You really didn't care when it was BFL ripping people off, so what makes this different? Is it that you are one of the people that were deceived?
I really did. But there was such as cesspool of bad behavior on all sides that it was hard to be crisp in my disapproval. Especially to those adopting a highly factional perspective "Anyone who says anything positive about my enemy is my enemy, anyone who says anything negative about my friend is my enemy."I even thought for a while that most of the shrill anti-bfl voices were actually BFL shills trying to discredit the complainers because they were so ... anti-persuasive ... but that guess was thrown out the window by the BFL employees acting in ways which I would have attributed as being the output of anti-BFL folks in disguise, if the fact of their employment didn't exclude that possibility.
At the same time, BFL was late and under-spec for every product. I successfully predicted that their asic products wouldn't be a good deal and stayed clear, and— perhaps unfairly— I wasn't really personally shocked until say march or so.
What bothers me— in terms of long term risks— isn't the mistaken (/deceptive) product claims or missed deadlines. If some mining company was late and lied to their customers, and delivered an underspec part— but the miners were still able to break even that bothers me less than a company which is honest and on-time, but through a combination of pricing, order-book non-transparency, and self-mining delivers a product that can never break even.
When BFL was initially delayed they seemed an anomaly, a not very reliably company with habitually late products. But for a long time they still looked like they'd break even for some time. Ha. In the time since then _most_ of the products sold have not broken even and likely will never break even vs just sitting on your Bitcoin. The rapid appreciation of coin has enabled some miners to lie to themselves about their losses, but they're losses none the less.
If you look you can see me complaining about practically every mining hardware company (I think) I know anything about. (Including ones that I generally like)
Mining products are sold for a particular purpose: To mine Bitcoin. A miner which mines a nearly guaranteed loss is defective, no matter how timely the delivery or polite the sales staff.
The baseless, now-rubbished "Is HashFast Self-Mining?" thread is a sterling example of why following Gmaxwell's rules is a good idea.
A thread which had fallen to the second (third?) page when you asked me to unlock it so you could bump it.FWIW, I strong disagree with any hardware company "testing" hardware on the production network. There is a dedicate test network, and system testing can be adequately tested on a private network. I lauded avalon's initial commitments to not do so (which were subsequently violated), and complained about other companies doing so. When you mine instead of shipping you are taking from your customers, even if you don't use their hardware to do it, because you are elevating the future difficulty which will reduce their income on the products you eventually ship as well as any equipment they are currently mining with.
There is a sure way to avoid complaints about minor amounts of things like that: deliver on your promises.
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Of course, being both a disgruntled customer and a mod presents an increasingly apparent conflict of interest for him.
Well, I can't deny being human. Looking at at >100 BTC loss does tend to increase salience.When HashFast started it was looking for well known and high profile people to help promote its products. I didn't get involved in any promotion or whatever, but I did eventually buy a product (and a second one a month later in September, since everything was "on time"). The advantages of affiliation with high profile people cuts both ways however: Had hashfast delivered on time and to spec I would have been singing praises, and now that I'm out a lot of coin and getting outright _offensive_ settlement offers for a contract that HashFast has defaulted on entirely on their own... well there you go: You're damn right I'm going to speak up about that too. I suppose one lesson might be that one ought to take as much care in picking their enemies as they do their friends.
As far as moderation goes, there is actually very little control I have over things here. I've been pruning out offtopic crap to keep the threads readable. Feel free to complain about anything you think has gone wrong and I'll try to fix it. If you think the pitchforks are making it hard to hear your product updates, create a self moderated thread for product updates. Cheers,
[And now I have to go figure out how to split all this OT stuff out of this thread. ::sigh::]
