Scammer TerraHash, TerraHash.com

[btceic]

TerraHash is a scam, there is no two ways about it, and it's about time somebody has called terrahash and its staff out on the scam that they are pulling.

Proof,
TerraHash has lied and or misled us about nearly everything.

• Misled customers about CloudHashing deal by non-disclosure of what the pre-order funds would be used for.
• Misled customers about sales for early adopters only.
• Misled customers about physical location.
• Misled customers by attempting to remain behind privacy protection on website.
• Misleads customers by non-disclosure of company principals.
• Misleads customers by failing to communicate about almost anything. Support tickets, refund requests, emails, phone calls all go unanswered.
• Misleads customers by telling us we can stop by for a tour, but when people do, they rush them out the door or simply are not there at the office at all all day long.
• Threatens customers when customers are forced to turn to PayPal claims for a refund rather than simply refunding the customer.
• Misled customers about chip orders.
• Misled customers (and continues to do so) about purchasing required components.

To date TerraHash has scammed 100's of thousands of dollars from the community and continues to do so, and is now attempting to scam even more money from the bitcoin community by opening pre-orders for their new scam.

Profile of the scammer in question:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=112022

Main thread of scammer:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=198489

I may have missed a few things, feel free to add to my list if you think I have missed anything.

[btceic]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=190731.msg3115839#msg3115839

I don't think everyone needs to.abandon.  For the sake of community development. I'd say we finish the project.  If a handful exist  that's okay. I understand people are MIA as well as nerve racked.  That is why I believe wr need fresh hands and eyes on this project.  

Absolutely! I'm not advocating we abandon the project. But there's no point in continuing the design using first-generation Avalon chips. They are obsolete. At this point, with an assembled board in hand, if you mine forever, you will not make back the cost of the miner. However, we can retarget for a different chip and, at the very least, break even.

The design is fully functional, the only thing that needs to be finished is firmware.
I have two boards hashing with only one side (with 8 chips) at about 3Ghps, ~3% ER (without USB ferrite beads), chips overclocked to 375MHz with no overvolt. Other side on each board has few chips that do not respond, but this is because those chips were poorly soldered. And on every board it's different side. Tried to fix it yesterday, but was unsuccessful, and now waiting for solder wick and isopropylalcohol.
I've also tried some modifications in firmware for 16 chips, but it wasn't really usable. The board with that did hash faster, but had around 20% ER - which is a firmware and poorly assembled chips problem, not the design one. Now waiting with this until I fix the other side, then will continue working on FW.
Tried also to contact one of the companies, that claimed to have fully working board (with firmware that hash with all 16 chips), but they did not respond. Anyone here can guess why.
About the ROI, it really is gone now, but you have to take into account, that BTC price will likely go up, so even if you lose now, you can gain later. Especially if you've already made an investment in the HW, chips etc.

Edit:
And about changing the HW for next gen Avalon chips (or any other chips), who is going to make this? Bkk seems to be gone (probably get sick of all the events regarding chips delivery, companies taking advantage of opensource project and giving nothing back) and there is noone (even in the group of those companies, which started their business on this) who is able to make this change.

Is it not possible for you guys to use TerraHash's stuff? They said they have working k16's with less than 1% error rates.

What Terrahash stuff? They have used stuff that Bkk made as opensource. To be absolutely clear on this, I've wrote to them about mine board with 4 chips assembled hashing at 400MHz with around 0.6% ER, when they were asking me via PM about the changes in HW I made to get it working. They were not able to fix even this for the whole time. They claimed even here on this forum, that the design is wrong.
Later, when they did claimed at 5th of September, that they do have a working board, and the only issue there is I2C, I've wrote them again, asking what firmware changes do they made to hash with all 16 chips and that low error rate.
They didn't even bother to wrote me back.
So what do they actually have? Nothing? Lies?

[btceic]

TerraHash was unable to produce a single working k16 even after given 2 weeks time and everything necessary to produce a working board.

TerraHash / Amir,
You are a straight up scam, I would advise you to refund all of your "customers" immediately.

[btceic]

• Misled customers about CloudHashing deal by non-disclosure of what the pre-order funds would be used for.

Please provide Proof

• Misled customers about sales for early adopters only.

Please provide Proof

• Misled customers about physical location.

Please provide Proof

• Misled customers by attempting to remain behind privacy protection on website.

Please provide Proof

• Misleads customers by non-disclosure of company principals.

Please provide Proof

• Misleads customers by failing to communicate about almost anything. Support tickets, refund requests, emails, phone calls all go unanswered.

Only Valid Complaint so Far

• Misleads customers by telling us we can stop by for a tour, but when people do, they rush them out the door or simply are not there at the office at all all day long.

This is completely false, Please provide proof.

• Threatens customers when customers are forced to turn to PayPal claims for a refund rather than simply refunding the customer.

Please provide Proof

• Misled customers about chip orders.

Please provide Proof

• Misled customers (and continues to do so) about purchasing required components.

Please provide Proof

So far all you have done is rehashed your personal opinion and again gave zero facts.

You have received a refund from PayPal for your purchase even though you agreed that at time of purchase that there were no refunds and that delivery would be two weeks after chips were received.

Honestly we should give you the scammer tag as you are slandering and telling blatant lies, but I'll give you a chance to provide proof for your accusations.

Oh and by the way, quoting a post of some random person is not proof. You need to show physical proof and not opinions of your accusations.

Bar,
Now that you are leading the way to a lawsuit against TerraHash with your lawyer, and have received 100's of PM's for your lawsuit, would you like to delete any of the above.

It might look a little phunny to the people that you are getting a commission on if you leave the above post up.

[btceic]

One of the hardest things i would ask the lawyer about bitcoins.   Might want to see if they really want to combine bitcoin orders and other orders in one lawsuit.   I think the bitcoin one might be harder to get a judge to understand, really want to see what they think if it gets to point of lawsuit.  Money will be easier.

A lot of people are asking this question in PMs,

Basically from my understand it doesn't matter if you pay someone in gold/euro/chickens, they advertised a price (Let's use the fully populated DX-Large as an example) $10,500.

We would essentially sue them for $10,500 and not for "Bitcoins".

Obviously I would bring this issue up to the lawyer and get their opinion about it but if it comes down to trying to get BTC back from Terrahash I might not be able to have them join in the lawsuit.

This will obviously be one of the first questions once a fully established counsel is chosen so I'll let everyone know when I do.

gold/euro/chickens all have value.  I know chickens were meant as a joke but still laws on books about them.  Bitcoin is not a official currency in US, and since virtual will be interesting to see how it goes.

Are you hiring a lawyer who specializes in anything, or law firm with multiple?  What type of lawyer accepted the case?

I am in the preliminary stages with the lawyer, we talked for about 35 minutes last night regarding this case and he's asked for additional information which I have sent. I have not retained anyone currently but we both seem to agree that this case is fairly simple for those involved with USD payments.

I've been advised that trying to sue for BTC payments will add a very complicated layer to the case but I have also sent them are the information regarding that court case where they mentioned BTC as a currency.

I really don't want to talk much about anything else until I have a lawyer on retainer and after I send all of the individuals that PM'd me a message. At that time I will likely open up another thread (What Forum Topic should I use to post it in? Scam Accusations?)

It turns out that International Payments are not very hard to include in the lawsuit,

I've also been advised that this will likely NOT fit under a class action so those that do not contact me and are not involved will not see any benefit from the outcome of this case if it goes that far.

For what it's worth, I've also been advised that I would likely have a higher success rate if I did this alone than with Co-Plaintiffs due to them only needing to pay my money back versus multiple people but I made it clear that this is not an option for me at this point and anyone that I can include in this will be able to join.

[atomicchaos]

Honestly we should give you the scammer tag as you are slandering and telling blatant lies, but I'll give you a chance to provide proof for your accusations.

Oh and by the way, quoting a post of some random person is not proof. You need to show physical proof and not opinions of your accusations.

Hmm, I wonder if we should consider the scammer tag for Bargraphics, since he very vocally supported Terrahash and attacked anyone with insults that said anything negative about them. Nah, it doesn't much matter, as I read other threads he is involved with, he has zero credibility already with his track record in the Crypto world.

[balanghai]

I would be glad to hear a word from terrahash in this regard.

[gwoplock]

I would be glad to hear a word from terrahash in this regard.

+1

[Darktongue]

I can assure you they don't have a 100% working rig. And if they do,  It's pretty fucking ignorant not to pass the mojo. I can name a few who have spent countless amount of hours on this.  Everything they have is now in writeing.  We all may not get to see this knowlege yet.  But I know for a fact those needing the fresh ideas and solutions are obtaining them.

[btceic]

TerraHashes response...

Some points to consider before accusing us of scam:
1. We stopped taking orders as soon as we had enough orders to account for the chips we ordered. If we were a scam, we would have continued taking orders and could have easily raised double the money we did.
2. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on components, heat sinks, cases, boards, cables. For people saying that its "only a few resistors", look at the BOM provided by BkkCoins. It says components cost around $23 for a K16. And this does not include the heat sinks (~$14), boards etc. For each K16, the components including the heat sink, board, power cables, etc. cost us around $45. And we were prepared to assemble around 5,000 K16s (for 80,000 chips). There goes $250,000. Why 80,000 chips? We had ordered 40,000 of our own and had at least 4 other parties who were going to get their boards assembled from us. But guess what? Tired of the delays from Yifu, they all ended up getting a refund from Avalon.
3. We spent so much time and effort trying to source the really hard to get components. You can go read the Klondike thread where everyone is discussing the shortage of the PICs, the IR3895s, and others. But we have all the components, we even overpaid to get some of them. Show me a scammer who would do that.
4. For the components that even we could not get, we invested a lot of time to search for alternates. For example, the Power Inductor 38L361C was not available anywhere, so we instead bought SPM10040T-R36M170. But the latter was not pin compatible with the former. So we ended up changing the circuit board. I will publish the updated KiCad files. Would a scammer go through all this trouble? Anyone with half a brain can answer this.

If we were a scam, we would have disappeared on June 20th.

Why going out of business?
I am really sick and tired of all the scam accusations. I appreciate all the negative criticism that the community does, resulting in catching scams in early stages in order to protect the newer members of the community. But baseless scam accusations from day one have taken their toll on our company. The FUD spread by a few members (along with the delay from Yifu) lead to a lot of refund requests. The result of which was that, if we continued with the project, we would have been left with inventory worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in our hands. And it would have been almost impossible to sell it at a price where we could even break even. Even if nobody asked for a refund, we would still have been left with about $125,000 worth of useless components (read point 4 above). But with about half of our customers asking for a refund, we would be stuck with another $350,000 worth of inventory that we couldn't have sold for more than $150,000, putting us under red for over $300,000. I am sorry, but I am not running a charity. It made much more sense to ask for a refund from Yifu and pay back as much as possible, without going into debt.

Why only a 50% refund?
With people who paid with PayPal taking a 100% refund, it leaves a lesser share for everyone else. I am sorry, but that's how it is. We do not want to be owing hundreds of thousands to PayPal. Also, with some customers contacting our bank with fraud accusations, Chase has shut down our bank accounts. In my opinion they were just looking for an excuse. They have already contacted us in the past, asking for more information about our business, just because we were a "Bitcoin related business."

Patience is a virtue
Now, you can either be content with the turnout of the whole fiasco and stop attacking me personally, and wait for your refunds. Or, you continue accusing me of being a scammer, and continue publishing my addresses publicly and tarnishing my image. Its up to you. Some of you have already done a lot of irreparable damage, not just to me but to all the TerraHash customers. And please remember, that there is only so much that I can take. If pushed into a corner, I will defend myself.

[DiamondCardz]

TerraHashes response...

Some points to consider before accusing us of scam:
1. We stopped taking orders as soon as we had enough orders to account for the chips we ordered. If we were a scam, we would have continued taking orders and could have easily raised double the money we did.
2. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on components, heat sinks, cases, boards, cables. For people saying that its "only a few resistors", look at the BOM provided by BkkCoins. It says components cost around $23 for a K16. And this does not include the heat sinks (~$14), boards etc. For each K16, the components including the heat sink, board, power cables, etc. cost us around $45. And we were prepared to assemble around 5,000 K16s (for 80,000 chips). There goes $250,000. Why 80,000 chips? We had ordered 40,000 of our own and had at least 4 other parties who were going to get their boards assembled from us. But guess what? Tired of the delays from Yifu, they all ended up getting a refund from Avalon.
3. We spent so much time and effort trying to source the really hard to get components. You can go read the Klondike thread where everyone is discussing the shortage of the PICs, the IR3895s, and others. But we have all the components, we even overpaid to get some of them. Show me a scammer who would do that.
4. For the components that even we could not get, we invested a lot of time to search for alternates. For example, the Power Inductor 38L361C was not available anywhere, so we instead bought SPM10040T-R36M170. But the latter was not pin compatible with the former. So we ended up changing the circuit board. I will publish the updated KiCad files. Would a scammer go through all this trouble? Anyone with half a brain can answer this.

If we were a scam, we would have disappeared on June 20th.

Why going out of business?
I am really sick and tired of all the scam accusations. I appreciate all the negative criticism that the community does, resulting in catching scams in early stages in order to protect the newer members of the community. But baseless scam accusations from day one have taken their toll on our company. The FUD spread by a few members (along with the delay from Yifu) lead to a lot of refund requests. The result of which was that, if we continued with the project, we would have been left with inventory worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in our hands. And it would have been almost impossible to sell it at a price where we could even break even. Even if nobody asked for a refund, we would still have been left with about $125,000 worth of useless components (read point 4 above). But with about half of our customers asking for a refund, we would be stuck with another $350,000 worth of inventory that we couldn't have sold for more than $150,000, putting us under red for over $300,000. I am sorry, but I am not running a charity. It made much more sense to ask for a refund from Yifu and pay back as much as possible, without going into debt.

Why only a 50% refund?
With people who paid with PayPal taking a 100% refund, it leaves a lesser share for everyone else. I am sorry, but that's how it is. We do not want to be owing hundreds of thousands to PayPal. Also, with some customers contacting our bank with fraud accusations, Chase has shut down our bank accounts. In my opinion they were just looking for an excuse. They have already contacted us in the past, asking for more information about our business, just because we were a "Bitcoin related business."

Patience is a virtue
Now, you can either be content with the turnout of the whole fiasco and stop attacking me personally, and wait for your refunds. Or, you continue accusing me of being a scammer, and continue publishing my addresses publicly and tarnishing my image. Its up to you. Some of you have already done a lot of irreparable damage, not just to me but to all the TerraHash customers. And please remember, that there is only so much that I can take. If pushed into a corner, I will defend myself.

Sigh, so people are taking a 50% haircut. Based on what they've said, I think their story of all the complaints and shit is legit, but it still sucks for those who paid with Bitcoin. It does seem like the FUD spreaders have caused this, but then again, there's probably more than the surface shows.

[imapd]

any news?


i found this!

http://www.coindesk.com/terrahash-shuts-down-bitcoin-miners-upset-with-refund/
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiyRS_8Y_814dGM0cU5KdFJTVlpWeG9LSDJKYnNmMkE#gid=5

you think there is no way to get back our money?