I’m posting this today because EVERYONE who is interested in this company deserves to know. You’ve been sold an obsolete promise and your deposit is now forfeited to this ‘joke’ of a company.
As you know we are nearing the end of July with no shipping date. We have previously said we believe transparency, even in the case of something negative like a delay, is something customers must know and will only help our company’s reputation in the long run. As such we must unfortunately announce that we have had technical issues during tape-out which has caused us to have to do some portion of the ASIC layout one more time thus delaying the chip fabrication. Again, in the interest of transparency, we could have not only started this second tape-out sooner but also fast tracked it and corrected this issue if we were allowed funds from PayPal which they have decided to hold until delivery. We have had to rely on other sources of funding for this which we have achieved, so we are fully funded and tape-out is mid-way now there can be no more delay. In parallel to the tape-out process we have already started our fabrication of the PCB’s and enclosures, which we will display in our next update.
In the interest of there being no confusion, July while it was our genuine expectation, is not mentioned in our terms. As a result of this we have decided to announce shipping to be September as per our terms, this is something we have learnt we should have done from the start so we can avoid expectations and hopefully only announce good news. We know this news is unpleasant for all rest assured this includes ourselves, we have always tried to do right by you but may have perhaps over promised when we should have been more conservative all we can do now is learn from this mistake.
What is the takeaway from this? They misled the public with exaggerated expectations (in January when these units were offered they had promised a window between Q2 and Q3 all in hopes of generating enough pre-order funding to proceed with production.)
Furthermore:
We would also like to take this opportunity to clarify a complaint among some customers with regards to our cancellation policy. We have been very clear and open with our terms of order, it was released as a news update, it is easily available on our website and you are urged to view it on the product page before you order. As far as if it contradicts with consumer laws; this is not possible as such regulations only apply to consumer products. We can assure you that our legal matters are dealt with by a leading law firm in the UK and our terms of order are completely legal; they were typed up by solicitors who specialize in this area of law. All sales are legally classed as business purchases for many reasons, one being that the hardware we are selling can only be used for mining cryptocurrencies which is legally a business practice and a taxable activity according to HMRC (http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/briefs/vat/brief0914.htm).
We also want to remind you we have increased the hash rate of these devices from what we were obligated to deliver by 10 fold at our expense, our terms only state minimum 25 Mh/s. We saw we had the capability do it and made a decision to put customers first in order to gain their loyalty for future batches. We must also remind you of the benefits of being a batch 1 customer, you will receive free shipping for batch 2 and a 10% discount off any future batch of your choice (we hope to avoid pre-orders for future batches).
Kind Regards,
Mohammed Akram
Is an outright ‘Slap To the Face’ Dear Mr. Akram (and associates), why on earth would you put this in a newsletter? The problem with your reasoning is that you should have required a Business resale number, a VAT number or at minimum, should have restricted the purchase to businesses only. Furthermore, it is poor business practice to apply the mechanics of standard economics to cryptocurrency hardware manufacturing. If you are a casual reader who came here to learn about scrypt-asics, please be aware that there are many different on-the-shelf models available for about one thousand dollars that can provide you with about 50 MH of mining power, about 1.65 LTC or $9.76 usd per day as of writing this.
Difficulty is still expected to climb as more and more will be turning on their own branded scrypt asics for the first time. Telling me that I’ve ‘earned a discount on shipping and 10x’ the hashrate for being patient is by all means s-t-u-p-i-d. Seeing how the process has worked now for two different types of asic hardware, I see that acis vendors will start small and release a 1 chip version, then they will incrementally ramp up. Also, your company did a bang-up job promoting scrypt asics, only for other vendors to come in and sell to all the demand you’ve generated. Your company has likely fueled the pocketbooks of ZeusAsic, Gridseed, and RockMiner. Good Job.
Till Next Time,
Frankenmint
