Topic: Innosilicon official reponse to Bitmine bankruptcy - Let the evidence talk - page 3. (Read 7602 times)

Regarding the market... It's already in control by the PTB and that was demonstrated a few weeks ago with new block structure. They are in a position now to utilize bitcoin in the event there is another crisis... BTC has demonstrated stability for over 6 months straight, attracting more conservative financial mindsets and companies, investments have been made into the right companies (outside the country) which are now basically owned by US venture. The new bandwidth requirements cancel out the potential mining monopolization from countries with poor internet connections. And the country which produces the most miners and mines the most btc has the poorest of internet connections. Effectively issuing partial if not soon to be complete control of transaction speeds to western enterprises. Mining operations of the future will exist in countries with the fastest bandwidth...

We've said it before and we'll say it again, this forum was created to aid and assist in the development of the technology necessary to make BTC successful and to monitor and eliminate all potential liabilities or threats to those who may stand in the way, alter the outcome, or could profit more than they should from this business. And to find a few scapegoats and distractions. Most of us have lost everything and have nothing to show for it. Most companies never looked at the big picture, or were often distracted by things which didn't matter. These are all lessons to be learned for ventures to come, that's something we all need to realize. No help or guidance is free, opensource is never better than enterprise because it was created for sole purpose to teach enterprise how to to do it for free in the first place. Android is linux, is it not?

Final note:. Don't buy miners, invest in BTC at an amount that your comfortable with and that wont effect you from paying your bills or taking care of your family... Buy BTC, keep it offline, never in online wallets or exchanges, and when the time is right, usually 60 to 90 days for any good investment, sell.

Innosilicon was the first company to produce a 28nm Asic, they were the only company that seemed to be fair and aided AMT in their time of need. They are ahead of the game in most cases and will most likely continue to be a successful company solely because building asics for miners is not their core business, it was like a hobby for them.

You have the bom and the docs, the same as IMET received. It called for 70% sink on the bottom and 30% sink on the top. The original contract called for ready made modules, in an effort to deliver on time AMT was assured that Bitmine would assist or at least consult during the production process. The alternative was to try and get refund or sue Bitmine at the time, and return everyones money, which wasn't an option anyway because AMT funds went towards Asics and had already been spent. So the only option was the route which was taken and hope for the assistance promised, which rarely happened, if not at all. Either way, IMET was responsible for ordering the values on certain components and skimping on the qty of copper in the board. Despite the lack of assistance from Bitmine, the design worked if it was built correctly. The DCDC and power regulator came from Martin at technobit, who attempted to help bitmine during that time, and was paid for it as well. The problem wasn't in the asics because asics from the same batch, which were picked up from switzerland and brought to america were then taken to china and used in the production there.

Which was not Lketc by the way, that was a different company all together. We used one of the factories that built Inno's miners, and the board which we delivered was different/more improved than the dragon miners. In the end we delivered a working product, and built better ones there after. it was the perceptions of the community and the crap that we got on this forum among other sites owned by competitors like GAW that turned our focus towards larger clients vs individual ones. But all attempts failed.

The problem stemmed from the lack of help from bitmine and the negligence and greed of IMET to bank on commissions from express orders, IMET's lack of attention to detail and greed in commissions on resale of components and PCB's. But mostly, AMT's trust in others, and the focus on distractions rather than the ultimate goal, distractions like this forum and the opinions of a few clients vs the masses. And the court cases and all that, all distractions. A lesson well learned for what ever the next business will be.  

Almost all miners were shipped with PSU's, there were a few which weren't and those went to the very same people that attempted/plotted to help/monitor AMT and then pulled a 180 when we had a real product to deliver. An attempt which was seen from the beginning, not many people spend ours on forum for free. Or insist on helping as much as possible without delivering any real technical assistance what so ever (excluding Fuzzy, who was the only one with actual knowledge of these systems). So false information was given to said individuals in the event an 180 did occur. Effectively make them seem questionable to those that matter which could easily verify what as true or not.

It's not even worth the time of going into it. And AMT is just another failed business to add to the to list of the so many failed businesses. But we were at least one of the few companies that tried to pull it off and eventually delivered a working stable product despite everything else. If we wanted to steal everyone's money and run away and build mines, we would have bankrupted in April of 2014 like Hashfast, who walked with 8 million in customer funds, legally.

We kept the majority of the boards/broken or not from IMET in the event we actually went to court based on the summons we have. Which hopefully one day we will, but without money for lawyers its another useless venture. We should have blown off Lenell's case, blocked this forum completely, and used the funds for the case against IMET. IMET's insurance would have paid out double if not triple, and we would have issued refunds, in that event, lenell would not have had a case (which has been moved to civil suspense btw) and it would have been dismissed. This was AMT's fault and a poor decision on our part, to fight the pending class action or go after IMET.  

That being said, Fuzzy if you have the means to fix them and want to spend the time swapping resistors maybe its worth it to you or the community to pick them up instead of us taking them to scrap.

But I think you did a test with them at one point and of the 8 IMET produced boards you were sent I think only 2 lasted more than 3 weeks or so. Did you ever keep them running or what happened?

Ja, ^^ is a perfect example of how to not cool power chips.

Perhaps it was this one?





I've yet to recieve my power supply and we're coming up on almost a year after mine shipped, the second one that is. Still haven't received a miner that hashes any where near what I paid for. Even after they went to china mine hashed at 600gh. Haven't heard much on the class action so if that fell apart I'll just have to sue him individually and then have his wages garnished.

I always wanted to be an avenger.

And trust josh, he would know threats.

ya
Yes they were and despite trying to help them gratis, the Ltek A1 miner they finally sent was also sans PSU though they did send one for it a week later. I do have to say that the miner has been running 24x7 for almost a year now with zero issues aside from being hungry. Shows what a proper design can do (and I have free power)

Not exactly supporting Josh about his post on his and AMT's role in things but good to finally hear a bit more honest explanation/tale trickling out over what transpired between AMT and Bitmine. As I had been saying since getting into the A1 mess by buying a miner from AMT and then digging into all I could find about the A1 and Bitmine and knowing that AMT's miners were re-branded Bitmine ones the fact that Bitmain was not fulfilling their own general-public customers did not bode well for those of us who were AMT customers...

I get that their major customers - including themselves (Bitmine) via their partnership in mines - get the bulk of production in a sort of 1st-come-1st served BUT if they had a viable and stable design at least a trickle of Consumer rigs would have made it out the door to placate the clamoring hoards. At least the peta-farms they were supplying had to eat the dog food they made

Even my few attempts to get some specifics from Bitmine via Josh on some basic questions I had were -- not promising -- with Bitmine not exactly responding. In retrospect Josh's post is just backup to what I was seeing.

Folks, a reference design PCB & circuit is just that - for reference to test how a chip should work. It is NOT a guide to making a real-world product. That is up to the end-user of the chip to figure out using the reference to guide you in how your final design should operate. Sometimes a reference board/circuit is optimized to show Best Practice for the final design, most often they are not. Now if Inno was supposed to also supply a working Production system or hash board module design, that's another story and is between Bitmine and Innosilicon to work out.

Part of Bitmine's problem was that they copied the PDN (power distribution network) from the 2-chip board and just figured, 'lets make it bigger to fit more chips per-chain". Doesn't work that way as an ASIC has a very 'spikey' current draw and those spikes happen at the clock freq - 10's to 100's of mHz. The PDN has to be designed like a radio circuit or all sorts of havoc ensues. Make a major change as Bitmine did and well... That goes in line with Inno's comment about the DCDC margins as well.

In this case the A1 Dev thread here covered many aspects of what killed the Bitmine design and yet Bitmine ignored them. Possibly because they and the WASP project were pushing for open-source DIY miner designs?

My new title: Mr. So Isolated Avenger: Seek out and destroy All Josh Zs

Yep

This thread gets better and better.  I really need to get popcorn.

I'm very very surprised to see AMT coming on here defending anything.  Werent they the company that wanted to ship miners without PSU and only shipped PSU as lawyer said to?  I was thinking they had all kinda of rumors/stories way back then.

I think Innosilicon proved they had working chips.  I know I had A1's and A2.   I just hope lawsuit does not delay them much I would rather they can focus on next gen.

well, well, well... look what the cat dragged in.

AMT Miners. Interesting.

That 70K in legal fees could have paid back  6-7 people you swindled. you might have come away unscathed. instead chicanery prevailed and you persisted in your ways. your business failed because you are an extremely dishonest person.

you stole $6,000 dollars from me. i WILL have my day in court Joshua Zipkin of AMT Miners.

Blaming your customers for complaining about non-delivery ? How quaint.

hey Joey Jiang,

giorgio masserati said you took 8M paid to Innosilicon for development, masking and production lots of CoinCraft A1 chips.

and giorgio ferrari also said Innosilicon. The company that we engaged for the development of our A1 CoinCraft chip ended up in being BITMINE’s biggest failure. We engaged this company with a regular contract and entitled them to develop our 28nm ASIC based on our know-how and instructions, along with the full turnkey process of creating the mask, wafers and IC packaging. We had signed a contract that was expecting to guarantee us a one year exclusivity on the chip, however at a later stage we received proof that Innosilicon was plainly violating the contract from day zero and selling our own A1 chips to whoever inquired them directly. Once we pointed this out, they simply stopped answering our enquiries and disappeared, putting us in obvious panic because we had an extremely tight schedule and obligation to deliver the miners on time and they knew that perfectly. So, once they knew how attractive the market we were into was, they forced us into signing an amendment to the contract where we allowed them to sell the A1 chips to third parties. Additionally, they even forced us to write formal excuse letters for the “false” accusations under the threat that if we hadn’t signed them, they would just delay the supply of the A1 chips so long that they would be worthless.
Once the first production lot of chips, with a delay of nearly two months and a performance 50% worse than promised was delivered to us, the issue of “yield” popped up. Innosilicon repeatedly delivered us broken chips or “junk grade” ones as part of the purchased (and paid for) lots, forcing us to place ever bigger and bigger orders in order to fulfill our customers’ orders and eventually draining out most of the company’s money. Out of all the ordered chips, a huge part of them were simply not working and could only be thrown away in the garbage bin. Here you will see for yourself the pictures of the piles of tens of thousands of worthless junk grade chips still sealed in their original packages. When asked about clarifications, they claimed this was “normal production yield” but failed to provide any relevant document that could certify it. It is also worth mentioning that while we were struggling with thousands of junk chips, the A-grade ones could at all time be purchased in Hong Kong directly from their Chinese resellers, at some point even at lower prices than what we ourselves paid for.
At the end of this horrific experience, we had paid to Innosilicon in 2013 and 2014 a total of more than 8 million CHF but received only a small amount of usable A1 chips, causing us a huge financial loss. Therefore, we enquired two different lawyers in order to evaluate legal actions against them, but ended up with answers that more or less said that the chances of getting our rights respected from a Chinese court against a local Chinese company were close to zero. We only later found out this is a common practice from Chinese companies, regardless of the written agreements you make with them. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_in_China)

the problem in this whole thing is, this 8 million wasnt giorgios cash. this was all preorder cash from many idiots who send mr masserati money...

so in my opinion you should send all your evidences to the local competent court of Bellinzona...

why? its simple because all the fucked customers will never see a sathosi back. so we need at least justice...

giorgio masserati is a liar, a con artist and a monumental asshole. so please send your evidence to the court.

bitmine.ch is gone so here for all the liars open letter...

giorgio made a fucking bunch of bitcoins with his farm in iceland. and now he hides them from the court!

___________

Open letter from the former BITMINE AG management.

 

We are sorry to announce that on the 20th of May 2015 at 9:00, BITMINE AG has been officially declared bankrupt from the local competent court of Bellinzona.

It was publicly known that BITMINE AG was in a difficult situation from several months, but despite our biggest attempts to save the company by restructuring its product and services and seeking for new investments, all without success, left us no other chance than the road to bankruptcy. The accounts, assets and all company documents are now in hands of the Swiss justice and will be under inspection and investigation.

We all, both as former directors of the company and as individuals, make our deepest apologies to the many customers and suppliers that were patiently waiting for a refund or a compensation. As BITMINE AG’s board, we have always acted in our best good faith, within the limits of our skills and in the interests of the company and, therefore, its customers.

We also want to take the opportunity to make clear with everybody that the accusations on the forums are false, we as first have lost all the company’s share capital and several hundreds bitcoins in loans to the company ourselves. This is fully documented on the company registers and is now available to the relevant authorities for inspection.

Why did BITMINE AG go illiquid and eventually bankrupt? The answer to this question can be, in our opinion, divided in the three major issues that affected BITMINE AG:

    Bitcoin value and mining difficulty. Everybody knew and was aware that there was a significant risk associated with Bitcoin mining. We have to be honest and face it: if Bitcoin was still valued at well over $1000 like it was in the beginning of 2014, nobody would have tried to cancel his orders and we would all be rich. Unfortunately, the BTC value collapsed constantly since Mt.Gox’s bust and mining difficulty exploded to values that nobody was able to predict at the time we were selling our products. Today, the bitcoin mining market is completely dead and in the hands of a tiny group of major players and the bankruptcy of most of our former competitors is the brightest demonstration that this market collapsed.

    Innosilicon. The company that we engaged for the development of our A1 CoinCraft chip ended up in being BITMINE’s biggest failure. We engaged this company with a regular contract and entitled them to develop our 28nm ASIC based on our know-how and instructions, along with the full turnkey process of creating the mask, wafers and IC packaging. We had signed a contract that was expecting to guarantee us a one year exclusivity on the chip, however at a later stage we received proof that Innosilicon was plainly violating the contract from day zero and selling our own A1 chips to whoever inquired them directly. Once we pointed this out, they simply stopped answering our enquiries and disappeared, putting us in obvious panic because we had an extremely tight schedule and obligation to deliver the miners on time and they knew that perfectly. So, once they knew how attractive the market we were into was, they forced us into signing an amendment to the contract where we allowed them to sell the A1 chips to third parties. Additionally, they even forced us to write formal excuse letters for the “false” accusations under the threat that if we hadn’t signed them, they would just delay the supply of the A1 chips so long that they would be worthless.
    Once the first production lot of chips, with a delay of nearly two months and a performance 50% worse than promised was delivered to us, the issue of “yield” popped up. Innosilicon repeatedly delivered us broken chips or “junk grade” ones as part of the purchased (and paid for) lots, forcing us to place ever bigger and bigger orders in order to fulfill our customers’ orders and eventually draining out most of the company’s money. Out of all the ordered chips, a huge part of them were simply not working and could only be thrown away in the garbage bin. Here you will see for yourself the pictures of the piles of tens of thousands of worthless junk grade chips still sealed in their original packages. When asked about clarifications, they claimed this was “normal production yield” but failed to provide any relevant document that could certify it. It is also worth mentioning that while we were struggling with thousands of junk chips, the A-grade ones could at all time be purchased in Hong Kong directly from their Chinese resellers, at some point even at lower prices than what we ourselves paid for.
    At the end of this horrific experience, we had paid to Innosilicon in 2013 and 2014 a total of more than 8 million CHF but received only a small amount of usable A1 chips, causing us a huge financial loss. Therefore, we enquired two different lawyers in order to evaluate legal actions against them, but ended up with answers that more or less said that the chances of getting our rights respected from a Chinese court against a local Chinese company were close to zero. We only later found out this is a common practice from Chinese companies, regardless of the written agreements you make with them. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_in_China)

    Engineering difficulties. There were some difficulties on the engineering side as well. The technical design of the “CoinCraft Rig” was flawed due to its 24V power supply design. Several engineers were hired to counter the issue but this model was production ready only so late that in the meantime we had already replaced most of the Rig orders with Desks. We had also suffered from electrical components’ shortages (DCDC controllers, organic polymers capacitors, MOSFETs, etc.) and where therefore repeatedly forced in delaying our production lots.

 

The most often asked question is: where is my money gone? Why weren’t you simply able to pay back everybody?

Let us expose the financial figures to answer this question. BITMINE AG has sold in 2013 and 2014 a gross total of 12.1M CHF of products in various currencies and forms (Fiat and Bitcoin). Below is a summary of where this money has been paid to and is taken as an excerpt from the company’s official balance sheets and financial records, hence fully documented (the numbers are rounded for reading convenience).

    8M paid to Innosilicon for development, masking and production lots of CoinCraft A1 chips.
    2.1M paid to major suppliers of electronic components, heatsinks and casings (like Digi-key, Future Electronics, etc.).
    0.7M paid for logistics (UPS, DHL, etc.).
    0.7M paid to IceMine for the hosting fees of our cloud mining service.
    0.6M paid as salaries to the production, management, engineering and support staff (totaling 18 people).
    0.4M lost in Mt.Gox’s bankruptcy.
    1.4M refunded to customers.
    0.5M other running expenses such as rentals, travel expenses, legal expenditures, accounting, marketing and advertising, fuel, etc.

 

With a grand total of 14.4M CHF you may be wondering why this is actually higher than the above-mentioned sales volume. Just remember to add 1M share capital, 0.8M of loans with third parties and 0.6M of self-mined bitcoins in our operations in Iceland. If this last number may seem low to you, please remember that most of the miners in Iceland were offered as compensations to former customers through bitmine.io, leaving us only the smallest part of profits for our own operation.

The second most asked question is whether we were a scam or not. We were not because we have actually delivered a significant amount of our products. Despite all the above mentioned problems, out of the 3500 units that we sold and we got prepaid for, we have delivered to our customers more than 2000 units, all produced in our facilities.  There is a full photographic documentation of our production facility, happy customers picking up their miners and pallets full of miners being picked up by the freight company for shipping.

We acknowledge that this will not bring back your money, but hopefully it will give you an honest view on the reasons why it had been lost.

 

Regards,

The BITMINE AG board of directors

_____________

In the end, Bitmine's design was stable, but it took a while to get there as Inno pointed out. AMT wasn't updated on revisions and never received adequate support from the swiss as well, this was due to their own chaos of their business, or the fact that they didn't care becuase AMT had already sent their payments to Bitmine, we're still not sure. After reading this thread, some of claims brought against Inno are valid, and some of them against Bitmine as well. Bitmine did have a problem financing the chip, and inno did cover the other half. Inno was subcontracted by Bitmine, and was supposed to and did deliver a reference board as promised. Expansion on that design led to further problems.

AMT had a contract with the swiss, Bitmine was due to originally deliver fully working populated modules by a specific date.  After the delayed delivery of the chips/or more over the delayed in the allowance of AMT to pick up the modules, both AMT and Bitmine went into different productions because Bitmine made it apparent that there was no way AMT was going to get fully working modules prior to bitmine customers, especially some of the larger ones. With assurance of support and help from Bitmine AMT agreed and contracted IMET, which further botched the job through several errors, ordering the wrong values on various components and ultimately taking advantage of AMT's desperation at the time with the suggestion to quickturn all orders knowing the capacity of production wasn't there. Skimping on vital details set forth in the bom like the amount of copper in the boards, while cutting costs to increase their commission.

While this community has made both AMT and Bitmine out to be something ridiculous, both companies did try to deliver a product. Now, poor business decisions were made, bitmine did procrastinate in building the design which was due to the fact that they wanted a working asic before they designed a board around a proto, or so it seamed. In our opinion, this caused the delay. AMT ended up re-promising other's promises and hoping for the best. Bitmine did have problems with the designs, and Inno did have different grades and versions of both A1 and A2 chips. Which is a normal process in asic production by the way. When you produce a batch of asics, some turn out better than others. Design changes of the asics between versions made things more complicated for the pcb designers though, and yes voltage is one of them.

In the end, AMT dropped bitmines design and went to china and Inno helped AMT with introductions to production facilities and connections in order to deliver miners to those clients that would still accept them at the time. AMT understood both worlds by the end of that fiasco, and worked to develop rackmount miners which were affordable, stable and viable at the time. AMT's 6 or 7 avengers (clients that were either paid or just made it hobby to screw with AMT's staff and online rep) made it nearly impossible to sell the new models with limited staff and no budget. So, AMT gave up. Which ended the same way for Bitmine, broke and out of the luck. The problems which occurred between bitmine and Inno and why they occurred were ridiculous, problems created by paranoia, greed, suspicion, lack of funding and false promises, on all sides. The problems which occurred between AMT and Bitmine were mostly due to disorganization, and both parties living through the same shit storm, and one party putting too much faith in the other. While Bitmine made miners and mines, AMT made miners in china and focused on lawsuit which drained over 70k+ in legal fees alone.

Neither Bitmine or Inno acted 100% correctly, but each of them had their reasons as to why they shouldn't. Bitmine procrastinated on the design until the asics and reference board arrived. Inno sold to chinese vendors because they weren't confident in Bitmines ability to pay. Bitmine didn't wan't to pay until they saw a working product.. You get the idea of the argument.

But again, this business was a mistake from the beginning. It's ruined lives, it put business owners and clients in financial burden, its destroyed reputations and families. When a wife a client doubts her husband because he made the wrong choice to purchase a miner, (from any company by all means),  or when the wife of an owner divorces him right after having their newborn for fear of her child's life and her own due to the types of threats and gestures which have been made. One can say this business destroys lives. But I would guess stocks are no different from the client aspect. Despite good faith practices due to competing parties, it has brought the essence of greed out in everyone involved, investors, clients and manufacturers alike. And almost all have either failed or barely broke even. Like we've said before, the only guy's that really made money were the exchanges.

And in the end people still rant and rave on this forum, waiting for the next spurt in bitcoin, getting ready for the next mining manufacturers to trash. While still pissing on those that tried and failed.

Any lawsuit between bitmine and inno wont happen, it's china, no rules apply. So don't waist your time on it. Inno in many ways acted correctly, and Bitmine in many ways acted to the extent of what they felt was justified based on their position, neither acted in a malicious way towards the other in reality, or nothing more than the nature of this business/industry could allow.

The best advise, which has been reiterated on this forum over and over is the following: Don't buy miners, buy Bitcoin.

There will be another cycle of this drama soon, hopefully this time it will be more regulated. BTC and all things around it will start up again mid August, escalating (steadily in price) until the beginning of September. You'll see a steady slow rise in BTC, like clockwork. +2% -1% +2% -1% etc. Between the 10th of September and beginning of October, you'll see a jump not too far off from November 2013.  LTC will fluctuate between 4 and 8 until hits $9.50, and then jump to 14 shortly after it hits that price point, and will stay consistent at a 4.5-5% threshold of the value of BTC as it once did before.

The age of crypto currency is not over, if anything it will be needed more than ever shortly, but to those who mine, sell them, because it'll become more and more regulated over time and profits from transactions will decrease as well as it becomes more monopolized by the PTB. Or keep mining, as long as you have a 100mb connection.

This topic of Inno vs Bitmine, is a useless one. Inno has the upper hand, Bitmine's broke, and their swiss. Plain and simple.

AMT_Miners ..... 9 months since last post! This thread IS something .....

The 100k vs 10k regulator was available at the time. IMET ordered the wrong component, either by accident or on purpose we'll never know, but this was one of the main reasons the boards didn't work. Also the thickness of copper in the board, which was incorrectly ordered as well, both of those were the main reason for the productions failure.

NotFuzzyWarm,  thanks for sharing your info.  You are absolutely right! They took Innosiicon's Dec 2013 2 chip lab test boad and simply multiply up to a big board while replacing our DCDC regulators and heat sinks design with their own inadequate ones. They ingored our repeated warning about the importance of extra margin on DCDC and big top thermal heat sink. Also they were way too aggressive in reducing on-board MCU. They one time fried a large batch of ASICs by ignoring the manufacturing protocol of baking the chips 7 hours before SMT soldering process. Chips were fried and pop up in flame. What can we say? All sorts of silly mistakes imaginable for naive engineers trying to make their 1st PCB production in life time.
 
From Jan to May 2014 when A1 was the best in the world and miners were in huge demand, they wasted all these precious mrket windows and chips in several failed attempts to make their Miner production. This is why any chip in their hands did not turn into miners to make money. In the meantime, people used the same design they released also suffered big time and sat with boxes of PCB boards not knowing what to do.  We really felt sorry for them.
 
Simply a  tragedy!

...gross

The schems, BOM and PCB files remain property of Bitmine.ch and I have to respct that part of the NDA I had with AMT.

What I can say is that Bitmine pretty much took the 2-chip dev board that was being used in the A1 dev thread here and multiplied it into a lot of 2-chp layouts on 1 big board. Also apparently never paid attention to what was being said there about thermals when the chips are pushed to published specs.

As to Vcore... Due to product availability AMT used a different model of the regulator chip that had a higher value internal ref divider (100k vs 10k). But - dinna change the external resistor values to match the difference. Also AMT/Bitmine never tried to set the internal flash ram in the regulator to startup at a safe voltage. Result: For several seconds the ASICS are hit with a Vcore voltage above their max ratings until a bootstrap program is run to set it to the correct voltage.  

EDI: Correction. Looking through my notes was the DPOT feeding the regulators set point that was substituted w/o correcting the fixed resistor values in the reference divider tied to it. End result was the same.

I'd be interested in looking at some of that. Haven't had a good laugh in a while.

All in all I side with Inno's OP explanation of what went down in the Bitmine.ch/AMT A1 miners fiasco.

As an attempt to help out with the A1 mess from AMT/Bitmine, I did forensics on several of the A1 boards that Bitmine/AMT were using from late Feb thru around mid-May of 2014. They went through several revisions in that period. These boards and a testbed were provided courtesy of Joshua Zipkin owner of AMT. Since aside from a different name on them they are the same boards, my findings should apply.

Bottom line is that whoever designed those boards and ESPECIALLY the thermals layout should be shot (figuratively of course). As evidence, re the difference in the large topside heatsinks that the Dragons used, Bitmine/AMT 1st tried none at all then tiny chipsinks held on by thermal tape. 1 guess as to which hashboards had highly heat-discolored sinks falling off and chips literally going poof letting out their Majik Smoke.

Trying to get information from Bitmine's engineer on even the most basic things like how the ASICs are reset on power up generally resulted in, 'uh, what?' By digging deeper through the schems provided I found how they did it and their method of choice often/mostly worked but was certainly not 100% reliable. I won't even get into the Vcore regulator issues I found...