My partner and I personally flew to Wuhan China to meet with Innosilicon after our investigation into Halong ended in us deducting that it is a fictitious company.
My associates and I have come to the same conclusion. I have been a long time member and browser of BitcoinTalk even though I am not an active poster. I’m compelled to warn people about Halong Mining. I do not believe Halong will ever ship a working product. I've purchased many units, and I know others who have purchased many units too. I hope I’m entirely wrong about Halong, but the evidence I’ve collected suggests my hopes are probably ill-founded.
Halong points to its affiliation with "MyRig, Inc." as proof that Halong is a legitimate operation. Therefore, the credibility of MyRig equally warrants our scrutiny. Unfortunately, for those who have pre-ordered DragonMint miners, including myself and my friends, Halong Mining and MyRig, Inc. fail basic due diligence tests. I only wish I had done this research earlier.
Please consider the following before ordering from Halong Mining:
1. MyRig, Inc.’s Terms of Use (see
https://myrig.com/terms-of-use/) state that Colorado is its choice of law, but the Colorado Secretary of State, who maintains official record of all businesses that are authorized to conduct business within the state, has no record of any incorporated entity named "MyRig, Inc." or its purported predecessor "BitMain Warranty." One can verify these facts by searching for those names here:
http://www.sos.state.co.us/biz/BusinessEntityCriteriaExt.do?resetTransTyp=Y 2. Halong Mining's website (
https://halongmining.com/) does not specify any information about its business license, its jurisdiction of incorporation (such as the nation, state, province, etc.) or what kind of entity "Halong Mining" actually is (such as a corporation, a limited liability company, known in China as a "limited company" or "有限公司"). This information is basic and is ordinarily specified by a credible business.
3. MyRig lists 4 "offices" on its website (
https://myrig.com/contacts/). Its U.S. office is now listed as a UPS Store private mailbox. Prior to last week, it didn't even list this address on its website. Instead, it listed merely GPS coordinates. Last week, those coordinates tracked to a Panera Bread store. MyRig updated its website only recently to add the physical address to the UPS Store, which is located in the same building as the Panera Bread. The coordinates can be viewed here:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/39%C2%B046'05.9%22N+104%C2%B054'07.6%22W/@39.7683056,-104.9042998,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d39.7683056!4d-104.9021111
4. Contact requests to MyRig have gone unanswered and unacknowledged.
5. Our associate's ticket submissions to Halong Mining asking for any information that could provide us with information about the legitimacy of its operation and the DragonMint, following our very substantial order, resulted in a reply that contained no helpful information, basically only a URL in which Halong Support touted its purported relationship with MyRig.
6. The domain name HalongMining.com was anonymously registered a mere five days before Halong Mining's November 22, 2017 announcement of the DragonMint. Quite unusual for an entity that represents it spent $30 million USD in R&D leading up to the date of that announcement.
https://www.whois.com/whois/halongmining.com 7. Multiple Twitter accounts advocating favorably for DragonMint were created in early December 2017, suggesting they are bogus accounts (see @ColumbusCrypto, @iwearahoodie, for example).
8. No real human's first and last name is associated with Halong Mining or MyRig (not a single engineer or corporate executive) on its web site, public postings, or LinkedIn. The company has been promoted by someone known only by a nom de plume -- "BtcDrak" -- whose Twitter photo is of Gollum, the antagonist from the fiction film "Lord of the Rings." The only exception is "Yoshi" from MyRig (see
https://twitter.com/HalongMining/status/960804550184611840), but who is Yoshi? What is his last name? Where does he live? Why should we believe he is legitimate?
9. Apparently, Halong Mining’s only public comments in which it discussed the legitimacy of its operation can be read earlier in this very thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2443327.msg28513208#msg28513208 We find this message disturbing, especially in light of the large sums of money that many consumers have spent, and the legitimacy of the concerns of those who pre-ordered. Our most recent estimate is that Halong has sold more than $50 million USD worth of DragonMint miners, based on Halong’s minimum order requirement of 5 units per order and Halong’s usage of sequential order numbers in its online order system, which together reveal an approximation as to how many units have been sold. Any large farms that invested in upgrading their equipment with DragonMints could easily have push total ordered units to more than $100 million in sales.
10. A screen frame capture of the official DragonMint video supposedly in action, shows the unit actually mining at 4 Th/s, not the claimed 16 Th/s.
https://twitter.com/msaf/status/93345645599006720011. Halong’s claim of having successfully developed a competitor to BitMain's A3 miner is highly suspect and perhaps the most damning evidence of all. BitMain's A3 unit mines at 815 GH/s, while using 1275 W (
https://shop.bitmain.com/productDetail.htm?pid=00020180116164357365a2ljX8gx06D3).
Yet, somehow Halong claims to have created a miner that is vastly superior -- a unit that purportedly hashes at 3.5TH/s at 1000 W. That is more than 4x BitMain’s A3 rate as shown in the specs here:
https://halongmining.com/shop/dragonmint-b52-blake2b-miner/How could a company with no publicly disclosed engineers, no publicly disclosed management, no track record, and no willingness to substantively address consumers' reservations produce something that is so radically more efficient and powerful than the current unit from BitMain -- a known and respected mining hardware manufacturer? Halong's claim is simply not credible.
12. The only unequivocal public endorsements by actual, known people are from Mr. Adam Back (see
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/adam-back and
http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/) and Mr. Joseph La Torre, also known as JP La Torre (
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/jp-la-torre).
Mr. Back claims to have seen the DragonMints "in person" (see
https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/933360079432245248) and that they are "very real" (see
https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/933348194062360577). Back also claims that he personally ordered $200k USD worth of DragonMints and pre-paid in a group order for additional DragonMints to the sum of $80k USD (see
https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/933358573307953152). However, when Back was asked on January 24, 2018 to reaffirm his support for Halong Mining, his response was merely to point to what he perceives as the credibility of MyRig (
https://twitter.com/BrahmaBull785/status/956060518321664001), which is troubling, since we know from the point made above, "MyRig, Inc." is not an actual registered entity in the state of Colorado where it operates.
JP La Torre has stated he "was granted an in-person @HalongMining demo at BTC Miami of the DragonMint 16T" and that he "can confirm they had several prototype units on hand and they most definitely hash at 16TH/s." He claims he "Verified with FLIR thermal gun" (see
https://twitter.com/josephlatorre/status/960728417669795840). A FLIR thermal gun will not confirm the hash rate of a device. Since Mr. La Torre is a tech professional, we presume that he would understand that a better means of determining whether a piece of mining hardware sitting in front of you is real would be to direct output from the mining software of bfminer, cgminer, etc. His support, regrettably, is unconvincing.
13. BitCoinTalk user "bt898" claims in a post on February 6, 2018 that he visited the factory of Innosilicon, and that Innosilicon's staff claims the unit shown in Halong Mining's video is actually Innosilicon's product. He adds Innosilicon and Halong Minding have no relationship whatsoever." (See
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2443327.msg29744426#msg29744426)
Other reasons exist that Halong Mining fails a due diligence test, but this list is just a start. We encourage the community members to add their own reasons and analysis. If Halong Mining reads this post, please understand we hope that Halong will address these concerns so that its customers can have some comfort knowing that it will actually deliver.
We suspect, however, that Halong will never deliver. When it is time for the units to arrive at its customers' doors in March and April, we suspect that Halong will announce an “unexpected” delay, perhaps caused by an Act of God or by whatever major natural disaster happens to occur in Asia next month, a supply chain disruption, a factory fire, or some other explanation that is conveniently and “innocently” out of the control of Halong Mining. After multiple delays, we expect Halong will announce a bankruptcy or some other reason why it must hastily close, and no one will ever hear from them again. We hope Halong proves us wrong.
