Anybody here suing Bitmain

[Steamtyme]

Here's a version of the article I read the other day https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/5-million-lawsuit-against-bitmain-filed-northern-california/

Key points:

It's a Class action lawsuit filed in the US, by miners who purchased Bitmain products. Now before you jump for joy at the potential payoff, they are planning on limiting the actual number of plaintiffs represented to 100 people through some criteria.

They are suing over Bitmain earning from the gear at the miners expense. At first glance I assumed this was someone going after their QA process and length of burn in time. However it's over the initial startup of a new miner; you know how it connects to Antpool for Bitmain until you input your own pool information.

That's where I had a chuckle, because the plaintiffs make themselves seem somewhat incompetent and want to blame Bitmain. I feel like they are counting on jury being ignorant to the facts about how mining rewards are earned or payed out. They talk about how every second the machine is on that Bitmain is earning off them; maybe if they shipped out the miners and pointed them at someone else's PPS pool.

Here is my favorite quote from the article in regards to how long Bitmain could be earning.

In addition, the court filing claims Bitmain’s mining devices can take anywhere between several hours to a few days to configure.

In the end I imagine this gets dismissed, maybe Bitmain has to ship he miners without pointing them to their pool in the future. Considering it's industry practice to ship the Miners configured this way I imagine most manufacturers will at least be paying attention to the outcome.

My defense would probably be somewhere along the lines of prove your miner submitted a share and found a block; Oh you don't have the log data sorry.

[philipma1957]

if pointed to a solo pool and they hit the block for bitmain

bitmain scored a block

Since they sold many many many many s9's I would think they scored a few blocks this way on the customers dime.

I saw this years a go and I would only power the controller with 1 pcie jack.  program my pools and then shut down .

I would then fire gear up and only mine for myself.
If I were on the jury I would award a block to anyone this happened to(hitting a block for bitmain)

As The operation instructions included and the bitmain blog does not tell you to do this.
Bitmain is absolute guilty of theft by deception. Maybe someone with a real Hardon against bitmain taped endless gear power ups hoping to show  a block get hit for bitmain.

I know the newer bitmain gear stopped pointing to a solo pool  which meant a few pennies got stolen from every one that fired them up wrong.
In this  case bitmain absolutely hid this from buyers for years.  So it is pretty much an open and shut case against them.

[mikeywith]

with all respect, I think having your pool url and worker ready and pasted on a txt file, and then changing the first pool to yours and hitting save will be much faster than unplugging and plugging the pcie's on and off the miner, the time wasted in doing so is money loss for you.

assuming your loss is only 1 cent ( for the sake of argument) and your miner finds a block or twenty blocks for bitmain ! why would one care? i rather start making money ASAP than having to worry if my Asic magically hit a block for bitmain in the 5 seconds period that i need to copy-paste-save my own pool.

but again this is all PERSONAL points of view which non is wrong.

but again going back to the topic , i am no law-expert but this lawsuit is only going to waste. from the technical aspect's point of view the miner has to come up with a WORKING pool for the average person to see it hashing, or else it gets stuck at a socked failure thing showing nothing. so bitmain has to either put their own worker, or someone else's for that matter, and since bitmain can't magically pre-input EVERYONE's worker then the default worked could be anything except for the owner of that asic. so from a $ point of view, your asics will have to run for x amount of time without hashing to your account. plain and simple !

Now unless bitmain PROMISED not to have their worker's as a default,  then how is the judge going to hold it against them?

if this does even make sense, then i could sue ACER or/and Microsoft because when i bought my last laptop , i opened IE and the first  thing came out to me was an MSN page full of bullshit ads and links ( someone made money of me seeing those ads). IE should open with a blank page for that matter !.

** I had to use IE to download Google Chrome by the way  

[sidehack]

[...] ( someone made money of me seeing those ads). IE should open with a blank page for that matter !.

** I had to use IE to download Google Chrome by the way  

(Thereby lending support to Google, the largest advertising agency and data profiteer on the planet, further reducing the credibility of your worries)

Maybe Bitmain can set up a payout address that gets periodically cashed out and donated to UNICEF or something pretty much everyone likes. Put those pennies to work.

[philipma1957]

I did the math and estimate  in may have been under 100,000 usd in earnings  if they sold 2,500,000 s-9s

and everyone of us gave them a minute or so of hash.

They would do well to just settle and avoid cost of court.

[Philopolymath]

While true Bitmain is a greedy deceptive scumbag business model.
I think it's just a cheap cash grab attempt from a Bitmain hater. ( I would still vote against them if I was on the jury)
It was so very easy to prevent machines from connecting to default pool settings by simply NOT connecting to internet until you changed pool preference.
My machines never mined a single share for them.
Same caution must be taken when buying from 3rd party.
(as my first 4 machines were, which is how I new they were USED and NOT brand new virgins from Mindtrip as they DID mine to his address for a few minutes)

[mikeywith]

(Thereby lending support to Google, the largest advertising agency and data profiteer on the planet, further reducing the credibility of your worries)

Maybe Bitmain can set up a payout address that gets periodically cashed out and donated to UNICEF or something pretty much everyone likes. Put those pennies to work.

I chose to use Google Chrome. it is different from being forced to use something I do not like. you don't get the point, people will still sue bitmain for the fact that their asics ran a few minutes/seconds on someone else's account , be it UNICEF or even the devil, it makes no difference. they will always have a way to complain. the only way would be for bitmain to manually turn on every Asic and pre-config each client's worker after the buyer sends his worker details after payment ( which is impossible to be done), then people will not be silly enough to file a lawsuit. a side from that they will always complain and nag about the silliest things.

I hate bitmain probably as much as anybody else, i am not defending them by any means, but they really have them selves covered really will. they have the best lawyers and they know what they are doing. if anything this is nothing but a waste of time, nobody will win against bitmain in court for something like that. for all we know bitmain can simply deny they own the default worker and that it is randomly generated. unlike us the Judge has not been screwed by bitmian ever, he or she needs to judge according to solid facts and evidence.

[fanatic26_]

This is so stupid.

Why is only bitmain being sued? What about every other miner manufacturer in existence?

When you violate a law you cant just claim ignorance, why is a customer claiming ignorance a reason to sue?

Also with how long the auto tune firmware takes to get started, there is absolutely no merit behind the claims. It takes 10 seconds to update pool information.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

And of course if this ever goes to trial, the ONLY folks who will make significant $$ will be the lawyers from both sides.
Frankly the premise is so stupid - as are the plaintiffs if they can't input their info in a timely manner - I hope the judges find it without merit and dismiss it.

[DaCryptoRaccoon]

This actually has some merit if you look at antpool on the solo rankings



Seems user Antminer which is the per-configured username and pool for bitmain stuff has the following

1    antminer    454    3y206d3h52m1s    6.65 PH/s    115.47%    0    0s    0 H/s    100%

454 Block found..

They have also stopped reporting the hash rate for that worker on the stats page.
I know when my miners arrived they connected to antpool at initial start up.

[Steamtyme]

This is so stupid.

[...]

It takes 10 seconds to update pool information.

Frankly the premise is so stupid - as are the plaintiffs if they can't input their info in a timely manner - I hope the judges find it without merit and dismiss it.

That was my thoughts on it. It doesn't surprise me though people often jump at the chance to sue a large entity hoping to get rich. What I'm most interested in is finding out more on this first plaintiffs mining background. Their either a damn good con man hoping to capitalize on a complete lack of understanding, or their the equivalent of someone jumping in front of a car for an insurance scam.

Phil gave a good number on what Bitmain could reasonably say the total amount owing would be, and attempt to settle. I think they could also laughably use that number and say they will provide all past customers with a 25-50$ coupon for future use.

This actually has some merit if you look at antpool on the solo rankings

Assuming this did proceed to court.

Here's where it would get tricky in my mind and goes back to my initial "defence" of prove it via logs. I assume the above to be the username used for all initial QA testing and burn in, big assumption. Not sure about cases in the US but I believe it's up to the aggrieved party to prove they've been wronged, and that would be hard.

So unless it can be shown that Bitmain, or other hardware manufacturers actually paid someone to input these pool settings before shipping the miners out I don't really see a case.

I haven't bought many Bitmain products so I don't remember where they said they were pointed, but that 454 blocks could also help them to suppress any settlement amount. The calculation is no longer a PPS what would my few hours seconds of hash have earned, it's now there were only this many blocks found at these price points, where any of them yours?

[aarons6]

i think the real issue isnt the person that had one or two of these to setup.. its the ones that had 20 or more.
i helped a friend setup 25 s9s.. we put them all together, turned them all on all row by row, then went and logged into the main terminal and started setting them up.. which since they come dhcp you had to log in find the ip, go in and change the ip then setup the pool.

they ran for an hour or more on bitmains pool. the whole time running at full power.

had these came without an username they would be mostly sitting idle.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

If really concerned about where the miners are initially pointed then here's an easy startup for mass miners: When starting up a new rack/pod of miners - block internet access to them until configured. Is that really so hard? Nope.

Thing is, once again it is the 'Evil' Bitmain that has been singled out. Um, controller software for the Avalons is pre-configured as well and point to Canaan's account with Kano. In 2014 my AMT miner came pre-configured pointing at Eligius. Odds are all miners arrive already pointing at the mfgr addresses/pools...

[fanatic26_]

had these came without an username they would be mostly sitting idle.

Actually s9s sdraw almost full power even when not hashing, they run wam up cycles on the chips to prepare.

P.S. There are many mass deploy tools that would have made your job easier

[Steamtyme]

i ones that had 20 or more.
i helped a friend setup 25 s9s.. we put them all together, turned them all on all row by row, then went and logged into the main terminal and started setting them up..

No disrespect but that sounds crazy to me.

Personally I would have turned on a couple machines set them up and just carried on down the line doing that.

Going forward though after the first set up you should know what you are getting into and be able to make a plan moving forward. Anyone who mined for hours somehow for bitmain just didn't do enough research to be prepared IMO.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Personally I would have turned on a couple machines set them up and just carried on down the line doing that.

But that means them having to think and know about what they are doing and that is just sooooo hard for some folks...  

[minefarmbuy]

I feel like NFW is talk to me sometimes.

I'm actually wondering if Bitmain changed the default pool settings in there latest releases.