Hi,
Have thought about the refunds and my decision is a no go. Of course, if Avalon doesn't give me an answer soon, i will have to listen to the majority, but for now i wouldn't want to back out right 2 meters before the finish line.. I repeat for the sake of those who did't read the above posts: Avalon is shipping orders made in June.. This means our first batch should already be shipped.
One of my ideas to compensate for the lost time here is to build the miners, but instead of sending them, keep them and host them (for free) at one of my places for a few months, making sure you recover your investment (you've got to love the electricity fees in Ro). After everybody has recovered his/her own personal investmens, either continue hosting them for 10% of the profits or ship them to the given delivery addresses.
This idea was in the back of my brain for a long time now, creating a mining organization based on shares / contracts and offering bitcoin for bitcoin, hassle-free, like AsicMiner does.
First of all, i really appreciate your effort and i agree with your point of view, even if i wouldn't trust BitSyncom has shipped our chips already (only orders from April has been satisfied since now): if they did, shouldn't we have a tracking number already?
Also, an hosting service would be really great, but are you considering all the costs you will have to cover for renting, cooling, electricity and all the time you will have to spend to setup and everything else? And the setup for an interface for the miners?
Really, hosting for free is possible for you? Maybe a little fee could cover your costs, like the fees of a pool, and we could still recover the investment.