Bitcoin Forum

I see many loan requests on the various P2P lending sites for upgrades to cloud mining contracts.  Some of them quite large and many of them getting funded.  In the short term these look like good opportunities for both parties but a look at the fundamentals of this strategy show how it falls apart relatively quickly.

1. It costs about 3 times as much per GH/s for sha 256 or MH/s for scrypt  as it does to buy a physical machine to do the work.  This effectively puts your break even (NOT RETURN ON INVESTMENT!) around 200 days or more for these cloud contracts.

2. Your breakeven point is around 200 days and not return on investment because you do not have any underlying value with the contract (unless it is a gawmining hashlet that you can resell).  With a machine your return on investment is helped somewhat by owning the machine at the end of the mining period.

3.  With every increase in difficulty your investment pays less and less.  Sometimes as much as 20% less as is the case with bitcoin.  This difficulty is reset often and at the present time only goes up.  Altcoin is a little better with the difficulty moving sideways for awhile until the next wave of machines hits the market.

4. Price volatility also diminishes the value of what you are mining.  Especially with the recent fall of bitcoin.

5. At first the cloud contracts pay enough to enable you to keep up with your loans and make you think you are doing well but inevitably as the days wear on your return will be less and

less, eventually going to near 0.  Those new lifetime hashlets will not produce anything within a year and their value will be 0 as the hashrate they represent becomes more and more obsolete.

6. This scenario leads a borrower to always posting new loan requests and upgrading their cloud capacity to try to keep up with the diminishing returns but they will really never make any money.  Only the cloud companies will.

7. Once they get to the point of not being able to get enough loans or provide their own capital, the whole house of cards will crumble. 

8. This is why it is very important to lenders and borrowers to be sure of their strategy and hopefully move more to having physical miners that can pay for themselves before they are totally obsolete.

Starflyer, where did you buy your cloud mining contract? It is very important to use only good and reputable cloud mining providers. With some random and unknown company you can be in wrong hands. Not to mention they can scam you.

This is probably the biggest concern, but most cloud mining companies have plans to combat this in various ways.  LTCGear will "multiply" your shares to combat difficulty.  GAW/Zen has just recently increased their SHA-256 hashlets output by 50% (10GH/s to 15GH/s).  So the threat of difficulty eating into ROI is there, but some of the cloud mining companies are doing right by their customers.  Lots of cloud hashers reinvest to increase their position and to offset perceived difficulty changes.

There are strategies to combat difficulty, but no one really knows if they will pan out.  There are plenty of stories on both sides of the clould mining game, and I don't think we've had enough time to say for certain whether it's good or bad overall.

Point taken.  I guess I just wanted to point out some underlying mechanics of cloud mining to give food for thought.  In the long run I guess we will see how it all shakes out.  It just perturbs me when one particular company states that their miners "never become obsolete" or "always are up to date" when the only thing that really matters is hash rate.

If this is in reference to GAW/ZenCloud Hashlets, those phrases only really apply to one type... the Prime.  The claim that it "never becomes obsolete", or is "always up to date" refers to several aspects.  The Prime can switch between SHA-256 or Scrypt mining.  You can choose your pool from the small selection.  And they have all these weird add-ons like "double dipping" or "rocket boost", which allow you to mine two pools at once or increase hash rate temporarily, respectively.  I personally don't think the price of the Prime (currently at around $50) is worth those add-ons... but at least GAW/Zen are helping the Prime owners recoup some of their investment.

Those folks who got in early with ZenCloud when the Primes were around $16 are really making their ROI pretty soon with all the add-ons.  Plus, as you acknowledged, they get to sell them back for 80% of their current value... so they've already made their ROI if they want to cash out.

I've got a few MH/s scrypt mining hashlets on GAW/ZenCloud for full disclosure.  I like the service, and I'm keeping a close eye on everything.  I had to underclock the Antminer S1 I have at home this week because it was no longer paying for the electricity it was consuming.  I never made enough with the S1 to trade up to something better for the house.

But services like LTCGear bring you ROI in under 40 day's if you invest wisely and you can sell the shares whenever you want effectivly giving you ROI after like 2 or 3 weeks.
Insane..

And they have shares multplication to give you extra shares based on the difficulty increase every 45 days  ;)

Very true, sir. I currently have around 14Mh/s on there, and it fetches a cool 2.85LTC a week, not bad considering I payed 0.16 BTC for them and have ROI at the end of this week.

I can't even beleve it, and what makes it even better, is that the LTC/BTC ratio is something like 0.012 BTC/LTC and normally is around 0.022 so almost doubling the BTC also :P
Dark time's are over, this is a true goldmine and I am wondering how this guy makes money of it.

I got the vouchers off ebay for CEX.IO -- I know maybe it was a silly thing to do.  :( The way I learn is I jump right into things. But I only invested $10 so there's no big loss if it doesn't work out. I figured I might as well just keep them in there and let it do it's thing for awhile.

I agree with some of your points, but I think others are less valid. In particular 2 - owning the machine is of virtually zero benefit in my view. The rate of improvement in technology means that your machine is so quickly redundant that it has no salvage value by the time you have been using it for a short period. This is supported by your point 3 too.

Also, this is definitely not a zero sum game. Cloud mining service providers AND investors can win if the bitcoin price is high enough relative to input costs. A zero sum game is one where the net effect is that no none wins, certainty not true here.

The truth with mining at current prices and with the massive investment from so many is that the little guy will struggle from here. You need massive scale to make this work so that your costs relative to mining power are as small as humanly possible. The investors who put $20m into BitFury know this.

My 4 week ROI disagrees

buying contracts that you cannot sell is the worst choice in my opinion.

If you look at CEX you will se however that the market price of the shares is way aboven ROI. There are a few reasons for it. One is the hope for BTC price movements making minig more profitable. Another one is the price fluctuation (read speculation). You can buy shares and re-sell them with profit and keep the mined coins.

Pfft! Their customers just want to re-mint old dirty bitcoin scrap into shiny new blocks without any history!

I'm rapidly heading towards ROI so I have to disagree.

I've also mined at home and I don't miss the heat, noise, random issues and the high electricity bill.

Really? which cloud mining did you purchase?

The future of mining lies much more in the "cloud" than in home mining.

In theory, a well designed cloud mining system can provide both hardware and power at lower than residential rates.

This pooling of buy power should be enought to give both you and the managing company a profit from mining - if anyone makes profit from mining that is -


The current state of affairs seems to suggest that cloud mining is more expensive than home mining, as some people are willing to pay a premium for the conveniance of the service.
Many cloudmining providers take advantage of this and turn around HUGE profits.

Like to know also.

Thanks.

Which cloud mining did you bought that is heading towards ROI?

I'm with PBMining and several months ago when i signed up it looked like i would ROI in two months.  Payments have taken a dive and get smaller each week.  I mentioned this on their thread and people said you just had to buy more Hashes to make up for the increase in difficulty!!!!

Since when has increasing your investment while returns get smaller been a good idea? ???

I recently joined PBMining and according the first two payouts I must reinvest between 10-15% monthly to keep it. Even though, ROI is about 160 days.

I don't know how hard the difficulty will increase from now on but it seems pretty good to me!

Are you guys having similar results?

Would you care to show how you worked that out?  With 60Ghz my first payouts were around the .02 mark while my latest have been about .0063 Btc.  Big difference.

Where did you get the idea that ROI is 160 days for pbmining? It should be never...

It really depends on how quickly difficulty increases.

I just bought 1 TH/S on PBMining to test the waters.  If it grows faster than 35%/month, then my ROI is basically never.  If it grows slower than 35%, then it's less than a year.  It's a gamble, but one I'm willing to take, since I've exhausted all electricity available to me at the moment.

Until a legitimate hardware upgrade opportunity comes up (that would significantly improve my current .7W/GHS), I'm testing out cloud mining options.

I started march and i´m deeeeep in positive ROI with PBMining :)

Not correct. There are cloud mining services that offer GH/s for decent rates with fast ROI periods, like Hashie.co (https://hashie.co) - starting from $4.51 per 10 GH :)

-Sahra

hashie.co is too new, high risk..

It depends on the company. I currently use 4 different cloud mining companies, there are all profitable ATM but LTCgear is absolutely the best. Have been with them since May and have reached 500% ROI so far.
Take a look at their review in my signature if you are interested.

Other then that, GAW s quite nice too but they have been reducing their payouts recently, I do not know whether this is going to continue.

yes cloud mining mainly blows

completely agree.

Cloud mining is like paying rent. It's lost money. If the owners of cloud mining services could make more not renting their equipment then of course they would. But they make more from peasants thinking they can make a fortune. Common sense people.

I agree that the future of mining lies in the "cloud". But I have a question. I purchased a 250GH miner with GAW Miners and I want to know if this was a smart move.

Yeah, but do they do Btc?

Yeah most of them do BTC..

cloud miners will close up shop eventually and run with your bitcoins, so never invest into cloud mining, its a ponzi.

Why wouldn't it be?  You get a year of free hosting at GAW/Zen for your hardware miner, and if you haven't ROI'ed in a year, you can just convert it to Hashlets and start paying "rent".  Profit!

With flat diff mining is actually profitable now depending on the price of the equipment or shares. What do you think?

you meant the ones offering contracts or all of them?

Is there a list of reputable cloud mining providers? There are so many companies these days that offer cloud mining services.

You select the service as bulk the better. Currently, It's about time. We will know soon.

You can select cex.io or eobot , they do good things.

cex.io and pbmining is both good.. But I prefer pbmining..

There is no easy money to be made in mining; if you are very skilled you can make money out of it and if you are cloudmining it may be even harder because you have the risks of losing it all.

I don't get posts like these. All the negative comments about cloud mining, when its been proved that LTCgear and GAW ROI. Are the negative comments hardware sellers? If you are reading this and thinking about cloud mining, don't listen to posts like this. Research the companies and do the math. You will miss the boat otherwise. Cloud mining is the future, the small home mining ventures are being pushed out.

What is the price you need to buy a Ghs today with average maintenance fees? 0.001?

you do the computation lets see if you wont complain about it.

It is very hard to ROI in BTC with cloud mining but it is possible especially if you get referrals  ;)

Most of the Cloudmining returns happen over time, and only then they turn out to be profitable. Most shutdown before that. But, investing and having referrals is definitely a good way to be profitable.

As someone said before "there is no easy money to be made in mining" anymore. As there are no clear winners in the cloud mining race yet some companies are leading the charts. Maybe you won't be rich after investing in cloud mining contract right away but testing waters would be nice. As you won't lose anything by doing so.

Cex.io was great to get referrals because the site is simple and beautiful

Cloudminr offers 7 to 9% on referrals which can add up very quickly; you get a free 100Ghs for a week just to try the service ;)

As the mining industry evolves, I think taht cloud mining will become a better optin compared to hardware mining, and it will prove to be profitable for the company as well as the users.

For me cloudmining was (and still is)  the better option :)

Always depends what you are paying electric , which country you life, how many $$$ to have to spend on hardware.

And if you are not too tech savy i can be stressy handling the hardwareminers. Also there is heat and noise.

great

I think your right about everything but the biggest issue is the fees. Cloud mining has become the Ponzi scheme that bitcoin naysayers have dreamed of. This because virtual miners cost more/Gigahash than a physical miner plus service providers are taking between 50 and 90% of your earnings. Leaving you with noting at all. They are getting away with this because there is no regulation in the system.

Nobody has to invest with them. There is heavy regulation in the banking sector but they still rip everyone off.
If you do your own calculations and think you can profit you made your own choice, didn't you?

It has already started happening, because its hard for people to run rigs at their houses and do all the maintainence. Cloudmining is profitable as well, specially if its in countries with cheaper electricity options.

That's kind of a snappy comment for agreeing with you.

Now you should know that maintenance fees where pretty low when I got started in cloud mining. I didn't mind the high cost/GHS because I had to consider not just how much energy home miners where using but the energy used to keep them cool. The heat was filling my entire house. So the cost was still worth it. It didn't become a ponzi scheme until the maintenance fee went so high that people wasn't making any money.

You seem to be implying that because I had a choice that its my fault if I get scammed. That's not exactly true. Did everybody make a bad choice when bitcoin exchange sites claimed they lost millions in bitcoins due to a transaction bug But later we found out that the bug didn't cause that kind of problem? The exchanges just tried to take peoples money. Is it investors fault when Mt Gox tried to take millions of dollars worth of bitcoins when they went down? No. You simply just can say I had a choice like that means something. We all had a choice. I did the math. Many of us did the math. Still things don't go as planed.

Yes you can get ripped off anywhere but not by a ponzi scheme which is a specific type of scam and very illegal in the US. I'm not sure about anywhere else and I believe that CEX.io is either British or Canadian. Is it a persons fault for wanting to make a buck? No. advised or ill-advised, research or no research, its not an investors fault for getting scammed because the scammer is breaking laws. When a ponzi scheme arises we do need regulations to crack down. Nothing can stay unregulated forever.

A ponzi scheme is one which when you make an investment the returns form that investment doesn't really exist. The bitcoin isnt an ponzi scheme because it really exist. the argument is over weather or it its actually money. Cloud mining in it self isn't a ponzi scheme but when the purchased mining power produces bitcoins but it evaporates due to fees then it becomes a ponzi scheme. So the fault doesn't lye with an investor making the choice to invest. You don't see a ponzi scheme coming until its here.

It didn't intend to be snappy. Scams have to be fought and even if there were signs that it was a shady operation, people who get scammed didn't deserve it.
Regulation by the State usually means higher costs and more corruption

bitcoincloudservice.com is a good one for me

Cloudminr sells at 0.0011/GHS and no maintenance costs, what is pbmining rate? You have to register to know the price

mh..i dont see the 0.0011/GHS..can you tell me how you get the price xD

0.0013/GHS if you buy less than 2000GHS
0.0011/GHS if you buy 2000GHS or more

It's in the FAQ (https://cloudminr.io/faq/) or in the BUY HASHRATE page after you registered

I lost alot with Physical Hardware.

I have earned over 3 times my investment back thanks to cloud mining (Mostly ltcgear).

Started with 2 btc, I now have over 2,000 Mhs.

Good Game.

Yeah, you can. Certainly with the vast majority of these cloudmining ponzi's.

Everyone here is focused on ROI, and no one seems to care if these companies are legit. The majority of cloudmining websites dont do any mining whatsoever. They pay out old customers via coinmixers from revenue that comes from recruiting new ones. No surprise, to keep the game going they usually emphasize referrals to make you do their dirty PR work.

Now why would you care if these companies are mining or not? All that matters is they pay out, right? Wrong.

If the company (or more aptly: scammer) isnt mining, then its impossible on average for the investors to profit. Early investors might, but only at the expense of later ones.  If there are no miners, then there is nothing to generate those profits. So dont be fooled by low prices or high payouts. Ponzi miners will drop prices as low they need to keep the game going.

And dont think because its been running for 10 months, that it has to be legit either. Unlike traditional ponzi's, mining ponzi's dont risk a bank run. You cant get your money out if you begin worrying, so they can run a fairly long time. Take PBmining, one of the most obvious ponzi schemes. Several posters here are promoting them, and at least some seem to think  they are legit because they have been paying since early this year. Here is the reality: based on their own stats, in the past month they sold ~1.5 (non existent) PH worth of contracts. Good for around ~2200 BTC. During that same month they paid around 1600 BTC in dividends. A net profit of  ~600 BTC or nearly a 1/4 of a million dollar. Just for running a website. SO of course they are still paying out, not because they are legit, but because they are maximizing their profits: they are still getting far more revenue from new victims than they are paying out.

Of course that cant last. At some point the new sales will slow while the owed dividends keep going up. Once the latter becomes bigger than the former, guess what the anonymous operator will do? Yep,  the same thing pirate, bitcoin-trader and countless other (mining) ponzi's before did. They go *POOF*

http://www.quickmeme.com/img/4f/4f15ca326d661fd71177bcd909ec6023cc4b1688aee152ebb815e15a8fc380f8.jpg

Be smart. Think before you invest. Dont trust *anyone* with a referral link in his signature. Let this be a guide:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=860400.0

BTW, to all the referral link whores that are about to say Im full of it, that I have no proof etc,  Im taking bets. I will double your ponzi revenue through escrow if Im wrong. I will win the principal if Im right and within say 12 months, said ponzi collapsed.

I accept your bet. Whats the price, and who is the escrow
Cloud Mining provider in this case is Ltcgear.

(My thought is that the Escrow will vanish before Chris)(But I have to think this way, For I have invested more than I can afford to lose)

PS: Not a referral whore, my signature is for slightly alternative means. Just saying lol.

Im not taking bets against ltcgear. See the link I provided, I do think they are very suspicious, but not enough so that I declare them a ponzi with confidence.

Here are a few I will take bets against:

  
CoIntellect.com      
coinsoncloud.eu      
cloudmining.website
PBmining.com        
cloudminr.io        
grmining.com

For cloudmining.website, it is always 0.001 BTC/Ghs, whatever u buy.

0.001/GHS is a good price but Cloudminr has no maintenance fee

Most scrypt coins are paying 8 cents per MH per day or less.

Goldcoin - 8 cents
Litecoin  - 7 cents

Gawminers charge 8 cents per MH per day in maintenance fees, this will result in a zero payout.

Day 39 comparison of payments
GAW Waffle Hashlet                   0.00000000 BTC (No Payout)

Day 46 comparison of payments
GAW Hashlet Waffle                   0.00000001 BTC

Day 52  comparison of payments
GAW Hashlet Waffle                   0.00000456 BTC

Day 54 comparison of payments
GAW Hashlet Waffle                   0.00000001 BTC

Day 56 comparison of payments
GAW Hashlet Waffle                   0.00000001 BTC

Day 57 comparison of payments
GAW Hashlet Waffle                   0.00000001 BTC

Day 58 comparison of payments.
GAW Hashlet Waffle                   0.00000253 BTC

Day 61 comparison of payments
GAW Hashlet Waffle                   0.00000001 BTC

Day 62 comparison of payments
GAW Hashlet Waffle                   0.00000001 BTC

Day 67 comparison of payments
GAW Hashlet Waffle                   0.00000001 BTC

Day 68 comparison of payments
GAW Hashlet Waffle                   0.00000001 BTC

Day 69 comparison of payments
GAW Hashlet Waffle                   0.00000001 BTC

Day 71 comparison of payments
GAW Hashlet Waffle                   0.00000001 BTC

Day 72 comparison of payments
GAW Hashlet Waffle                   0.00000001 BTC

Day 73 comparison of payments
GAW Hashlet Waffle                   0.00000001 BTC

Anybody who says you could possibly make money or break even 'now' is dreaming.

Here is the full record of the payouts:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=768931.0

Honest cloud mining providers have simply stopped accepting new customers

https://i.imgur.com/nJsKryN.png

Genesis Mining seems even more expensive than cex.io where 1GHS=0.64$ with high maintenance fees.

New comers offer cheaper GHS because they have smaller structures and costs but you have to take a chance they are honest and that their business will last.

I've spent some money on PBmining contract and maybe was going to invest in cloudminr.io so I hope you are wrong about those two :P Hard to know in advance, not sure if PBmining is amongst those suspiciously low charging anymore @ 0.0014btc/GH currently.

I dont base myself on price to determine if they are legit. I list the criteria in the post I linked:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=860400.0

Feel free to apply them yourself and consider what the chances are pb or cloudminr are legitimate. IF you think there is a real chance, lets make a bet.

No bets ;D I find most cloud mining sites suspicious in one way or another. Not sure if I'd call some of those legit sites not being scams. If ROI was never even possible (because of maintenance fees and estimated difficulty increase) aren't those sites scams also? and the way many market themselves is like difficulty will never increase or even use old stats from mining months ago to deceive new customers. The whole cloud mining business seems a very dishonest one and hard to know where to invest. So judging from what everyone says it seems most legit ones will never ROI and the ones who will are all possible ponzi's :(

Nice list using your 7criterias, only 3 companies end up not having any points.

It all come down to taking a risk or not after studying the company you wish to invest in.

No. Is the Red Cross a scam site because my donations dont ROI ? :)
Its a scam if they deceive you, dont provide what they promised. But an investment that doesnt achieve, or even can't achieve positive ROI is just a bad investment.


The ponzi's generally wont give you a profit either. IN fact they will on average cause a far greater loss than the legitimate sites.  They just appear profitable, right until the moment they run off with all your money.

If it takes around 200 days to breakeven, and you are not investing in a ponzi site

, then wouldn't it be profitable on legit sites? as they offer cloudmining for longer terms?

Its just based on the calculation, but a 15 gh/s account of mine generated around 0.0005 BTC in 2 days.

I would certainly expect to get a good ROI on it.

200days taking into account the rise in difficulty or 200days with the current difficulty? Do you take into account maintenance fees? There is none on cloudminr but most cloudmining website have some.

When the difficulty rises, the revenue decreases.

I think your criteria is generally good indicators, however they are not all 100% sure either way. One think I would suggest adding to your criteria is a cloud mining company having a large number of obvioius shills (ltcgear would certainly meet this criteria - and they all respond to concerns almost the exact same way)

Nothing gives 100% certainty, but you can be fairly confident that as long as scammers can make 100s or 1000s of BTC without complying with any of my criteria, no sane scammer is going to bother setting up an elaborate scam that complies to all, or or nearly all of them.


Thats far too subjective, and for the most part covered (and explained) by the "referral program" red flag.

I guess this is fair however some cloud mining companies do have referral programs that give a much more reasonable payout for referrals that is generally in line with the cost of advertising.

I would say that any evaluation of a potential scam should use some kind of subjective criteria as a scammer could simply look at your criteria and work around it

A cloudmining operation could have a very generous referral system to grow fast hoping new referees will bring new customers and so on, new companies often have an unrealistic business plans with margins way to small.

I am sure some companies start as a real mining operations then turn scam.

If by "working around" you mean they verifiably prove their identity and verifiably prove ownership of the hashrate they are selling etc, then great!

Here is the thing; setting up a scam that conforms to one or two of my criteria is easy enough, but setting one up that conforms to all or nearly all of them is very difficult. Its probably not impossible, just very difficult. And what scammer would go the very difficult (and expensive) route when a transparent copy/paste scam that conforms to virtually none of my criteria works so well?

It's only zero sum if you're not "mining" the right cloud.

I am convinced a lot of miners have ROI in BTC since January 2014, I don't know what portion of all miners, probably a minority but more than 5%.
Among serious big miners, it is probably an even bigger percentage.

You would have ROI in BTC buying up hash rate on a lot of cloudmining websites that were online in January 2014 and are still online today. Some of them were new and unknown like cloudminr.

Well the thing about "verifiability" proving something is that not everyone agrees on what exactly would meet this standard.

I would say that it is generally not possible to prove beyond most naysayer's doubts that any cloud company has the physical hardware. Pictures can be faked, the same with invoices, and allowing people to physically see the equipment poses a security risk.

The answer to proving that a company owns actual equipment is to show them the mining address. The issue here is that even this can be faked. A company could rent mining capacity for a period of weeks or months when the term of a mining contract is years. Another way to fake a mining address would be to claim they are mining at a pool (like many smaller cloud mining companies probably are - when they are actually operating in a legal way) that doubles as an exchange (cex.io). The company could launder proceeds from their contract sales either through a mixer or through a large exchange like bitstamp, then deposit the proceeds into cex (the sales proceeds would not go directly to cex in order to make it difficult to draw the connection). Now the company is able to send payments to their customers from an address that can be easily traced to mining proceeds.

While I agree that as of today it does not make sense for a cloud ponzi to do much more then their cookie cutter approach, I think that the market will get "smarter" and people will watch out for these kinds of red flags

Right now people react like it is a Gold Rush and they want a piece of the action at any cost. The market will get more professional as times goes.

It reminds me of the recent Chinese Bitcoin rush.

People will panic buy again when it looks like Bitcoin can become a large mean of payment in the near future.
5000$ will be reached very fast.

You think so? I dont know.. prices were dropped back down to the same a year ago no?

it would move faster, if BFL, and other shit shows did the right thing of conducting proper real business though.. so i dont know.

I think so. Prices were 100$ a coin just over a year ago and the halving next year will help get a bull market. 2014 has been complicated with problems in china, a correction from the market rally of November/December 2013 and maybe regulation problems and the FBI coins.

I don't know the future but I am optimistic for Bitcoin in 2015.

The sad part is, most of my friends heard about bitcoin. But the whole bitcoin scam hype just took a overwhelming turn for most and I cant even explain the proper stories to all of them.

ESP BFL crap, when of my friends wanted to consider jumping in etc. But yeah, I`m hoping for a price jump only cause history only proven to go up regardless of all the bad times lol.

If they know about Bitcoin it is already a good start, it will be seen as a powerful way to transfer money or store your wealth by most of them after Bitcoin has showed it is a great innovation.

I agree, thats why I said its not impossible, just a whole lot more difficult and expensive. But in order to score full marks on my criteria, you also need an asic vendor to vouch for you and there should be no doubt about the identity of the people behind the company. Not many scammers like to expose themselves to prosecution.


I wouldnt hold my breath. I lost count of the number of ponzi's Ive seen come and go over the past years, and if anything, they are getting more transparent (as in, more obvious to be a ponzi), not less.