What was for sale? The boards?
They had miners listed on ebay before BKK had a chance to debug them (possibly before he had even assembled one, I can't recall exactly).
Here is the post I was referring to.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2492794Here is my reaction at the time
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2502914*edit* BTW I didn't even consider TH as scam but they took a big risk on lots of fronts and most of them seem to have come back to hurt.
How do you know that it was their ebay account?
It wasn't Terrahash's E-bay acccount. It was obviously some other person, in retrospect, but it was still pretty PREMATURE.
And now, because of all the troubles with Avalon shipping, it basically means people got scammed, literally. Whether it was intentional or not, it doesn't matter, the end result is the same as a scam, therefore it was/is a scam.
As for the Klondike project, there are still quite a number of people that are still working on getting this right, and I believe its VERY close to working.
Regardless of what happens, Bkkcoins is a hero, and eventually, other people were going to be involved with it/take it over anyway. So this is just the natural progression of things.
There has already been a HUGE amount of development work for the K16, and in my humble opinion, it would be completely foolish to throw it all away. Avalon (regardless of what I think of them, it aint good..), has already said that their 55 nm chip will be pin compatible with their older generation, but it will obviously be more power efficient.
So, at least to my mind, it would be GREATLY beneficial to take advantage of all this development work already done for the 110 nm chips, and have it be ready for the new generation chips when they do arrive. To throw it all away would be pretty foolish.
There are actually still examples of K16 hashing out there, and I think we would have had these problems anyway, even if Avalon had shipped the chips on time. It's just the natural progression of things, and I think the future still looks good for the K16. How do I know this? Well, let's just say I'm an optimist, for a good reason or two.
Even if your reasons suck, it's good to be an optimist.
That being said, I can see several positives from this already, not necessarily in any order.
1. People like me learned a hell of a lot about modern circuit design just by being spectators. If BKKcoins completely left the building, he still contributed a lot of education to a very interested amateur.
2. In that same spirit, he attracted a lot of other really smart and talented people.
3. Following from that, those same people learned to work together toward a common goal. Doing it again should be easier as new chips/technologies become available. As smart as a lot of you are, you still get to learn from each other, and each other's mistakes. Winning situation right there.
4. Y'all demonstrated that a complex project like this can be done out in the open with minimal funding by people, not faceless corporations. (I'm not anti corporation, but I do get tired of the idea that only the "established" players have a shot at anything)
5. If it gets finished and works out, the design can probably be modified to accept Bitfury and other similar chips, or at least the experience in making this happen will help shorten the development time.
6. It's fun to watch, and if I had the resources, would be fun to play!
I can think of a bunch more. I think this was a good thing, despite how some of it turned out. I am frankly somewhat worried about Chris, as him just vanishing like this seems very out of character.