My Avalon ASIC Gen1 batch #2 pledge

[iammagicmike]

I received DHL Tracking # on 6/17/13 - any word for your order?

[silverserpent]

so you sent in your EQ more than 2 months ago. how much power did it have? perhaps another Avalon ploy to facilitate their apparent secret mining with customer pre-orders

[Raize]

I still have received no notification on my trade-ins or on my regular batch #2 orders as of this morning. Sorry folks, no update yet.

[Raize]

Received noticed of shipment and tracking # at the same time this morning for my regular order:
June 29th, 2013 8:32 AM CST

Edited the original post to reflect this.

Still no status update or change on trade-in orders.

[Raize]

Edited #13 to reflect delivery time on regular Batch #2 orders:
13) Time of Avalon regular order arrival: July 3rd, 2013 11:30 AM CST

Hoping to hear about trade-ins soon.

My regular order Avalons were received in great condition, they were definitely used for mining, as others have stated. They were set on Extreme for the 24-hour burn-in test. One of the units had an orange LED light up, I put it back to Advance for chip frequency and reset cgminer and it appears to be running more stable. I'll probably fiddle around with these settings and other firmware at some point in the future, but for now I'm going to leave them in a stable state as I continue to work at my day job.

I'm going to start looking for a commercial/industrial real estate option soon to get these out of my living quarters.

[dogie]

Edited #13 to reflect delivery time on regular Batch #2 orders:
13) Time of Avalon regular order arrival: July 3rd, 2013 11:30 AM CST

Hoping to hear about trade-ins soon.

My regular order Avalons were received in great condition, they were definitely used for mining, as others have stated. They were set on Extreme for the 24-hour burn-in test. One of the units had an orange LED light up, I put it back to Advance for chip frequency and reset cgminer and it appears to be running more stable. I'll probably fiddle around with these settings and other firmware at some point in the future, but for now I'm going to leave them in a stable state as I continue to work at my day job.

I'm going to start looking for a commercial/industrial real estate option soon to get these out of my living quarters.

How many do you have?

[Raize]

More than one  . Also have more than one trade-in as well as not all of these are mine. That's about all I'm willing to disclose, sorry...

[Raize]

Updated with the latest info. Yifu never responded to the customer service inquires I made, I've given him a negative rating and now consider the Icarus devices as stolen/lost. I never received a refund.

[creativex]

Sorry for your trouble. Are you pursuing a refund from Yifu now that he's trying to peddle his g2 stuff? He always seems to behave when he wants to bring new hardware to market.

Thanks for keeping the community apprised of the situation.

Edit:

Well, it was a fun ride, but I've given up on BitSyncom providing the Avalon replacements or providing a credit for the Icarus shipped back to him, or making up for the lost Bitcoin revenue from the last ~5 months of mining revenue. I will never do business with Yifu again.

[dogie]

Sorry to necro, but did really nothing happen for the trade ins? Everyone gave up without legal action?

[Raize]

At the time, BTC was worth under $80 so they said they wanted something like 17 BTC per FPGA for an ASIC miner. If I would have paid their ransom money for the new ASIC miners, it would have resulted in an even bigger loss so I just took the 31ish BTC in lost mining revenues, FPGAs, and shipping as a loss.

[el_rlee]

I also sent in one Icarus, never got a reply...

[yxt]

same here! all PMs, Tickets, mails was ignored

Let us spread that behavior now, when they are going to sell their next product!
somebody talked to a lawyer?

[knedle]

same here! all PMs, Tickets, mails was ignored

Let us spread that behavior now, when they are going to sell their next product!
somebody talked to a lawyer?

+1, just don't buy from them...

Did you post trust on their profiles?  These dicks should never sell anything here. 

I read somewhere they have that against-bitcoin policy in China, maybe contacting someone from the gov in China could help you put somee pressure on them?

[Bicknellski]

At the time, BTC was worth under $80 so they said they wanted something like 17 BTC per FPGA for an ASIC miner. If I would have paid their ransom money for the new ASIC miners, it would have resulted in an even bigger loss so I just took the 31ish BTC in lost mining revenues, FPGAs, and shipping as a loss.

And some still want to trust the new Yifuless Avalon?

[xstr8guy]

At the time, BTC was worth under $80 so they said they wanted something like 17 BTC per FPGA for an ASIC miner. If I would have paid their ransom money for the new ASIC miners, it would have resulted in an even bigger loss so I just took the 31ish BTC in lost mining revenues, FPGAs, and shipping as a loss.

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.

[marto74]

At the time, BTC was worth under $80 so they said they wanted something like 17 BTC per FPGA for an ASIC miner. If I would have paid their ransom money for the new ASIC miners, it would have resulted in an even bigger loss so I just took the 31ish BTC in lost mining revenues, FPGAs, and shipping as a loss.

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.

+1

[Bicknellski]

At the time, BTC was worth under $80 so they said they wanted something like 17 BTC per FPGA for an ASIC miner. If I would have paid their ransom money for the new ASIC miners, it would have resulted in an even bigger loss so I just took the 31ish BTC in lost mining revenues, FPGAs, and shipping as a loss.

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?

[xstr8guy]

At the time, BTC was worth under $80 so they said they wanted something like 17 BTC per FPGA for an ASIC miner. If I would have paid their ransom money for the new ASIC miners, it would have resulted in an even bigger loss so I just took the 31ish BTC in lost mining revenues, FPGAs, and shipping as a loss.

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?

You are expecting an ASIC manufacturer to actually communicate with the masses?! With the exception of Spondoolies, of course who are amazing with their constant updates.

Seriously, wtf is wrong with these other companies? We give them millions of dollars and they shit on us with alarming regularity. I feel like a battered wife.

[Raize]

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.