Topic: Avalon is (unfortunately) a scam. Here is why. - page 8. (Read 37929 times)

Who cares when BFL shipped?
What interests me alone is, when you sent my boxes
What is a smaller batch good for, if you bring not even the few boxes out of the country?
What good is it, if BFL shipp not bevor March, when our Boxes not shipped before CNY?
You wrote in big letters and counters "we Shipped"! We have not done! And what happen?.... "we shipp 2 Boxes" Great! Applause!
Why do you not publish the order number of the shipped boxes daily, so all the buyers know what going on?

This kind of questions have to be answered from you! Not all the other meaningless BS!

A review from Jeff could be faked too, so why bother with that, if your logic is sound?  When BFL wouldn't provide timely pictures and videos, it later became clear that they were failing to provide that stuff because they simply didn't have it.

Now you're failing to provide that kind of stuff, only under the excuse that you could have faked it.  Sure, but we know that.  We know that a video of the machine isn't 100% proof, but that isn't what people are asking for.  They're asking for whatever assurance they feel pictures and videos would provide.

I agree that on the outside, there's no evidence for BFL and Avalon being scams. But BFL is taking orders with Paypal, which has fraud protection, and Avalon is not. I, personally, am not comfortable with this offering.

I feel that there is only one reason Avalon would be taking pre-orders on batch #2 before test review units will be received by jgarzik and someone else at Bitcoin Foundation.  Batch #2 couldn't be delayed for a week after reviews of first Avalon units, because _______________ .

In a couple of days, some people will give Avalon BTC with No refunds, No proof  

How could this not be a scam?

I think we're all saying the same thing; this new "batch #2" stinks of unspoken problems. As gmaxwell said, anyone could make up a demo video; its a mystery as to why team Avalon won't do it themselves. They are more than capable of doing that and NGzhang with regards to his icarus / lancelot projects have been able to prove that his previous FPGA projects worked. Through BFL's admission, we already know that there are problems with QFN packaging and it appears from the little information that exists online from team Avalon (I feel like I'm saying something out of Pokemon lol..) is using QFN packaged chips. My guess is that they either rushed to ship out what products they could and purposefully didn't do a demo because they feared it would give BFL an edge (this part is really a mystery to me as both companies seem to already be cash / asset committed to their own designs already at this stage in the game).

We have been through this before.

Setup the asic unit. power it up. login. start the software. create a video showing things.
create account at a mining pool. point asic device at it. get pool owner to agree that is actual mining on their pool. they are easy to contact.
 
setup a few more of these asics devices and point at the same account. before you know it you have 100s and 100s
of gigahashes mining away and you show screen shots or what have you.

So, do you know of someone who has enough gpus around to fake that sorta test? ha. i don't.

Avalon has me concerned from a business standpoint in addition to it sounding a little like a Ponzi scheme at this point.

Here are my thoughts:

- They PROBABLY have SOME units ready to ship as they're confident that they'll get a couple (to date, two) out to "testers" so they can post their reviews.

- My thoughts about them opening up round #2 pre-orders has me concerned that they're running out of money from the initial round of pre-orders and need additional capital to meet their goals

- The fact that they're ONLY using BTC this time around concerns me because it's not trackable and it seems like they're gambling that the price of BTC will continue to go up

- "No Refunds" sounds like the final blow as to their having business issues because what they're essentially saying is that they need to use the capital to pay bills and once you pay, money is gone.

- The network hash rate would lead me to believe that there are no ASIC's currently even operational (unless they're testing on a private chain, which would be weird because they COULD make some money off their testing)

I have concerns for those who still have their money with Avalon, or with any ASIC manufacturer in general. I think greed got the best of people. SURE, at current difficulties and network hash rate if you're THE FIRST on the network with an ASIC you'll probably stand to make good money... but after more ASIC's spin up, your profits should start dropping sharply. But perhaps there's another thread on this.

All I can say is, good luck to anyone who invested thousands of their hard earned dollars on this. It's quite the gamble on your part!

The only reasonable explanation is that they cannot or just like being drama queens. your choice.

I'm pretty new at this, but they did test out the units that shipped, right? Why not just go ahead and make a video of that happening? I'm sure there would still be people calling it a fake, but at least there would be something.  In all honesty, with the amount of money involved here I'd just personally deliver a few working units to trusted community members and let word of mouth do the rest.

+1

Sure is.

It couldn't be done transparently without increasing false confidence in some cases. It can't be done in secret without turning the forum into a potential extortion racket (or at least subjecting it to credible allegations that it is one).  You do not want either of these outcomes.

Fortunately, centralized authority is not the only way to get things done. Prospective customers could put funds in escrow (even a trustless blockchain escrow) and make transparency demands— "You get our money only if you do X, Y, and Z and by putting funds in this escrow we prove that we're not trolls making demands to waste your time or upset your business".  This would avoid the above pitfalls.

The biggest problem I see with it is that I can't think of an X, Y, or Z that would materially reduce risks — except getting working units in the hands of some trusted third party and they claim to already have that in motion— given that they need the funds upfront to fund their production. A lesser issue is that if the community wanted to do it they'd have to come to a consensus on the terms very quickly.  If people could come up with and agree on some terms (that I don't think are insane), I'd be willing to act as a signer on an escrow for this.

Or the mods could simply message them and say show our community more proof or we will delete your threads as there have been too many
scams around here and we wish to protect our users in the only way we can.

The people with the money normally have all the leverage. But in this goofy community it seems like the sales person who promises something
has all the power. I guess greed is the reason things are upside down around here.

@gmaxwell, I think we understood perfectly, thank you.

I can imagine a sophisticated scam where carefully constructed "leaks" are used to dupe trustworthy™ people into 'laundering' weak evidence in order make it seem stronger— If I tell you I've seen photos, some people will believe me more than _any_ photo they could have possibly been shown, and I may have missed some glaring flaw in the evidence that would have been discovered had it been made public... and while— as mentioned— I don't think Avalon is scamming here, it occurs to me that to avoid contributing to this kind of game in the future I ought to act consistently:  If Avalon wants the benefit of people confirming that there is more evidence, then they should make it public.

So, I'll leave it at: Scam or not, they could easily provide lots of additional information. Fans call everything proven here, haters call everything disproven here. This is one of the reasons that 'evidence' is not all that good protection against scams in this sort of thing. Considering the kind of funds involved even from batch#1 surely a scammer could go buy a crate of fans, throw them on a bench, and call it an assembly line. The reason I think they should post more and are confused that they aren't isn't because I think it will protect anyone from getting ripped off— but simply because it's good PR that will help them collect more money.

gmaxwell, are you saying that you have seen any pictures or videos that you think are evidence, which are not public?

You know they'll fill that 2nd batch in hours right? Even with this total PR fail...