Is Avalon mining with customer hardware? Answer is here.

[deadweasel]

If I was avalon i'd be shitting my pants right now. They pretty much owe you $100k.

No, they don't.  They haven't breached any legal agreements.  They're "testing." 

And anyway, this hardware is coming from China, which is as much the Wild West any day of week as bitcoins is.  There's no telling whose sneaking those boxes (if it actually happened on the scale alleged here) off to do a little moonlight test driving.

Exactly this.  Prove malevolence or GTFO. 

Expecting Transparency?  GTFO.

Expecting Professionalism?  GTFO.

Expecting an ASIC?  GTFO.

[ThickAsThieves]

honestly, is there even a single person here who wouldn't be doing the same thing ? 

for months though?

[ProfMac]

Today I finally received my units from Feb. 2 order. One unit was almost clean, while other one is moderate dusty. After checking all connections and desoldering F1 fuse, I started to configure units. First unit has been tuned to ozco.in and that is not surprise, cos same config was on my unit from batch one. Second unit has more interesting config:
http://puu.sh/3hrak.png
As you can see, first pool is eligius.st and most important is address: https://blockchain.info/address/1AYdAw8CcrQ2wx55LTbFHRn5bxgNZhaRLW?offset=0&filter=0
716.40851602 BTC was mined from April 22 by various units. And only gods know, how much was mined on ozco.in.
So, regardles what said Yifu, the answer is: YES, Team Avalon is mining with customer units.

PS: I'm don't have any problems with fact, that Avalon is mining with my units, if this is burn test and not introducing shipment delays.

Does your tracking information tell when the unit left Avalon's control?

[ProfMac]

Seems like no need to find a "plausible explanation". sometimes the simplest is the truth. I've said this in other threads, people really need to re-evaluate their idea of a normal business interaction when it comes to ANY vendor in the bitcoin world. This is a cutthroat business of fast money, which brings out the worst in people.

This, this and only this.

Haven't seen so big concentration of utter human failures anywhere for some looong time like it's the case with bitcoin and overall cryptocommunity.

I have a feeling people would eat kids for few bitcoins sometimes.

And yet everyone swear about network, new better free world, bla-bla-bla, lol

Vendor:  This device will make all the money you can ever spend.
Bitcoiner:  I need two.

[infested999]

Is it not a bit suspicious that if they were mining 700 BTC for "testing", something they should have made public and is not for us to find out, that they would have deleted the default pool information? This all seems too easy to come out.

Or Avalon just doesn't care or is ignorant against customer satisfaction.

[ThickAsThieves]

Is it not a bit suspicious that if they were mining 700 BTC for "testing", something they should have made public and is not for us to find out, that they would have deleted the default pool information? This all seems too easy to come out.

Or Avalon just doesn't care or is ignorant against customer satisfaction.

Or they simply missed a spot.

[Rampion]

honestly, is there even a single person here who wouldn't be doing the same thing ? 

for months though?

Honestly, I wouldn't mine with units that were crowd-fucking-funded. Some of us have a minimum of ethics and principles. Some of us would have some empathy towards the folks that risked their hard-earned money to make this project happen.

Yeah, I guess all of us would try to maximize the profit and build a % of units that we would keep for ourselves and mine with them. But mining with customer's units, taking away from them the possibility of achieving break-even? Because that's what's going to happen to late batch #2 and all batch #3.

Because of the above, I don't think Avalon is mining with customers units. Yifu really seem a guy with ideals, that won't fuck with people like that. Thus, until definitive proof is given, I will believe they are just incurring in unfortunate manufacturing and shipping delays, I will believe his word and I will keep thinking they never mined with customers units.

[Vicus]

Today I finally received my units from Feb. 2 order. One unit was almost clean, while other one is moderate dusty. After checking all connections and desoldering F1 fuse, I started to configure units. First unit has been tuned to ozco.in and that is not surprise, cos same config was on my unit from batch one. Second unit has more interesting config:
http://puu.sh/3hrak.png
As you can see, first pool is eligius.st and most important is address: https://blockchain.info/address/1AYdAw8CcrQ2wx55LTbFHRn5bxgNZhaRLW?offset=0&filter=0
716.40851602 BTC was mined from April 22 by various units. And only gods know, how much was mined on ozco.in.
So, regardles what said Yifu, the answer is: YES, Team Avalon is mining with customer units.

PS: I'm don't have any problems with fact, that Avalon is mining with my units, if this is burn test and not introducing shipment delays.

Does your tracking information tell when the unit left Avalon's control?

May 24

[DobZombie]

"RLW" was noticed in the Eligius pool thread a few weeks ago as having brought in 3.5 Th/s for a few days.  Then they (Avalon) left, and came back a couple days later.  There were several pages of discussion speculating who it was.  I guess we know for sure now.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=23768.msg2276814#msg2276814  

Here is another thread discussing the 3.5TH/s enigma on eligius a few weeks back.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=214010.msg2280383#msg2280383

Avalon farm of 50+ units seemed unlikely... but not impossible.  Looks like confirmation.

I guess the good news is that the mining difficulty won't go up much when those units ship to their new owners 

It's not a farm, the payouts would be much higher. Testing is still possible.

Thats what the BLOODY TESTNET IS FOR!

 

[infested999]

honestly, is there even a single person here who wouldn't be doing the same thing ? 

for months though?

Honestly, I wouldn't mine with units that were crowd-fucking-funded. Some of us have a minimum of ethics and principles. Some of us would have some empathy towards the folks that risked their hard-earned money to make this project happen.

Yeah, I guess all of us would try to maximize the profit and build a % of units that we would keep for ourselves and mine with them. But mining with customer's units, taking away from them the possibility of achieving break-even? Because that's what's going to happen to late batch #2 and all batch #3.

Because of the above, I don't think Avalon is mining with customers units. Yifu really seem a guy with ideals, that won't fuck with people like that. Thus, until definitive proof is given, I will believe they are just incurring in unfortunate manufacturing and shipping delays, I will believe his word and I will keep thinking they never mined with customers units.

Since they are still the most ethical company in the game right now I will give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe they only pre-mined with some of the units. OP's unit just happened to be one of the most used ones.

[auto2nr1]

I feel that they should be mining on the testnet if they were going to be mining for an extended period of time. If they were going to be mining on the mainnet to do testing it should be no more than 24-48 hours at most. After the short test period as long as the unit did not experience any issues it should be shipped out immediately. It is unfortunate that they are mining and profiting off the customers units that have been crowd funded. 

[coinedBit]

I don't know, except for pretty much anybody else, they have actually delivered something, so the temptation must be huge once you realize that most of your competitors underperform, possibly also because they're realizing how much profit you can make by mining extensively and delaying hardware delivery, because of the exponential increase in difficulty.

[jerfelix]

I feel that they should be mining on the testnet if they were going to be mining for an extended period of time. If they were going to be mining on the mainnet to do testing it should be no more than 24-48 hours at most. After the short test period as long as the unit did not experience any issues it should be shipped out immediately. It is unfortunate that they are mining and profiting off the customers units that have been crowd funded.  

Did you do the math?

If they have 1200 units in batch 2 and 3, and they are currently generating about 3 BTC per day (and more back in April), how many Bitcoins would have been generated with a 24-48 hour burn-in test?

Hint:  A lot more than the 716 BTC mentioned here!

[ProfMac]

Today I finally received my units from Feb. 2 order. One unit was almost clean, while other one is moderate dusty. After checking all connections and desoldering F1 fuse, I started to configure units. First unit has been tuned to ozco.in and that is not surprise, cos same config was on my unit from batch one. Second unit has more interesting config:
http://puu.sh/3hrak.png
As you can see, first pool is eligius.st and most important is address: https://blockchain.info/address/1AYdAw8CcrQ2wx55LTbFHRn5bxgNZhaRLW?offset=0&filter=0
716.40851602 BTC was mined from April 22 by various units. And only gods know, how much was mined on ozco.in.
So, regardles what said Yifu, the answer is: YES, Team Avalon is mining with customer units.

PS: I'm don't have any problems with fact, that Avalon is mining with my units, if this is burn test and not introducing shipment delays.

Does your tracking information tell when the unit left Avalon's control?

May 24

That seems like 3 weeks that are unaccounted for, when many units are able to ship in a matter of days.


I don't have it together enough to compete at making Avalon clones with the chips they are selling.  However, I doodle with different ideas of how I might change the design.

Some options that came to mind are:
1.  A GPS unit that sends it's location to a well known database.
2.  IPv6 with a MAC based address that puts it's identity into a well known ntp servers logs.
3.  A "power on" log across the AC power, similar to what lots of high end lab equiptment has.

[Xialla]

I feel that they should be mining on the testnet if they were going to be mining for an extended period of time. If they were going to be mining on the mainnet to do testing it should be no more than 24-48 hours at most. After the short test period as long as the unit did not experience any issues it should be shipped out immediately. It is unfortunate that they are mining and profiting off the customers units that have been crowd funded.  

Did you do the math?

If they have 1200 units in batch 2 and 3, and they are currently generating about 3 BTC per day (and more back in April), how many Bitcoins would have been generated with a 24-48 hour burn-in test?

Hint:  A lot more than the 716 BTC mentioned here!

if they got it, why all guys who ordered them not yet received them?.) and yes, they should use more addresses/accounts/pools etc..

[Loredo]

Here is another thread discussing the 3.5TH/s enigma on eligius a few weeks back.

So is that most likely the smoking gun?  Let's do some back-of-envelope here.

Say the network was running 100 Thps at that time, and somebody came with 3.5 Thps.  Not counting the bonus from front-running the difficulty, they'd be looking at around 3600 * 3.5% = 126 BTC per day from that.  

So the 700 BTC being talked about is maybe 5 days of such shenanigans?  I'm not a YiFu fan boy, but somehow that seems too small and one-off for him to mandate.  

[infested999]

..

[k9quaint]

I feel that they should be mining on the testnet if they were going to be mining for an extended period of time. If they were going to be mining on the mainnet to do testing it should be no more than 24-48 hours at most. After the short test period as long as the unit did not experience any issues it should be shipped out immediately. It is unfortunate that they are mining and profiting off the customers units that have been crowd funded.  

Did you do the math?

If they have 1200 units in batch 2 and 3, and they are currently generating about 3 BTC per day (and more back in April), how many Bitcoins would have been generated with a 24-48 hour burn-in test?

Hint:  A lot more than the 716 BTC mentioned here!

This is the issue with pre-ordering and paying full price up front. It is a crap shoot.
Until there are companies that can deliver existing inventory at the drop of a hat, there is nothing to hold these ASIC companies honest.
At least ASICMiner is up front about it.  

[Loredo]

Until there are companies that can deliver existing inventory at the drop of a hat, there is nothing to hold these ASIC companies honest.

Ab.so.lutely. But it's only been two three (time flies  ) months since the BTC exRate has been sufficiently high for guys who don't have to bootstrap it to get attracted to it.  

I'd be real, real, surprised if there weren't a fully legit, USD 20K / Thps, collect-on-overnight-delivery vendor appear by autumn.  The first one is going to make a fecking ton o' money in a two-step (sell to recover NRE, then mine in shares to make it a business).

[tinus42]

Until there are companies that can deliver existing inventory at the drop of a hat, there is nothing to hold these ASIC companies honest.
At least ASICMiner is up front about it.  

ASICMiner is such a company. You get your order delivered within a few days.