Email sent to Black Arrow Customers(meaning Minersource will be affected as well):
Dear Xxxxxx,
We have to inform you that our schedule to manufacture and assemble the system has been disrupted and we are unable to make delivery of the Batch 1 Minion ASIC chip on the initial scheduled date (end of February). We are now expecting to dispatch all Batch 1 orders on 1st of May 2014.
Please be re-assured we are confident that we have tried our best to accomplish our initial ambitious targets. However, we came to the conclusion that it is in the best interest of our customers to delay shipping in order to ensure that the product provides the best-possible user experience.
Without this delay we would have achieved 1.5W/Ghash which would have meant that our chip would not have been competitive at all.
We have now finalized the design process using our newly improved code and will start manufacturing the chip (tape out) in the next few days.
We are happy to announce that Black Arrow Softwares products remain on target for being the best in their class for power consumption. We confirm that our latest improved design has the following technical specifications:
·0.75w/Ghash on TT corner @ 25C which is expected to run at 120Ghash/sec.
·SS corner will be 0.6w/ghash and will run at 100Ghash.
·A further underclocking and underpower should be possible and should yield 80Ghash @ 0.5W/ghash. However, please note that this is not guaranteed to work stable.
Please note, that a further push for improvement in the optimization process would have guaranteed further delays for at least 1-2 months.
It is no secret to us that the Bitcoin mining process is proving to be more and more difficult every day. To compensate our loyal customer for the unforeseen delay of in delivering our miners for batch 1, we are happy to offer free extra hashing power which consists of 25% of your purchased hashing power from our Rent-Some-Minions cloud program for 4 months.
The account for the tape-out has been settled in full and we are confident that the delivery will be completed shortly.
We are taking all the necessary measures and positive actions to expedite delivery to you as soon possible and we are confident that we have the resources to be successful.
Please note:
·We estimate that the delivery for the Batch1 will coincide with the delivery of the Batch2
·The delivery of Batch2 remains unchanged
·The one-off offer presented above is open to the customers who placed orders for Batch1
Sincerely,
The Black Arrow Software Team
So basically Black Arrow website customers will get free hashing power for 4 months, while Minersource customers could potentially get a hot turd in a blanket and a smack in the dick.
We're awaiting word from Bobsag3(owner of Minersource) who met with Black Arrow officials to see proper compensation and/or proper refund processing.
You can see the drama unfold on the main Black Arrow thread here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=294197.1600Nice one for this, much appreciated.
Shame I had to find out about this on the forum (as well as from Black Arrow) as opposed to being informed by Minersource, especially as they told me a few weeks ago that my order was ready to go in February.
Hot turds in blankets sounds about right... It's just fucking grand isn't it. I seem to think that I justified preorders a couple of months back, and I remember reading horror stories about Butterfly Labs. Looks like my pessimism is here to stay.
Roll on May for the next push-back
