I don't know if there is an equivelent body in USA, b
Welcome to Scamerica!!!
You can joke all you want with this, but on second thought it is rather odd consumers in the biggest consumer market in the world are not protected more from such a things. I understand freedom of trade, free markets, weak state, and all this stuff, but believe me this is close to impossible to happen anywhere else. We scream constantly to overblown state mechanisms in my country, and state bureaucracy blown out of proportions, but I'm pretty certain anywhere else this things would end by state clerks all over the HF back. It's also odd that scam of these proportions is not all over the media, they should love such a juicy stories. How often multi-million dollar scams are there in the USA for this to go unnoticed?
It's the bitcoin aspect that screws up consumer protections. If it wasn't present, there would be more obvious recourse to that kind of complaint, and they'd stand a better chance of success.
But, if you put yourself in the shoes of a bureaucrat, you're kind of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" here. The "community" is loud and clear that bitcoin does not want regulation, but the "community" also has problems with dishonest and incompetent hardware manufacturers. From the federal level, there is bascially a policy vacuum, because the feds haven't figured out if and how to deal with it, and they are kind of signalling 'hands off', like the "community" says it wants.
So if you wade into this as a low or mid-level bureaucrat of the sort that might typically try to enforce consumer protection laws, you're probably going to get your head chopped off and be accused of overreaching. And you are probably saying to yourself, "heh, those guys, so proud of their independence and insulting the government all the time, now look who's crying? ... why should I stick my neck out for them? Most of them say I'm irrelevant, until they run into @ssholes like BFL and Hashfast. Well, sorry fellas, it's time you grew up and gave us more respect. Here's a lesson for you."
Yea, I think certainly the 'no forced refunds' aspect is dangerous for consumers. That, coupled with the meteoric rise in BTC prices has meant there's a huge lure for unscrupulous people to get their scams in.
If enough of these scams go on and people will give up on bitcoin. It's just too easy to be ripped off.
What I find ironic about this (and everyone else who's complaining) is the fact that so many people cried for the longest time about BFL and about how "You are required to give refunds if you don't ship in 30 days, the FTC says so!!!!!!1!1!" (which is wrong, by the way, but whatever) - now that it's happening, the same people are crying about receiving "forced refunds."
So which is it, do you want forced refunds according to the commonly held misconception about the FTC or do you want your hardware? You can't have mutually exclusive results happening simultaneously.
inb4 "But this is different." ... It's not all that different than what BFL went through. We had engineering problems, HF is having engineering problems. I have no doubt Hashfast is working as fast as they can to get the product out the door and everyone at HF is having sleepless nights over it. I have no inside knowledge about it, obviously, but I can imagine what they are going through. Could/can they handle things better? Yes, absolutely, just like there are many things about the sequence of events that BFL could have done better about. Unfortunately, neither BFL nor Hashfast are large, multi-billion dollar corporations that have the resources to do that... we are a few people, bitcoin nerds mostly, trying to deliver a high demand product that grows exponentially before ones eyes.
