IF this is indeed what is happening (as has been suspected of other companies as well) the only way is to prove it. This way they can be held to account. Honestly the company that plays straight in that regard is the one that asks for your wallet receive address and requests a worker config during the order process. That would demonstrate they are testing your hardware and are prepping it for shipping. Its also a little bit of free hosting in a way. But yea I gotta agree. I think its pretty widespread that companies use the hardware to mine until they ship it out. Might be easier to find out if we know the wallet addresses they use and then trace it along the blockchain.
Probably explains why so many of them are late to deliver too. Greed really messes with people.
Also explains why AMT would offer up 20
BTC to meet Phin. Probably up to their ears in
BTC that should be ours.
Strange AMT would claim "We're ASIC Manufacturer's, Not miners!" (end of their youtube video) but then be throwing
BTC around like so. I would imagine they spent or cashed out
BTC payments already to buy hardware with actually currency. If they could of bought some things with
BTC, well then they would've already spent it on hardware, especially when
BTC was valued higher.
I'm sure the "We're not miners!" part was added just to preemptively defuse that as a possibility. Personally, I think it was just a defensive statement, but also a 'tell' that they really ARE mining.
AMT can offer up their wallet address that they have been using to test these rigs on, and we can look at that. I doubt they would though. This also wouldn't tell us much if they simply used another wallet to mine the profits into after testing.
These aren't facts, just my assumptions and open air brain storming.
one thing i did notice, the tplink firmware flash and the hexminer software both have addresses in them, but both of those come from Technobit. The addresses being there was part of the basis for my assumption, but its a false accusation if those are the only facts being presented.
I do remember seeing addresses in my 80GH rig, before i flashed it, and Jim told me those were to test the unit.
So, which is the truth? The rig obviously wasn't tested beyond "Yup, it has lights. ship it" In fact, it didnt even have all of the lights flashing that it should have, if it had been assembled correctly. Still can't see how a rig that has 2 boards, ships with 1 not hashing, and the other having a non-hashing chip.
who knows.... and just about to the "who cares" point.
one more thing. my rig brings in .008btc/day if i mine btc directly. seeing as i didnt have it for the first month of my 6 month ROI period, that equates to about $732 at current difficulty. I think it was getting .01/day at the previous diff. which still would have left me about $500 short of just making my investment back. I think when i calculated it would have been somewhere between $900 and $1000, over the 6 month period.