With all due respect, I was not asking you how risky you believe it is to operate a DragonMint. Silicon is not the only material inside of the DragonMint and its PSU. Other risk factors exist, such as extremely high voltage. Yet the central question from my previous post remains, which you did not answer.
Should it be possible in a court of law to hold Halong Mining accountable, if someone has a valid claim against it? Should Halong be held accountable if it negligently released a defective product that posed an unacceptable risk of danger? Of course it should. Every business should be held to account if it acts with negligence or if someone has a
valid claim against it. I am not saying that Halong Mining has done any of these things (although the Innosilicon board looks staggeringly similar to that of the DM, see
https://i.imgur.com/RgI9Eoy.jpg), but I have a real problem with the public's not having the information needed to sue and recover from someone
if valid claims arise. Do you share this concern? If you do, then please realize that to hold a business operator accountable, we have to know, at a minimum, where we can deliver a copy of the lawsuit. That is why businesses are required to have a registered agent who can receive service of process from a court.
Using extremely high voltage is not an activity anyone should take lightly, even if you consider silicon safe. Even low wattage smartphones have been known to burn dangerously due to defective components. The DragonMint operates at 1500 watts, has no FCC certification that I have been able to verify (despite Halong's claim that it exists), and it is the first ever product from a new hardware manufacturer with no track record that insists on operating with total anonymity and impunity.
The mining industry is still young enough and its hardware rare enough that regulators still don't fully understand them. Governments are just starting to wrap their minds around the need for economic regulation of cryptocurrencies. The G20 leaders announced last month that cryptocurrency is on their radar. South Korea weeks ago banned anonymous cryptocurrency accounts. Regulation on the hardware side is just starting to happen too. The U.S. FCC in February sent a cease and desist letter to a home miner in Brooklyn, New York due to a Bitmain Antminer that the FCC believed disrupted a cell phone network. The disruption was so serious that T-Mobile, a U.S. corporation, spent thousands of dollars investigating the source of the interference and finally triangulated the interference to one man's Brooklyn apartment.
If someone in New York or anywhere else can't place a phone call to emergency medical services, for example, because a Bitmain miner is disrupting their cell phone signal, can't we all agree that is an example of a legitimate safety concern? If we learn that Bitmain miners disrupt mobile phone communications to a dangerous degree, and if that disruption is due to a design defect or gross negligence by Bitmain, can't we all agree that Bitmain should assume responsibility for its actions? If, hypothetically, Bitmain were to try to skirt responsibility, can't we all agree that a court of proper jurisdiction should force Bitmain to assume responsibility? The same should happen to Halong Mining (or any other entity) if for some reason Halong is ever found to have acted with negligence or some other valid claim against it exists.
Collaboration, unity, improved consumer experience, improved performance.... These goals are wonderful. I share them with you. But please realize that "improved consumer experience" requires the possibility that a manufacturer can be held accountable for
valid legal claims against it. It doesn't matter who the business is. You don't get to operate with impunity in business under any circumstances.
As for the contact at the URL you provided, the contact information shown on that page is for Little Dragon Technology LLC --
and notes nothing about Halong Mining. I found no evidence that an association exists between these two entities other than Halong Mining says it is a licensor of the patent purportedly owned by Little Dragon Technology. Halong wrote on its blog, "After Little Dragon Technology LLC acquired the patent from the original inventors, we negotiated a license to use AsicBoost in our miners on the understanding that AsicBoost would be opened up to everyone to use, under some form of defensive patent license, in the hopes it can help protect decentralization of Bitcoin mining. " (See:
https://halongmining.com/blog/.)
I checked the Statement of Information on file with the California Secretary of State for the entity Little Dragon Technology LLC, and the filing does not note any association between Little Dragon Technology LLC and Halong Mining. To that extent, I am inclined to believe that Little Dragon Technology LLC is simply a shell company with no legal connection to Halong Mining, and that Halong Mining is using the AsicBoost license just as anyone else is authorized to do. The key point is that one cannot successfully sue Little Dragon Technology LLC for valid legal claims against Halong Mining.
I personally trust the company enough to where if they say they're certified, that's good enough for me. I've had enough experience in the mining industry to make a judgement call on that without vetting further company details. I understand your desire to vet those aspects, everyone has a criteria they look for. Halong has fulfilled mine. I would much rather Halong focus on making and delivering hardware, as they continue to do. I'm sure they wouldn't risk importing tens of millions worth of hardware if it wasn't legitimate.
As for the miner in NY, that is far more likely to be a fluke than commonplace in the industry. It'll be an interesting case to follow, I'm not sure if the gentleman responded to FCC's questions yet.
