Cedivad - I'm curious. If all you want are your BTCs back, why did you ever buy mining equipment in the 1st place? Wouldn't it have been easier and less stressful to have just kept your BTC?
As for suing HF, please remember that you are dealing with a start up. So unless they get a lot bigger/more successful, i am not sure what you will achieve by suing them, as it will simply be like stabbing a straw man. All that will happen is that you will make things harder for the co and perhaps force them into liquidation and in this case, there will likely be even less support for their equipment than if they are still around. The same applies to other startups too BTW as there are usually few (if any) assets to go after with a start up. You might therefore want to save your money rather than throw good money after bad, if that is what turns out to be the case. Buy more BTCs if you believe they will go up from here, but don't waste your money on lawyers when it is likely there will be nothing to go after
This
Startup lied to their customers and game them a false date of October to get the necessary money to start their comapny. It was all lies from the very beginning with no way they would ever be able to deliver on time. They took note of the fact that BFL never got sued and thought they would take advantage of the situation as well. If Hashfast doesn't get sued, more companies will follow by example and lie/steal from their customers. They broke the law and they should be sued.
Do some searches for the HF Execs including John, it shows that they filed paperwork for an LLC (Hashfast LLC) in Delaware and it shows that they got "capital" from 7 investors at about $650k to start the company, strange thing is that the paperwork was filed late this October.
The LLC filing is just strange is all.... BUT obviously they knew they needed our pre-order money to build our machines in the first place as $650k is no where near what is necessary to most likely even get a sit-down to pen a deal with their "partners" (vendors really) as they basically ran an office that could have been even a home based business as (correct me if I'm wrong) but EVERYTHING (short of the marketing) was Outsourced (as confirmed by John in an interview from the Singapore BTC conference). What they did by saying all those companies which they contracted to build their machines are partners is like saying that because you bought Volume Licenses from Microsoft and say that they are now a "partner" in your business. I'm pretty sure that even the actual IC development was entirely outsourced as well as I don't believe that I saw any reference to any of the company execs having the engineering degree or experience to create any type of IC, fpga or asic...
Another example is the SeaSonic "partnership" is the same deal, they just made a deal to purchase a bulk amount at whatever price the negotiated for STOCK power supplies so it's not like they had custom made ones just for HF which would be what I would call a REAL partnership. Using off the shelf retail products is not at all a real partnership, even the 4u "Sierra" server cases are retail off the shelf and was told that they used 4u cases because it was more available than the 2u cases... also most likely increase cost as they would need to get 2u server parts and have some custom made water coolers etc to make a truly custom 2u product.
Those "partnerships" are also just to make a marketing PR announcement to give HF some media attention and that also cost quite a bit of money depending on how much exposure you want, the more you pay the more likely the PR firms will get the article picked up by bigger media outlets.
In reality, we could have just done this all ourselves if we organized a group buy and got enough funds to contract all the companies which is exactly what HF did. Yes, they found out which companies they needed to approach but that is not so hard since BF Labs already did some of their homework on who to approach to produce their wafers as well as learning from the previous ASIC manufactures as well.
Most likely if we did end up doing a group buy, everything in the process would be transparent and everyone would benefit a whole lot more as the money would really end up being used to build a very nicely designed ASIC with custom just about everything and still end up being cheaper than what we paid.
I owned a company for about 10 years that dealt in enterprise level hardware sales and logistics so I know first hand how that process works as my office and I have direct experience with outsourcing, talent, labor, product and PR. So instead of HF keeping a bunch of money for themselves we could have done the same thing that they did but even could have made the hardware open source or something like that.
Oh and the RPi that they decided to use could have just as easily been a beagle board like KnC and it does have a nice (enough) web based front end to control the basic mining functions and even give custom readouts of volt/temp/core functionality, SSH console access, etc. Since the BBB that they used has built in solid state storage there is no issue with having the SD cards fail and it runs linux just fine with the gui on top. They even had the foresight to let people upgrade the firmware through the BBB and I believe that they let the software on the BBB control as much of the boards as they could so that it would be easy for people to update firmware and tweak the machines as they wish instead of having those functions programmed to an eprom on their boards.
Unlike BFL which needed a serial cable and an eprom programmer to update any firmware. The question is what will it be like when we get our HF machines? Is it really that hard to make a simple web based gui with like 7 pages? It doesn't even need mysql, log data can be stored in plain text files, I don't really see a need for a DB for the web GUI so should be easy to build.
Oh and the 1u "controller" for the Sierras are just RPis with a usb hub.
