I don't think it was Kracken specifically which started to damage Patrick's rep - it really just put it beyond salvage - but more his promotion of pirate in general.  Once he aligned himself with a HYIP which was demonstrably unsustainable, he lost a lot of credibility in regard to risk assessment in general.  I think that's true of other lenders too.

Yeah.  I can understand refunds not being processed between Christmas and New Year and a lot of businesses here only went back to work yesterday, but if you're effectively closing down your customer service during a holiday period you should a least set up an auto-responder letting people know exactly when you'll be back to work.

pirate returned people's money on request at first, too (although he discouraged withdrawals by telling people that if they withdrew they may not be able to re-invest later).

Kraken was clearly designed for Patrick to hedge his own risk (and ultimately to dump his own toxic debt).  Just because you don't cut and run at the first opportunity doesn't mean you're not going to cut and run eventually.  My perception is that Patrick thought his experience in high-risk investments meant he'd come out ahead of the game and that the decision to "cut and run" was probably not made until it became obvious that he was so far behind the game that he couldn't catch up.

It's meant to be a show-stopper - they don't want to deal with small investors directly.  In fact, if you read Mircea Popescu's blog you'll know that the fee is going to increase over time.  Small investors are not their target market.  Deal with it.

Today's promised update should be...interesting.

Why?  I'm far from convinced that every single PPT operator didn't have a clue that Trendon was running a ponzi and intended to bail at some point.  Whether it's Thailand, New Zealand or some other country where a PPT operator is located that Trendon "turns up", the possibility that they're actively aiding and abetting him has to be considered.

Yeah, I was willing to believe that it might be a typo or the kind of brain-fart you have when you've been eating, sleeping and breathing a project for months  but Dave's follow up post is unsatisfactory in that respect.


https://www.btcfpga.com/forum/index.php?topic=882.msg2714#msg2714

I have no idea what percentage of total orders the cancellations now being threatened would be, but it's clearly time for bASIC to "shit or get off the pot" as far as some of their users are concerned.

https://www.btcfpga.com/forum/index.php?topic=882.msg2725#msg2725

In a way I can.  You can be anyone you want to be on the SE Asian backpacker trail.  Everyone's going to assume that you're dribbling bullshit and no-one's likely to check up on your story.  Remember that one reason many criminals get caught is that they can't keep their mouths shut - if they think they've been especially clever then they want others to know about it (and coke fiends will run off at the mouth anyway - overconfidence and thinking that you're interesting and invincible is the nature of the beast).

What makes me suspicious, though, is that the amount of detail is almost overkill.  While criminals don't behave rationally, the details that both these contacts have provided seem to fit just a little bit too neatly with what the community itself wants to believe.  Yeah, it's certainly possible that Trendon is trying to do the whole "international man of mystery" thing, flying first class and staying at 5 star hotels, but people who try to create an aura of opulence around them generally go the whole hog and don't dress like a back-packer or hang out at back-packer drinking holes.

Again, the only people who can check the details are the authorities - they can certainly check hotel registers for the period in question and match them up with immigration records but at this point even knowing for certain where Trendon is this very minute wouldn't be a whole lot of use.

Where on earth did I say that?  I would expect that the majority of miners will recover their initial hardware investment but the amount of time that takes will increase as more and more power ASIC power is thrown at the network, so miners will either need to buy additional hardware to mine a given amount of Bitcoins each month or see the amount of Bitcoins they mine each month diminish if they don't invest in more hardware.

By contrast, once their R&D costs have been recovered, those selling the shovels (ASICs) are making a known amount of profit on every unit they sell and making that profit instantly.  If they're half-way competent, they know exactly at what point the market will be saturated and they'll need to drop prices to stimulate further sales, but miners themselves are going to need to go on purchasing additional hardware just to tread water for as long as the overall amount of network power continues to increase.

In a sense, every computing technology which hits the market is already obsolete in that plans are usually already in place for the next generation.  It's not a field in which you rest on your laurels for a few years and then think about designing something new after your product is no longer adequate for its intended purpose.  I seem to recall Josh saying he expects that people will still be able to use their BFL ASICs in 5 years but that doesn't mean an individual ASIC will be bringing in a return which covers its power costs at that point - 5 years is a very long time when it comes to technology.  

Hell, in the 18 months I've been on this forum we've gone from people being able to mine using the CPU on pretty much any computer they already owned to the development of ASICs - it would be foolish to try to predict where Bitcoin mining will be in 18 months time, let alone 5 years, but one thing you can be certain of is that there'll always be a demand for new shovels.

I suspect that was a typo - either that or they don't understand how early production is affected in the lead-up to CNY and assumed the email they got said February but they assumed that was a typo - but it's really, really difficult to believe that they've only just become aware of this issue and it raises the question of the new anticipated delivery date for the component they'll receive last.

One thing's clear - their chips aren't packaged yet and they apparently don't have a date for when that will happen other than "should be coming very soon".

Just had a birthday, so 19 now.


My youngest is 21 so she's of the generation where everyone checks their phones for FB updates every 5 minutes - she and her friends have probably all posted more FB status updates in the last 18 months than the number of messages I've posted on here.  She does, however, believe that "Americans are weird" - which is her perception of the online communities I frequent in general rather than this one specifically.

None of my kids live at home, so my online life isn't something with which they come into contact really unless I send them a link to something - which I do very rarely regarding anything because link-spamming is as annoying as email and ICQ forwarding.

How other vendors announce and downplay delays reflects badly on them, but people aren't entirely stupid.  When multiple aspects of a device are now going to be affected by CNY, then it raises huge questions about the manner in which the project has been planned because anyone who's ever done business in the region knows that it's very risky to depend on delivery in the month leading up to CNY and that a slip in schedule at that point will often set you back a couple of months.  

At this point, when any vendor claims a last minute problem people no longer believe them, because short of the fab burning down those "problems" are ones which should have been anticipated and planned for (and the project should be insured against those types of possibilities anyway).

The thing is that it doesn't take a competing vendor to point these things out.  Customers and potential customers are doing it every time another delay is announced.  

The commercial reality is that a lot will be forgiven in respect of the first company which delivers ASICs which meet its promised specifications, which is why every vendor needs to focus on being the first company to do that.  It's also a commercial reality that these delays are going to affect the financial forecasts of the vendors and that we may see companies ultimately deliver a product but not be able to absorb the financial impact of these delays.

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The big problem is actual evidence.  Information given to BCB and relayed by him to the SEC can't be used so people have to be willing to deal with the SEC directly using their real names and to provide hard evidence of their dealings with Trendon or the PPT operators.  Think about what actual proof most people have that they gave Trendon funds (which weren't sent to anything as neat as a bank account in his name) and you see why it's not easy for authorities to take this anywhere meaningful.  Remember that most people didn't deal with Trendon directly, and those who did almost certainly violated the same laws Trendon did.

Even if we can "connect the dots", it's pretty much useless without people being willing to co-operate with the authorities.  I'm not sure there's much you can do to make people more willing to talk to the SEC or other authorities - as you said, it's not "evidence" without that co-operation.

Did you forward the chat log to the SEC? They have the resources to check whether he left the country under his own name and whether he's returned, as well as checking whether he stayed at particular hotels.

I think it's incredibly important to remember that we're not a law enforcement agency using confidential informants.  We have no right to ask people to try to obtain additional information for us, especially when we have no idea how Trendon might react if he becomes suspicious of their reasons for asking.  Encouraging people to see this as some kind of exciting game is something we want to avoid, especially if they're encountering him in locations where they have little access to support or protection such as the SE Asian back-packer trail.

Others don't have to reply to the crap and it would probably be a good idea for each of the vendors to start a locked update thread so that people don't need to hunt around in the discussion threads to find the latest information.

What a lot of crap.  Just because mining with ASICs may be profitable (given certain conditions) doesn't mean that selling ASICs isn't going to be more profitable.

While it's pretty obvious that the dates quoted in the update are a typo and should read February 10-25, the reality is that production is affected for considerably longer than the official holiday period.  Workers start heading home for the holidays in the couple of weeks prior to CNY because it takes so fucking long to travel home - bear in mind that most are poor people travelling very long distances using unreliable means of transport.  Of those who return - and many don't because employment contracts typically end at that time or they just can't face returning to factory life - many only begin making their way back at the end of the holiday period.  

Nobody who has any experience at all with having things manufactured in the region is unaware of this - it's something you plan for months in advance and take into account when planning your project.  It's not unusual for manufacturers to stop taking new orders between October and February to take this winding down of capacity into account, so any change at all regarding your order during that period (like the need to redo something or needing larger quantities) can add months to your delivery date because the capacity to meet your new needs may not be there until after CNY even if your need arises in November.  One of the sanest things you can to avoid this is to plan your projects so that you're never dependent on delivery between October and February.

Chinese New Year isn't some sudden, unforeseen event which throws you off schedule.  It's something you know damned well is going to happen and when.  Realistically, bASIC isn't likely to be delivering until at least March if "more than one aspect of the bASIC device" is going to be affected by CNY.

Every ASIC vendor on these forums needs to concentrate their energy on getting their own product shipped at the moment instead of flinging shit at their competition.  It shouldn't matter a damn to any of you what your competition is doing if you're confident in your own product and your own competence.

From memory, they way they did this run was to fully complete half the chips in the batch - so there's already a similar amount of chips which is half-way through production and which now only need the second half of layers added (because they know the first lot worked they don't need to make any changes to the process).