Providing MPP modules to Batch 1 customers at no additional cost and after the sale has been the best thing HF has done so far. I don't understand how you can criticize them about that, much less take them to court. You can pound your chest all you want but this is just not going to happen.
The thing I object to is that MPP was designed to protect against excessive difficulty increases. Not delays.
HF has done nothing to compensate against delays so it is the customers that will pay the price for HF failures.
correct. Also see [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=262052.msg3527186#msg3527186].
The MPP was born in an attempt to attract customers at a time the network difficulty grew dramatically. It is a value-added deal which makes this offer very attractive.
With the radio silence from Hashfast there is hardly any way to know what is really going on behind the curtain. All things are possible - from an honest attempt to fix engineering problems and avoiding PR interference to an attempted cover-up of fraudulent advertisement.
Dependent on how Hashfast used customer money to finance production (which has not been stated anywhere and should be considered malpractice), Hashfast customers may be locked into the fate of the company. If it succeeds customers will either be compensated for any shortcomings or may otherwise have grounds for litigation charges. If it fails, customers will have a claim on any left-overs after the company will have to file for bankruptcy. If customer funds were used, it's a misuse of financing, because it lets customers take all the risk while the potential gains (overall profitability of the company) is kept in private hands. Equity financing would have been more appropriate in that case.
Again - without anymore information coming from Hashfast it's hard to paint a precise picture of what is going on. For one it would be interesting to learn how Hashfast stored the customer funds to keep them available for a refund.
My deepest fear is that their business model was dependent on them shipping on time and that they were really hoping to not have to pay out any of the MPP, and now that it's obvious they will, there's no possible way for the company to honour the MPP without taking on substantial losses and/or bankrupty. The hardware for the MPP is still going to cost the company more or less the same now as it does in a couple months, and if they made a gamble on not having to pay for it, everyone will suffer in the end.
I don't want to spread FUD though, I guess we'll have to give HashFast the benefit of the doubt until we hear otherwise. Like everyone else, I'm crossing my fingers and hoping from an e-mail from them saying they haven't slept for the past two weeks because they've been trying to prevent their company from being insolvent and working hard on getting the consumers their hardware out as fast as they can, while what they're doing is still relevant.