I have to agree with this. The lies they told and then turning the customer into the competition. Shameless and pityful.
Mmmm .... Lurked on this one for a while ... and have respect for Dogie with his excellent teardowns ... but KNC surely lost all trust some time ago?
If not ... why not?
Maybe because for anyone who isn't sucking down BS from Avenger and friends it looks like aside from doing a crappy job of boxing products before shipping and having a rather ruthless approach to replacing the damaged gear, KNC has pretty much done everything they said they would, which puts them in rather rare company when it comes to mining equipment.
They made it pretty clear early on that they were going to be building a cloud hashing facility, and that Neptune would probably be their last consumer-grade mining product. Despite the constant bitching in this thread there is exactly zero data to show that they violated their miner protection guarantee during the period in which it was supposed to be relevant. Avenger hammers on endlessly about pseudo-facts like this and then just in the past day has rather hilariously ignored that the pie chart showed KNC with 5% of network hash power prior to the spike as Neptunes were being powered on and shipped. That was actually what prompted me to post.
If you pre-ordered a Neptune thinking there was not going to be a huge difficulty rise then you were delusional, since at the time that orders first opened it looked as if Cointerra and HashFast were starting to ship in volume. That they both performed below expectations and the difficulty rise happened anyway thanks to cheaper chicom stuff and various dedicated mining operations (to include KNC's) instead doesn't change the fact that buying a Neptune was a bet that difficulty wouldn't rise too much by the time they shipped. You could argue the Q1/Q2 thing but when someone tells you they'll ship somewhere in a six month range you'd be an idiot to put all your chips on it being early in that range. If you chose not to refund then you made your bed and can now lie in it. I see exactly nothing untrustworthy about a situation in which people are unhappy with the outcome of a gamble they freely engaged.
The people who have complained about refunds seem to either be ephemeral trolls or to simply be unable to figure out how to provide the correct information for an international wire transfer. As this is a situation that could be resolved with a phone call or a short trip to their bank I don't see how this is a trust issue for KNC.
It sounds like they finally found someone who can box things up based on Elenelen's report that the Neptune modules were well packed.
Arguably with 3.3Th/s of performance they have exceeded their threshhold by 10%, and power consumption seems to have come in below the level they stated, so while it's more a motto than anything else, they did in fact over-deliver.
Mine shipped today BTW (I had a late CA order#), and my plan remains the same. Play with it for a while and then probably sell it on eBay if it looks like they're selling for enough. Same for the second one that will show up sometime later. I may well end up with net negative monopoly money but c'est la vie. I was the one who rolled the dice, not KNC - and I didn't play with money that I could not afford to lose. While I have it, I'm hoping for a decent owners thread since this thread is a train wreck of useless posts by people who neither own anything nor have ever ordered anything from KNC.
Oh one last thing, I think the bitching about the IRS ruling is idiotic. I mean idiotic in the technical sense because it actually opens up some interesting options. If you have to pay capital gains on Bitcoin then the cost basis for the BTC would be the miner plus the electricity. If you mine less BTC than the USD equivalent of your cost basis you've taken a capital loss, which offsets any capital gains in other areas (such investments in more conventional equities such as stocks). If you achieve positive ROI then you'd owe taxes at the capital gains rate which should be lower than your income tax rate. Or maybe you try another approach and deduct costs for your "hobby business", which under IRS rules means you can deduct costs up to the amount of revenue the hobby business generated, so you could probably deduct the cost of the miner as an unreimbursed business expense up to the USD-equivalent value of the bitcoins you mined. Since you'd be getting a deduction against your bracket tax rate rather than the lower capital gains rate, this might work out, and the B2B terms of the sales contract from KNC actually reinforce this if questioned by the IRS - you clearly bought it under a B2B arrangement. Alternately, it is reasonable to straight line depreciate mining hardware to 0 over a very short period, as they are essentially worthless within a year. One could think of this as an extremely expensive machine tool head that cannot be resharpened.
