HF_CL, first of all, thank you for showing up. There are many reasons why i disagree with you. It will take a few minutes, but let's go trough them all.
We published a shipping window between Point A (end of Oct) and Point B (Dec 31) and committed to issuing full refunds if we ship outside of this window (IE after Dec 31).
You always promised a shipping date of October. When customers called you 3 days before the delay, you where saying that everything was on track for a delivery within 5-10 days. Many customers (about half of batch 1, or the customers that bought during the first half of the timeframe where batch 1 was sold), where promised a "Point A" shipping date on the website, and no "Point B" was visible on the ToS.
So, no, you never promised a shipping date between point a and point b. What an elaborate way of describing such an easy concept, anyway. What you promised where full refunds if failed to delivery before point b (we all know that if you arrive at point b without delivering you will be bankrupt). This however doesn't change the fact that you (will be) late on your self promised shipping date, and that entitles your customers to a full refund. Regardless, and more importantly with many fewer points of discussions, your contract doesn't say anything about denying customers to cancel their orders and to get a prompt full refund. I guess that there is not such a point simply because it would be illegal and a self admission of guilt.
It's a law, and usually legal entities has to obey to laws, right? Independently with what they write on their contracts.
What you're seeing is a narrowing of that window, and honesty on the company's part in communicating with our customers.
We believe that to be a good thing.
I have to use either Orwell or Kafka to describe how much i do believe that you do believe that this is a good thing.
Naturally, we'd love to hear whatever you'd like to say - and if you feel we are doing things wrong, please tell us how we may do better.
Sure. Thanks for the proposal. These are my suggestions:
1) Start by proving us that you are legit. You showed us pics of the sierra case, and that's good, but not good enough. You should have the boards ready (everything but the substrate is on track, remember?), so, if you are legit and where ready to ship, only delayed by a problem with the substrate, you should be able to show us pics of the boards. Please do it, you also promised to do so weeks ago by your own will, but we have yet to see those pics. My conclusion is that they don't exist. They are not yet ready because they where not needed for this point, but for 20 days from now. My second conclusion is that the problem with the substrate is just an "avalon 2.0" excuse, where they where lamenting lacks of "capacitors and resistors" in China. We both know that Avalon was lying, and it was only an excuse to delay their batch 2 to their customers, that if delivered in time, would have ROId a lot. So, and with this i will conclude our point, while Avalon couldn't prove the lack of Resistors&Capacitors in China, you could be able to prove the problems you are having with the substrate, and you would partially restore the trust of your customers; we are not bastards, we understand that problems could occur down the line, but that doesn't allow you to invent excuses Avalon-like; you have to show proof of them.
2) You are selling a product overpriced at least 10 times to your first Batch customers (i would call them yours VC). These customers, due to your lack of diligence, will lose, in the best case as of now, by supposing a mid-November delivery, 75% of their investment. That's not acceptable. You are refusing to help your customers in any way. You could for example fix the date of beginning of the MPP to the first of november (or better, the date where they where promised to ship in their invoices), and, add a fixed point on delivery with the MPP. As of now, the MPP only says that we will get 2 times that hashrate we would have needed to roi, up to 4 times the initial hashrate, 3 months later. But there are no fixed delivery dates for you. Being something incredibly dependent by the delivery date, not putting a delivery date there seems like adding irony at your customers' losses. When i meet John at the bitcoin conference@Amsterdam, he said that there would have been no problem to move my order to the second batch of sierra, "i don't see how that could be a problem", but later, he always ignored my requests to do so. Now, a second batch sierra is delivered 10 days later and costs 1/3rd of our BJs. Is that fair in your book? Given your closure, it looks like so.
3) i wrote soo much and i have yet to answer the bs you have at the end of your post, so i will stop here. If as you proposed others want to join the discussion, please do it.
PS to answer your other point regarding the ROI calculations, some points we think are relevant include
1- We do not control the hashrate
That seems like a point you will have to bring up in a court of law, not here. We know that. Thanks for sharing anyway.
2- Despite that, we came up with the MPP as a way to further support our customer's success.
Everyone on this forum agrees that the MPP, as of now, is one of the most comic pages of this forum. We both now that as it is right now, it's useless.
Reasoning:
1) 2 times the hashrate in 3 months, while the difficulty increases with the actual difficulty adjustment in 3 months would be 10 times+.
2) up to 4 times the needed hashrate to roi, so that even with a 2x multiplier, it will kick in full time given the minimal revenues batch 1 customers will make.
3) no fixed delivery date for the extra hashrate. This one is a really bad one, maybe the worst of them all. With this point alone, the MPP is useless.
3- We then gave MPP protection free of charge to all batch 1 customers, who were not expecting it and were charged for it.
Two incredibly big lays in this quote.
1) I ordered my batch 1 with the MPP already promised. As did many other, the MPP helped you to sell out the first batch, you where struggling at it before.
2) We paid for it. One just has to look at the price difference from the november BJ, with or without MPP. The ones with the MPP have a price in line with the BJ of batch 1, while the ones without MPP have a price of about half of that.
MPP protection is intentionally denominated in BTC, not USD. Given the direction BTC prices are taking, it is possible our early or late customers will achieve ROI in less that 90 days - and still receive MPP protection from us. No charge, no questions.
I invested to have a BTC return over a BTC investment, i really don't care about the exchange rate. I wanted a BTC ROI, not an USD one. Who cares about USD in this community anyway? At this point, anyway, BTC would have to go to 1000$+ for us to have a USD ROI.
Btw, those points looks like to have been email-formatted (max 70 characters per line as per RFC), where they sent via email to complaining customers too? I don't remember to have received them.
We are proud to be the first ASIC company to do that for its customers.
We're happy to see other ASIC companies follow our lead (down to copying "miner protection program" word-for-word); if it leads to ASIC companies treating their customers better than has historically been the case, we are all for it.
I won't even comment this marketing bs. Please retrain from inflating your posts with, it would be appreciated. You already sold a metric ton, now you just have to deliver.
Best,
-HF_CL
Have a nice time answering, as i did, HF_CL. Thank you for taking some time to pass by here and have a nice day.
