GAW Miners (Scrypt/SHA256 miners and Hashlet cloud) independent feedback thread

[Byte me]

Josh, the CEO of GAW.

[GAW Miners_CEO]

Josh, the CEO of GAW.

I am blushing

[Billsonl]

I am getting frustrated with GAW hosted miners constant going offline.  Today, 05/11/2014,  I wrote an e-mail to CEO of GAW miners, Josh Garza.


Hi Josh,

Order # 4151 & 3593

I am sorry to write this.   Here is my story.

I purchased 2 hosted blade miners, one on 4/26/2014 that went live on the night of 5/2/04, the other was purchased on 5/3/2014.  I paid about $3000 ($1,600 & $1,400) just before each price drop to $1,500 & $1,000.

Within the past week and half, there were constant numerous constant outages.  Miners went offline for hours.  The last time it was like off-line for 12 hours i think.  I constant have to monitor it.  I have called and sent support tickets. The support staff are very polite but what is the point of hosting if I have constant monitor it? Shouldn't there be some kind of alert when a miner goes offline?  


In the 1.5 to 2 weeks time on my hosted miners, I have only mined about 6-7 LTC's so far.

Is there a way for me to cancel both orders and get refunded?  I will return all the LTC's that were mined.  The only reason I went with housing is so that it can be set on cruise-control.  

Please let me know what you think.

P.S, as i am writing this, one of my blade is offline again.  This is really frustrating.


Sincerely yours

Edited and quote my self to add the following.


I contacted Josh, CEO, of GAW miners.  He has personally reached out to me and compensated me for my lost time.  As of today, 05/19/2014, I have upgraded my 2 hosted miners to 2 Widows. Very happy with GAW's service and on how they handled themselves.

[Edser]

Josh, awaiting a call


support request (10054)
Order #3566

[flintcog]

I'm also have been waiting on a call for days!

I am having a bad experience with a very simple order from GAW.

Ticket: 9724
Order: 5181


---------------------------------------------------

Update!

Within a few hours of posting on this thread I received a message from Josh updating me on the status of my order, which had apparently been lost between GAW's internal sale/shipping systems. Josh was very pleasant, straight-forward, and apologetic. He put the order in express mail the following day and also pledged to refund the order. This seems above and beyond great customer service. I will update this post again when I receive the refund.

[Edser]

Glad to have worked out a resolution!
Awaiting my order and new order to show up!

Thank you for personally contacting and not using a third party to distance yourselves.

[suchmoon]

My notifications don't match the actual GAW thread by a longshot.  I really wish notification emails also contained the post content, feel like I'm missing some gems tonight.

All-in-all though everyone who is selling the new Zeus gear is very quiet right now.  I'll be fucking floored if the reason GAW_CEO mentioned, testing on different coins/pools gives highly variable power draw, is the reality as everyone is trumpeting these as scrypt mining chips, not LTC mining chips, and a bulk of the scrypt market is and has been multicoin, trading, etc.

These next few days are going to be very interesting, dying to see how my four pre-orders pan out.

Then again, while trying to search for the content on bitcointa.lk (don't see the threads mirrored there, shame!) I noticed MinerEU mentioning the GridSeed/A2 connection and mentioning they are mainly selling to private farms?  Seriously, it's lovely seeing a company posting on a COMMUNITY forum about how they're targeting larger farms (which are profit cows, not anyone that really gives a shit about the tech).  I love this stuff.

My e-mails do contain post contents, or maybe it's an option, check your settings. Keep in mind that you will get a notification on the first reply after your last visit to the forum, and then no more notifications for that thread until you visit the site again. Bitcointa.lk does have GAW thread, but with the old title, something about $189.99 Gridseeds I think

A2 being expensive as it is AND significantly more efficient than anything else currently available, it would of course be appealing mostly for farmers, but then again farmers hoarded GPUs too. If a person can make a profit mining then a big business can make even more profit doing the same,  I don't think you could prevent that?

I'm seriously pissed at Zeus for their bait and switch, first with the "free cloud hosting", then with power consumption, and what's with the ugly fan screwed onto the Blizzard  . Thankfully I only ordered a handful of miners from them, had a feeling they were blowing a bubble all along. No preorders anymore, never again, only in-stock tested miners for me from now on.

[suchmoon]

Time for some independent feedback based on the news today.  Here's a link:

http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/groundbreaking-deal-gawminers-zenminer-will-revolutionize-mining/2014/05/23

So.  A controller that makes having mining hardware in your house easier to manage since it'll make handling the hardware more plug+play.  Bringing mining to new folks, folks intimidated by configuring hardware and typing pool info into software.

On the flipside, selling hardware that requires a computer PSU that needs to be jumped (or buy a jumper attachment, if it is available, on eBay). 

      

Open discussion time... I don't get it.  The Zen deal is supposed to make mining more accessible, but the controller only works if you have hardware at your house, which means you get all the headache of managing hardware at your house with a cloud service to handle the simple shit like drivers and writing a .bat for cpu/cgminer or a script loop for the rpi you likely already have?  Shouldn't the manufacturers be working on something like, I dunno, a mining device you can take out of the box, plug into your computer, and have it just work? 

Also, since I think this is important, we're just now dealing with the power draw debacle, but Josh mentioned this statement yesterday:

I had our cases made a little larger to be on the safe side with heat
We have many of our miners in has (and have for some time), so we are aware of the hashrates
And all of our hardware will ship on time, hosted may even come up early

(bold for emphasis)

If hardware was in-hand, power draw must have been known and there must have been an idea in place in regards to the fact that the numbers on the site didn't match the numbers on the hardware in-hand, but customers were still being led to believe they were buying hardware at Price/Hash/Wattage in their estimations and calculations.

Doesn't sit right at all.

I can't understand from that press release if the controller is going to be open (i.e. root access, works with any miner) or just a front to GAW's own miners. I'm guessing the latter, since it needs (?) the cloud to function.

Regarding hardware, there is this interesting post from a couple of weeks ago:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=529093.msg6577489#msg6577489

Let's just say I understated just about everything. From when they will ship by, what they come with, to how much they will hash

To be fair he didn't mention power consumption (note Mr. CEO - I'm being fair and objective here). So I guess this snafu shouldn't come as a surprise. Gridseed and Innosilicon get to be the top dogs in Scrypt mining for quite a while yet.

[suchmoon]

The thing I don't get is that Josh/GAW seem to have the best of intentions and incredibly high and optimistic hopes for what they can do for the industry... and we're seeing the same mistakes as the Gen1 BTC ASIC generation.  I'd imagine by this point people who are experienced in industry know to learn from their predecessors and not make the same mistakes about selling big and delivering moderately. 

You're right though, if the A2 vs. 'Big Zeus Machine' is any indication, the Gridseed/Inno team-up will dominate the landscape for some time to come.  I just wish I knew whether to sink money in more blades or if there will be some price warring going on.

I have a pretty interesting PM conversation going on, maybe I'll post it here later for posterity

Re: price wars, with Zeus basically out of contention at the moment, there wouldn't be much competition would it? Well, maybe Zeus resellers would try to undercut each other.

[suchmoon]

The thing I don't get is that Josh/GAW seem to have the best of intentions and incredibly high and optimistic hopes for what they can do for the industry... and we're seeing the same mistakes as the Gen1 BTC ASIC generation.  I'd imagine by this point people who are experienced in industry know to learn from their predecessors and not make the same mistakes about selling big and delivering moderately. 

You're right though, if the A2 vs. 'Big Zeus Machine' is any indication, the Gridseed/Inno team-up will dominate the landscape for some time to come.  I just wish I knew whether to sink money in more blades or if there will be some price warring going on.

I have a pretty interesting PM conversation going on, maybe I'll post it here later for posterity

Re: price wars, with Zeus basically out of contention at the moment, there wouldn't be much competition would it? Well, maybe Zeus resellers would try to undercut each other.

Yeah, because power is a different issue for different people.  If power price is negligible and folks have easier access to Zeus* than A2 units (maybe they only have $6k and not $11k), then they'll get and run the Zeus hardware.  For people with the choice, cash, and ability to run hardware, A2 beats the shit out of the specs we're seeing for Zeus and is proven to work.  To say that ~30MH of Zeus is the same power as 88MH of A2 is insane, it's not even apples to oranges, it's sloppy hardware versus refined hardware.

55nm vs 28nm as well, I guess you can't bend the laws of physics with sheer marketing force

By the way there are smaller A2 rigs, the 80+ MH/s one I think has six blades inside, and there are 2- and 4-blade options from some of the resellers.

[suchmoon]

reactor, just wondering if the CEO "banned" you from his thread? He said he banned me. Although I don't think there is such a thing I'm going to comply anyway, since I don't see any point in aggravating these guys or the mods. CEO has the mighty delete button and tons of time on his hands, tough to argue with that

[suchmoon]

Ok, let me rephrase that: CEO has a bot - invokes a robocop or a terminator-no-relation-to-innosilicon image - and tons of time on his hands, tough to argue with that.

[Alpharisc]

Last time I posted in this thread I was pretty disenchanted about the whole experience of purchasing and running a hosted blade with GAW. Happily, the downtime problems seem to have been basically eliminated. Luke, one of the tech support guys also hooked me up with 24 hours of hashing on several blades rather than my usual one, to make up for the downtime which was an effective gesture. Prior to this point I was pretty much ready to throw the towel in, and even asked for a refund, but they seem to have really turned things around. My blade hasn't been offline for any noticeable period since, except if I am restarting it.

I was also able to get store credit left over from another return and purchase refunded back to my credit card too, which was really appreciated.

Obviously, the business has gone through some growing pains and required more than the usual share of patience from some of it's customers, particularly regarding it's hosting, but they have obviously put in the effort to rectify this and things seem pretty spot on now.

It would be nice to have email alerts for downtime, but so far I haven't run into any issues.

[kebabman]

You do have some valid questions, I tried to give you my 2c to the ones I could in the other thread, but you are way too frustrated and picking on a lot of things that frankly just don't really matter. But really dude, this constant diatribe about the zenminer being a scary black-box etc really does nothing but prevent people from bothering to read your questions that are actually worth answering.  

[suchmoon]

Is that Zengawzeus frankentroller actually working? GAW confirmed that you can't register on the site yet, there is no contact info (I believe reactor brought it up already), and there is no other mining software available (cgminer?). They also don't provide a download of the Pi image, what possible purpose does such a restriction serve? Anyone who gets it will be able to make a copy anyway unless there some copy protection, which wouldn't make sense since it doesn't function without the cloud. Actually they could save money by providing downloads instead of shipping a Pi to everyone. I can see a lot of cheap Pis on eBay soon

Don't get me wrong, I sure hope it does work as promised - I recommended GAW (we all make mistakes don't we) to some people who kind of hold me responsible and I'm not looking forward to providing support for something I don't have a clue about... at least with Gridseeds I could actually help. Thankfully most are in week 3, so perhaps it will get sorted by then.

[suchmoon]

Kudos to Zeus, they actually managed to make it worse than I expected even after all the disappointing spec changes:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=529093.msg6922095#msg6922095


Edited 2020-11-27 to fix a broken image

About the only positive I can say about is that unlike Gridseed they put a grille on the fan, so that will save small domestic animals from getting chopped into pieces.

Compare to the original rendering and the most recent one:

[prestonm]

>> GAW_CEO:

Look, I am tired of explaining this.

We DO NOT INCLUDE ANY OTHER SOFTWARE THEN OUR OWN.

If you want to run something different, that's on you. This is how the entire mining world works

For example, Knc has their own software they ship. And of you don't want to use it, they do not stop you. But it's then up to you to install what you want.

I don't think we are the right company to support your needs. I think issuing you a refund so you can find a company that can accommodate your specific needs is the best option.

We, literally, have thousands of customers. And your the only one I am having this conversation with.

>> ME:

You said if we asked for the software we can get it.

I am asking for the software so I can run it.

What is so challenging here?  What isn't sinking in?  And that either means your customer pool is a flock of jackasses or people are otherwise ignorant of these developments because you haven't actually sent out official communication in regards to the requirement of using zenMiner along with the rpi included.  You sent out a message to advertise the Big Gun, you send multiple shipping confirmations, yet informing people of the whole zen thing just doesn't matter?  Informing them of the power changes doesn't matter?  So all your customers should be following bitcointalk and/or repeatedly checking the website in case what they ordered suddenly requires additional hardware.

Fuck, man, I really can't believe you ran successful businesses when you aren't even informing your customer base of these changes.  This is basic shit and you guys are getting it wrong. 

So, again, per your own words all we had to do was ask for the software.  Please link me to the software and I'll be gone.  That's all it would have taken since this zen shit-show started.

Dude, your are as annoying as hell, is anyone else tired of hearing from this guy? I can’t imagine having a customer like you. I feel sorry for these guys.

They have already explained to you what software they support. They have no obligation to support anything other then what they want to. If you don’t like it, just cancel your order (they already told you that!). dude, you should become more educated about what it is your doing before you start annoying companies with stuff you don’t understand. You want them to make it work on your wifi at you home? your loco man

I have ordered from GAW Miners on three different occasions. They do exactly what they say they will. My first two orders were shipped and delivered early. And my 3rd one is the new miners they. Which I can not wait to get.

Seriously man, get a life and find something better to do. Your the only one even posting in this thread anymore. What does that tell you?

I was impressed with them already, but I am even my blown away that they keep their sanity in having to deal with people like you. Go away! So they can actually focus on make more cool stuff lol

[cryptofunk]

The problem is this forum provides statistics.  So you can see the info people provide for their account as well as the general posting times.  

Interesting thing, these statistics.  They showed me that a few users, despite different geographic locations, kept the EXACT SAME hours as Josh.  Interesting, right?

Thanks for the laughs, Josh.  You fucking scammer.  What else you lying about on here?

This should look awesome on Reddit.

Reactor, I'm all for free speech and don't agree with moderation on the main thread but it's their choice and we have to live with it, that's how this thread came to life. Things were rocky for a while but they got better (I can only talk about hosting), my blade has been hashing rock solid for a while and complains I had earlier and posted about on this thread seems to be a thing of the past. My blade went down today (and I don't remember the last time it went down so it's been a while), I sent an email to support and got a reply and it was back up within 5 minutes from me sending the email.  I agree that the increase power usage with Zen is a bummer but it's been disclosed. I don't believe they're against canceling orders if it's a deal breaker for someone... so if it's a deal breaker for someone it sounds and look like there's a way out.  Personally I only have 1 black widow (to be shipped) on order and am comfortable with the increase in power usage, power is cheap where I live and I'm not running a data center so the impact on me is minimal, my electrical wiring won't catch fire.  Another option is to have them host it and they will pay for the increase in power (and not you).  

I also wonder about being able to compile sgminer/cpuminer or something to run on my own Pi image and hope they'll be a fork for people wanting to do so.  Information about it isn't as clear as it should (I'm a couple of days being on reading the main thread so I may have missed something).  As above, if they are willing to cancel orders for people to whom it's a big deal then I don't see any issues with it, they can get their money back and order something else from somewhere else... It may be a pain but I don't believe that anyone is being held hostage unlike customers of BFL, KNC and the likes on the SHA256 side of things.  If it can only run it with their Pi image and it's a big deal, I'm almost certain that anyone requesting to cancel their order will most likely be granted their request.

It serves no purpose to post the same thing over and over again, I think we must have 5 pages of the same questions by you, re-posting another 5 page of the same thing won't get you an answer and will only make this thread useless as keeping up with it takes time and reading pages and pages of the same complain by the same person renders it useless.  I suggest you edit the same post or something throughout the day.

Lastly, I think we should try and remain civil, we get that you're angry and don't like Josh but there's no need to go down to that level.  Saying you don't agree with the way the company is being run and being constructive is a lot different than saying f*****g this, f*****g that, calling people jackasses and the list goes on.  I'm not interested in personal vendettas, this was meant to be a feedback thread and it's almost to the point like it's been hijacked now.

[kebabman]

They just replied on their thread, the miner software will be available tomorrow.

[kebabman]

Rami is a guy.