BlokForge did this the right way and I don't feel they have anything to apologize for. I'm not saying this because I was one of the lucky ones. I'm saying it because it was the most fair way to do it and all the suggestions being bounced around would have caused things to go the same or worse.
(Warn people that you expect high traffic when the sale starts) - Assuming BF knew that their website would be suddenly slammed with thousands of would-be buyers, what purpose does warning everyone about it serve? The end result is the same and we all knew that everyone was going to be on there trying to order anyways.
(Advise How Many Units are available) - What is gained by knowing how many units they have available? If you knew there were less than 100, what would you have done differently? Scarcity breeds more interest, not less.
(Limit to 1 per person) - I like that they set a limit. I can't say I like it being as low as one miner, though. A more appropriate method of limiting order sizes would be to related it to the total number of miners available. If there are few to go around, then make an appropriate limit. Consider also that BF creates more work for themselves because the smaller limit increases the number of orders to ship, payments to handle/receive, and increases the number of potential shipping issues.
THANK YOU FOR THE LIMIT, BLOKFORGE! Seriously. That really helps those of us that do not have tens of thousands of dollars to throw around or the ability to write a script to automatically order dozens of units as soon as they're available).
(Make a Lottery/Queue System) - I think the lottery and the queue are both not-great ideas. There will be rumors that BlokForge is picking friends or family or that they're not randomizing the selection in the correct way. I've never known any other seller (in any private industry/business) to do something similar. And you're not thinking about just how many people would be in that lottery...
For the most part, all of us were on equal footing tonight. All of us were frantically trying to F5 our way to the "Submit Order" screen. And you were only competing with those that were actually online and trying to get the order. If there was a lottery/queue, then just think about how many people would just be adding themselves to the list. Now you're competing against 5,000 or 10,000... They already limited it to 2 per customer, which created a better chance than any of us has ever had trying to catch an order through Canaan.io directly.
I'm not trying to pander, but I honestly don't know how anyone could have expected BlokForge to handle that better. Honestly, I'm surprised their website didn't completely crash, since I doubt the servers were set-up for that much traffic. We are in a new world of BTC Mining. Even if you didn't get any tonight, you at least had a chance.
We agree, do not see the reason for any announcement of quantities, it was a small batch, we are not even sure on quantities until we get shipment notifications from Canaan, we have 10x more on order than what is produced, and there is 100x more demand than supply, nature of the industry.
Lottery is not really viable, if we had a one or two left we randomly might grab someone from the forum to offer it to that missed out, best we can do.
Our server is running 64vcpu with 128GB memory, not a shabby server by any means, just when you have 3000 people trying to checkout within minutes the prioritization is milliseconds, beyond any servers ability to handle with no hiccup.
Canaan's intention is to get as many miners spread across the globe as possible to build on the decentralization of the network, that is ours as well, we do not want to prioritize any "large buyer" no matter what they try to offer us in terms of personal bribes. We would rather see one of these in 100 peoples garages, than 100 in a data center somewhere or being resold on the market.
We will have a few tweaks to the checkout process for the next time around, but mainly issue was just sold out too fast, site said still in stock when they were not due to a few hung up orders that buyers were having payment issues, so technically it was sold out, just didnt relay that it was fast enough as people were still checking out.
We obviously could have raised the price much higher and slowed sales down, but in the end that is not the best for the community as a whole.