Some points to consider before accusing us of scam:
1. We stopped taking orders as soon as we had enough orders to account for the chips we ordered. If we were a scam, we would have continued taking orders and could have easily raised double the money we did.
2. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on components, heat sinks, cases, boards, cables. For people saying that its "only a few resistors", look at the BOM provided by BkkCoins. It says components cost around $23 for a K16. And this does not include the heat sinks (~$14), boards etc. For each K16, the components including the heat sink, board, power cables, etc. cost us around $45. And we were prepared to assemble around 5,000 K16s (for 80,000 chips). There goes $250,000. Why 80,000 chips? We had ordered 40,000 of our own and had at least 4 other parties who were going to get their boards assembled from us. But guess what? Tired of the delays from Yifu, they all ended up getting a refund from Avalon.
3. We spent so much time and effort trying to source the really hard to get components. You can go read the Klondike thread where everyone is discussing the shortage of the PICs, the IR3895s, and others. But we have all the components, we even overpaid to get some of them. Show me a scammer who would do that.
4. For the components that even we could not get, we invested a lot of time to search for alternates. For example, the Power Inductor 38L361C was not available anywhere, so we instead bought SPM10040T-R36M170. But the latter was not pin compatible with the former. So we ended up changing the circuit board. I will publish the updated KiCad files. Would a scammer go through all this trouble? Anyone with half a brain can answer this.
If we were a scam, we would have disappeared on June 20th.
Why going out of business?
I am really sick and tired of all the scam accusations. I appreciate all the negative criticism that the community does, resulting in catching scams in early stages in order to protect the newer members of the community. But baseless scam accusations from day one have taken their toll on our company. The FUD spread by a few members (along with the delay from Yifu) lead to a lot of refund requests. The result of which was that, if we continued with the project, we would have been left with inventory worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in our hands. And it would have been almost impossible to sell it at a price where we could even break even. Even if nobody asked for a refund, we would still have been left with about $125,000 worth of useless components (read point 4 above). But with about half of our customers asking for a refund, we would be stuck with another $350,000 worth of inventory that we couldn't have sold for more than $150,000, putting us under red for over $300,000. I am sorry, but I am not running a charity. It made much more sense to ask for a refund from Yifu and pay back as much as possible, without going into debt.
Why only a 50% refund?
With people who paid with PayPal taking a 100% refund, it leaves a lesser share for everyone else. I am sorry, but that's how it is. We do not want to be owing hundreds of thousands to PayPal. Also, with some customers contacting our bank with fraud accusations, Chase has shut down our bank accounts. In my opinion they were just looking for an excuse. They have already contacted us in the past, asking for more information about our business, just because we were a "Bitcoin related business."
Patience is a virtue
Now, you can either be content with the turnout of the whole fiasco and stop attacking me personally, and wait for your refunds. Or, you continue accusing me of being a scammer, and continue publishing my addresses publicly and tarnishing my image. Its up to you. Some of you have already done a lot of irreparable damage, not just to me but to all the TerraHash customers. And please remember, that there is only so much that I can take. If pushed into a corner, I will defend myself.
Meanwhile, at the ranch...
and probably Bar was too.....