with no control or influence over anything at that.
Why people would give him any more money is beyond me. He has no ability to get parts, influence pricing or specs, or anything. Worst he completely oversold who he is and what he could do. No one should ever trust him.
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485 chips
Batch 3 & 4
9 Sept & again on 14 Sept after receiving an email that the authenticate did not work (I did the signature incorrect the first time)
Purchased K16 assembly & testing
No refund or reply yet
Refund for chips portion received today. Sad that the amount refunded is significantly more than a K16 could ever mine over it's lifetime, even assuming free assembly and electricity... |
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Title says it all.
Now that a BFL FPGA single only breaks even with electiricty costs (depending on your rate, in CA it's negative now), what are people doing with their old BFL singles?
Each single generates roughly 0.002 BTC today, hardly worth it to keep the things on.
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Given that other buys around the same time period have their chips, I am assuming Steamboat has chips delivered?
For folks who have not refunded, are boards ready?
No status is not acceptable given chips should be in Steamboat's hands as of now...
What if you requested a refund weeks ago and did not receive it while others received theirs, and then SB receives chips and sends miners that will not ROI to you? To me that is the worse possible outcome since receiving a chip refund returns more BTC at this point. I hope SB honors people who requested refunds and doesn't ship to those. My worry is if some of us who requested refunds in time, still receive miners... |
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485 chips
Batch 3 & 4
9 Sept & again on 14 Sept after receiving an email that the authenticate did not work (I did the signature incorrect the first time)
Purchased K16 assembly & testing
No refund or reply yet
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Woke up this morning and got the email confirmation+refund, thank you Steamboat!!
320chips @ Batch5
edit: Re-calc'd the total and realized both transactions were combined into one @ 95%. Updated chip total to reflect total chip refund received. Thanks again!
Grrrr, I put in my refund request for a large order in 2 weeks ago, and then resubmitted the request a week ago after receiving a notice that the signature needed to be done again. Still no confirmation that the request was received. And now many others are receiving their refunds. Steamboat, is there a way to confirm when you receive refund requests? I've tried emailing multiple times. This was a several thousand dollar order |
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Chips are 22,5 EUR each (plus VAT if you're an end user).
Chip price is insane, those chips should cost less than one EUR each to make (maybe even less).
Agreed, these chip prices are currently priced at a steep markup to the actual costs. Most of this is due to the fact that the chip designers need to recoup their development & NRE costs, plus make a profit. When mining reaches break-even with limited ROI, purchases of new chips/rigs will slow or stop. This happened in the GPU/FPGA era. When this happens all of these chip vendors will be forced by competition to drop prices much closer to their actual manufacturing cost to keep making some sort of profit, and pricing will become more stable and reasonable. |
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Competitive pricing is by far the most important issue here.
I (and most people I suspect) just want a simple board populated with chips. In other words the exact same model as the Cairnsmore1 FPGA boards, where most of the cost was the FPGAs themselves and everything else was minimized.
My issue with the Cairnsmore2-3 proposals were all of the expensive racking and other 'engineering' put in raised the cost over the price of the base chips.
If this project and pricing goes the same way as Cairnsmore1 FPGA boards, which maximized the chip BOM vs. everything else, then I would be interested.
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I received an email request from SB to resend the refund request with a signed message. I replied to the email with the signed message hashes for each transaction, but have not heard back.
Were we suppose to submit the requests again through the automated form instead? If so how does that work since the automated form does not contain a place to input a signed message.
SB did you receive my request or not?
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Yes, I'm aware of what BitSynComm said, at 12:01 AM September 1st ...
I think it is completely unrealistic to expect Steamboat to make a decision affecting thousands of chips, ONE day after some comment by Yifu.
Is it?! SebastianJu set things in motion the same day and is processing refunds. Zefir set things in motion the same day and is processing refunds. Steamboat is quiet for almost 4 days now, and is refusing to process refunds. Hell, he's not making an inventory of who wants a refund and who doesnt. "Set things in motion" are you nuts? Read the threads you linked to, SebastianJu and Zefir only started a mechanism for people to notify them that they would like to request a refund. Nothing else. 1) No batch refunds have been requested yet by SebastianJu or Zefir 2) Who knows how Yifu will respond to refund requests. He might just sit on them for months, wait for BTC to hit $500, and then refund 0.02BTC per chip saying that represents the dollar cost paid. Is that what you want? If those are the refund terms I'll take my chips thanks. Point is Yifu is complete irresponsible, so assuming that you will be made whole by requesting a refund is foolish. You have no idea what will happen with the refund path because Yifu has not spelled out the terms, and even if he does why would you trust him at this point. This is why steamboat says that he is monitoring for more information and will update when there is something actionable to do. |
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Thank you for the update Steamboat, Please do update us on the refund aspect for assembly costs. Burnin stated in his thread at least 50% recovery is likely, more if you reuse components with him for the Bitfury project. Everyone understands there are sunk costs that are not recoverable, but other unperformed services should be recoverable. I do plan to reuse a lot of components for the bitfury design.
But some can not be reused and will be thrown away, like the PCBs for example.
For those that received a refund i could give a discount on a new bitfury order of about 70% of the not-returned funds.
But we all have to ask ourselves: is bitfury going to deliver?
Executive summary:
50% refund guaranteed.
70% money recovered when ordering a BitFury product.
Understanding what recovery is possible on assembly services has a large impact on deciding whether or not to go ahead with a refund IMHO. This all may be mute though. In Yifu's latest communication to Zefir he said he much prefers refunds over anything else. His comments also made it sound as if he is having difficulty receiving ASICs at all (shock), which makes me think these batches may all just end up getting canceled refunded regardless what we decide... Thanks again for the hard work on this steamboat, it is too bad for everyone it has gone this way |
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I think a class action law suite would be the way to go.
Anyone here want to join, I have already discussed this with a lawyer.
Absolutely NO to a class action lawsuit! The only people to EVER get meaningful compensation in a class action are the lawyers and a small handful of people bringing the original lawsuit. NO CLASS ACTION! However, I do agree with much of what has been posted in the last few posts. The profit is gone, especially with the ASCIMiner announcements. It IS time to force a refund under threat of legal action. Yifuk has mentioned issuing refunds while blasting the Bitcoin community for our "greed". If he dislikes our "greed", I wonder how well he'll like a federal indictment? ^^ This ^^ The class action path only generates costs and does not recover anything for us. Criminal charges are the way to go, the appropriate government division that handles this type of crime will pursue and litigate the case. This is what happened with pirate for those that followed. Yes there is no recovery with the criminal path, but if Yifu gets an appropriate judgement deserving from a $8M scam, then I'll be satisfied. |
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