Ok enough now.
This thread has now been locked due to the fact that a few users have been going nuts and are acting without any kind of even basic knowledge of how an educated person should act. I can understand anger and criticism, but I cannot tolerate personal insults to me or to one of our co-workers, never.
After this public release that is meant to hopefully address in an objective manner all the latest source of criticism (or better said, "flames") that have popped up these last days, we'll keep the thread locked for a few days to give the opportunity to the spammers to cool down a bit and hopefully open it again at a later stage. I've always been a supporter of an official support thread on bitcointalk.org and an activist of the freedom of speech, but the lack of moderation is allowing a bunch of brainless spammers to destroy the experience and all constructive criticism made by the other wide majority of users.
Anybody questioning the reputation of Bitmine here should just ask himself why the people that got an appointment and came to visit us have NEVER posted bad things about us but, rather, all claimed that we are nice people, hard workers and yes, definitely not a scam. Just scroll back in the history of this thread and you will find all these testimonials. Me and our about 20+ people staff by now have been working hard, overtime and spending an astonishing amount of resources, nerves and money to recover on our delays while, at the same time, giving out free upgrades to everybody. So I would say that... no, I don't feel at all like having ripped off anybody but rather I feel that I did the best I could reasonably do for our customers, while admitting that some mistakes have been made and that we're still improving ourselves to address the open issues.
I hope to address all the pending matters with this post but please accept my apologies if I forgot to cover something and, again, I would be more than happy to receive anybody here ON APPOINTMENT in case you want to further discuss anything that may concern you.
Thank you,
Giorgio Massarotto
CEO
BITMINE AG
Personal threats and accusationsWhile constructive criticism, suggestions and a reasonable amount of anger is perfectly understandable and accepted, recent developments have completely degenerated in personal insults to me and my co-workers. This is not going to be accepted and, given that Swiss laws are very clear on this, I'm going to take all the available legal measures against these people.
Petamine unitsAs part of the deal that we had with Cryptx, given the big amount of the purchase, we have agreed to setup an additional dedicated production line that would be working in parallel to the existing ones and producing the units just for them. As soon as the PCB boards were hashing stable at our strict requirements, the production of both the commercial units (aka the ones sold on the website) and the petamine dedicated units started exactly at the same time. The fact that they reported them before anybody else is just due to the fact that they have been picking up their units in person and reported publicly just the day after having them in hands, while the other users that had their units shipped didn't yet report that fast on the forum, but some did a few days later. Petamine just as any other user have suffered delays and are being compensated for that.
Lack of frequent newsAs I've stated previously in several posts, we don't have PR people here, so it's up to me to release news as soon as there are some. Unfortunately I also hold a key position in managing all this stuff and I'm working with an insane schedule, the company grew from a 2-people office to a 20+ employees one with production capabilities that have scaled 100-fold from when we started back in early 2013. This, unfortunately, takes time and focus has and will always be on making things run as fast as possible, however I will take the lesson and in the future we'll try to have more frequent news.
CPP and refunds deadlineConfusion would be the best term to describe an otherwise very straightforward policy. A dedicated page explaining in simple words how the CPP works
has been available here http://bitmine.ch/?page_id=850 since day 0, but it looks like it wasn't clear enough, or just not read by most people. Let me resume some key points:
1) First 10 days don't count in late delivery calculation.
2) Refunds can be asked on the 71th day of delay based on the committed shipment date, which is the one published when you place the order. For avalon-clones and December batch customer, that means you'll be able to ask the refund starting from February 27th (December 16th stated delivery date + 10 days + 60 days). An appropriate page on our web site under support will be opened tomorrow for anybody willing to ask for a refund and yes, we will be honoring them within 30 days.
3) The late delivery compensation for your unit(s) will be determined at the exact moment of its assembly, that's why it makes no sense to keep on asking the support team, they won't be able to give you an answer till the unit is in production!
4) The compensation is calculated on 10% steps of increase of the nominal hashing power that you've ordered, rounded to the next highest hashing module. So, if you ordered a 200 GH/s unit and your unit leaves our warehouse after 32 days of late delivery, that is 22 effective days which is 30% additional power. Theoretically that would be 260 GH/s which, in case of the Desk unit where the hashing modules are 200 GH/s each, that would make your order shipped with two 200 GH/s modules for a total of 400 GH/s. Before creating again a conspiracy based on my words, please note that we're currently evaluating the possibility to supply late orders with half-mounted hashing units (i.e. 4 CoinCraft A1 chips instead of 8 ) so whereas you'll still get more than what you were actually entitled for, it may be less than the above mentioned example.
5) Refunds are made in the same payment method on which the payment was originally made. That means: wire transfers get refunded with wire transfers, bitcoin payments get refunded with bitcoin payments.
6) Refunds are pinned to the daily exchange rate at the moment when the refund will be issued, based on the original USD price of your purchase order which is the base currency for the prices stated in the website. That means:
6.1 If you paid by wire transfer in USD, you get refunded by wire transfer in USD
6.2 If you paid by wire transfer in EUR, you get refunded by wire transfer in EUR at the daily USD/EUR exchange rate based on your originally invoiced amount.
6.3 If you paid by wire transfer in CHF, you get refunded by wire transfer in CHF at the daily USD/CHF exchange rate based on your originally invoiced amount.
6.4 If you paid by bitcoin transfer in BTC, you get refunded in BTC at the daily USD/BTC exchange rate based on your originally invoiced amount.
7) Refunds are not mandatory: if you don't request them with our refund request form, we won't be doing this automagically for you. You can opt to wait for your 50% (the maximum) compensated order to be delivered for any amount of time.
8 ) Refunds are based on the originally paid amount, excluding any coupons or discounts. For example, if as an avalon-clone customer you opted for a 50% free coupon on your originally paid amount of $1000, your refund will be based on $1000 and not on $1500.
Turbo mode issuesAll of our products have been sold, stated and guaranteed in
NOMINAL HASHING POWER. For example, product model CCD-800 is a CoinCraft Desk 800GH/s, CCD-1000 is a CoinCraft Desk 1000GH/s and so on. The Turbo feature is by purpose indicated as
"up to", which if I'm not wrong given
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/up-to?q=up+to , means literally "indicating a maximum amount". This is depending on overall operating conditions and will vary depending on your specific use case scenario, while the nominal power is guaranteed to work always. This is exactly what has been done here, the 1TH/s nominal units can reach easily 1.3TH/s in normal operating conditions (read: 25°C ambient temperature) and up to 1.5TH/s when conditions such as very low ambient air temperatures and a more powerful power supply are provided. Let me explain this again with different words: it's not that your unit will not reach the highest peak of the Turbo mode, it will but based on the specific conditions in which you operate it.
Production capabilitiesAs everybody knows by now, we have been delivering units since last week and are now nearly in full scale production ability with about 30 units/day, targeting 50 units/day in the next days. Based on current production schedules, we should recover the delays within a few weeks.
Support not answering e-mails or phone callsSome people have blamed the support to not be answering e-mails, I can just say that probably some of them are the same people that are sending daily flood e-mails that have the only consequence of delaying the response to the other perfectly legit requests.
We are not delaying any legitimate request and currently we answer e-mail requests within 3-4 days with volumes of about 250 daily e-mails. As for the phone calls, you have to be patient because all of our support staff may be busy during some peak hours. Please hold the line, and you'll see that you get an answer. We are working on staffing additional people in the meantime.
Rig device issuesAs it has been known for some time now, the rig design is having some engineering problems due mostly to the heat and the internal DC distribution design. We have been working hard in fixing this, the prototype is currently in our lab and we expect to be able to let it go in production within short time.
It has been 158.2 DAYS of late shipment, I asked for a refund on the 102 day.
The contract stated a maximum of 30 working days for a refund.. it has now been 40 working days.
I called BitMine on the 32nd working day, and was told to wait until the 21st and that the transaction would be surely cleared by then (by Kerin). I called again today and was told to wait another 2 weeks and that Bitmine processed 0 refunds in the previous week.
I demand an immediate refund in full, either $7700 USD in bankwire as promised or the equivalent in bitcoins so I can change them myself.
I have need of these funds at this moment and these illegal delays are not helping!
