The voice of reason, correctness and experience so far that I've seen in this thread is from itod. Just about everyone else are waldo worshippers, to their peril.
I don't really agree with those statements. I don't mean any disrespect to you or itod, but waldohoover is stuck between a rock and a hard place. I don't know the man personally, but reading this thread and knowing what HF did, I cannot see where he did anything wrong. He offered to collect funds from a group of people, buy a miner, and operate the miner. He did that, or tried. HF failed to deliver.
He cannot do anything to motivate HF and cannot be held responsible for non-delivery. He tried to get a BTC refund as HF promised, but they lied to everyone. And as HF did promise to return BTC (even guaranteeing people will not lose their BTC!), there were likely folks who joined the group buy thinking it was a relatively safe bet. Everything that went wrong here, IMO, is entirely the fault of HashFast. They lied about returning BTC and then they presented Waldo with an absolutely insane set of conditions for accepting the USD refund. HF is the one who screwed everyone.
It was said before, but if HF had delivered, nobody would be upset. They didn't. Blame them.
There is one other option that Waldo might have, if he's indeed in California. He could sue HF himself in small claims court. He could sue for up to $10K if he did not represent himself as a business to HF. He could file a case for the first miner and, being successful, sue for the next. He has reasonable grounds for doing that, since they only offered a refund with the condition that he cannot further sue them, etc -- it was an insane set of limitations to which nobody should be required to agree. Their failure to communicate with him would naturally lead him to court. So, he could sue over the first miner, showing all documentation where they offered a full refund in BTC, etc. and showing the present value of BTC. He cannot ask for more than $10K in small claims, but perhaps he could start with just one that is well below $10K.
Now, once the court agrees that the BTC should be refunded, HF might feel more compelled to refund the rest in BTC without further litigation. After all, the small claim lawsuit would set a precedent to which waldohoover could subsequently refer.
They might continue to be contrary, but he could then just file another for the next piece of hardware they failed to deliver, and so on.
The other option is to try to negotiate with HF to ship out a new miner that would meet the comparable hashing power as what would have been delivered by 12/31. They do have hardware. They could ship it. That would likely be best for all.