Oh yeah? Over the years I can link to at least two dozen ponzi's and scams Ive called out, all of which have already collapsed. Pirate, Obsi, mybitcointrade, Usagi Nyan/BMF/CPA, Patrick Harnett, Starfish and Kraken (the ponzi fund, not the more recent exchange),  hashking, labcoin, Kronos, bitscalper, AMT, BT trader, pbmining and those are just from the top of my head.
Of the one's I called out that havent collapsed yet, not a single one is older than 6 months to my knowledge.

The only errors you will find is where I failed to detect in time it was a scam/ponzi/heist, like MtGox, but you will find precious few of those (gox is in fact the only one that springs to my mind). I dont recall ever once calling something a ponzi and be proven wrong. So if you say im "consistently wrong",  can you point out just one single instance where I was proven wrong? Just one. And for every attempt at showing me one, Ill give you over 20 where I was right.

BTW, how is your own batting average? Oh right, you create new accounts after every miss, and thus you've been around for all of 3 weeks.

Interesting. Try googling his email: vasicekroman@hotmail.cz or watch his youtube channel
https://www.youtube.com/user/RomanVasicek/videos
You will find 100's of ponzi's he's been pushing, including ZeekRewards. Promoting ponzi's and scams literally is his full time 'job', he basically even says that on his youtube profile page and his linkedin profile (which is endorsed by an unnamed Nigerian 'CYBERPRENEUR' for his web marketing skills https://www.linkedin.com/in/vasicekwork)

Gonna send all my money to cryptomine now, what could possibly go wrong?

Is that based just on the pics found on cryptonzi.io ?
If so, it could certainly be useful, and there is a good chance you are correct, but Id be careful not to jump to conclusions. 

That said, this is the same guy:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vasicekwork

Endorsed by a Nigerian 'CYBERPRENEUR' for his web marketing skills :p.

Sadly, busting ponzi's is not something that anyone seems to be willing to pay for.

it could be lucrative if there was a way to short sell these scams, or if the ponzi boosters were willing to put their money where their mouth is,  but for some reason no one ever wants to. Are you different "RussianRaibow" ? Do you want to make an escrowed bet that this ponzi is still around in x month ?

As smooth as pbmining 2-3 weeks ago?

If its a ponzi as I suspect, there wont be any 'news' for as long as enough new customers sign up.  Its only when not enough new customers sign up or not enough old customers reinvest,  that you will be getting the news that payouts are delayed/too low/they were hacked/website gone/whatever. But until that day  (which can be any day) you would expect ponzi's to pay on schedule with no reported problems.

Thanks, added it, including the '5', referrals are there if you sign up.

It is extremely likely to close (or fizzle out pbmining style) soon.

But they werent promising dividends which would have to be paid from customer's investments.


A banner advertising may or may not alter their contractual obligations, Im taking no position on that issue,  but that doesnt change the essence that if they sell a contract that makes these profit promises, that ponzi is an appropriate term. So it may or may not apply to the theoretical AM case, but it certainly applies to bitcoinmaker and will apply to any cloudmining company that explicitly sells a guaranteed profit contract.

Anyway, filed a complaint with swiss authorities regarding bitcoinmaker.ch, lets see if they do something.

Whether its 'testing', private deployment or in preparation of cloudmining, clearly bitmain is doing something.
https://blockchain.info/pools
IIRC, antpool used to be in the 5% neighborhood. Now they are up to 15% of the network, 3x KnC and bigger than ghash.io (read: bitfury).

The network also appears to be up by >50PH compared to last week, although its anyone's guess how much of that is paycoin miners returning to bitcoin.

Consider the following contracts:
- you get mining revenue of x GH minus Y fees and we guarantee that as a result you will break even or make Z% ROI (if not tough luck)
- you get z% ROI (thanks to our pixie dust fairy tale miner pool)

Seems to me you would consider the first just false advertising, although if the profit is guaranteed, Id say its a contractual obligation and I dont see a fundamental difference with the latter. in both cases, there is no mechanism to generate the promised profits.

Amhash is the real deal, no one (sane) is questioning that.
But AMhash is not providing the hashrate for Hashie's Gen 1, they do not know who (if anyone) does and they dont even know the identity of hashie. No shred of evidence for the existence of any hashrate backing Gen 1 was ever presented. None. It was/is a ponzi, the money raised was used to prepay AMhash contracts which they then resold as a cheap (actually profitable) way to bolster their credibility.. But gen 1 still is backed by absolutely nothing and Im pretty sure we wont see any more evidence for these firecrackers.

If they were actually mining, difficulty drop wouldnt matter, as they would mine more coins.

But since no one has ever seen one shred of evidence that hashie has any hash power of its own, my guess is that these 'firehashers' are a way to boost short term sales to fuel a ponzi thats dangerously close to collapse.

ok, so lets be pedantic .

Am I correct assuming that we agree that bitcoinmaker is not just a scam, but specifically a ponzi type scam (either that, or a vehicle for Ingvar Kamprad to spread his wealth around).

If so, would it change anything if they were actually mining with 1 antminer ?
If not, what about  10? 100?

If not, then how is it different from the situation where amhash would be selling a fixed mining profit of x% per year ?

BTW, if you disable sigs, are you able to have one yourself?

Its not so weird if you've been around bitcoin for as long as I have. Out of many 100's, maybe 1000 IPO's and investment opportunities of all kinds, I recall only 1 that paid out substantially more btc than it raised (AM) and 1 that paid out a little more than it raised (satoshidice). The rest were all overpriced  mining contracts,  scams,  ponzi's, failed businesses or a mix of them that paid at best a fraction back of the money they raised.

This shouldnt be surprising either. There are fundamental reasons why investing btc doesnt make sense. Firstly, like gold, BTC is a commodity, it can not be created from debt like fiat money can. It doesnt matter how well the bitcoin economy does, it doesnt increase the number of bitcoins in circulation. So the bitcoins needed to pay interest rates arent created. Again, same as gold, you dont go investing gold either, because it makes as little sense. Secondly, unless basically all your business' costs and revenue are BTC denominated, borrowing BTC never makes sense, since you have no way of knowing just how much you are going to have to pay back. A shark loan would be less risky.


I have not looked in depth at either, quite possibly the companies themselves might be legit,  but common sense dictates that lending BTC is going to be very risky at best. Im fairly certain scammers are currently borrowing and repaying to improve their trust or rating or whatever they use, until they can borrow enough to ake it worth running. Also Im quite curious to see what will happen to these platforms if/when BTC exchange rate goes ballistic again. How many will be unable to service their debt then?

My cold wallet over the years has increased in value by ~10000% and not a satoshi was ever lost. Why would you risk it all for another 1 or 5%? I dont get that.

If AMhash started guaranteeing profits, they would have become a scam.
You object to the name Ponzi, and perhaps you are right and it should just be called a scam, but consider where the money would come from to pay out the partial 'profits' while the difficulty/exchange rate ratio isnt as profitable as they promised. They can only instantly break their promise, or delay it by turning ponzi. Frankly, the distinction is semantics to me, you're getting screwed either way.

True, which is why point 6 is so important, but sometimes difficult to verify.  I do think its going to be tricky to operate a large verifiable mining farm and maintain anonymity after running off with customers money though.

But here is the thing; I think I can guarantee that quite a few of these services will turn out to be scams, and thats what Im focused on. But no one can guarantee the safety of any cloudmining investment. After all,  there are other risks too, even a legitimate offer could be struck by disaster (fire, theft, legal problems,  whatever).  I think my position is clear that you are better off not investing in any of them, but if you have to, at least pick one that isnt guaranteed to be a scam. Just dont think that guarantees its not a scam.

so according to you there is a maintenance fee which isnt listed on the website, and you cant find anything about it, but somehow its not a hidden fee?
LOL.

Thats like saying the ponzi's are hoping difficulty will go up fast enough to make things work out. Keep in mind bitcoinmaker dont even sell you a certain hashrate, they explicitly sell you a profit margin and claim to adapt the hashrate to achieve that.

The dc and the cloudmining are the same people. They use a building right next to KNC. I granted them the endorsement point because of that and the pictures which I think prove beyond reasonable doubt they are a huge KNC customer. Moreover,  since KNC dont post here anymore, I kinda understand they are not gonna get an endorsement post. Some further discussion here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=860400.msg9580202#msg9580202