Fuck these people, they even just figured out how to take advantage of the fact that their pieces of shit light on fire to make not just the Rent-Some-Minions a Ponzi scheme, but also the direct hardware sales! These X3's never have to be made, all they have to do is once you're ready to end hosting, contact you with a price to ship it to you that isn't worth it, and in the meantime all they did was pay you back a tiny portion of your own bitcoins pretending you've been mining.

Meanwhile they're collecting an extra hundred bucks every month from you for the privilege of being conned, they keep all the functional X3's for themselves for their own personal farm, preferentially ship out the broken ones to a small amount of customers, and handle all the RMA related issues at customer expense.

Holy crap are we all idiots for not being criminals.

I went looking around online and found this miner, just as effective as BA's offering but uses no electricity, you just periodically have to stick some wood in it.

There's no way BA has a datacenter, at this point they make at least 300%+ profit just faking payouts by paying customers back their own bitcoins that they recently embezzled. No Rent-Some-Minions service has actually started yet anyway.

You people don't understand, it's your fault these still catch on fire, because all you mean customers are pushing them to actually ship.

They're looking to fuck a different class of mark now since the consumer sales angle is completely gone. The person they're looking for is willing to "invest" half a million dollars minimum, but has to pay before being allowed to see the contract, and if after seeing the contract it isn't acceptable, Black Arrow keeps 10%.

If anyone has any explanation other then mental illness here I'd love to hear it.

Whackjob conspiracy theories to support a very artificial worldview about Bitcoin painted with a broad brush is way easier than a sober nuanced assessment of skin in the game vs talking their own book for these individual players. Stop the presses everybody, some retard on the internet who can't even spell the names of the entrepreneurs just figured them all out!

In idiomatic American English we have something that is exactly the same thing, although in a very specific context, i.e. the phrase "draining the lizard".

What's crazy too is that their failures to deliver have very little to do with the fab at this point, it's almost entirely to do with PCB's / serial communications / power (or so they say). It's absolutely impossible that their performance has anything to do with anything other than financial fraud, because their manufacturing is located in the one spot on earth where you can get any of these things done quickly, cheaply, and correctly.

The fab projects are most likely complete vaporware trying to scam bigger fish than just individual customers, because those power consumption specs are absurd. It doesn't seem out of the question though that they could maybe find a few early adopters with large amounts of bitcoin wealth who, lacking technical expertise and due diligence, could get taken in. That might explain why they were so zealous to nuke their own self-moderated thread right in time for the London conference.

So if I'm to understand this correctly, when questioned about refunds Alexey Assholeev lectures us about how they're on the brink of bankruptcy, yet they're capable of moving forward on a fab project that will have millions of dollars in upfront cost.

This guy is a real piece of work, it'd be absolutely hilarious dealing with this guy if this weren't such a financially tragic situation. He's the most inveterate con-artist you can imagine, when he actually responds to you, he learns how to talk to you based on the words and phrases you introduce to the situation yourself. He will literally say absolutely anything he needs to say to get you to accept this bullshit, including but not limited to threats and intimidation.

Nobody even knows what trolling is, it's become just a meaningless catch-all phrase for anything on the internet somebody doesn't like. Nine out of ten times what people really mean is "flaming".

Preach that 'ligion! What a bunch of Libertarian retards, caring about ideas that are annoying and complex!

I heartily agree. Disintermediating central payment clearance by constructing a peer-to-peer network achieving consensus with a practical workaround of the Byzantine General's problem is obviously for stupid Libertarian assholes. What a bunch of idiots, finding value in a system that is trying to do something pointless like make money and property exchange clearance fast and cheap!

This asshole aka Alexey A. is literally the only person at Black Arrow I've ever been able to talk to, but basically all he does is troll and threaten you.

Their loophole on this one is that while they still accept orders, they do not publicly publish prices anymore. You have to contact them to find out privately how much it's going to cost to have the privilege of perpetuating their Ponzi.

They're not parsing actual text, but manually at their discretion they'll add your user account to the list of accounts that their bot auto-deletes.

Not that I'm advocating any kind of ethnic bigotry here, but the idea of pursuing them through UK law enforcement sounds like a really good idea to me because from what I understand, there is a stereotype about Eastern European immigrants (which unfortunately happens to be 100% true in this situation) that is totally lost on us in the States. From what I gather, in the UK it isn't exactly a stretch for the typical person to take it very seriously that some Eastern European is running a con?

This is not a complicated situation, you mention the words "Alex Sovu", you get auto deleted, end of story. There are plenty of very negative borderline spammy posters but the only posters they actually care about flagging for deletion are people who have ever said "Alex Sovu".

The criteria for being one of those blacklisted usernames seems to be anyone who mentions the actual name of any individual associated with Black Arrow.