My quick guess would be that one would have to pay additional filing fees for registrations that were allowed to lapse. Of course, if wrenchmonkey was serious about his "fuck the law" stance, BFL should just fail to register and not pay any taxes either.
Who can really say they were surprised by this? Or surprised that some people would try to defend this behavior? Yet another broken promise from BFL, and they'll get away with this one too since nobody bothers to hold them to their promises.

In other words, if you have a website, you're a captain of industry and caveat emptor, f*** you got mine, immune from prosecution, but if you're just a plebe that runs your business in a forum thread and can't afford your own website, then scammer tag for you. 

Whose ARS? As in, ARS issued by whom?

A Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) can be reprogrammed into doing almost anything you want it to do. If the printed circuit board around it doesn't support your new application, you can still re-use the FPGA.

An Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) is locked into doing only one thing. It's not field programmable.

So yeah, an FPGA miner probably has higher reuse value than an ASIC.

All it would take is one administrator at the forum level or the hosting level being compromised, or one bug in the forum software, and the email addresses and IPs can be made public or be for sale to the highest bidder.

My guess is that those who shout the loudest that this is a definite scam, will be the first ones to order a unit, and they probably ordered from every ASIC scam out there too.

Perhaps as a bonus KNCminer's business parters could be scared away from this venture by the rabid hordes calling the phones off the hook demanding to preorder right at this minute, having one of their employees constantly on the phone and not getting any work done.

wchy1128 and virtualfaqs, sent you both 305 XRP. Cheers.

If it was a bakery that sells to the public, and perhaps even have their own food serving area, then of those 11 I'd expect 4 bakers, 3 sales/serving staff, 2 patissiers and 1 HR/admin person and 1 cleaning staff. (Baking is made at night/early morning, and the day staff takes care of the sales.)

In a more industrial bakery, that sells to stores and businesses rather than directly to the public, you can cut the sales staff and add more bakers.

In a ASIC developing company, that doesn't interact with the public either, you'd be more served to put together a team where each engineer has slightly different, but also overlapping, expertise. There might be one HR/admin staff, but the rest of the employees could be engineers. Cleaning and security is typically outsourced. Even the owners could be engineers.

So yeah, they're probably just needing more people. Or perhaps one of their employees is moving to a different part of the country, is retiring or is going on pregnancy leave.
Touché. And the 1 baker would have a full time job in a bank, and remote control the bread making machines on his spare time.

However, this company isn't really a BTC company. They're in it for the dirty SEK.

Bakery with 11 employees posts advertisement asking for a baker. You would assume that lab member 12 is the first baker that they hire?

If Coke is USD, and Pepsi is EUR, then Bitcoin is New Coke and Ripple is a system of tubes that sprays any liquid you want to deliver into your friends' mouths. XRP would be the pressurized air that runs this system of tubes; you can trade bottles of this pressurized air but you can't drink it, only use it to send liquids throught the tubes. And you'd only let those you trust pour things into your mouth over the internet, so if you want give some raw milk to a friend of a friend in Japan, you pour the raw milk into the mouth of a mutual friend that you both trust, and he'll forward the raw milk to the guy in Japan. Excelsior!

Here's the thing: XRP will only have real value if Ripple is successful. As in, enough people need XRPs that they'll be willing to buy XRP, or that their gateways buy XRPs for them behind the scenes. OpenCoin can't just sit on their XRP, they have to work at it.

It's just like pre-paid phone minutes from TMobile won't be worth anything unless TMobile actually provides a working service, at a service level that is competitive.
The point of XRP would be to reward the developers of Ripple, and the guys who run peers that actually perform transactions. The sort of "proof of work" you mention would just reward those who wastes the most electricity, and not those who actually make transactions happen.

Why don't we instead discuss what incentive people would have to run their own Ripple nodes? Perhaps those who buy Ripples from Opencoin and from people who got free Ripple handouts would be the people who have an economical incentive to run their own Ripple nodes? By contributing to the success of Ripple, their hoard of cheap XRP becomes worth more, and they can sell those XRPs to cover the cost of running Ripple nodes. This sounds good at first, but it wouldn't provide an incentive for latecomers to run their own Ripple nodes?

Because startup costs for silicon mining and IC production are enormous, while PSUs and computer cases are available off the shelf almost in every country in the world. It makes sense to find ones place in the margins vs. cost field. Avalon are in the high margin and high cost area, since they gambled on making an IC for Bitcoin mining. An integrator/re-seller are in a medium margin and medium cost area, since they won't have to design and get ICs made from scratch, but they have to assemble modules. Adding PSUs and cases adds to their cost more than their margins would justify, since pretty much everyone who would buy a unit from them is capable of buying and installing a PSU and case themselves. (Yes, yes, I know the mining rigs pictures thread provides a counterpoint, but the point remains that selling modules to miners is more cost effective for both the miners themselves and the integrator.)

The above is of course only on-topic in this thread if KNCminer really are buying their ASIC wafers from Avalon.

If these guys are Avalon resellers, I think the European customers - and everybody else - would appreciate an ASIC option that both will deliver and would have better customer service than Avalon itself (one can hope), and the claim to be able to ship this summer seems reasonable.

What happened with the plans to sell the units through regular retailers like Dustin?

As for votes for what particular configurations they want to sell, I wonder if they'll skip that and go straight to preordering. Cases, PSUs etc. would just be more overhead when they could just sell finished modules to the hungry masses.

ASIC vendors have made no secret of them taking part in bets about them. What Luke-Jr did on BFL's instruction was clearly a ploy to provide betsofbitco.in with implausible deniability for cancelling a bet that BFL employees were about to lose. Paying coinjedi a fraction of the value of the bet, in order to recoup most of it, makes economic sense if you make the assumption that everybody is some sort of Game of Thrones level backstabbing objectivist robber baron without any honor or shame.

A Bitcoiner Never Pays his Bets.

weisoq, maybe your browser deletes cookies after every visit? That might explain what happens. You have an option of storing the wallet in the browser and/or on Payward.

Some people are confused about exactly where their wallet resides, it seems. Personally, I keep it in my browser, and I've also backed it up as a file on my harddrive, and I've stored the secret key as well.
To lose your wallet even with your login information, you need to
- fail to use a blob store like Payward
- fail to back up the wallet file
- fail to take note of the secret rescue key
- lose your browser cookies

If all those things happen, you have lost your Ripple wallet. If you averted one of the above, you can get back into your wallet. Correct?

Some reading comprehension would help here. kncminer has already made clear that they haven't got a finished product yet, and that they're going to solicit for what sort of products would be in most demand. (As in, what hash rates and power usage vs. pricing that people are most interested in, so that they know how many modules to put in each unit.)

It's clear by now that these people really do exist, and have a real company in Sweden. So they're about as proven to exist as BFL are, but they haven't taken any preorder money yet nor have they accused anyone of being a gay prostitute - the latter two steps evidently being required before being taken seriously on these forums.

I wonder if kncminer and those who are financing the operation might have been spooked by the recent BTC market crash.

Well you shouldn't put blind trust even in a well established system where the source has been available for decades either.

We'll just have to wait for the source for the servers to become available first.

The "shipped" thread has been closed with Luke-Jr given the last word.

Well this would be a good argument for all BTC ASICs being scams, except that BTC is so horribly volatile, as well as the startup costs for ASIC design is so high. Even if the company is run by true belivers, the investors and banks that give them money to pay for their costs won't accept that risk. ASICMINER is a special case in that they spent time gathering investors that believed in BTC, or who hedged for a rise in BTC; that venture capital has probably been vacuumed up by ASICMINER so I think a second market entrant of the same type won't be successful.

That's why I think unless you're ASICMINER or are able to get investors from the BTCliebers, the only sensible business case right now is to sell the units as you'd sell shovels to gold rush miners, and do so quickly. You can't fund the design and startup costs with preorder money either, even if you might have gotten away with that in the past.

My guess is that they already have an ASIC design, perhaps Avalon's or ones of their own design, and that they have some funding standing by in case there is sufficient interest in the product. I don't know if they'll be able to deliver on time, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they start shipping before BFL does.

If you distrust the re-issued phone number, why don't you just give it a call? If a Chinese restaurant answers the phone, you know the number is fake or incorrect, but if you actually get the kncminer people, you know they at least have the phone.