This is the story behind the two little Bitcoin miners on display at the Bitcoin Embassy in Amsterdam.

Jannes and Hillbrand, two long time members of the Amsterdam Bitcoin community purchased these Bitcoin miners somewhere in 2013 in the hopes they would be able to start mining Bitcoin soon. Both Jannes and Hill had experience mining Litecoins using their computer’s GPU so when they read the press release about these compact BlackArrow, Prospero (really?) X1 miners they were sold and parted with their hard-earned crypto to get on the pre-order list.

Then nothing… Delivery times slipped over and over again, and in the mean time the Bitcoin network difficulty went through the roof, rendering these two Bitcoin miners useless even if they would ever get delivered. Later it turned out that the people who thought they purchased a product where in fact funding the development for Black Arrow. To make matters worse, when BlackArrow finally started shipping their long overdue orders, online communities were flooded with complaints from clients that their units arrived either broken, almost broken or performing far under the advertised speed.

TIP: Don’t trust a (Bitcoin) company without a track record. Stay away from ‘pre-ordering’ products and never trust Black Arrow (they make Bitcoin wallets nowadays) with a single Satoshi. 🙂

About a year later, quite a number of clients were still waiting for their units and the ones that shipped were plagued by software and hardware issues. Instead of addressing the problems, the manufacturer, BlackArrow Software responded by censoring their online support forum . Black Arrow software never bothered to reply to our numerous support tickets even though both of these units should still be under warranty at time of writing, neither did they respond to our requests for comment.

The BlackArrow Prospero X1 miners on display in the Bitcoin Embassy crashed after only 2 weeks of running at a lower than advertised rate, the miner on the right died about a week later. Jannes donated his miner to MrBitcoin and the second miner was donated to the Bitcoin Embassy. Martijn Wismeijer turned both of these miners into TweetBeam units for the Bitcoin Embassy so their tiny displays now display the latest tweets of the Bitcoin Twitterati in The Netherlands

If you are a full member of the Bitcoin Embassy Amsterdam your name should be on the TweetBeamer! To activate, just send your Twitter ID(s) via the Benefits Tab in the My Embassy section on this site.

The two repurposed miners are on display at the Bitcoin Embassy Amsterdam, Zeedijk 43, 1012AR Amsterdam but if your are not near the Bitcoin Embassy, view our TweetBeam online.

Bitcoin TweetBeam