I've just received an email regarding Xwin to an address used solely to register with this forum.

I only ever receive two kinds of email to this address:-

1) Official forum emails

2) Phishing emails (the forum appears to have been hacked at some point in the past)

Either the forum admins are selling our email addresses or Xwin have purchased a mailing list from scammers.

I received this to an email address used solely to sign up with bitcointalk earlier today. Keep those bitcoins safe from these scamming bastards, folks!

You can't cancel what you never planned.

Dear Black Arrow employee

Once the storage deadline has passed you should refund the customer in full. They have paid for the equipment. By "disposing" of that equipment (assuming it exists at all) without permission, you are committing either theft (if the miner exists) or fraud (if it does not). Either way, unless a full refund is made you are committing a criminal offence.

You should also bear in mind that some people have invested several thousand US dollars in your product. Some of these may be "Joe Public" buyers, others will be legitimate businesses, and others may (most importantly of all) be organised criminal gangs looking at Bitcoin mining (or at least the purchase of miners and subsequent selling of mined coins) as an easy way to launder money or finance other crime.

Given the amount of people still waiting on their miners, I'm betting at least one customer falls into the latter category. What do you think happens to people who steal from these people? Do you honestly think you can run? Change your name? Change your country? Do you think they won't find you? What if the police catch you first? Do you honestly think you'll live long enough to stand trial?

They still seem to find time to delete posts on here.

Nice place 
https://goo.gl/maps/nwx45

Price match with competitors at time of shipping: FAIL
Compensation units: FAIL

I'd say the contract is yet to be honoured.

That'd be easy, he could just show us the datacenter full of customers' X3s that he's self-mining/extinguishing (delete as appropriate)

Hosting, or self-mining?

An electric heater cannot catch fire. However, it can START one. Same goes for anything else if it gets hot enough, including a badly designed miner.

Where your machines have probably already been mining for the past six months.

In other words non-X1 deliveries have stopped (again), this time (flips excuse calendar over to October) "awaiting certification".

    Edwards Place is a small block of overpriced flats, so that's only a partial address. Wonder if running a business is prohibited in the tenancy agreement.
http://goo.gl/maps/el8cP

Difficulty's stepped up by 16% in the last day or so, making any miners that now arrive even less useful.

The difficulty is now about 16x what it was in January when Black Arrow promised they'd be delivered by. Bullshitting, scamming, self-mining bastards.

All BA need to do is ship the X3 with a power supply shell that consists of the internal connector at one end and a standard ATX PSU connector at the other.

Of course that would mean they'd have to stop mining with the customers' X3s (hosted at the datacentre they announced was ready in May) and start shipping them...

Some have arrived. My X1 was ordered from BA in mid-November and finally arrived last month. First thing I did with mine is power up to test, then tear it (and its power supply) apart for YouTube. Currently running at 1100 (freaks out at 1200 and steps back to 1100 automatically) and drawing 119 watts at the wall.

At the moment (current difficulty x current electricity cost x current Bitcoin value) it's making money. Nowhere near break-even once you factor in the purchase price but at least it's mining more than it's using. Difficulty goes up? Not worth mining unless Bitcoin value goes up (or keep mining anyway in case value of mined coins subsequently goes up).

Joint third-worst along with AMT and HashFast. Only BFL and VMC score worse.

What a fucking scam-fest! I've been following the BA debacle for months whilst waiting for my miner, only just stumbled into the AMT shenanigans. I'd better get myself some popcorn...

It's yet another gamble, and it's a tricky one. You could spend $10 mining $20 worth of bitcoin, but what will that $20 worth of coin be worth in a year's time? What's a loss today could be a profit tomorrow, it's kind of a 3D gamble pitching power draw versus coins mined versus time.

I'm running mine 24/7 because I can afford to throw the money at it (119 watts 24/7 is probably on a par with smoking one cigarette a day, and I don't smoke).

I feel sorry for the guys who have put four or five figures into Sovu's grasping claws, and I doubt he's going to crawl out of his cave for any BTC conference for fear of getting a pasting or worse.

The China Export mark is apparently a misconception, what I suspect these supplies have is a counterfeit Conformité Européenne mark. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_marking#China_Export

The X1 PSU definitely has an incorrect CE mark as seen here:-

(screenshot from http://youtu.be/KtxVxqPmN7k?t=2m50s at 2:50)

I believe BA were badgering the PSU manufacturers to shrink the physical size of the PSUs which won't help matters. Here we go, 20th February weekly update (remember those?) parts 6a and 6b. http://ecointalk.net/topic/392-black-arrow-weekly-production-update/

Anybody in the US want to get in touch with Underwriters Laboratories? They take a rather dim view of logo misuse and there's a UL Registered Component mark on those power supplies. http://site.ul.com/global/eng/pages/offerings/services/programs/anticounterfeitingoperations/


ALSO of note (the deeper the rabbit hole goes) there's no FCC declaration on those power supplies, and for import to the US they appear to require one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_Declaration_of_Conformity