I had some time and decided to come out of lurk mode and create an account. Please insert speculation regarding my motives as a first time poster here:
Question is how long have you been lurking? By your responses, not long.
What finally prompted this post is my surprise at how a few short updates from KNC that spawned some speculation have now turned into facts after a couple weeks, with no additional information.
You mean their dodging of questions from even their most respected customers, and their customer relations department effectively shutting down, doesn't add to your surprise?
I don't see any real justification for the complaints about their NPS, because they didn't ship more power during the declared NPS timeframe.
You're kidding right? 3 Chinese OEM's shipped daily since December 1st, along with another company. Their NPS stated they would offer more equipment to be shipped same month if competitors were shipping hashpower. How can they offer same month? They already had more than enough 28nm on hand in preparation for this, and for their datacenter (which they'd been planning). This ties in below. Not sure where you get that competition didn't ship more, the hashrate went up throughout the NPS time window, as did the difficulty. Jupiters were supposed to be valuable well past spring if competition wasn't shipping. They're no longer valuable now.
I've seen speculation that they were mining themselves the whole time, but exactly zero proof of it, so to me this is just noise.
Huh? They show their own datacenter in several press reports and video releases. It's significant. They even admitted to mining the entire time, but they won't say how much power they're using. It's likely to say they were using far more than they want to admit.
The endless whining about their decision not to sell more add on modules after they suggested they might is also noise. They never promised to, and only said to keep some BTC available if you can, so I'm not sure what anyone hopes to gain by hammering on about it.
It's like you know nothing about the company or anything in their newsletter, or in their terms of service. For every single product they've offered for sale, one of the primary selling points/features (since June 2013) was modular upgradability, and that modules would in fact be produced side-by-side and available. They included this bullet point in batches 1 & 2 of Neptune as well, but redacted it for batch 3. This has been discussed many times over, and has even the most hardcore KNC supporters upset, because when questioned in email, Sam and the other KNC guys said--without a doubt--they would always be selling the modules for the products which could be upgraded.
If they add 3.6Ph to cover one batch at a time, then at present that would increase network power by 1/7 - but it may well not come online until June
They said they plan on getting it up and running as soon as possible, and said they could have it up and running within a month or so. They'll likely have it going long before June.
Realistically, between Hashfast and Cointerra finally shipping, and even BFL (which while already late seems like it will eventually ship the Monarch)
Monarch isn't late, original ship timeframe was March-April. Where do you get any of your information?
and KNC's statement that they haven't been cranking out a lot more 28nm hardware. Every other statement about this is speculation, much of it contravening the few facts we have, and is just useless noise to wade through on the forum.
They said they hadn't been making more 28nm for sell orders. It's important to note the wording. They've kept their foundry very busy over the last few months.
So there is a lack of information problem, but that has not stopped the perception from being that they've already been mining with giant amounts of power, or that we've all somehow been screwed as such even though whatever they have done, or are going to do is not a huge % delta in total network hashing power over all the other stuff that is shipping now from other manufacturer's, or is likely to. So am I missing something here, is there some signal in the noise of this forum that I missed?
Judging by your lackluster understanding of the facts at hand, and how the difficulty increase steps haven't really slowed down which shows generous network growth, I'd say you have indeed missed a lot. Go back and read starting around Nov 1st, and you'll actually understand the situation and why so many long-term supporters have jumped ship. It isn't just noise, what you're seeing is the clamour of folks waking up and smelling the burnt toast.
Seems like once a week someone "new" is coming in the forum who claims they've kept up with things, and doesn't understand why people are hating so much.. and then within a short period of time the light bulb comes on for them too.