Bitmain has been hit by a $5m lawsuit
Crypto mining hardware firm Bitmain faces a legal threat…
Cryptocurrency mining giant Bitmain has found itself on the receiving end of a new lawsuit. It’s just to add to the challenges it’s already facing in the cryptocurrency mining market, as demand softens for its Antminer collection of mining products.
The lawsuit has been filed in California, and it’s a class action suit that’s demanding over $5m in damages.
The heart of the case is an allegation that Bitmain was benefitting from the cryptocurrency mining machines and equipment it was selling, before customers had fully got to grips with them.
The case suggests that Bitmain was getting the benefit of new customers’ machines that were mining coins at full power “for the benefit of itself rather than its customers who purchase the products”. That’s as per the court documents that were filed in the North California court.
Apparently, over the last year or two, Bitmain has changed the default configuration of its newly sold machines. Whereas previously they were initially low power with no default account in place to send mined coins to, that has reportedly changed. As such, it’s now said that the new machines start in full power mode, and default to sending coins to Bitmain’s account. It’s also been said that the configuration period is very tricky, taking some time to reconfigure the account to benefit the end customer. Thus, those new default settings as a consequence tend to stay in place for longer.
The class action case brings together over 100,000 individuals, and you can read the full document filings here.
Bitmain as of yet hasn’t commented on the case at the time of writing, and nothing, it should be noted, has been proven one why or the other.
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