Topic: Cointerra Mining ASIC coming soon - page 13. (Read 35558 times)

Oh, the bitter irony!    

Nope, no more than booking a hotel room through a travel agent, less so as I've personally visited the metaphoric hotel KnC for myself to see it exists. Admittedly I haven't had a chance to check my room yet, but for intents and purposes they're an existing hotel and their builders, ORSoC, have built many before over the past decade and they've promised to have it ready for my stay based on their experience. Perhaps they won't, but my credit card company wants my repeat and continued business, some even offer airmiles!

In other words, you have done thorough research, concluded that comparing the risk of your pre-order to amazon purchase is so absurd that you must laugh, and yet:
1.  You're "pretty damn certain" nonetheless?
2.  You're perfectly willing to pass these lol-worthy risks to your credit card company?  You honestly don't feel just a teency bit in the wrong?

Edit:  Thank goodness for the evil bankers & usurious CC companies!  Without them, bitcoin business itself would be impossible

Paahahahahaa! No i'm not, what a flawed assumption to make, my judgement is indicative of just making sure I have a protected purchase in case they don't deliver as promised. This is the same reason you'd want to ensure any consumer protection exists when dealing with any new businesses. For the record I certainly think there is more chance of delivery than a lot of Amazon Sellers though, assuming you appreciate how Amazon works...

That said what is fraudulent is people riding on credit cards and/or Paypal and bailing if hashrate increases too quickly for their comfort. That's not the fault of the banks or the companies manufacturing these devices. That's up to those wishing to purchase to perform further research.

In any case as much as this does bare relevance, this is Cointerra's thread, so back on track, but before we do I just want to leave you with one example of where consumer protection exists specifically for pre-orders:

Holidays, and any kind of pre-booked travel. There are often stories of third party intermediaries going bust and not delivering on promises. Book on ccard and you're covered. Not sure what Paypal's stance on package holidays is, but they are resold on eBay...

Thinking this is worth highlighting again, compared to a CPU, every operation is "worst case instruction mix", if anyone is telling you that TDP should be much less than worst case power on a SHA-256(256) ASIC then they are full of crap.

Intel in order to implement their "cloud on a chip" projects (Experimental/prototype) 80+ core CPUs, had to come up with aggressive load balancing and core de-activation strategies. These appear to be shelved, although the management strategies may be applied in future mainstream CPUs, it was probably found that it was no more effective than running multiple virtual machines on say a 6 core hyperthreaded chip, due to having to idle so many cores at once.

A sort of visualisation of the difference this makes for the less technical might be imagining a simple implementation of a "pong" game on the side of a building with 60W lightbulbs being the pixels. Imagining a 48x32 playfield with the bats being 12 bulbs (2x6) the ball being 1 bulb, for 25 bulbs total. Implementing it as white on black means you only have to have 25 bulbs lit at a time, 1500W, could jusssst about do it off a household circuit. However, if you want to do black on white, you have to have (48*32)-25 bulbs lit, which would be 90,660W. The difference here is extreme to make the point, but the CPU is more like the white on black, and SHA core more like the black on white. Though to get closer to real percentages, we could say a 16x16 array where the CPU can light between 2 and 5 bulbs at once, and the SHA core randomly lights between 7 and 9 bulbs at once. So instantaneous power on CPUlike array may be between 120 and 300W whereas the SHAlike array would be between 420 and 540W.... but the CPU designer would split the difference and call TDP about 220W, so you might be left with the idea that you could SHA on a 16x16 array of lightbulbs for only 220W power usage... where the 16x16 lightbulbs are our proxy for a 100+ Million transistor array.

Not only that but also, imagine we are building a pneumatic/steam computer in about 1830, and we have large piston clearances and pipes made out of stitched leather. There's a physical limit to how many switches/pistons can be activated at once, because although they should not consume steam to remain in position, there are leaks everywhere and the boiler can maintain only so many PSI, get a bigger boiler, the leaks just blow harder and you're not much further ahead. This is sort of what is happening on small process nodes now, everything bleeds electrons, worse than that, unlike the steam computer, it's a more closed environment so your leakage doesn't just go into open air, it makes "pressure" in a pipe that should be empty at the moment, leading to spurious operation. Try and raise the activation threshold of your valves and you need more PSI, which in turn leaks harder... meanwhile the resistance to flow makes more heat, consumes power and your holes get bigger.

Anyway, when you see the little demo engine going chuff, chuff, chuff, don't be too impressed, thinking if they can do it once, they can copy and paste it 20, 50, 200 times, it's not whether the pistons and valves do the right thing, it's whether they do it with close enough tolerance, and stitch the leather pipes together well enough that they can make 20 or 50 of them run without losing steam everywhere.

I'm glad we at least cleared BFL of any wrongdoing.  I admire your consistency. 

Technically, i would love to hear your recorded phone convo, or read a transcript -- if i told my credit card company i was gambling on the card & planing to charge back, i'm not certain if they'd laugh at me, call the cops or call the nuthouse.



You are telling me that you are more certain that these companies will deliver than you are with Amazon purchases.  No offence, but this speakes volumes about your judgement.

The bawling of BFL and Avalon is due to inept project management and idiots that perform no due diligence on payment methods.

BFL buyers can claim refunds if they paid by credit card and bothered to ring their credit card issuing bank.

Out of the thousands complaining they have their funds held hostage, how many have picked up the phone, even once? None.

If that's how responsible they are with cash, and how much their money means to them, BFL are entitled to the funds. You know some of these muppets actually used debt to purchase, as opposed to money they can afford to risk??

I gave this analogy the other day, and it compares to having been taken hostage and being tied to a chair, only the no knots were tied, the door was left wide open and the kidnappers left the building. Would you stay?

Apparently most Butterfly Labs buyers would...

Let's get this out of the way -- boldface above.  BFL is shipping boxen.  Avalon is shipping boxen & chips.

Only in so much as above I have stated your investment buys you an electronic box that connects to the Internet and doesn't make any guaranteed promises of ROI.

Why is this relevant?  Do you or do you not agree that a pre-order is different from investment or speculation?  Shall we backtrack?  would you like to change your position?
I limit the scope of my replies to concise, defendable points, and now the conversation is steered to which of the various investment schemes makes the best pre-order.  

The other question still remains:  Why all the bawing over the BFL & Avalon?  Why are the informed investors being hauled away in whaambulances?

Technically we are buying an electronic box we plug in a wall that connects to the net. Whether it's wizardry makes a profit is yet to be seen. No company can guarantee anything but their best effort we will realise ROI as too many factors are outside of their control, like the Bitcoin economy.


I am pretty damn certain. I've proven to myself they are a real company with experience of meeting deadlines. I have not defrauded myself or my card issuer at all, even they have confirmed that, furthermore I went to the length of recording the conversation, so on their head be it legally. I've gone to greater lengths proving they are legitimate than I've ever done with an amazon seller.

There is far more chance of my card issuing bank standing by my purchase which is protected under UK law by section 75 of the consumer credit act, especially after speaking to their own fraud department and having a fraud protection representative of my card issuing company stating on record saying I can proceed, twice.

With Amazon the resolution of the dispute is between you, the seller and Amazon's goodwill unless, you similarly pay by credit card and then you are protected by section 75 as well.

No. Either grant my point that there is a qualitative difference between "pre-order" and "invest," or concede that you are investing on credit and charging back when things go wrong.  I hope this explains why  i take pains to differentiate the two.


Please understand that phone call means nothing, much less sets a legal precedent.  You are, in fact, defrauding the credit card company unless you believe you will get your miner with the same certainty as you believe you'll get a book from Amazon.  You, as you have admitted, are nowhere as certain.

Look if the companies are claiming they can meet these deadlines, and have gone to lengths to provide proof as to who they are, their experience etc. and are asking you to hand over payment and are making it possible to do so by payment methods that charge fees specifically to insure against fraud then where is anything underhand happening from the point of view of the buyer?

You can pre-order playstations, xboxes and cars ahead of their release. That's why consumer protection exists, to protect the consumer against possible fraud and hold those behind it responsible.

I rang and spoke to my credit cards issuing bank, I did not try to defraud them, I explained explicitly in no uncertain terms what it was for and there may be a risk of fraudulent activity and they told me that is what their consumer protection was for and I was protected. I confirmed that they are giving me the ok to proceed, and they said yes. So no one's trying to defraud the payment processor, or the card issuing banks unless it's the vendor.

Believe it or not Paypal do pre-screen sellers using them as a payment processor especially when there are unexplained sudden spikes in sales. KnC had a massive issue winning them over and had to provide a huge amount of evidence due to the miss selling of pre-orders on eBay and delayed delivery. KnC felt the Paypal brand was an important association to have.

There were issues in the beginning where their Paypal account was locked until they sat down and ironed things out with Paypal, also Paypal is not active in most of Asia, and doesn't recognise Asian address format. So they had to work around that...

Determining how to pay with a means that has purchase protection when you have any reason to be uncertain is just performing due diligence and acting on it.

  Thanks, at least someone has a sense of humor.


Oh, where to begin...  I have about a hundred arguments in the alternative for this.  I'd like to at least point out that *any investment* is your "money-printing machine."


Pointing out that bitcoin investing, no matter how many "virtual" prefixes are added to obfuscate the fact, is still IRL.  I wish i could bypass sympathy and bask in schadenfreude...

Now we're getting quite a bit off topic... but, as someone who comes from the gambling sector... (my day job is online poker in europe)... I can tell you that people regularly buy poker chips with their credit cards and paypal... and play, and then sometimes they lose.. and occasionally, just occasionally, they try to pretend that it wasn't them and they claim to have their credit charged back.

the gambling industry calls this 'friendly fraud'... ie: its not stolen credit cards but simply people having 'buyer remorse' the day after they had a big loss and trying to pretend it wasn't them.

the annoying thing about this is that the credit card companies and paypal will always side with the customer, even if we can prove without a shadow of a doubt that it was them, and the player used the correct pin, and the same ip address, and had the same play habits and poker strategies as every other time they played for the last x months.... but still, the cc companies take from our account and pay back the player.  that's just 'our cost' of doing business and we have to live with it.

If you are gambling, or investing, while pretending that you are purchasing a pre-order, *you are scamming the credit card companies or PayPal.*  Please understand that what you are doing is functionally identical to gambling on credit & charging back when you lose.  I'm not saying it's not an interesting scam, but it's just us chickens here, you're amongst friends, let's call a spade a spade.

I never addressed the sanity of making speculative pre-orders.  I simply pointed out that "pre-order" is not the correct term for wagering on a product that may or may not materialise.  
In cases where the buyer bases his decision on sufficient data, the correct term is "investment."  
In cases where the decision is based on little or no data, it's called a "gamble."
In cases where the data is false, sensationalized or misleading, it is called "being scammed."

This is not pedantry or semantics -- it points to the very core of the bawing regarding BFL and now Avalon.
If the distinction between pre-orders and investments is truly rhetorical, why the temper tantrums?  People invested their nickels, took their chances, and when the investment proves to be subpar, they cry to PayPal?  
Why do you think PayPal doesn't let you buy IRL stock & chargeback?  Or gamble in Vegas & chargeback if you lost?  Why do i even need to point this out to adults?

Its also not fair to compare IRL with anything bitcoin related.  theyre so different as to make comparison impossible.

there is no 'money printing' machine that can be bought IRL.   that's a bitcoin eccentricity.. the fact that you can buy a box that will 'mine coins' for you and generates an ROI measured in days or weeks and not years... is a very bitcoin related thing.  And to get such a thing, requires you to take risks not normally associated with IRL !