These folks just don't stop with the smoke do they? And notice how the update is coming from the big cheese, instead of the little squeeze.
As such we must unfortunately announce that we have had technical issues during tape-out which has caused us to have to do some portion of the ASIC layout one more time thus delaying the chip fabrication.
Another red flag. This is interesting considering their last report regarding tapeout was they had finished tests and were just a few days shy of packaging and shipping. THINK ABOUT THIS FOLKS! They started design in spring of 2013. In spring of 2014 they claimed to have a perfect design, and in May 2014 they claimed tests were perfect. More than likely their acceptance of 'varied quality chips' is what ruined them.
but also fast tracked it and corrected this issue if we were allowed funds from PayPal which they have decided to hold until delivery. We have had to rely on other sources of funding for this which we have achieved, so we are fully funded and tape-out is mid-way now there can be no more delay. In parallel to the tape-out process we have already started our fabrication of the PCB’s and enclosures, which we will display in our next update.
They're fast-tracking a 2nd tapeout? Didn't they fast-track the first one and it ended up being ruined? So they're fully funded for 20x the original project cost, despite claiming to be a startup with no money, and only having a few of the deposit funds? (10x for the hashrate boost, 10x for redoing it). Think about this!
In the interest of there being no confusion, July while it was our genuine expectation, is not mentioned in our terms.
False, even in emails up through March/April they were discussing July as the latest promised delivery point, and based on advertisements from day 1 they promised it "or your money back". That is a term.
As a result of this we have decided to announce shipping to be September as per our terms, this is something we have learnt we should have done from the start so we can avoid expectations and hopefully only announce good news. We know this news is unpleasant for all rest assured this includes ourselves, we have always tried to do right by you but may have perhaps over promised when we should have been more conservative all we can do now is learn from this mistake.
In other words, they weren't capable of such business execution to begin with. They had no experience, and now they're eating it, hard. This means for you folks who are paying these people, you'll be waiting at least 60 more days. That won't help your bottom line at all, with KNC and other folks likely shipping in August.
We also want to remind you we have increased the hash rate of these devices from what we were obligated to deliver by 10 fold at our expense, our terms only state minimum 25 Mh/s. We saw we had the capability do it and made a decision to put customers first in order to gain their loyalty for future batches. We must also remind you of the benefits of being a batch 1 customer, you will receive free shipping for batch 2 and a 10% discount off any future batch of your choice (we hope to avoid pre-orders for future batches).
WARNING: My suggestion is for folks to require this company change the terms to specify the new hashrates as the minimum. They keep flogging you guys over the head saying "it's not in our terms to provide more than 25mhs". Be warned, you could end up with a machine of less than promised hashrate, and then they'll tell you that they don't have to support you because their terms only specify 25mhs. This happened to many batch 1 KNC customers. This is very important! Get them to update the terms!
Another red flag. And they still haven't completed the supplementary boards? For a company who's "greatest hopes" were to ship in July, I find it *really* odd they had NONE of the required support equipment *already built*. How the hell were they supposed to ship thousands of units without PCB's or cases? It's obvious what occurred: They knew about these issues in MAY, which is right about when the development of the supplemental gear seemed to stop--they stopped talking about it, and everything went silent on the development front. If they knew about this in MAY, and are telling you 60 days later .... what were they doing this whole time?
As I've suspected for awhile, I believe their intentions on the outset were genuine, but they lacked the ability to properly accomplish the task at hand. Shipping in September means a likelyhood of October arrivals of your equipment. I don't have to tell you what this means for folks wanting to get money out of this. Your best bet is to immediately resell the equipment online, even at a slight loss if necessary
