You might want to share that with PPOC .

That was the topic of the last five posts. Pls explain how they "appear to be legit".

According to this, California to be precise, probably on a non existent desk in their non existent San Francisco HQ.

Also from their assessment



So why would anyone want to call them anyway?

"Hello, can you help me, are you a scam?"

Of course they're a fucking scam. 

Onecoin appears to be entering the terminally fucked stage.
Signs:

1) Huge hurdles to withdrawal in shape of KYC regulation (a sample of complaints)


2) Affiliates unable to sell their 'coins' on the only exchange that handles this shit


3) Lock in periods heavily promoted to delay meltdown


4) Package price increase


5) The only "exchange" that trades in this shit closes with no notice



Quotes from Oz at http://behindmlm.com/companies/onecoin/onecoin-add-25000-package-suspend-withdrawals/
(a.k.a. "behindlosers" as hilariously called by Ken Labine, Canada's unicellular OneCon promoter.)

Please would someone share this post on Ken's Facebook page, as I am persona non grata there.

 





 

FYI, this piece of shit just ran off with stupid peoples' money.
STAY AWAY FROM HYIPS.

Seeing as nothing resembling the photo has ever been seen in the wild, despite the various badges that have been rendered onto it, maybe "spare parts" are Blu-Tack or pins to attach the picture to your calendar as you cross off the days, waiting for the Delivery that Never Comes...

 

"Cybercurrencies" WTF.

Hey OP, your short posting history suggests you are really keen to start mining, fair enough, but make sure you pay for miners that actually exist.

The picture they are using has been used so many times by scams that it's probably registered as a stock photo ref: "vaporware" by now.
Search SMART miner, minerslab, hashingminer, ad nauseum...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=883534.0

That's quite a difference in the bolded part of the quote.
I'm also doing a few calcs here, could you help me try to establish a way to reliably estimate the total hashrate at any given point in time?
How accurate are the Blockchain.info and Bitcoinchain.com pie charts?
If I know the hashrate of a given pool and multiply out their attributed share, by a factor of what can that be out?
Thanks.

You mean like that piece of crap you run?
Worth it yeah, for the admin.


 

I think it's the sign of a good salesman that they have the ability/gift to believe their own pitch and come across as sincere, and the best are undoubtedly charismatic. In the end however, hyperbole is just hyperbole.

My view is that the leeching effect of the MLM structure makes BCN investment

1) unattractive for mining returns only, without any referral add ons. Weeks may say that all mined Bitcoins are paid out to members, but the proportion of that which goes to the top of the pyramid in referrals leaves a cash daily return on purely mining at about 0.1%.

2) highly vulnerable when their grand investment plans are scuppered, if their reduction in income because of the halving isn't compensated for by a doubling in the BTC price. Where exactly is the $17m coming from if current income is already fully allocated, essentially servicing existing debt?

3) high risk, because of lack of exit strategy. The mandatory reinvestment is of no value unless expansion continues exponentially. Future shares only have a value whilst they can be serviced by cash returns. The only 'value' in a share is the clause which allows investors to physically claim an ASIC, the type of which is solely dictated by BCN. What is John Doe going to do with a parcel of unprofitable mining equipment?

4) dependent on non core schemes like Clubcoin, ATM's, merchant platform succeeding quickly. There is no sign that BCN have the ability to pull this off. Hyperbole, "Great things in the pipeline", classic MLM stuff.

Overall, it looks to me like a poor value bet on the assumption that the BTC price continues to rise, with most of the interim mining income leaving the scheme and going into the wallets of Weeks & co.

To quote a happy fan


Sums it up for me.

There is a third category, those which can superficially pass the sniff tests outlined a while ago in the 101 guidance thread, but are still a bad investment because their business plan is unsustainable.

These are outfits that are mining, can show stats and pictures, but are "fractional reserve" mining, which is hard to estimate because they will keep selling hashrate beyond that which they actually have.
As most cloudminers have clauses which allow them to vary repayments for various reasons, a set up like this can be a slow burning Ponzi (i.e. using new investment to repay old) and last for a considerable time.

"All cloudmining is a scam"?
No, but it's a good default approach to take when giving a lump sum of money with only a promise of a return, and no form of redress or exit if those promises aren't met.

Got a reply back from punin, Bitfury's Head of Product Development, regarding Weeks' claims about mining with 16nm chips


Also Roger Ver has decided that, in the big battles, you need all the "friend" you can get. This is what Bitcoin is all about, integrity. lol....bro.

 
Something which CMS would like to see remedied, no doubt?

But sure, just like guns themselves don't kill people, other people do, so currencies themselves don't rip people off, other people do.
Is that the future for Satoshi's project then, enabling thieves and liars?
I guess in a world which is more fractious, selfish and intolerant day after day, that would be truly visionary...
 

From http://bitcoinist.net/localbitcoins-volume-south-africa-shows-50-fold-growth-one-year/


In that same period, MMM RSA started taking off.
Originally the fiat version, but now that the SA banks led by Capitec have started being awkward about large cash transactions, more and more activity is shifting to MMMGlobal (bitcoin only), especially with the extra Magic Money available in that version.
$750,000 per week of bitcoin being bought, probably by newcomers...doesn't do the price rise any harm.

South Africa had essentially zero Bitcoin activity before MMM arrived.
Coincidence?

This thread is really interesting for me, not being a tech head but willing to learn.

But back to the actual title of the thread "Bitfury: "16nm... sales to public start shortly"....

I was listening to this https://soundcloud.com/heryptohow/roger-ver-vs-joby-weeks-sasha-daygame-juan-galt-jeff-berwick

BitClub Network are an MLM funded mining operation, they have a pool with currently just under 40 PH/s, somewhere around 4% of the total.
The conversation on the audio came about because BCN promoters were using Roger Ver's name in their material, and he got a bit pissed about that.

A person called Joby Weeks represents BitClub Network, altho a formal position in the operation is unclear.
In it, he makes several claims of relevance to this thread.
I wonder what your thoughts are, especially punin's, as Weeks' claims flatly contradict what he has been saying.

What say, punin?

Some of Weeks' claims (transcribed by me, 99% word for word, check them yourselves)





Also, BCN has increased mining capacity by double since 22nd Jan, referring in their pool to




And just for luck, although not Bitfury related, he (BCN)


I have been following the progress of BitClub Network here

Hey, thanks for that.

So, what's going on?
As I outlined in the last post, a BitClub Network promoter called J. Ryan Conley has been plastering social media with posts highly insinuating that he and Roger Ver are best buddies and that, by extension, Roger is a BCN fan.
Roger has got pissed about the use of his name like this, and made it clear that he has severe misgivings about BCN, its business plan and its ability to service its ongoing commitment to pay the investors in its mining operation, especially because of the cost of maintaining the MLM matrix referral structure.
MLM's are pyramids, structured so that money flows to the top, in BCN's case to the "Founders" who buy $3500 deals, not for the small residual Bitcoin mining payments, but for the matrix commission structure and its 'legs', which mean ongoing payments to them from their downline.

So, who is Joby Weeks?

According to Google, Weeks has self described in many ways:

'a nutraceutical wellness consultant'
'lifestyle coach'
'avid adventurer, world traveler, social entreprenuer sic, author and libertarian political activist!'
'millionaire'

in the audio, he says he is also an earlyish adopter of Bitcoin, but more of that later.

He 'lives outside the box', leads what used to be described as a "jetset" lifestyle and posts pics of himself in hot tubs on Richard Branson's rental island, stuff like that.
This is Joby Weeks (you may recognize the other person, more of that later)



and this is J. Ryan Conley



Mr. Weeks claim to have "been promoting bitcoin for three years" bears inspection. For someone as adept at "blowing their own trumpet" as Weeks is, there is no trace of anything on any of his social media to verify that. Until his 2015 BitClub involvment....nothing, nada, zilch.
His only Bitcoin tweet is one doing exactly what Conley has been doing, dragging Roger Ver into his name dropping circle.



Weeks rose to prominence in 2008 as


 
Mannatech is worth a Google if you want more laughs.

At that time, the time of Ron Paul's Presidential campaign, Weeks also set up RonPaulLimo.com and piggybacked on that, MyRonPaulRewards.com.



The above is taken from Ron Paul's dailypaul site after originally being posted by Jeff Rense. Make of it what you will.
http://archive.dailypaul.com/25719#comment-828039


Anyway, Google Joby Weeks yourself to get a flavor of the man.

---

Parsing the conversation linked above, the relevant bit starts around 43.40.

Straight in, Weeks sets his tone, loud, laughing and disingenuous.
He apologises for his 'friend' Conley, over whom he has no control, for #ing Ver (just like Weeks does himself), even tho Conley was "Roger and I"ing in text.
Weeks refers to it laughingly as "harassing", a common misattribution technique: to ridicule by exaggeration.

He name drops ferociously, a "founder of Google" (who knew nothing about bitcoin until enlightened by Weeks?) , "throwing a million dollars", 30 day cruises etc. Weeks is the Real Deal.
He refers to The "Inside Bitcoin" Seoul schmooze that "we sponsored". Well they did, the tote bags anyway.
Oh, and he hasn't seen any of the YouTube vids that link BCN to Ver and just about anyone else with a pulse and a name.

Weeks also makes it clear from the get go that BitClub Network wouldn't be, without him. It's all "I" and "we". There is no indication of Weeks' position within BCN, their site makes a big play of no bosses, no main man


The next bit is important.
It is important because regulatory authorities like the SEC (boo hiss) do NOT like people selling unregistered securities.
Also, MLM regs make it very clear that in order to be legal, the product must be the reason for the existence of the MLM, not the matrix structure itself.

Weeks gets his denial in straight away.
BCN are not selling "securities", i.e. a financial proposition, they are selling a product: physical bitcoin mining machines. The spiel goes that when you give BCN $500 or whatever, you are buying an ASIC, not an investment product. In their small print, they do offer the choice of taking delivery of your very own ASIC at any time, to maintain this fallacy.
As Weeks himself states, 99% of BCN investors have no prior knowledge of Bitcoin, so it would be safe to assume that the take up rate on having your ASIC disconnected and shipped from Iceland is vanishingly small.

(Around this time of the chat, naughty boy Conley is commenting online "Just to clarify, BitClub Network is not a scam." Thanks for that JR)

Weeks is off and running now.
At 51.19 he reveals that
"I've got the new (Bitfury) 16nm tech chips". Later he states "BCN are the only people in the world with Bitfury chips, buying all they can produce." I'll have to ask punin about that, because it flatly contradicts what Bitfury are saying.

He goes on, comparing BCN with Visa, bringing up his unprovable "promoting Bitcoin for three years" assertion and making it clear his vision is of an army (uses that several times) of Bitcoin/BCN promoters quitting their day jobs (Classic MLM dream) as Bitcoin goes to $10,000. See you in the hot tub, guys.

He then refers to BCN investors as shareholders (previously insisting they are miners) and when pressed about ROI, immediately cites a for instance which is optimistic by a factor of at least 2. $500 contracts do not return $4 per day, split 50/50, it's less than $1.


Yup, he said it.

At 56.00 he reveals


another one that I'll have to ask punin about.
Then it's magnetic motors, mining on ships, more "shareholders" in 80 countries and I even get a h/t reference along the lines of

(See my early posts).

More bad math, 330 blocks mined = "$4m". That's an average price of $484.

Back to another Bitfury reference, he's buying $17million of Bitfury containers at $3m a piece and pays Bitmain $100 for an S7....

And that's about it really, some guy comes on at the end and says he's getting 8-15% ROI on his $3500 "Founders" mining deal, which is about right.
Weeks had blustered and talked over people, standard MLM salesman.
Job done, all off for tequila slammers and mega schmoozing.
Weeks will be signing up left, right and center no doubt, among the PUA's and other cutting edge folk in the hot tub, JR will be round the back signing up the maids and chauffeurs.
Dream Team.

Minor grammar edits.

If you can't tell the difference between "investing" and giving it to some anon who says he's doing something which no one else can do, then don't worry, you won't have that problem (or any BTC) for very much longer.

That's quite a common view in the UK these days, the isolationists UKIP got about 3.8 million votes out of 30 million cast in the 2015 General Election, when 2 out of 3 entitled to actually voted.
If that 3.8 million vote 'out' and are joined by say half the 12 million Tory voters, then a low turnout would probably swing it. Rule Britannia.

There is no actual legal obligation for the Government to do anything as a result of the referendum. A close call would be quite a problem, especially for a neocon government whose leader wants to stay in.


When people say stuff like this......

Betting odds are 2/1 in favor of staying in atm.
Whether that will reflect in the result depends on how many stay ins bother to vote. That's why the pro camp pushed for the inclusion on that list, dire warnings of economic chaos might have some effect on turnout.
The only people who have strong opinions in my experience are antis, who generally believe coming out will "Make Britain Great Again" or some such bollocks.
It's a Xenophobia poll as much as anything, the economic effects are incalculable.

The Brits pushed hard for it to be included on the list of woes at the last minute because Osborne and Carney are both pro stay in.
In the global scheme of things it's pretty minor.