Why is the date inverted there? What if they argued in court that meant March 12, 2014, lol.

I happened to have emailed myself the bitpay URL, I'm not really sure how you would go back and find that otherwise necessarily (maybe have an account with bitpay?).

Did anyone else not fill in the Bitpay URL?

You didn't specify lunch-time here or there! That combined with the way you ended your comment, I read as them replying "arrrrghhh" to being woken up in the middle of the night or something

Unsurprisingly, since you were supposed to get the Mars miner to work with. Since that changed I don't know why you and others keep thinking that didn't change everything for you guys.

Wait, so you like called them when it was like 4am in Sweden? That's kind of a jerky thing to do :\

It's not non-sense, it's a shortcut for that exact meaning, akin to colloquialism. When I say "achieve ROI" I mean the device achieves positive ROI, which implies it has reached the breakl-even point, quite obviously.

But no one gets excited about breaking even. We're all doing this to achieve positive ROI, but that's clumsy to say, so we just say 'achieve ROI. The continuum of ROI is implied:

< --- negative ROI --- |break-even| --- positive ROI, or just "ROI" --- >

I, for one, will continue using the term ROI to mean exactly this, and I doubt very many similarly using it are unaware of the meanings involved and therefore using it unknowingly wrongly.

TL;DR: language usage evolves organically, thus the prhase 'achieve ROI' means 'surpass break-even point and achieve positive-ROI.'

Escrow is just a beard, without that magic word they'd have been denounced from day one. Still not sure what the angle is but I'm sure it's there somewhere. Either an escrow scam, or 'Orama thinks it might be a delay scam, an indirect scam, to tie up money in a fictitious product so as to reduce the overall difficulty of the network, thus making existing miners overall more profitable.

To do that you'd need to:

A. Maintain anonymity so they have no one to get mad at when it all falls apart.

- check

B. Make your offer as incredible as possible ($/GH), offering a beautiful case design to visually snooker people, offer as many guarantees against loss as possible (difficulty guarantee, shipping delay guarantee), capture as many price points as possible (from beginning miner to whale with a range of products). We see all of that here.

- check

C. String people along for as long as possible with fake / manufactured yet plausible information, updates, etc., while not spending very much of your own funds.

- check, and continuing to this day.

I don't know why anyone would go to this length. It seems far to go just to reduce investment into ASICs generally. I suppose they must figure that if they could tie up a few hundred thousand dollars as long as possible that the difficulty growth curve would be extended and they'd personally see profit if they had a very large mining farm. That's the only thing that makes sense from a financial point of view. Someone with a large interest in mining and a plan to make others tie up money for no reason.

Perhaps it's just someone doing it for jollies.

I even considered the possibility that it was someone doing it as a fake-out, only to come out later and say 'Wow you guys are idiots, I could've scammed you in ways X, Y, or Z and this whole thing was an experiment to show how gullible this community STILL is.'

As always however, time will tell.

The surprising outcome to me, at this point, will be if Xcrowd is actually legitimately attempting to build a miner. We shall see.

It's just to give an idea. Of course it won't be accurate, but it's gonna be a helluva lot more accurate that a 10 trillion difficulty any time during 2014.

Price of BTC goes up enough and you might lose more by cancelling an order than by following through with it. Plus tax consequences, as that might constitute 'sale' of bitcoin, thus taxes on gains. Luckily we're still in the black on profit.

Who do you think is easier to escrow-scam, John K, or Escrow.com. I know my answer.

Well, cynical as it sounds, perhaps they decided to let you refunders get first crack at their gen-2, maybe they're going to offer you to simply transfer your BTC over. What better way to both make it up to you (they may think) and also make it easy for you, by keeping the BTC you've already given them?

Just a theory.

Excellent point, but do me one favor, someone who's happy to do math right now, what difficulty is justified by a $110 price? If 1 trillion diff corresponds to $42k price for BTC, what BTC price of $110 corresponds to which diff?

That should give us the end-point of difficulty leveling off and should also tell us roughly when to expect that to finish levelling.

They've never heard of the phrase 'escrow scam' before.

Could be a stack of Avalons or the like. You don't know until they can prove they have hardware. Right now they won't even prove who they are much less that other info.

Did you pay bitcoin, cash, credit? If paid in bitcoin, did you receive a refund in bitcoin or cash? Did you get back as much bitcoin as you paid in despite exchange changes?

One guy, whom the writer of the Xcrowd account claims is not himself. Thus, we don't know. Also he claims a team of people working with him. No idea who they are either.

You guys seem to think escrow is some magic word. Good luck to you.

I'm not sure extreme skepticism and wariness due to you being incredibly guarded about who you are and thus failing to establish trust with the community counts as 'agenda.'

K. Like what.

Still strongly suspect XC of being some kind of scam. Good luck, I guess. Can't believe you're giving an anonymous poster money.

Here's a tough question.

XC offers hosted mining, only $44k & $5k a month. 30% down in escrow, of course.

Now, explain to me how the customer will ever know that they've actually delivered the unit.

All of this could be a beard for the hosting scam. Why are the hosting prices so incredibly high? To catch whales, of course.

You simply tell whale his device is hashing, send a few BTC to his wallet of choice as if it were part of a pool share, get him to release the escrow (multi-sig allows this without need for the escrow agent to even agree) and bam. Conned.

Watch out. We still have no idea who is behind Xcrowd, who the principals are, who's speaking on this account. I can't believe anyone has given them any money without that sort of forthrightness right away.

http://imgur.com/Xwa0jUQ

It's called a red flag...