I am happy to hear the news from Yifu. I feel the tone of this community has a pretty poor attitude towards the engineers that make it all possible, and the people that work hard creating companies doing what they love (which is not sitting around making sure mining rigs have power). I know BFL took a really long time to develop their product, but Avalon has their product developed.
All this talk about making roi... maybe you should power them with an excersice bike instead of paying for overpriced middle America electricity fees. You would have enough time to calm down and make some happy molecules in your brains (these are important). Also if you plan on making real money(over 50k/yr min) by mining you might want to start looking for a real job again, I mine to support the bitcoin currency and to generate a littlte bit of it for myself, I also work 2 jobs and create electronics as a revenue generating hobby.
You must have understood the risk involved when you spent the money on chips... hell their wasn't even a working board design (other than avalons) when I spent my money. You must have seen what went down with BFL before you spent money on pre order chips from Avalon... Im glad I talked my buddy out of dropping $20k on boards from terrahash (dropped $2k instead, put 15k in a hedge and a little liquid). Did you not understand the rise in difficulty that was going to occur? I also didn't put all my eggs in one basket... if you are looking at bitcoin mining hardware as an investment then you should really diversify so you don't get burned.
I just feel the attitude in this room is a bit dark and could use some light. Especially seeing how none of this technology even existed a year ago and you are all complaining how screwed you are to not have the latest and greatest toys.
Don't give us your holier-than-thou BS - "I don't care if I make profit, I am in this for the betterment of the bitcoin network". Total crap. The betterment of the bitcoin network results from making profit - profit is what is guaranteeing efficiency and reliability in the network. Your view actually prevents healthy growth of the network, because you aren't demanding that its infrastructure improve.
The rise in difficulty IS understood, which is why getting these products on time is necessary. When we don't get the products on time, that hurts Bitcoin, not just us because good BTC investment money went after bad. You obviously do not understand economics in general, and definitely don't understand how it applies to the growth of Bitcoin.
It is also a bad idea to share the tracking number because....as has been evident before Kano. Someone out there has been doing social engineering to steal Avalons...so a couple multiples of "ten thousand(s)" of chips would make a great DHL target.
Taking a non-descript screen cap of the claimed customs hold is enough as long as certain critical elements are blurred out so the social engineering can't take place.
Keep in mind they now have Yifu and the teams personal info, so pretending to be them is possible. Especially if there is a PDF out in the wild with all the team members personal addresses and details.
What??? They can't give the tracking numbers to those who they are shipping to? Yet another dumb statement from the sympathizers.
On another note, we don't know whether this "We have been targeted" story is even true, this could be just a emotional diversion to make us feel sorry for the Avalon team and cushion the blow.
You want them to give out tracking numbers so anyone with some skill can re-route the package while still in transit? Are you stupid or what?