Topic: My Avalon ASIC Gen1 batch #2 pledge (Read 6741 times)

Thanks! for the link!
Kindly,
       Muhammed Zakhir

Fair enough.   I was referring to the New York State Department of Taxation and Revenue.   They make the IRS look nice....
They are very aggressive and quite irrational.   Personally, I think Yifu deserves to deal with a complete dickhead agency that drives him nuts for stealing from us and mining with our batch IIs for so long.   

Because frankly, I hate the IRS more. The IRS is the piece of shit government agency that bilked me of ~40% of my 2013 profits, somewhere in the five figures. Yifu screwed me over, sure, but the IRS is pure evil and yet I'm required by law to follow their directives. I'd rather accept my own responsibility in trusting Yifu to have delivered, and influence ngzhang and xiangfu to publicly shame him than turn him over to the devil. Even with how upset I am with Yifu, I'm far more disgusted with the IRS. I estimate the IRS took about triple what Yifu ultimately did (though as time has passed, the value in Bitcoin has inevitably increased).

Yifu may have "scammed" me, but what the IRS does is outright thuggery.

If you believe in karma then NY State will go after Yifu Guo for income tax evasion.   Surely someone has reported him by now?   If not, perhaps it would be good use of your time.   They are SUPER aggressive with tax cheats and do not think it is funny that a resident tries to make a foreign company and not pay tax on their profits.   Especially someone that likes to appear in media bragging about his success.    Why not spend your time typing on NY State's site for a few minutes and attaching the articles and the fact that he probably made about $3-9M in profits (and likely reported ZERO of it)?

karma is a bitch.

Thanks Raize... that is very helpful. Wish it can be backed up from what is left of Avalon. There are many good Engineers who lost everything in the DIY community as a result of the events surrounding the failed chip deliveries.

fuck em all!

typical thieves!

stole the ip to even get started

stole the trade ins

stole the profit by mining everyones rigs to death for over 5 months

but in china that behaviour is rewarded with government contracts and extra fish heads/chicken feet in your lunchbox. yum!

Yeah, I had trouble ultimately deciding on scoring ngzhang and xiangfu positively while I scored BitSyncom negatively. Ultimately though I went that route because I think ngzhang and xiangfu were the victims here, not the problem (which was BitSyncom/Yifu).

Here's the summary of what happened:

I have a framed shipping note for my FPGAs that I hang in my office to proudly show friends/family that I had ordered some of the first FPGA Bitcoin miners from China in 2011 (These were the Icarus FPGAs). I took a picture of it and wrote a note on it to ngzhang that I thanked him for letting me use his tech and looked forward to using his new ASICs just as I had the FPGAs. It occurred to me while watching a video of Yifu talking about how he had to hide ngzhang due to "death threats" that it is possible they interpreted that silly picture/note as a threat, possibly because it had his home address on it. I'm not sure how someone who could both read English and Chinese could do that, though, because the English note I made should have been clear I was proud to have had been an early miner using Avalon tech. Not only that, but it had MY home address, email, forum name, and phone number on it. If it was a death threat, they could have just reported me :/

When I got my batch 2 miners (non-tradein) they had been pre-configured to mine on Eligius to a specific Bitcoin address that held ~400 BTC at the time I had received them. I'm not sure if the burn-ins for Batch 2 just did that much mining (it's not out of the question that they could have mined so much in such little time back then), or if they were intentionally screwing over customers. My argument in the support ticket was that it looked as if Yifu had intentionally delayed Icarus trade-in deliveries past the April/May date, sold Bitcoin from the June/July chip orders to drop the price from $250 down to $65 or so, then updated the Icarus trade-in prices to have us pay 17 BTC per trade-in. I suggested to use a more current rate as the price of BTC began to soar past $75, $100, then $125 (later hovering around $140ish) in less than a week, since I hadn't gotten any notice they had posted the trade-in info till a week later. I was now being expected to pay ~70 BTC (valued around $10k) to a company that showed it was delaying chip shipments, delaying trade-ins till they had a more favourable exchange rate, and was mining significant amounts of BTC on their customers' hardware. It was very easy to say "no" with zero response coming from them, either through the ticketing system or forums.

Yifu's response was that we were "greedy" in public posts, he never addressed the support ticket, however. From what I understand many trade-in customers never got any notification to send in BTC at all. I feel really sorry for those folks. If I would have done the trade-in, and assuming they sent me the 4 Avalons I would have gotten, I could have turned around and maybe sold them for ~40 BTC each if I did it quickly enough. They would never have mined back what I spent on them, however. ROI was abysmal as priced in BTC. I don't *really* care about the lost BTC, either that which I would have obtained had I finished the trade and resold nor that of the lost 31 BTC from mining/shipping/etc. I care more about the attitude Yifu had in regards to his customers. In the end, I've made far more than I've lost on Bitcoin mining, anyway, and I have ngzhang and xiangfu and a healthy knowledge of GPU over-clocking to thank for that.

You are expecting an ASIC manufacturer to actually communicate with the masses?! With the exception of Spondoolies, of course who are amazing with their constant updates.

Seriously, wtf is wrong with these other companies? We give them millions of dollars and they shit on us with alarming regularity. I feel like a battered wife.

If that is the case they could clarify that for everyone right?

+1

Wasn't Yifu the main culprit? If so, a Yifuless Avalon is a good thing, lol.

And some still want to trust the new Yifuless Avalon?

I read somewhere they have that against-bitcoin policy in China, maybe contacting someone from the gov in China could help you put somee pressure on them?

+1, just don't buy from them...

Did you post trust on their profiles?  These dicks should never sell anything here. 

same here! all PMs, Tickets, mails was ignored

Let us spread that behavior now, when they are going to sell their next product!
somebody talked to a lawyer?

I also sent in one Icarus, never got a reply...

At the time, BTC was worth under $80 so they said they wanted something like 17 BTC per FPGA for an ASIC miner. If I would have paid their ransom money for the new ASIC miners, it would have resulted in an even bigger loss so I just took the 31ish BTC in lost mining revenues, FPGAs, and shipping as a loss.

Sorry to necro, but did really nothing happen for the trade ins? Everyone gave up without legal action?

Sorry for your trouble. Are you pursuing a refund from Yifu now that he's trying to peddle his g2 stuff? He always seems to behave when he wants to bring new hardware to market.

Thanks for keeping the community apprised of the situation.

Edit:

Updated with the latest info. Yifu never responded to the customer service inquires I made, I've given him a negative rating and now consider the Icarus devices as stolen/lost. I never received a refund.