And some still want to trust the new Yifuless Avalon?
Wasn't Yifu the main culprit? If so, a Yifuless Avalon is a good thing, lol.
If that is the case they could clarify that for everyone right?
Yeah, I had trouble ultimately deciding on scoring ngzhang and xiangfu positively while I scored BitSyncom negatively. Ultimately though I went that route because I think ngzhang and xiangfu were the victims here, not the problem (which was BitSyncom/Yifu).
Here's the summary of what happened:
I have a framed shipping note for my FPGAs that I hang in my office to proudly show friends/family that I had ordered some of the first FPGA Bitcoin miners from China in 2011 (These were the Icarus FPGAs). I took a picture of it and wrote a note on it to ngzhang that I thanked him for letting me use his tech and looked forward to using his new ASICs just as I had the FPGAs. It occurred to me while watching a video of Yifu talking about how he had to hide ngzhang due to "death threats" that it is possible they interpreted that silly picture/note as a threat, possibly because it had his home address on it. I'm not sure how someone who could both read English and Chinese could do that, though, because the English note I made should have been clear I was proud to have had been an early miner using Avalon tech. Not only that, but it had MY home address, email, forum name, and phone number on it. If it was a death threat, they could have just reported me :/
When I got my batch 2 miners (non-tradein) they had been pre-configured to mine on Eligius to a specific Bitcoin address that held ~400 BTC at the time I had received them. I'm not sure if the burn-ins for Batch 2 just did that much mining (it's not out of the question that they could have mined so much in such little time back then), or if they were intentionally screwing over customers. My argument in the support ticket was that it looked as if Yifu had intentionally delayed Icarus trade-in deliveries past the April/May date, sold Bitcoin from the June/July chip orders to drop the price from $250 down to $65 or so, then updated the Icarus trade-in prices to have us pay 17 BTC per trade-in. I suggested to use a more current rate as the price of BTC began to soar past $75, $100, then $125 (later hovering around $140ish) in less than a week, since I hadn't gotten any notice they had posted the trade-in info till a week later. I was now being expected to pay ~70 BTC (valued around $10k) to a company that showed it was delaying chip shipments, delaying trade-ins till they had a more favourable exchange rate, and was mining significant amounts of BTC on their customers' hardware. It was very easy to say "no" with zero response coming from them, either through the ticketing system or forums.
Yifu's response was that we were "greedy" in public posts, he never addressed the support ticket, however. From what I understand many trade-in customers never got any notification to send in BTC at all. I feel really sorry for those folks. If I would have done the trade-in, and assuming they sent me the 4 Avalons I would have gotten, I could have turned around and maybe sold them for ~40 BTC each if I did it quickly enough. They would never have mined back what I spent on them, however. ROI was abysmal as priced in BTC. I don't *really* care about the lost BTC, either that which I would have obtained had I finished the trade and resold nor that of the lost 31 BTC from mining/shipping/etc. I care more about the attitude Yifu had in regards to his customers. In the end, I've made far more than I've lost on Bitcoin mining, anyway, and I have ngzhang and xiangfu and a healthy knowledge of GPU over-clocking to thank for that.
