+1

This is a different situation from what that was intended for.

I don't want to come off as someone who's never pleased and I appreciate that you are willing to make a vote now, but what you're doing now still isn't the best. For one, anyone can vote on this poll regardless of whether or not they have an order. For two, the vote should be focused solely on one thing, does the person want his chips or not, and once you know who wants to keep chips, you can ask them what they want to do with them.
I strongly recommend doing exactly what the other two group buys have been doing: send a PM to everyone involved asking them how many chips they want to keep and where to send the refund if applicable, then count the replies. I know this is more time consuming for you, but it's pretty much the only way of getting accurate results, you'll know exactly how many chips are wanted, as opposed to this poll, where someone with 1000 chips matters as much as someone with 16.

Oh no, you seemed to misunderstand me. I'll just be blunt, and please don't confuse this with rudeness, that's not my intention:
The most important bit I'm talking about here is the group buy. Not your hosting idea, not your assembly service. The group buy is a bunch of people who trusted you with their money to purchase chips. It's not up to you to decide what to do with that group buy, it's up to the people who took part, your task is carrying out what they want. If, out of the 2 group buys, 50% of the people want their money back instead of waiting for the chips, then you should request a refund from BitSyncom for one of the group buys and divide the money you get back amongst the people who want a refund.
The fact that you only added .003BTC/chip to the price, at points even less than that, is very nice of you, but the risk was yours to take, you expected to get compensated for your efforts from the assembly (for which, mind you, you could still keep some of the money for, others are doing the same as well, and thus getting more compensation for the effort you put in). So all things considered, unless you managed funds really really badly, you are getting compensated for your time, maybe not as well as you'd hoped, but that's still something.
If you have some idealistic reasons for going on and not even asking people what they want, e.g. "We started this so let's finish it" or "We need to help bitcoin grow!", then you have to put those aside real fast, because this is other people's money you're talking about. You can do what you want with your own money, but others should have a right to decide. If you ask everyone and it turns out only some 10% wants a refund, then I'll shut up and go with it, but you're saying you don't have to ask people what they want because you know better. That's a horrible thing to even think, nevermind actually doing it.

Again, the assembly is different thing entirely that you have to handle differently, and it's not what I'm talking about here.

The hosting option, considering the circumstances, is a good idea, but I'd much rather have my money back than to wait for BitSyncom to ship. You don't have any idea when the chips are going to arrive. Neither does any of us, and neither does BitSyncom by the looks of it. But at this point, when we can be sure that they missed their planned time of delivery by almost 100%, the odds of this not being profitable are high enough to make me want to get a refund over investing more into it just to possibly reach ROI and some minor profit beyond that, if I get lucky.

The miners only reach ROI if you are very optimistic about future events. Price will not go below 100, difficulty increase won't speed up further, and most importantly, the miners will be up and running in a month.

What I don't see is why you dismiss the option of refunding chip costs and the shipping fees. It's not like it costs you anything, you're not refunding the components you bought, you're not refunding any surplus you might've gotten for the chips. If there are people who want their miners despite the not exactly stellar odds, and it seems that there are, you can still do what others did and only ask for refund for one of the two orders, or combine orders with other group buys.
Really, the very least you could do is ask everyone what they want and act accordingly, since you're managing a group buy that's kind of what you should do as well.

TH, announce the date and time when you open up orders very clearly and at least a few days ahead. That way most if not all people get the same chance.

On subject of pricing things in BTC, the thing is that you are looking at it backwards. It's not the machine that gets cheaper or more expensive as the price moves around, it's that the worth of your bitcoins purchased at a given point changes. If you want to play around with that, what you do is buy BTC and then later sell it if and when it goes up, and then you'll have more money - doing this will yield the exact same results as them pricing things in BTC. That being said I'm neither for or against the BTC-based pricing, it could easily backfire on the customers but it's impossible to predict anything.

Those cases are all nice and shiny, but why would anyone want to spend 12BTC on one? At current prices that's over $1300, you can make a case of your own for about a tenth of that. Surely it looks better than anything you throw together at home, but $1.3k merely for looks? I just don't understand the point of this.

Terrahash isn't developing their own miner though, they're just providing boards and case+PSU combos for Avalon chips. If they deliver later than KnC for any other reason than BitSyncom not delivering the chips on time, that's a huge failure on their part; not that I expect them to be slower, since, again, they're just putting chips on boards.

The point of the FPGA was to prove that they can develop a product quickly and produce it in large quantities. The first they did actually achieve, the latter they did not; I'm not particularly upset that they aren't going to deliver the FPGA since it really was useless. Whether or not I order is entirely dependent on whether my bank covers the purchase, if they do, there isn't really much to lose, and as such I don't really see what's everyone getting upset about either.

Well that's kind of what they should've planned for since the beginning, that said I really doubt that they will respect these new order IDs over the old ones, they were really set on that idea for whatever reason.

Are they going to ship Saturn units all the same as well? They're essentially the same ASIC but with half the modules and half the size, and half the price.

Indeed, it has a few flaws. I suppose they want to open orders sometime around the open days.

Well if you want to see shady business practices there's always plenty around that's much worse than any of this regarding KnCMiner. What we need to do is push them to accept credit card payments, because that's not something they seem to plan to be doing, even though it's the only payment method offering some protection.

Is the Mars unit gone from their pages? It's not showing up on my end.
https://www.kncminer.com/categories/miners

Are you applying for the second Sherlock Holmes position, after Phinnaeus?

I know about those two, but neither of those will have as big of an impact as BFL would if they actually fulfilled a large portion of their orders. Of course saying that that's highly unlikely is an understatement.

I don't really expect ASICs to increase confidence though, if anything, the relative stability of the btc price might do it. Of course, if nothing horrible happens in the coming months to bitcoin, it's definitely not going to drop too much either way.

I'd assume about 200-400k are from group buys and another 150k from companies that plan to sell assembled units with a 200% profit margin.
Isn't it irrelevant though? We know that there are 760k chips being made and added to the network around August, that's all that matters when making projections. What is much more of an issue is whether BFL ships and to what ends; additionally if there are any other manufacturers/groups working in the background that add a lot of units.
I tried calculating ROI with 100 and 200m difficulty, that's where I expect it to be around October; but then it's all worthless anyway, it's pretty much impossible to project ROI since the price is going up and down all the time and the smallest news leave a huge impact. You can make estimates of difficulty but by the time KnCMiner ships the BTC price could be anywhere between $.1 and $600, and this is true all the same after you receive the miner, but it has an even worse effect; if BTC crashes then, you have no possibility of getting your money back.

If they don't accept credit cards directly, which as it looks like they don't and won't, I'm not giving them a penny. Or more exactly, I would give them a reasonable amount to reserve my order and pay the rest once they actually show that they are trustworthy and have an ASIC; but they're not doing that either. Paypal is an all around horrible payment method.

They seem like they don't have a single spare moment to plan their next one or two steps, and most decisions are made and implemented in a big hurry, but then they go ahead and say that they actually do have the time to offer extra customer care to those who wish to transfer their pre-order queue positions and manually verify it, even though not only are they not forced to do this, not only do people not expect this from them, many are actually against it. I see their point, but it's not a good one, and they really should be rather dealing with one of the dozens of issues they have on their hands instead of dicking around with this sort of petty shit.
I'm not shouting scam here, to me they just seem.. well, lacking a better word, dense. That, or once again, really bad at PR, saying one thing and doing another, I actually hope this is the case.

"soon"

Oh, yes, but most people don't have the $7k (or $9k with VAT) to actually register the order. Indeed the first units will probably be worth at least twice their price. If they actually manage to ship a large amount though, they will quickly lose value.
Edit, on top of that, the credit card only covers you for 120 days if I interpreted what was posted earlier right. If they start accepting payments this month, that will still barely cover the current estimated shipping date, if you don't have an order in the first 500, then it won't cover it entirely. That's assuming they won't be late, which is just unrealistic, no matter how often they claim they won't be; it's just a matter of "how much".