No need to wait, you can assess them yourself. Just look for their  business registration, mining addresses, pictures of their datacenter, find asic endorsement etc. Can you find them? I cant either so its not likely going to be a 0 or even 2.

Thats funny, you have the same profile as me
(your link is incorrect and points to the edit page of whoever clicks it)

As for escrow, I was thinking something simple; I (or someone else) puts a smallish amount of btc in escrow to be released to you only after the card arrived, is funded and used for said amount.  So you'd have to prefinance it, but I see no other way for you to begin establishing some credibility.

Note that this wouldnt prove a whole lot, just that you can deliver and fund working prepaid visa cards, but then I could probably do that too. It doesnt guarantee you wont run off one day, but at least it would be a first step.

Id like this to be legit, and to be fair, the business model makes sense and the two directors have some credible looking linkedin profiles:
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/dmitry-lazarichev/27/483/6ba
https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=71008233&authType=name&authToken=wl07

edit: neither of which list e-coin.io I just noticed..
Thats not enough for me to trust it, but Im watching.

@OP, would you consider using escrow? Not that it would prevent you from running away later, but at least we could see you can deliver and fund the cards and we can test this without any risk.

Dead wrong. Aside from moral and legal problems with knowingly investing in a ponzi, its also impossible to profit from it unless the ponzi is successful enough and lasts long enough. Something that seems highly unlikely in the current climate with such glaringly obvious scheme.

Gee, who would have seen that coming?
Oh thats right, I did.

However, if I were a shareholder, Id demand to see some proof and numbers, it seems a little convenient the projected liquidation - contractual liabilities would end up pretty much exactly at current share price.

Signing blocks to me isnt a requirement, as long as they provide the addresses where the mined coins are sent to (be it from coinbase transaction or just the pool paying out).
I thought hashnest provided those, but I cant seem to find them now.

scrypt.cc will be added later, but at first glance seems an obvious case of 'stay away'.
Ill look further in to MN_BTC too.

Because they published their mining addresses. User select-able pool is not a requirements for point 1, provable hashrate is.

Its both and neither. From a usage POV, it acts more like currency, as you can easily exchange it and buy things with it. In theory you could do that with golden coins too, but its hardly practical.

But from an investor POV, its clearly a limited supply commodity, very different from fiat currency. Unlike fiat, bitcoins are not created from debt, and therefore cant be created (or destroyed) in response to economic activity. You therefore can not expect to make a % return, nor do you need to, as its not infinitely inflationary like fiat.  It acts just like gold. This makes BTC a very poor instrument to invest with rather than in.

Lets say you purchased another limited supply commodity such as gold instead of btc. What would you do to "actively be working with your gold" ?
You cant, or at least not in a way that is not extremely likely to generate losses.

BTC is the investment, they are cheap now, just put them in a cold wallet.

I dont think it needs any more attention. Even assuming it does what it says, it should be obvious to anyone who read this thead that its bad idea because several of the companies in the index are ponzi's. Secondly, on the payout addresses I see amounts coming in that are on the order of 0.1 BTC per month or less.  Tiny by any standard, and lets keep it that way.

Nothing I said would result in variable hashrate throughout a difficulty period, which was your observation, so no, we are not saying the same thing.

I see your point, but just boxing units and refilling takes some time and may not be done 100% efficiently. We are talking about 1000's of units.
Then again, antpool seems to be back at 15%. Yesterday IIRC I saw it at ~5% 24hr average, could just have been bad luck.

ANyway, if you look at this chart:
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-10k.png

Its fairly nonsensical to conclude the recent downward "trend" is not just randomness. Lets see in a few days.

It could be statistical noise. But there is also another reason you have overlooked: bitmain shipping their S5s that have been 'burning in ' for a while.

Doesnt make any sense at all. It would be far cheaper to run with just a fraction of the hardware than running it for a fraction of the time, and its even better to run everything underclocked, ie at higher efficiency, all the time. Idle hardware is not a sensible business plan.

I think its actually quite easy; there is always someone who overpays compared to expected divs/mining revenue, because he cant do the math or doesnt understand the dynamics of this market, be it for hardware or cloud mining. Look no further than cex.io pricing to see my point. THat means hardware and contracts will pretty much always be overpriced. And even if they werent, so many would be sold that difficulty would catch up with it again until it becomes overpriced.

You can gamble you can gain a bit flipping shares, but long term anything based on mining is a loser.

even 100 is too much IMO. If for simplicity sake we assume divs will go down linearly, then your math would mean divs halt in 200 days - just to break even, and more than that for any profit. In reality this is likely much sooner considering 0.1-0.2W/GH hardware that will come online in Q1.

Moreover, even if difficuly goes up linearly, divs go down faster than that because of the fixed fees.

Its called reality, and you better start facing it if you want any chance of justice and who knows, at least some reparations.

*Hashie*
There, I just sneezed on it. As should anyone: yield% is meaningless if you dont take in to account the inherent extreme devaluation of mining securities.

Does having a 100% accurate trackrecord in spotting ponzi's count as 'personal experience ', or are you asking everyone who hasnt been foolish enough to get ponzi'd to shut up and you want everyone to rely instead on co-conspirators such as yourself, with a track record of posting "I can't see any scam" " I never had a problem with that site" nonsense in obvious ponzi threads such as golden-cows ?

Too conservative? I might have been tempted at .0005 but even that Id consider high risk and would basically have been a short term bet.
At .0007 you're still betting on <3.5% average difficulty increases at todays price. with an upcoming 14-15% increase and so many new chips that should come online in the coming weeks and months, not a bet I would take.