Schrodinger's ASICs.  There was something inside the boxes until you looked.

Transport and logistics is a 24/7 industry.  Their consignment may be collected or they may be dropping it off themselves.  I wouldn't worry about the Sunday thing - the real question is how long it's going to take from the time the packages are scanned into the transport company's system until they start being delivered to their final destinations and that will likely vary as customs clearance times always seem to be something of a lottery.  Tracking information also seems to be extremely hit and miss, so I guess there are going to be many nervous moments until the first customer confirms that they've received their ASIC.

Note to  new users : Maria is more reviled and less trusted around here than Matthew.

I'm not sure what the exchange rate has to do with this.  People who paid in BTC are being refunded in BTC and people who paid in USD are being refunded in USD. 

I don't think "level with me" means what you think it means.  But that's OK because we have MPOE-PR here who can teach you what the phrase really means.

You problem is that you started asking people to lend or give you BTC almost the moment you joined the forum.  That's pretty flaky behaviour in and of itself and you've made yourself look even more flaky by then trying to solicit "donations" for drug addicts.

That you need to ask for a loan worth about $7.50 in order to "get started" doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.  How is half a Bitcoin going to get you "started" in any meaningful way?

$7.50 is the kind of amount most people can borrow from friends.  It's 12 days until the 30th, so how do you plan on surviving until then if you don't have $7.50 now.

I think he understands just fine.  He's just hoping that if he makes enough noise BFL will decide it's worth paying him the difference to get rid of him.

Apparently you don't understand the difference between an exchange and a payment processor.  Mastercard and Visa are not currency exchanges - they are payment processors.  Nonetheless, they frequently take funds from a customer in one currency and pay the merchant in another.  By contrast, exchanges convert the currency for you so that you are able to pay the merchant directly in their preferred currency.

PayPal allows me to fund my account with AUD and then convert those funds to other currencies before paying the merchant.  I then end up with a sub-account which is holds USD in addition to my primary account which holds AUD.  Almost no-one uses this option because PayPal's fees for exchanging one currency to another are brutal compared to what CC companies charge, but if I was to directly pay the merchant in the destination currency then I could get my refund in that same currency and it would be for the exact amount I paid.

And yeah, in a couple of days people will abandon the trollish threads because one way or another Avalon will be the hot topic.

That said, Custom Hardware probably isn't the right forum for a thread about payment issues so maybe a mod could boot it somewhere else.

And yet most people understand perfectly well that Amazon prices their goods in USD and that if they use a payment processor (such as Visa or Mastercard) which raises a charge in their local currency at the USD/local currency exchange rate any refunds will also be made at the USD/local currency exchange rate at the time the refund is issued.  Most online vendors do not explicitly state this because most people who use payment processors are well aware of how this works.  

While many sites will allow me to see the AUD equivalent of the USD price (which allows me to compare local and overseas prices easily), the product is still priced in USD and Mastercard pays the vendor in USD even though the transaction is shown in AUD on my account.  It's not rocket science.

As my daughter in law the lawyer would say - "If the law is on your side, argue law. If the facts are on your side, argue facts.  If neither law nor facts are on your side, just argue".  becoin has apparently chosen option 3.

To be honest, I think people have become a lot more rude in real life as a sort of flow on effect of not applying a filter to what they say online.  People have become used to venting every little frustration online and it seems to diminish the capacity of many to deal with frustration or disappointment in real life in a non-confrontational manner.

Donation requests go in Off Topic.  I'll ask a mod to move the thread.

If you can't even give specifications for what you're going to ask these people to produce, then you're not equipped to become an ASIC vendor and nobody's going to trust you with their money.  Once any Bitcoin mining ASICs hit the market, people aren't going to be willing to place pre-orders. 

You're going to have to find investors to fund the development costs for your ASICs and then recoup those costs from sales.  You might be able to use the ASICMiner model of investment for funding development, but first you'd have to convince people that you have the slightest clue about technology and the type of ASIC unit you'd be aiming to develop and so far you haven't said a single thing which suggests that you are technologically competent enough to undertake such a venture.  You seem to be under the mistaken impression that you can just order these units off the shelf from any ASIC producer and that's simply not the case.

ASIC has been around for decades and there are plenty of places which have produced many of them.  What is new is designing ASICs for Bitcoin mining and the people you talked to do not have experience in that.  It's not as simple as saying "make me 1000 Bitcoin mining ASICs" because they need to design the product first and the development costs are going to be significant.  

You're at least going to have to come up with a design and specifications before anyone's going to take you seriously, and it's pretty unlikely any new player entering the ASIC market is going to be able to fund development with customer pre-orders.

This seems to be more about the bolded part of your statement more than anything else.  It's fine if you don't want to be an invisible player who works behind the scenes, but that's about your own wants and I don't think you should try to dress it up in terms of what the community "deserves". 

LOL @ domain pre-orders.  This "pay now and wait 6 months for delivery" thing seems to be catching on.

More technical information from Josh.


https://forums.butterflylabs.com/bfl-forum-miscellaneous/690-13-jan-2013-asic-update-discussion-thread-7.html#post10426

What method were you using for the withdrawal - it tends to make a difference with MtGox.  Also, they did put a notice on their website advising the period where there would be minimal staffing over the holidays (24 December to 7 January), so you need to take that period into account - it's likely they had a backlog of withdrawals to process when they went back to work after the holidays.

Bear in mind that structuring transactions to avoid limits will often flag a transaction for AML investigation, too.

Dave suggested people do chargebacks when Tom was out of contact and he wasn't sure whether or not Tom had wired the money to the merchant account.  He's edited his post since then.


https://www.btcfpga.com/forum/index.php?topic=1041.msg3093#msg3093

It says Dave will be offline and won't be answering emails today. 

Some people have received their CC refunds, but it's unclear yet whether Tom transferred the funds to allow more CC refunds to be made (Dave really needs to clarify that).  If the funds have been transferred then it's quicker to have Dave do a CC refund.  If not, then it's better to do a chargeback, even though it typically takes quite a while to receive the funds from a chargeback.