Any lawyer (who isn't incompetent outside of the narrow domain of IP law) will confirm windfalls are frowned upon by the legal system. "Full refund provided in BTC" means you get back via BTC the purchase price, which was denominated in USD.
Dude. Explicit agreement. Without it I would not have bought. This is a clear reliance. And-- it's also not a "windfall", as hashfast claimed they would put the assets aside. (And apparently did so, since they had no problem paying Cypherdoc 3000 BTC) -- strange to see you argue this here, while not arguing that cypherdoc was entitled to "only" three hundred grand rather than the much larger "windfall" he was actually paid. It was also equally explicit that if the Bitcoin price dropped to $1 or whatever, I'd still just be getting back the Bitcoins I paid.
Consider: You own 10,000 tons of steel and expect the price of steel to go up a lot but aren't doing much of anything with your steel right now. Someone offers to sell you a machine that will, given time and inexpensive feedstocks return something between 5000 and 25000 tons of steel, likely 15000 tons... but only if delivered on time. They offer to sell it for your 10,000 tons of steel... but you're concerned that they'll just do nothing and hand you the market price of the steel at the time of the sale back if the steel price goes up since that has been a common scam pattern. So they agree that they'll have third party investors pay for the production, and if they fail to deliver on spec they'll return your payment. Absent fraud this is a good trade... the risk that the machine might end up producing less is acceptable to you, and they sweetened it even further by offering that if it significantly under-produces they'll give you an additional machine later (most of their costs are NRE-- machines are marginally cheap to produce). The seller get a good deal because-- assuming he can deliver-- he gets a guaranteed return instead of a machine with an uncertain income an a bunch of operating requirements. So you go for it.
Later, they don't deliver and try to cut you a check for the market prices at the time of the sale. The very situation you were concerned about and which you sought and obtained multiple copies in writing, explicit agreement otherwise.-- and made it very clear that you would not buy without this agreement.
This is hogwash, and if people can get away with it the result is a trivially repeatable scam pattern: Collect Bitcoin for mining pre-orders at prices almost too good to be true, later when the bitcoin price goes up: "refund" the market value of the coins at the time of the "sale"; otherwise if the Bitcoin price goes down-- "refund" the exact Bitcoins paid. Heads I win, tails you lose. Yes, in HF's case they did actually attempt to build hardware, but that doesn't change the general pattern.
To call that a "windfall" is to make a mockery of contract. If this hadn't been explicitly agreed in advance as a condition of the sale then maybe there would be an argument, but here it was clearly agreed. The only limit on the enforceability of the agreement is insolvency of the entity that made it, which was sadly the case here (esp with Cypherdoc walking off with so much of the Bitcoins).
Cypherdoc was always transparent; he fully disclosed his compensated endorser status at the very top of his Hashfast Endorsement Thread OP.
After it went sour and I negatively rated him, he contacted me directly and said his only compensation was discounts for hardware which he never received and that he was just as much of a victim as me, he plead at my sense of justice and I fell for it. So, indeed, I was not amused when I read the court documents and found out that he got 3000 BTC and full price refunds for the "discounted hardware". So much for "transparency" unless you mean transparently dishonest.
and is not a public figure,
He argued before a California court that he was the "LeBron James of Bitcoin"; and that on this basis the payment of 3000 BTC (10% of gross income) was more than justified. Are you saying he perjured himself?
Of course Reddit will not allow their platform to be used
Except... it isn't there.
I won't defend Frap.doc doxxing you, that was obviously wrong, although I will not the only reason everyone including dangerous nutbags knows your shipping address is the mass doxxing accomplished by the spectacularly ill-advised and monumentally useless bankruptcy lawsuit.
My information cannot be found in the public bankruptcy proceedings. I specifically did not participate to keep that information out of them; because the at most few thousand I could have conceivably gotten out of the defunct entity was far less than the cost of security precautions necessitated by the publication of the information-- better the funds go to people who need them more.
Repeating an Officially refuted accusation of a criminal act like tunneling is called defamation. When it's written on the internet, that's called libel. When you post it in a way that encourages mob justice, that's called harassment at best and incitement at worst.
Bullshit. But feel free to file a lawsuit. Otherwise pound sand. You're the one arguing that you paid Cypherdoc hundreds of thousands of dollars for effectively nothing. I wasn't even specifically arguing that tunneling was engaged in here: only that you bought and paid for his reputation (and thus he shouldn't be surprised that it's trashed when hashfast failed to make good on its agreements) or that he was paid an astronomical amount of funds for some other reason. E.g. If it wasn't buying the reputation of a public figure ("LeBron James of Bitcoin") to endorse the product, -- then what was it?
Let me make this completely clear here: There was clear dishonestly here and it is unambiguous, while the this and that details may not rise to the level of criminal conviction and the successfully dispersed funds make civil action a waste of time, no one involved has any right to demand the affection or respect of others. You can sit here impotently threatening with bullshit litigation on behalf of your buddy, but I won't be cowed by it. All doing so does is piss me off and encourage me to make it more clear what a ripoff I believe the whole operation was.
But you know all this, quoting you from elsewhere on Bitcointalk:
I already told you the "then what" if BTC had gone to a buck: Frap.doc would be S.O.L.
It's only fair he enjoy the reward, since he embraced the risk. Especially since that reward came with the externality of reputation damage.
We agree-- that if an agreement was X bitcoin, it should be honored as that for better or worse-- and that cypherdoc was granted a windfall in exchange for his reputation, so why do you seem to have forgotten your prior position?