I don't know what mechanism you think it could have accomplished that. I moderated here then purely as a volunteer. Recently the forum started paying mods based on activity out of its substantial war-chest— makes it a little easier to not feel guilty about spending some time on it instead of other activities— but that started after all the major BFL drama went down, though I'm completely ignorant about the advertising stuff. I have no idea who pays what for what, I know there are auctions, but I don't believe I've ever even loaded the one of them.

I think I must not have been very clear. In the pre-OP posts Entropy-uc expressed the view that people shouldn't care about protecting others from getting ripped off. I disagreed, expressing the view that miners getting ripped off is bad for Bitcoin as whole.  I subsequently elaborated that this Bitcoin-as-a-whole concern is primarily related to mining breaking even, and that this concern is addressed if the miners break even, even if the vendors are slimely-slimeballs-who-slime.

The reason I pointed it out is because this bitcoin-as-a-whole concern is a problem with practically every vendor right now, not just the supposedly dishonest ones. Some of the better liked hardware makers are turning around their sales and using the income to buy a multiple of the hashrate for themselves. This worrys me because I am concerned that it undermines the security model in Bitcoin. I've expressed this concern many times, and specifically in a few vendors threads.

I try to be somewhat conservative about it, because I don't want to be one of those sociopath miners who tells everyone else mining can't be profitable while they're happily buying up all the hardware they can.

[Not that I don't personally care about the people who get jerked around by poorly managed companies or scammers, but bad things are going on all the time all over the world— and especially in Bitcoin.  I damaged friendships in begging people not to invest in Pirate40 and in warning people off of many other outright scams. My heart can bleed for only so many wounded, and at some point triage sets in.]

I am not your mommy— wellI'm actually quite paternalistic in places where I have full reign but the style of the forum is that you need to look out for yourself. This is advertised everywhere. The forum leaves known, even admitted, scammers to post. This is not necessarily policy I agree with (although I suppose I understand the arguments: better the known threat), but its the kind of open community that exist here, and really not all that many other places.

There is simply nothing I can do, as a moderator, to help about these things. I have no power over these companies. And even when I express even the most mild disapproval— just as a regular user of the forum, which I also am—  I am met with vicious attacks by the companies supporters. I only know what I've experienced too. People do make fraudulent scam accusations on the forums (and elsewhere on the internet) in order to try to extort reputable vendors and persons.

As you should. I'm not just a moderator here, I'm a miner who's bin around longer than the vast majority, and one of the developers of Bitcoin-QT, there are lot of different perspectives I can speak from here. The moderator one is the least interesting. In some communities "moderators" get called "janitors": It's more accurate, sometimes I pull out a mop and clean up after some crazy person has crapped on the floor.  What policy I make is generally procedural: Vomit goes in the green bin, used diapers in the red bin.

I absolutely haven't. Companies have come and gone without me even noticing them, I didn't know about bitfury until people on IRC were talking about waiting for shipping on theirs. Fully keeping up with the threads here could easily be a full time job. But my job as a moderator isn't to police the companies, nor do I have the authority do so.  I contribute intermittently as a regular miner, picking and choosing what threads I read and offering my opinion where I fee like it, and when I act as a moderator is usually either because someone has reported a post or I keep seeing one constantly at the top so I decide to start reading it and find that it's gone repetitive, off-topic, or outright animalistic.

Holy shit. Where did you get the video of me?!

... In any case, this should be in the scam subform— it's getting a bit far afield of hardware, but please feel free to add a to it in the more hardware / delivery centric threads.

Me defending my integrity is, I think.  As is the yabbering about the rules. At least it has nothing to do with the subject of this thread, which is "A call to the Custom Hardware community: Please let the world know about HashFast".   Not "Let the world know about Gmaxwell, and HashFastCL's interpertitive dance to Gmaxwell's stunning prose".

I'm kinda afraid of crapping up speculation.  If it's confined to a couple threads does it matter?

I really did. But there was such as cesspool of bad behavior on all sides that it was hard to be crisp in my disapproval. Especially to those adopting a highly factional perspective "Anyone who says anything positive about my enemy is my enemy, anyone who says anything negative about my friend is my enemy."

I even thought for a while that most of the shrill anti-bfl voices were actually BFL shills trying to discredit the complainers because they were so ... anti-persuasive ... but that guess was thrown out the window by the BFL employees acting in ways which I would have attributed as being the output of anti-BFL folks in disguise, if the fact of their employment didn't exclude that possibility.

At the same time, BFL was late and under-spec for every product. I successfully predicted that their asic products wouldn't be a good deal and stayed clear, and— perhaps unfairly— I wasn't really personally shocked until say march or so.

What bothers me— in terms of long term risks— isn't the mistaken (/deceptive) product claims or missed deadlines. If some mining company was late and lied to their customers, and delivered an underspec part— but the miners were still able to break even that bothers me less than a company which is honest and on-time, but through a combination of pricing, order-book non-transparency, and self-mining delivers a product that can never break even.

When BFL was initially delayed they seemed an anomaly, a not very reliably company with habitually late products. But for a long time they still looked like they'd break even for some time. Ha.  In the time since then _most_ of the products sold have not broken even and likely will never break even vs just sitting on your Bitcoin.  The rapid appreciation of coin has enabled some miners to lie to themselves about their losses, but they're losses none the less.

If you look you can see me complaining about practically every mining hardware company (I think) I know anything about. (Including ones that I generally like)

Mining products are sold for a particular purpose: To mine Bitcoin. A miner which mines a nearly guaranteed loss is defective, no matter how timely the delivery or polite the sales staff.

Yea I was thinking about doing a "New product announcements and preorders" subforum. But other than improving the SNR, I don't think it'll help.

A thread which had fallen to the second (third?) page when you asked me to unlock it so you could bump it.

FWIW, I strong disagree with any hardware company "testing" hardware on the production network. There is a dedicate test network, and system testing can be adequately tested on a private network. I lauded avalon's initial commitments to not do so (which were subsequently violated), and complained about other companies doing so. When you mine instead of shipping you are taking from your customers, even if you don't use their hardware to do it, because you are elevating the future difficulty which will reduce their income on the products you eventually ship as well as any equipment they are currently mining with.

There is a sure way to avoid complaints about minor amounts of things like that: deliver on your promises.

Well, I can't deny being human. Looking at at >100 BTC loss does tend to increase salience.

When HashFast started it was looking for well known and high profile people to help promote its products. I didn't get involved in any promotion or whatever, but I did eventually buy a product (and a second one a month later in September, since everything was "on time").   The advantages of affiliation with high profile people cuts both ways however: Had hashfast delivered on time and to spec I would have been singing praises, and now that I'm out a lot of coin and getting outright _offensive_ settlement offers for a contract that HashFast has defaulted on entirely on their own... well there you go: You're damn right I'm going to speak up about that too. I suppose one lesson might be that one ought to take as much care in picking their enemies as they do their friends.

As far as moderation goes, there is actually very little control I have over things here. I've been pruning out offtopic crap to keep the threads readable. Feel free to complain about anything you think has gone wrong and I'll try to fix it.  If you think the pitchforks are making it hard to hear your product updates, create a self moderated thread for product updates. Cheers,

[And now I have to go figure out how to split all this OT stuff out of this thread. ::sigh::]

The future of others is also the future of Bitcoin.

If small independent miners keep losing their shirts on deals like this we'll end up in a case where only huge consolidated operations with captive manufacturing will be profitable. The end result would be an enormous centralization of hash-power which would undermine the security assumptions in Bitcoin, and result in the ultimate failure of the cryptocurrency... which wouldn't be in the interest of anyone currently mining or holding coins.

Besides, the future actions of others may include my friends and future friends. Not everything is about making a profit denominated in coins or dollars.

"I'd be treated with more respect if I paid 18K at a car dealership." isn't a thread created by BFL pitching their ASIC.

The other is though, heck if I remember why it was moved— and it was _probably_ me that did it, as I think I've done most of the thread moves in the form. If it was it might have been because by the end of it was totally offtopic and I wanted people to start new ones, or it could have just been a mistake.  I'll ask that it be moved back.

A lot of both the PRO and ANTI BFL people behaved in ways that made me think they were double-agents really shilling for the opposite side. I've seldom seen behavior so reprehensible.

That a common misconception.  You're buying a miner. You spend BTC, it gives you BTC back. If you do not get back BTC more than you started with, plus some extra to pay for power and your time, you will have made a loss— as you could have just sat on the coin. Perhaps you are laundering money and don't care about a loss, in which case, analysis of (non-)profit is irrelevant to you but that doesn't make it incorrect.

Other than indirect effects (e.g. rising Bitcoin value driving hashrate up, or crashing Bitcoin value making both Bitcoins and miners less valuable), or crazy things like assuming that you're so irresponsible that you'll spend all your coin unless its locked up in a miner, the future exchange rate doesn't come into it at all. Even if you could buy these with USD, and AFAIK you can't— you still have the option of buying Bitcoin instead.

Sushi's service and support indeed appear valuable. But I suspect that the pricing is creating an uncomfortable outcome where it is likely purchasers at this price will end up with fewer coin than they started with. I comment on this with hesitance because I don't want to undermine the sales of a really good vendor (which I've recommend to many others), but I also worry about Bitcoin's future if massive numbers of small miners continue to make a loss, and only huge installations with captive manufacturing are able to return a profit.

Really?  Recent hashrate growth appears to be 2%/day. The end of April would be 20 days from now. 

$6000/2000GH/s_april = $3/GH/s_april
$3/GH/s_april * 1.02^(4*30days) =  $32 GH/s_now.

Unless you think the April units will come substantially sooner than 120 days from now or you believe that groth will be less than 1.25%/day you'll be better off buying the bitmain antminers which ship ~now even at the too-high 3BTC/180GH price being offered to US customer (antminer buyers in china are paying 1.9BTC, which you'd need grow of less than 0.84%/day for a $3/gh unit 120 days later to be more profitable than).  Even at the antminer prices it looks like the devices will not break even. $6k for 2TH in April has very low chances, in my experience and opinion, of breaking even vs just sitting on coin.

I've got a CT order for January, and the gear is looking sexy indeed. But I agree with your initial price comment about the current prices.

Oh, there are more pictures at the link, I almost missed that.

Dumb electronics manufacturing question: How is reflow done for boards with components on both sides? Is it done in multiple passes or is the solder paste enough hold the parts on without gravity's help?

As an aside, my SO saw the CoinTerra wafer pictures on my computer and expressed surprise that it was circular. She wasn't aware that the wafers were cut from monocrystalline boules and thought it was interesting when I dug up some links.

Hm? Link me to some of them.

You might be saying it, but it's not true. I'm curious as to why you think it.

WRT offtopic, things which are not at all related to the buying and selling of hardware— including garbage like posting pictures of various peoples family member and other grade-school rubbish are offtopic and they're going to get moved. If you don't like it, stay the @#$@ out of the subforum.

(This thread is offtopic too— but since you're accusing the moderators here, I suppose it falls with an acceptable level of meta at least in its own thread)

I'd assumed that on the Nth person he'd randomly pick one of the first N. ...

Estimated hashrate over the past 576 blocks is 10.09PH/s— we're about to make another fairly big difficulty step, recent growth hasn't been below 2%/day. If these ship 2 days later than the last group buy they'll have only just kept pace with difficulty (3.15 * 0.98^2 = 3.02). ... The antminers are really nicely done hardware (esp with the new firmware), and I think Sushi's buy handling has been pretty great. But my figuring under mildly pessimal assumptions is that these devices will only earn a bit over 2.05 BTC now. I'd buy something that only just broke even under mildly pessimal assumptions and hope for an upside on things not being quite that pessimal... but I've thrown my fill into miners that will never make their coin back.  (If only I had a time machine: At least I could have instead lost coin to a hardware maker that actually ships which would be greatly preferable). People who assume they'll be able to resell the gear later may reach a better conclusion though.

"Ways"
...

Miners express their own local view of the time in the timestamps, subject to some constraints of plausibility that don't endanger the decentralized nature of the system. You can freely apply whatever postprocessing you like to these values— or, better, find parties who have already recorded times for them.

It does not do what you want it to do, it does what the system needs it to do.

Would you please reduce your level of nonsense emission?

There hasn't ever been such a situation in Bitcoin. Though I believe some altcoins may have self destructed based on trying to "fix" timestamps as you've outlined.

In any case, if you did want to try to produce a precise consensus "real time", though Bitcoin doesn't— and avoids a lot of unnecessary complexity on account of it— you'd still need a mechanism for participants to express their true opinion about the time, and that metric would not be monotonic.

Gah. what are you guys going on about? It's just a regular, ordinary, pay to pubkey output...  there are thousands of them in the blockchain— with with ASCII garbage encoded in the public key. It can't be spent. It's not unusual, except that the pubkey is junk, which is not surprising because the protocol rules have practically no constraint on the scriptpubkeys in txouts (beyond their size). The hash160 being shown for it is correct— it's the hash160 corresponding to a normal pay-to-pubkey-hash for that "pubkey".

I still think it's time for another auction. 

Antiquated nodes running years old software, a good number of which likely do not work at all at this point.

There needs to be a freestanding domain with this information.  Doesn't have to be anything complicated. Just something that advertisements on the keyword hashfast can be pointed at.

Bitcoin doesn't use IRC.

Maybe time for another uniform price auction?

Sushi looks like he still has some life left in him— I'm sure we can wear him out completely.

I don't know how they could pull off a "dramatic price increase" when Bitmain's last antminer group was $12.5/gh and shipped right away, and I expect the next group will be somewhat cheaper.

If you compensate for now vs "march 31" by subtracting the btc the antminer would mine between now and then, even with pessimal 100%/mo difficulty increases, the HF price would need to be less than $4.5/GH to be competative with the antminer price... and the currently advertised price is $5/gh.

Perhaps the strategy is metamorphosing from exploiting customers who believe (mis)representations about delivery expectations and refund policies to exploiting customers who can't do math.