Quote from: mugwump on February 04, 2018, 01:48:30 PM

Alright so let's structure this a little bit:

* Their ICO was sold out within minutes. This had to be expected.
* With 60Gwei and 200,000 Gas limitation, it was pure luck whether or not your transaction would arrive on time
* If it arrived on time, then you're fine now. You'll get your ABT. If not, your funds are under Arcblock's control until they decide to refund you
* They now have way more funds than they intended to raise. This could or should have been done differently (using a smart contract for example)
* My transaction took more than 11 hours with 60Gwei and 200,000 Gas. I knew of the risk but wanted to try it anyway.
* They say that there is a minimal chance for contributions that arrived too late to still be counted. I don't expect mine to be among those so I'll now have to wait until they are done with all their calculations.
* It's possible that contributions that arrived too late will still be counted purely because they are putting a penalty on those who went over the limitation of 60Gwei and 200,000 Gas. As far as I understand, these funds are going to be refunded minus the 20% penalty, thus opening spots for pending transactions.
* The intent was to prevent a "Gas-war" where investors would pay horrendous fees just to get into the ICO on time. By putting a penalty of 20% they wanted to prevent this which of course did not work. A lot of people still went over the 60Gwei, 200,000Gas limit.
* As a consequence, Arcblock is now sitting on a ton of funds they don't need. People did pay them probably millions without getting anything back. Plus they dare to keep 20% if you went over the Gas limit. Even if they refund all the transactions that did not arrive on time, they will keep a huge amount of ETH as a penalty. I think this is unacceptable.

I can totally understand the motivation behind this 20% penalty. ICOs have become really hard to get into. But I don't think that a company should be in a position to penalize people in that way. They just don't have the right to do so. I'm not criticising the project itself, just the ICO and this is yet another example for future ICOs to look at and do better.

I recommend the Arcblock team to be as transparent as possible about this and state exact numbers of how much funds they collected, how much will be refunded and how much they will keep as a penalty. And then maybe consider just giving people these 20% back. It's just not okay to keep it if it's not needed for the project itself.

1. Sort out who didn't follow the rules.

2. Initiate a refund.

3. Find someone who played by the rules, and transfer tokens to him.

4. Repeat thousands of times.

Do you think this comes for free? 20% is too much, but who else should pay the people who does this' salary if not the people who abused the rules and gave them this huge amount of extra work? To state an example they should actually keep all your funds, convert them to fiat, and donate them to a NPO.