If you want to spend your money to hear from someone, maybe you should try a phone sex experience.

Since your estrogen levels are on the level of someone in menopause, I'm going to guess that the you're referring to your ginormous pair of man-titties.

Right, except they weren't bargaining. They were in a binding auction, and last time I checked, an auction doesn't automatically get advanced to the maximum amount that a bidder is "willing to pay".

Obviously no one physically forced anyone's hand, but Garr certainly invalidated StarSoccer's previous bid, by bidding with his alternate ID. Thus, StarSoccer had no other choice but to increment his own bid, if he wanted to win the auction. Clearly Garr had no intention of winning his own auction, and he knew that if by placing his bid, he was forcing all bidders to bid at a new price point. I wasn't involved here, so I'll chalk this up to semantics, but we should really be asking the bidders themselves if they felt like they were forced into submitting higher bids.

I will full-heatedly dispute that this is in any way similar to a reserve price. Reserves are always set before bidding begins, before interest in the item can be gauged. Additionally, in any respectable auction system, the reserve price can not move, like Garr had the ability to do with his Werner account. He was giving everyone the impression that there was broader market interest in the item. This is what we call creating a bidding frenzy.

The whole premise is that it didn't go above anyone's maximum. Let's pretend that StarSoccer was willing to bid BTC65. He was winning at BTC61. Garr comes along when there were no other bidders and bids BTC62, forcing StarSoccer to bid BTC63 (a difference of BTC2, had Garr not interfered).

Just for some perspective, Bernie Madoff made these quotes to New York Magazine in 2011:

“I made a lot of money for my clients”
“I’m not the kind of person I’m being portrayed as.”
“Does anybody want to hear that I had a successful business and did all these wonderful things for the industry? And got all these awards? And so did my family? I did all of this during the legitimate years. No. You don’t read any of that.”
“[The fraud] was a nightmare for me. It was only a nightmare for me. It’s horrible. When I say nightmare, imagine carrying this secret. Look, imagine going home every night not being able to tell your wife, living with this ax over your head, not telling your sons, my brother, seeing them every day in the business and not being able to confide in them.”
“I was always able to rationalize [the fraud]… Look, I tried to give moneys back to my individual clients when I realized it was impossible to get myself out. I tried to return funds to my friends, moneys to the smaller clients. They wouldn’t take it back … "

Fixed it for you. Do you think Garr would have come forward if Inaba (of all people) hadn't called him out?

Quite honestly, it is quite impressive what you've been able to do for your age - but that's a double sided sword. You've built up a pretty solid operation, but it's also shocking that someone your age would have already developed the self-serving business practices that you've shown. It's not just about bidding up those auctions. You've displayed a hypocritical attitude the whole time you were dealing with BFL, and you've outright lied and misled this entire forum by denying your actions and insinuating that Josh had your hands tied. The coverup is much worse than the actual offense (from my POV, but it's not my coins that you scammed). You came out and admitted your mistakes (congratulations) but you've had plenty of opportunities so far to do so (how about during your first "appology"?). Towards the end, the evidence was pretty damning - the admission was pretty much the only hand you had left to play. If anything, this demonstrates that Garr has a habit of being conniving, and then quickly apologizing when he's caught. Would anyone here hire you to flip burgers if that meant you would even have a line of sight to the cash register? "I only emptied the tip jar to supplement the dividends I need to pay to Cognitive!!! It was my fiduciary duty!!!"

On the bright side, you've probably impressed BFL quite a bit by showing there are no limits to where you will stoop - maybe you could hit them up for a summer internship?

Real question is, why is Garr planning on attending college this fall anyway? After this thread is done, any employer doing a background check on Garrett Ian McDonald is going to come across this site and know that the little shit is untrustworthy. Unless North Idaho is a farmer's college, I'd say use that tuition money to make everyone on here hole and spend the rest on a good, solid name change. May I suggest Ian Garrett McLovin?

If you were busy, how do you know you could have been one of the first 10? You can breathe easy, I don't think anyone is selling a preorder for 22K.

No way in hell you'd be able to expand your pre-order to include more units. Place a new order.

You jumped the gun a bit when you assumed that this is a working board. All they have done is assembled a K16 prototype and mounted the avalon chips. The board itself still needs to be tested, and is still completely useless without firmware and drivers (not to mention the missing power connectors and capacitor). By Terrahash's own comments, they need ~ 2 weeks to get a working prototype.

Where is this working prototype you speak of? Seems that Terrahash would also like to get a look at this working prototype, since they've clearly never seen it before:

Isn't it though?

You do realize that Terrahash  doesn't have "actual machine in hand" (as you put it), and you are completely mitigating their risk for their chip order, right? So you have no qualms about Terrahash selling a preorder for something they don't yet have, but you're kicking and screaming when someone else tries to pull the same thing? ::palmface::

Let's get something straight here. No one is pushing anyone's order back. Terrahash was very clear at the beginning that orders would start being placed at 9AM Pacific. Your spot in line is where it is, and the only reason there are orders in front of you is because you were slow to the punch. Seriously, if someone managed to place 10 separate orders before you, are you really surprised you weren't fast enough to get into the first batch?

Yes, a pretty dumb question. If you had just searched this thread for 'PCI' or 'heatsink', the first results would have answered your question. I usually don't spoon feed, but since I'm trying to get my post count up:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=198489.msg2500643#msg2500643
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=198489.msg2479035#msg2479035

Hold the phone. Who made you the spokesperson for all paying customers? I am sure that everyone paying by international wire appreciates the order priority as is. Point 2, changing the order priority after they've already started taking orders is ridiculous for you to even suggest, and just a thinly veiled attempt to move your position up a few spots. Be happy with your place in line and forget about it. If others placed orders, they are free to do with them as they wish (selling them or not).

And for what it's worth, Paypal in the US gives you 45 days to file a claim.

TH T's and C's - Despite what was said on this board, there is clearly no mention of refunds or pre-order cancellations

Terms & Conditions

We provide a 2 year warranty on all our products. If there is a defect, or a product is dead on arrival, please contact us. You will have to ship the product back to us, and we will try to repair it within a reasonable time. In case we can’t repair it, we will send you a similar or a higher capacity product.

In case of a pre-order, we can not make an accurate prediction when we will be able to ship you the product. Any dates given on the order page are our best estimates only. Shipping dates depend upon when we receive the chips from Avalon. Once we have the chips, we will start shipping the orders within 2 weeks. We won’t be responsible for any delays in receiving chips from Avalon.

We accept Bitcoins, PayPal and Wire Transfer as payment.

Some of our products may require additional components and/or an advanced knowledge of electronics. Please make sure you know how to use our products before ordering, we will not provide any support other than any downloadable drivers/software available publicly on our website.

Please make sure you enter the correct address while ordering. We are not responsible for incorrectly entered addresses in case a package is lost.

So, I'm rooting for you guys. I really am. What kept me from ordering is I don't think there's anything to claim with Paypal or with Amex if TH doesn't deliver in 30 days. Their T's & C's mention nothing about immediate delivery. In fact, they say that delivery is highly dependent on Avalon, and that they will have 2 weeks to start shipping after Avalon does. So if 30 days rolls around and Avalon hasn't shipped chips yet, is that basis to file a claim with Paypal/Amex?