reposted under the Doctrine of Fair Use

Add another paying customer banned from their forums...  I made the mistake of asking some hard (but polite, I might add) questions, only to get my account and IP banned - good times.

Around 6 weeks ago, Payments@Alpha-T agreed to downgrade my 250MH device deposit to a 50MH full payment, plus £250.01 refund.


I provided them with the information required to make a SWIFT transfer to my bank account. 
I certainly haven't received a penny from them yet - but no shock there.

Welcome to the club, soon there will be more banned customers from the forum than there are those that are not :p

You can't reason with someone who is unreasonable or incapable of suffering logic. It's in their email blasts from 2013, on up through March, at which point they got really sketchy about timelines, details, prototypes, even pictures.

They had pictures of the controller board. Then it disappeared, and said they had to work on the design more (despite it being finished?).

Maybe the answer lies in the tapeout news. Around the same time they claimed they would have their chips shipped to them (end of May) is around the time Drexcel cut ties with them on the internet. Could this mean that they did indeed send the chips and wanted to wash their hands of the deal? In which case, what's going on with Alpha? Maybe they do have some gear and are working on the 2-12 week process of getting it certified.

All speculation, and that's thanks to their 100% transparency promise of providing detailed information, where they've done nothing but used smoke and mirrors, and proper grammar in emails.

er did they then 'ban him?"

Searing (can't tell banned from alpha forums...)

Timeline:

https://twitter.com/UkAlpha

Interesting how chips capacity power usage changed trough the time.

And the GEM - first delivery indication (they were convinced FPGA would do the job I believe):

Alpha Technology @UkAlpha  ·  Oct 24
We are ~2 months from product launch. Testing and verifying at the moment.

For those who don't know about the Internet Archive you should check it out. https://archive.org/web/

I find it interesting that this domain used to belong to a private investigation firm based in Asia. You can see those web pages too, just go back to 2004-2005. The irony is kind of uncanny.

This website, The Way Back Machine, doesn't update every time Alpha-T updates their web pages, it's just how often their archive bot crawled the pages.
The site caches the entire World Wide Web  and saves it for public access. Maybe you can find some pages to use as evidence in your upcoming court battle. You can also get a good laugh by going back to see what big name websites used to look like in the late 1990’s. Looks childish compared to today. I digress...

I started Scrypt mining in early December of 2013. I personally leveraged the hill using my credit cards to put together a 75Mh/s GPU farm. I spent about $70k setting things up. I ran it for 6 months and pulled in about $70k worth of BTC that was converted to fiat as quickly as it was coming in. The farm was liquidated for $20k when I literally pulled the plug about 2 months ago. Total gain at best was $20k for 6 months of hard work. I consider myself lucky, it could have turned out so much worse.  I was so close to buying into Alpha-T, a couple of my friends went in deep. They are in the same county and are running a 90Mhs GPU farm; they put money down for at least 10 of their (at the time) 25Mh/s units. Last I heard they found a deep pocketed investor who put in even more money when the faster speeds and (the convenient) openings for Batch 1 were announced. I'm sure they are way more than $100k in the hole for deposits, forget about paying off the balance.

I would have put money in for sure if I wasn’t already maxed out on every credit line I could get a hold of. For that reason and that reason alone I’m sitting on the side lines watching this play out.

I know how devastating this may be for most of you. I really feel like there are two camps here. Those that have accepted the truth and those that refuse to. It's been interesting reading all of these posts. I wonder how many of these user accounts are controlled by Alpha-T? Some of their supporters will blindly follow them over a cliff, others need to believe in them because the truth is to painful to accept. Those people unwittingly help keep this ball rolling by finding any thing that they can latch on to to show that good people like themselves aren’t victims, It’s the company’s fault for slow shipping, delays in manufacturing, etc. etc. etc...

Folks, there is nothing coming to show for your hard earned money except for a flood of emotions to process before you can see things clearly for what they really are.

I'm here to tell you that Alpha-T is in big trouble. At best they had good intentions but they've strayed from the morally correct path and have gone to the dark side folks. Your money is paying for their homes, cars, fancy dinners, vacations, etc... They are going to dodge and delay until they are checkmated. It will be years before any of them are sent to prison. They are too busy covering their tracks and putting together their defense to ever worry about getting their company back on track. The company is a loss, and it's clear they've cut that loss with the current attitude towards their customers. Why should they be nice and forthcoming? They have no product to sell and If they don't stop taking payments they have no hope of avoiding criminal indictments.

This is what I think happened, in roughly this order as well:

- A couple of accountants decided that they were going to lead the charge to develop custom hardware for Scrypt mining. Knowing they have no experience but decide they’ll figure it out on the fly. Dollar signs are dancing in their heads as they see easy money for the taking due to the arms race for the fastest mining hardware. Knowing this is the perfect opportunity to take advantage of pre-orders, watching how other companies had gotten away with it during the BTC ASIC arms race. The plan became more about how to get those dollars than making miners. 

- They hire an IT guy to help get things going. This person is not qualified for the task but gives it his best because of the promise of a big paycheck. (they needed a large staff, not a guy)

- They announce their GPGPU as their plan, then change their minds. Their first plan was to essentially build custom PCI-E graphics cards loaded up with multiple GPU chips.

- Then they announce they can do better, and ditch the GPGPU design and will now make actual ASIC chips, not heavy duty GPGPUs.

- They establish a relationship with Drexel against Drexel’s better judgment. They too are seeing $$$ signs and don’t want to leave it on the table. Drexel agrees to work with them and goes as far as posting a vague official announcement on Drexel’s website. Probably at the request of Alpha-T, and possibly contingent upon their future working relationship.

- Without any thing to show accept for a lot of lofty promises, and an announcement on Drexel’s web site, the money starts rolling in faster than they dreamed.

- They again announce they can do better and change their plans. This pattern is repeated several more times. They keep announcing changes or improvements to essentially a non existing product. The community rallies behind them and even the most skeptical start to think that maybe this is for real. 

- For a moment it appears that a couple of accountants might actually be able to deliver on their grandiose plans to change the landscape of GPU mining literally overnight. .

- Drexel finds it difficult to work with Alpha-T because they have no experience, don’t understand the industry speak, or the pitfalls of trying to go run before you crawl. The constant changes throw the timeline completely off track. They probably started butting heads with Drexel because they are taking short cuts. Drexel is telling them to, measure twice cut once. They continue to take short cuts and when it doesn’t work they blame Drexel. Drexel realizes they are dealing with a bunch of unprofessional clowns and sees the writing on the wall. Drexel ends their relationship with Alpha-T  for breach of contract. They remove all traces of Alpha-T from their website. Any product that was made is now tied up in litigation. Alpha-T either can’t pay the bill for the chips, or the chips don’t work and Alpha-T refuses to bite the bullet and eat the loss so that a new batch can be put into production. I’m guessing there are some big egos at Alpha-T, they can’t take constructive criticism, or accept responsibility for anything. It’s always some one else’s fault.

- Alpha-T starts to implode from the inside out. There is no one left to run the ship. Anyone with half a brain sees this as a toxic mess. Instead of focusing on making mining rigs Alpha-T goes into full damage control mode. Clever payment schemes, by making customers wait beyond the chargeback date, switching payment processors and closing out accounts to ensure the money only flows one way, in not out.

- At this stage Alpha-T is probably no more than just the Akram brothers. Falling back on the one thing they actually can do, accounting work, your money is being moved around like it’s a shell game. They will ensure it will take years to unravel the threads and prove criminal intent.

- Alpha-T is written off as a loss in the minds of the Akram brothers. They no longer provide meaningful updates, refunds, real customer support, or anything else that a company must have in order to survive. They know it’s over, do you?

I'd love to be wrong here, but the writing is on the wall for those who care to read it. Think about it folks, they can't produce any picture of anything. Not even a partially assembled prototype missing the key component, the chips. I can't understand why they don't at least try and give us a picture. It would buy them more time and give hope to those who refuse to believe they've been scammed. We would see that they are actually using your money to attempt to make a product. No photo, no product = no good!

What’s left to do at this point? I know many of you want your mining rigs, it’s too late to expect the mining rig to pay for itself. If you put down anymore money that would increase your losses, even if you ran the hardware for a year. Remember you can’t go by today’s numbers to make your ROI calculations. By the time the machines ship out and are turned on the combined added hash rate will cause the difficulty to sky rocket. If the prices hold stable but the difficulty triples by the time you get your mining rig online, is there any hope of it ever paying itself off?

I know there will be some people who agree and others who disagree with my opinions. Either way, I hope these bastards don’t get away with this. I’d love for nothing more than to see all of these mining rigs ship out. However the chances of that happening are slim to none – and slim just left the building.

This is not gonna happen. Within 3 months + some hope™ factor time they will be able to buy 50 & 250 MH rigs from other manufacturers for the fraction of the amounts people entrusted them. Monkey business.

Deeper into the dodo … a family's plea to Fiaz from the Alpha-T forum https://forum.alpha-t.net/index.php?topic=770.25 (Screen shots of a working unit)


If The all Sovereign can't get an update out of Fiaz, nothing can ...

(Note: republished in part under the Fair Use Doctrine as a matter of public interest)