I'll mention that some statements in the press conflict with
what I've written here, so you may have to do your own research to clarify
these points.
I'll begin by saying I am not a lawyer.
This is my understanding of how companies are supposed to be run:
Companies have three assets - retained profits, equity and debts.
Equity is an investment at risk, when you invest you know you may lose it all.
Retained profits belong to the Company, and the Company is owned by
the shareholders, ie, equity investors. If the Company has no equity it
is technically insolvent and should cease trading. If it continues to trade
while insolvent, it may be breaking Company law.
That arrangement protects creditors, because the creditors should get
their money back minus any legal costs of bankruptcy. Under Bankruptcy
law some Creditors are more equal than others, ie a queue forms to collect
on their debt.
Topic: Official BITMINE CoinCraft series 28nm ASIC miners thread - page 5. (Read 565240 times)
Finally some closure on this issue, with Bitmine's bankruptcy.
Those guys were well out of their depth in attempting to take this company forward,
and as I had warned on the unofficial Bitmine thread, from the end of May 2014 when
refunds ceased, bankruptcy was a possible outcome. I'll quote Upton Sinclair:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
My experience in dealing with these guys suggests that Bitmine kept paying salaries
until all the money was gone.
It's time to take some time to figure out what is left of Bitmine, and how to maximise
any returns to people like myself who pre-ordered miners. Maybe we need a new thread,
or just restart the old "Refunds" thread.
Those guys were well out of their depth in attempting to take this company forward,
and as I had warned on the unofficial Bitmine thread, from the end of May 2014 when
refunds ceased, bankruptcy was a possible outcome. I'll quote Upton Sinclair:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
My experience in dealing with these guys suggests that Bitmine kept paying salaries
until all the money was gone.
It's time to take some time to figure out what is left of Bitmine, and how to maximise
any returns to people like myself who pre-ordered miners. Maybe we need a new thread,
or just restart the old "Refunds" thread.
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-mining-hardware-producer-bitmine-declares-bankruptcy/
Bitmine AG, the Swiss Bitcoin mining hardware producer which CCN recently reported was facing multiple lawsuits in regards to undelivered hardware and broken promises, has declared bankruptcy in the Swiss city of Bellinzona.
In a lengthy note posted to their website, Bitmine explained their insolvency, complete with a breakdown of costs versus income. Cold comfort for the customers who never received their hardware at all, of course, and in most countries, bankruptcy means that all creditors are basically out of luck. In the case of a company taking pre-orders, it seems that’s really what the customers were: creditors, investing their money in a company which turned out to be risky and shifty.
Bitmine AG, the Swiss Bitcoin mining hardware producer which CCN recently reported was facing multiple lawsuits in regards to undelivered hardware and broken promises, has declared bankruptcy in the Swiss city of Bellinzona.
In a lengthy note posted to their website, Bitmine explained their insolvency, complete with a breakdown of costs versus income. Cold comfort for the customers who never received their hardware at all, of course, and in most countries, bankruptcy means that all creditors are basically out of luck. In the case of a company taking pre-orders, it seems that’s really what the customers were: creditors, investing their money in a company which turned out to be risky and shifty.
Quote
The second most asked question is whether we were a scam or not.
When you promise 0.3W/GH and end up with 1W/GH that IS a scam!
Also paying 8M$ to Innosilicon who also stole their IP for this efficiency is very very dumb! GJ!
I HAVE TOTALLY AGREE WITH RoadStress. He is absolutely right. Just because they put a letter up informing everyone of their bankruptcy that doesn't make them not a scam operation. As a matter fact, if they knew all this information ahead of time why didn't they tell their customers about it....Oh I know, because they didn't give a shit. Just like an other scam operation they put up some fancy numbers and explain everything like they weren't at fault. They even invested in Mt. Gox....How stupid can you be? I mean really didn't you do any research on anything you set out to do. Not only was it a scam operation from day one but it was ran by morons who didn't have any business knowledge. I'm not saying I'm better or anything but come on have a little more acumen before setting out to do something like this. Obviously I would have started by not doing business with a Chinese company. What did you think was going to happen? I truly feel bad for all the other individuals who lost their money too like myself. This has put a burden on all of us and now if you try to justify Bitcoin people will throw Mt. Gox or Bitmine in your face that they can't trust this technology. Can you blame them?
Quote
The second most asked question is whether we were a scam or not.
When you promise 0.3W/GH and end up with 1W/GH that IS a scam!
Also paying 8M$ to Innosilicon who also stole their IP for this efficiency is very very dumb! GJ!
TL;DR
- Bitmine is bankrupt. "The accounts, assets and all company documents are now in hands of the Swiss justice and will be under inspection and investigation."
- Chinese company Innosilicon stole their ASIC intellectual property and re-sold the components to the Chinese market.
- Innosilicon delivered junk components and twisted their wrists into signing contracts, took 65% of their money.
- Bitmine successfully delivered 2000/3500 units.
- If you have not received a refund, your money is lost.
...and off they went... 
FYI Daveb0 is referencing the bitmine.ch website, which has been taken offline and replaced with a bankruptcy statement:
Quote
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
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
Fuck. What next?
...and off they went...
Yop the show is over.
Scammers win for now.
Maybe some of us can get 100$ back at maximum now that Bitmine is officially going bankrupt.
just one week before my final trial with the judge... At least they won't be scamming under this company name anymore.
I'll keep those who have contacted me informed this week about the procedure to get a debt certificate from the judge.
But this certificate will be just a reminder of this sad story, I highly doubt they gonna settle any debts now.
Also, I'm planning a trip to Ticino to see if I can find those bastards to have a little talk.
If anyone would like to join, feel free to contact me via pm.
Gonna see with my lawyer if there is anything to do to sue the other company they used to buy the mining facility in Island. But Switzerland seems to be a good country to scam, close a company and then start another without having to deal with the consequence. I'm very disappointed about how slow the justice was acting about all this mess.
Sorry for the bad news Guys.
All the best to you all
Jey
...and off they went...
dangit, now here is my second would i find someone to buy it for more then 200 on ebay or here in the buyers area? just wanna get something more then 200 was maybe 400-600
There is 1pc 1THs on ebay which has the highest bid of 240€ at the moment and one that has a starting price of 455,50€ and no bids so I think it is not possible to get 400-600 for it on eBay
Have never looked at the price level here in the market area
dangit, now here is my second would i find someone to buy it for more then 200 on ebay or here in the buyers area? just wanna get something more then 200 was maybe 400-600
Hey might be out of place but how much you guys think these are worth now? Like I got a 8 card rig unit for 900$. How much would one go now?
Not much... maybe somebody could pay ~$200 for it.
Hey might be out of place but how much you guys think these are worth now? Like I got a 8 card rig unit for 900$. How much would one go now?
Got some Mail from Bellinzona for Mr. L. Richard Alexander.
Can you please contact me so we can deal with it.
Can't find your email in my PM messages.
Can you please contact me so we can deal with it.
Can't find your email in my PM messages.
FYI Zefir left Bitmine's sinking boat.
Sounds like the beginning of the end.
Sounds like the beginning of the end.
info ?
source ?
http://www.moneyhouse.ch/en/u/v/ws/bitmine_ag_CH-501.3.017.896-7.htm
autsch...
thx...
FYI Zefir left Bitmine's sinking boat.
Sounds like the beginning of the end.
Sounds like the beginning of the end.
info ?
source ?
http://www.moneyhouse.ch/en/u/v/ws/bitmine_ag_CH-501.3.017.896-7.htm
FYI Zefir left Bitmine's sinking boat.
Sounds like the beginning of the end.
Sounds like the beginning of the end.
info ?
source ?
Any news?
FYI Zefir left Bitmine's sinking boat.
Sounds like the beginning of the end.
Sounds like the beginning of the end.
So now I've send a Pm to you... hope it goes right this time... 
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