Clearly, I didnt fud nearly enough, considering how many (claim to) have taken my assessment that there were no obvious red flags with AMhash as some sort of ironclad guarantee, despite my posts explicitly claiming the exact opposite.

If you cant trust the oldest and most trusted bitcoin asic manufacturer around, who are you going to trust? Your redflag-ridden "hashes backed by nonsense", l3sny ?

Both statements dont necessarily contradict each other, if you assume friedcat vanished with the keys to their wallet (and the knowledge needed to bring BE300 to market).

As for suing, I tend to agree with Jutarul; if you would sue AMhash/rockminer, there is a good chance you wouldnt win because they might rightfully claim force majeure, or put the responsibility with AM and friedcat. And even if you'd win, you cant get blood from a stone.

As for suing AM; if indeed friedcat and the bitcoin wallet are gone, then AM is broke with only some IP that might be turned in to money, but requiring fresh capital first. Suing wont do much good here either, because by the time you could hope for a verdict, that IP will be worth next to nothing anymore and a trial would make it very difficult for AM to monetize it.

To win anything through a legal procedure, your only hope is going after FC's bitcoin wallet, but if he and his wallet resurface, its probably going to be the government that takes it (and him).

So your best hope is that AM is somehow resurrected, hopefully with fresh management to commercialize BE300 asap. Or you find someone to buy the IP, but its dubious that is really worth a lot, think Hashfast.

In short: there is no happy ending that I can see.

Or instead of stealing,  the food production plant was given low electricity rates, because, well, it produced food. And then they used much of that electricity to power bitcoin miners.

I vaguely remember an argument about AMhash maintenance cost being improbably low with Chinese electricity rates, unless you got some special deal which would involve politicians. If it was pure theft, I would assume friedcat didnt know about (cant be that stupid) and he would have no reason to hide. My guess its more a case of corruption, lying about nature of the operation or straight  bribing someone to obtain low prices. That might make you want to run in China, and Id expect police or media to label it as theft of electricity.

Then again, Im just guessing.

Again you show an utter lack of knowledge. AM's board isnt structured like traditional companies. The board isnt elected or appointed, and it has no authority whatsoever. Its just a fancy name for anyone owning over 5000 shares in AM (not even in Bitfountain which owns most of AM).  You could have least read the first two posts of the AM thread and figured this out:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.msg1088045#msg1088045

It might have been a bit more at some stage, but it was probably even less than 5PH before it went down, as some smaller datacenter was reportedly unplugged due to too high costs. It was in that ballpark however, no where near 100.


Ive been reluctant to add anything to the list for some time, as the main purpose of the OP is not the list but the criteria themselves and the logic behind it. The list started as illustration and now I see its become the focus, and it shouldnt be. People should make their own assessment and the criteria are there to help them filter out obvious ponzi's. I also dont want it to be abused as free advertising for fresh ponzi's, Ive noticed some cloudmining scams actually like being listed even if they score 7/7 on the ponzi scale, just because it gives them exposure to the ponzi gamblers.

As for BW;  I dont speak enough Chinese/chinglese to make a full assessment, but at first glance, it would probably score fairly well on my criteria, its clearly not an obvious scam, but neither was AMhash. So whether that means you ought to trust them is something I cant help you with and you know how I feel about (cloud)mining in general..

The board is supposed to put out a statement shortly; dont confuse that with the company, the board essentially consists of large shareholders, though they may have information we dont.

Something doesnt add up.. Josh's spelling and grammar is nearly flawless in these emails.

Seems unlikely. AM had ~5PH. BW is operating ~100PH (they host antpool too). Who would jeopardize a venture this large by including 5% worth of stolen hardware?

I wouldnt read too much in to this. Bitmain says that someone else says that some company didnt place a large order with some supplier.
Bitmain is also making it appear as if its Bitfury that didnt place the order, it could even be KnC, but my guess is that Bitmain is just exploiting the turmoil to jack up their preorder prices for June. Chances are very high at least one of these companies will not deliver in quantity in the next few weeks, so they can always pretend they were alluding to another company that didnt deliver.

None of this means I think AM's future looks rosy btw.

You can think of me whatever you want, but Ive been around for longer than most and this isnt exactly the first publicly traded  bitcoin company Ive seen implode, and its not the first where a bunch of shady C-less nonames pretend to organize or coordinate action but mostly just want to make themselves feel important and often want to collect bitcoin. l3sny is to AM as Goat was to Pirate. Anyone remember that?

Ill also give you the bad news, that this has pretty much never worked. Even fully doxed scammers that undoubtedly committed financial crimes, where lawyers got hired and police reportings filed, Alberto Armandi comes to mind, still roam free. The only cases where at least something happened, is when government stepped in.

But if you want to do something, then you need to get in touch with AM board members. Thats your most realistic chance of finding someone who is well positioned to lead an inquiry and possibly coordinate legal or other action,  and who doesnt fail on all the C's I mentioned (credibility, clout, clue, coin. Common sense and Chinese language wouldnt hurt either). Board members interests should also be aligned with the other shareholders, they own too many shares that Id believe them being bought off. Doesnt hurt to keep that possibility in mind though.

I honestly find that very hard to believe, if for no other reason than there seems to be only a handful of people in this thread who have confirmed owning a card and we are the only one's reporting the issues we've (all) been encountering. Also, and that is to your credit, considering how fast we get replies and support, and its never from some "Barry" in a Bangladesh call center.  More often than not I get emailed by 2 of the (I believe) 3 principals. Quite the VIP treatment .

Id believe 100. Id be quite surprised and impressed if you had issued 1000 cards already.
10K? Sounds like quite a stretch.

I was wondering the same. Does anyone have a list of current board members?

No you dont.
Let me clue you in: his concern is not what can or will be done, his concern (rightfully)  lies with you specifically. You are not the one thats going to hire a legal team and achieve anything.
-You havent got any credibility, running your own tiny wannabee scam
-You havent got any clue, getting even the basics about AM wrong time and again, let alone you'd have the knowledge required to achieve anything in China.
-You havent got any clout with anyone or anything. You probably hardly even have any coin at all.

All you have is a big mouth.


No one believes you, besides perhaps your airwolf alter ego.

You're making too many assumptions. We dont even know what company is being talked about, for all I know its KnC. Or AM.
We dont who was allegedly talking about the unknown company, but even if we assume its a fab (whom I highly doubt would disclose such info), we dont know if said unknown company didnt decide to fab elsewhere. And if course we dont know if bitmain isnt just exploiting the AM trainwreck by telling a vague story to jack up their prices on pretty far out preorders. Bitmain built its reputation on shipping from stock, I see thats out the window now. Might not be the only change.

Silverbox tends to be pretty bad at responding, but Im not sure he is a scammer.
You can verify your card balance through SMS to see if he did indeed steal it.

I got a visa card from e-coin.io. You can charge it with BTC, and link it to your paypal account, so that way you could convert and spend your BTC via paypal. Side note: dont sell all your BTC.  Who knows what it will be worth in a few years.

"Diversification" is not a sensible approach, not without filtering out the scams first. Setting up an actual mine and cloud platform costs  many $100K's and months of planning and work. Setting up a scam site costs a few hours and a few 10's of dollar. The predictable result is that for every legitimate platform there are  ~100 scams. Diversifying without first weeding out the scams, just means you will feed (and breed) more scams.

Right. So you ignored my sound advice of not buying any cloudmining. Then you where too lazy to do your own due diligence to find out what you now say was so obvious. And then when something happened that no one predicted (only you would have),  you blame me for not predicting it?  I have two more words for you: fuck you.
Now stay out of this thread.

So why didnt you?