It is time to get a refund, even then things look ugly. Many miners have requested refunds in BTC and they are taking longer than 2 months in BTC, in dollar the wait time is much longer.
In my opinion things overall at KNC look really ugly, not quite as ugly as BFL, but getting there, and would not be surprised if in a few months they are the new BFL.
Remember the KNC that we knew in 2013 is not the same KNC I am talking about today.
Just a few observations:
1. They promised not to mine over 5% of the customers hash rate, they mine more than all of their customers together, they were one of the main factors in making the equipment they sell obsolete. That promised was broken.
2. They offered refunds for Neptune Batchs 0,1 and 2 (not 3), they are not honoring those refunds in good faith, having to wait several month for something that could be reasonable be done in 24 hours is not good faith, European law considers the deadline for refunds 30 days. Here is the link:
http://ec.europa.eu/justice/consumer-marketing/rights-contracts/distance/index_en.htmso this is another broken promise, the law says a refund should take up to 30 days, and KNC is taking over 3 months in some cases, as it can be seen on the forum.
3. They offered, new hardware ready to go with the exception of the power supply. super jupiter customers got partial kits, they had to build their own cases, their own mounting hardware, and the hardware was used not new. another broken promise.
4. The offered plan B in which customers could start hashing on their data center early June, currently no one is hashing on their data center, and early June is over. another broken promise.
5. Late on delivery and fail to admit it. Batches 0,1 were promised to be delivered on Q1/Q2 - 1 month, and Batch 2 was offered on Q1/Q2, in other words batches 0 and 1 were going to be delivered a month earlier than batch 2 but delivery for batch 2 was Q1/Q2. Well for batches 0,1 they are clearly late, the end of May is over. the reason they did this was batch 0 costs $10000, batch 1 $13000, and then batch 2 $10000, people in batch 1 paid an extra $3000 to have it a month earlier of course when batch 1 was sold they did not say batch 2 was going to cost $3000 less. Well they are late, and this is another promise broken.
So right here I have just listed 5 promised they broke, I am sure some of you guys can mention some I have missed.
Unethical behavior, not illegal, but something a decent company does not do to their customers:
1. They have began to ban users on their own forums.
2. They have began to delete some posts especially the ones that talk about refunds, or super jupiters.
3. They silently eliminated all refunds from new purchases, Titans, and Neptune batch 3 do not have the options for refunds.
4. The terms and agreements page silently changed, they removed the original page no longer found on the knc forum, but found on other pages, and replaced by a different terms and agreements page, the warranty was 1 year, now it silently changed to 3 months, so if you were on the 1 year warranty, now they will refer you to the 3 month warranty since the original page is missing.
5. They promised not to compete in mining against its customers because they said it was not good for their customers, and now that is exactly what they do.
6. Lack of transparency, like there is absolutely no information in regards the refund queue, even though it has been asked my many to know their positions in the queue to monitor the process in refunds, but KNC will not provide this information.
7. Lack of transparency in regards the progress of Neptune.
So at this point with so many broken promises, so much unethical behavior, and absolutely no signs of them correcting themselves, how possible on earth could you trust them, at this point trust is completely lost.
All of the good references about KNC are from last year, even if someone were to ask me about KNC last year I would say they were ok, but all the bad about KNC has been building up slowly since this year.
They could very well be planning to burn their customers in regards refunds, after all they did burn and really burned big time the super jupiter customers, I would be highly surprised if you can find more than a few happy super jupiter customers.
Super jupiter was an scam to clean their data center of old hardware in preparation for the Neptunes, so they offloaded that junk onto their customers, once customers realized the junk they were getting KNC denied all refunds.
For all of the above reasons, they can not be trusted, trust has nothing to do with the hardware, it has to do weather they will honor on good faith what they say, once trust is broken it is very difficult to repair that, since they are purposely scamming their customers.
Anyone can make a mistake, but with KNC the problem could be greed, there is nothing in the world forcing them to lie to their customers.
I have a bad feeling this is another BFL, mtgox, we will have to organize, they have the money, and I am sure we could be refunded in a timely manner if they wanted to.
If after all the warnings I gave you about KNC which are facts which many can prove to be correct, you still trust KNC you are taking a huge risk, huge could be an understatement of the risk you are taking.
I gave warnings about mtgox in 2012, the warnings I gave about gox were much lighter than what happened in 2014, thats because they were showing bad signs by unethical behavior, but hard to predict accurately what was going to happen 2 years latter.
Intersango, was delaying btc refunds and we all know how that turned out to be.
Now I am givings warnings about KNC, I have no clue how bad things can get, but as of now they look really ugly.
My personal recommendation is to try to get a refund, but at present time even that is risky since refunds are mostly stuck in a queue that does not move.
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