Question, does anyone else think that waiting on getting the Avalon Gen2 chips is going to end up the same as this fiasco? There was a serious break down in the supply chain here, breaking down at several levels. Just because they come out with a new generation of chips this is suddenly fixed?
To each their own here but if you just had chip orders only, without a doubt the best move is a refund, but if you already paid for assembly is it really the right thing to do and just take a large loss with a refund instead of just over paying for a under powered product? I mean you could at least try and mine with it for a longer period of time and eventually get paid back while they worked on a firmware fix, or just try and get another board and possibly just populate it with the non hashing chips (that is just a speculation I don't know if the design would allow for that or not).
By the time Avalon Gen2 chip orders would get fulfilled it might even be a lost cause by then at the current rate of increase of difficulty. Its all speculation, the price of BTC may shot up enough to account for the loss or not. Just my 2 cents.
Demand escrow for any future purchases from BitSyncom, it apparently worked with loose chips purchased from BFL. I've read they're shipping loose chips even though they're no where near close to being done with their backlog.
That is the best for protection on the buyer's and seller's side as far as a scam on either side of the transaction. Only issue is we were funding the purchase of equipment up front, that was the deal we all agreed to entering into this group buy, thus the name "group buy" .
But I do see your point this could have all been handled in a complex escrow with Yifu as well, but hindsight is 20/20 on that. This is just a situation were there is no real good way out of, everyone walks away with a loss, its just a matter of how you want to handle recouping it. I am more on Steamboat's side on this but people need to get paid for their refunds in a prompt manner. I am sure he is going through a liquidation process which is causing a delay in payments of refunds. That should really be communicated out to everyone though.