Since people are not still reporting when they receive payments in this thread, I'm not sure how long he's been going between payment rounds. Used to be 2-3 days, I think. No clue what it is, now.

I guess I'd just like to know if they really feel it's truth in advertising for their site to claim they are open & ethical, when they refuse to give full refunds after breaking their own terms of order (by a full quarter of a year), after failing to report problems until people had made their final payments to them and now, going a month between updates. I wonder how on earth they can feel justified in making that claim.

Also would like to know what it feels like to realize you're currently one of the most reviled companies in crypto, being routinely mentioned in the same breath as Butterfly Labs.

I've been on the sidelines since my Gridseeds stopped breaking even. I'm not happy with "cloud mining" as it exists currently, because there is zero transparency across the board. I don't see anyone offering metrics on the size of their farms, the percentage of hashrate leased, the uptime, power cost, or anything at all that is meaningful to people looking at buying hosted/cloud hashrate. People should be able to have some reasonable expectations when it comes to information about what they're buying, but companies like GAWMiners and others intentionally obscure it, or make it so convoluted that people aren't even sure exactly WHAT they're buying...buying nothing but marketing and hype, following the pied piper as a cult forms around him, everyone willing and eager to drink the Kool-Aid.

I like controlling my hashrate, seeing it and knowing exactly what it's doing. Unfortunately, hardware makers are still being allowed to gouge consumers with their exorbitant retail prices, because people are willing to pay it. Right now, with price and difficulty being where they are, I wouldn't pay more than $3.50/MH for Scrypt/Litecoin mining. Hence, I'm still on the sidelines until prices come down to what I consider to be a reasonable level...and I'll never, ever pre-order again. These things may never come to pass. In which case, I will take the money I would have spent on hardware and simply hold it in Litecoin for the long term. I enjoy mining though, so I hope things turn around. I don't like the cloud trend at all.

Yes, actually it IS bad advice. I lost money in BTC-Arbs when it shut down and vanished. Rather than simply throw up our arms and say, "Oh well, guess we were stupid and lost our money," certain people pursued a doxxing that resulted in finding the culprits, who have now been forced to repay the principal investment of everyone involved, or risk being turned over to their local authorities...or deal with a couple of Guidos at their doorstep, depending on who you talk to. They've been paying people back (slowly, but surely) ever since.

These a-holes cannot run from the law and they are not anonymous. What they have done is wrong. They broke their own terms, yet expect to hold their customers to them. They are in breach of contract and they will pay...and if it isn't compensation for what their customers lost, it's whatever we can get out of them until they've got nothing left but the shirts on their backs, with no ability to ever do business or take advantage of people again. People like you are the problem...people who will simply shrug their shoulders and say, "oh well." People like you are the reason NOTHING ever gets fixed...because why bother, right?

Seriously dude, why are you even in this thread at all? To gloat? Do you get off on seeing other people twist in the wind?

I don't see the law in quite the same way you do, apparently. Stick to offering bad advice in other threads, rather than gloating about how much foresight you had in this thread. If all we manage to do is get them shut down completely and destroy their ability to ever do business in this industry again, I'm happy to pursue that.

There are some of us who were substantially damaged by Alpha-T's refusal to fully refund our money, talking about pursuing a winding up petition with a UK law firm and possibly seeking the involvement of anyone who is willing to pay a portion of the legal fees to be part of it. It's just in the discussion stage right now, but that action would either force Alpha-T to pay its debts or have their company "wound up" and all assets liquidated (including the chips, etc...) to repay its debts. Now, whether or not there are substantial assets remaining to be liquidated, is the question. These guys ARE accountants, after all...but I know several of us are keen to pursue this avenue. As I understand it, Alpha-T currently has at least three judgments that have been entered against them, none of which have been satisfied...so it's pretty clear they intend to simply damage their credit (which they don't need anyway) by not paying these judgments off, but continue doing business. This is something we cannot allow.

It's hashrate that isn't "dedicated" to Dogecoin, though...that's the thing. It's hashrate being thrown at Dogecoin due to Litecoin merged mining, because why not get both, while you're at it? The extra Dogecoin is icing. I don't think anyone is banking on ANYTHING, with regard to Dogecoin. It has never reacted to halvings with price gains.

In my opinion, we're probably looking at 2 TH/s in Litecoin by the end of the year. I'm holding out a little longer before my next round of hardware. My power costs are just too high...I need hardware to come under $4/MH (after power supplies, etc...)

It varies a lot, depending (I assume) on how much money he's able to bring in through trading. I've gone six weeks between payments, before. I think he's going through the entire list over and over again, paying in sequence. Something like that.

I think we can all be pretty happy that BTC-Arbs is still here after all this time, paying people back...even if it's slow going. It sucks that I've missed the opportunity to use that money in other ways, to profit from the price movements or invest in more mining hardware with it, but at least I have a reasonable expectation of eventually seeing it returned. Even if it's going to be years, at this rate

Looks like fightalpha.net took a dump. Hopefully Alpha-T hasn't managed to get their provider to shutter the site (and hopefully they had it backed up, lots of good information there).

I'm in SoCal and I pay $0.31/kwh for residential power, in Tier 4...which you can hit just by running a refrigerator every day for a month. It's ludicrous. So yeah, the calculation on a 250 watt Viper looks abysmal. Considering their latest forum post, stating that they cannot even guarantee a December delivery, it's going to get a lot worse. Alpha-T apparently expects people to be excited about profit sharing on the bulk sale of their chips now...because that'll yield SO much more money than selling a batch two (which will never come), right?

It's a joke.

Still seems to be paying, there are just a lot of mouths to feed here and it's very slow going. I received another payment last week, I believe.

I love how they claim that they're "offering refunds" despite the "refund period" being over...when this was supposed to ship no later than the end of September and they've missed that mark by a mile and a half and the "refunds" they are offering involve them keeping 70% of your money, if you paid in full.

These guys need to go down.

Already contacted CoinDesk about it a few days ago.

I don't care if they're accountants and have moved money, the law is the law and they've broken it. I will seek restitution.


Suggesting that victims do nothing, because these guys have accountants in the family and may have moved their money around, tells me you probably haven't lost any money to this venture.

Time will tell. Personally, I suspect they have MORE than enough money to refund what I am owed. The profit margins on this hardware are very high, though they'd like you to believe otherwise. In fact, they could probably simply sell the chips direct to another hardware maker to enable full refunds to EVERYONE. But I don't think it's their intention to do the right thing, anymore.

Sure. I'm in the U.S. but I'm looking at possibly lawyering up with a UK-based solicitor. From what I'm told, it doesn't make any difference whether I live outside the "jurisdiction" (which is what Alpha seems to be trying to tell people) or not...they still sold me a product that they materially changed and failed to deliver on in the agreed-upon timeframe. So they're at fault, and they need to refund the full purchase price. I'm not going to let them walk away with that much money scot-free.

I wouldn't say that. I was banned yesterday for telling someone on their forum who claimed they weren't visiting or deleting posts that they were, in fact, deleting posts. The day before, I had written a post describing their shady practice of only refunding only my pre-order payments via PayPal and pocketing my pretty substantial final payments (paid in Bitcoin) in spite of my request for a 60% refund...and my expectation that they're setting up their own farm with the hardware we all paid for...a post which they deleted.

They don't like people being critical of them on their forum. That's okay, though...it's the only forum they have control over.

I'm going after them for every dime they took from me, plus legal fees.

I finally threw in the towel. Requested a 60% refund and instead, got only my PayPal deposits refunded. All of the funds I paid via Bitcoin for my final payment back in May are gone. I read the last couple of pages and saw that BitPay is investigating, so I sent them a message via their website form.

I am starting to think they intentionally delayed to get people to take partial refunds, thereby funding the development of their hardware and enabling them to start a farm on the backs of their customers' money.

Entirely too many scammers in this business. Knew it was a risk pre-ordering with these guys, but for a long time they seemed to be on the up and up. Now I'm going to try to get every dime back I can from them...30% isn't going to cut it, when I invested as much as I did in this.

How would you classify it, when writing it off on taxes?

This payment process takes a long, long time. I wouldn't put a timeframe on it...but it has been somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-6 weeks between payments, for me.