Well this is an important question to ask. If the company is running as a ponzi then it would obviously be something you would want to avoid.

Once you have established that GAW is not a ponzi (if you can reach that conclusion) it is generally easy to measure when you should expect to break even as well as how much profit you should expect to make by using a mining calculator (and inputting in what difficulty increases you think are realistic)

Gaw has been in the cloud mining business for a while but has only recently started offering bitcoin cloud mining recently. Plus they spend a good amount of money on marketing and have a professional seeming operation. It was also recently confirmed that they placed an order for 1 PH/s worth of miners from (I think it was) bitmantech.

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that pbmining controlled ~10% of the network hashrate and that their pool was represented on blockchain.info/pools, however I may be mistaken about this. If they are actually employing a mixer to fund their payouts, then I would consider it very shady, however it is possible they are using the bitcoin from the sales of their cloud mining services to payout their users while keeping the mined bitcoin in other, separate addresses.

I think it would make cloud companies even more trustworthy if they allowed users to direct their purchased mining contracts to a pool of their choice (similar to how leaserig operates). This would allow users to be able to truly verify that they have purchased mining capacity as they can more or less independently verify as such.

He actually has this backwards. A country that is going through any kind of economic crisis will almost always want to have the value of their currency decline (especially countries that have a trade surplus) as this will make domestically produced goods cheaper and more competitive overseas. Also China could easily give/lend Chinese banks US dollars or US treasuries to bail them out as both are considered to be very safe assets

I don't think it is 100% certain that we will have 2FA with the new forum, although I may be incorrect on this. I would think that any 2FA would likely somehow involve the signing of a message from either a PGP key or a bitcoin address as this would be much cheaper then using email/text messages (it costs money to send emails and text messages)

The economic advantage of using bitcoin is the fact that it costs the merchant much less to accept your bitcoin. This should result, over time, in lower prices for people who chose to pay in bitcoin verses people who pay with credit cards

There are not any altcoins that actually offer "faster" transaction times. There are many that offer fast block confirmation times, but this is not the same as faster transaction times. With bitcoin you can know with a good amount of certainty that a TX will confirm after only a few seconds.

You can also establish anonymity with bitcoin by simply using a mixer that does not keep logs.

Coinbase recently expanded to many European countries and I am pretty sure that the UK was one of them. In the US they generally have a spread of ~1% so you would pay an effective trading fee of 0.5% which is competitive with most exchanges (I would assume they would charge a similar amount to UK customers).

I believe they actually, (at least at one point) offered a service when a customer could pay for something using bitcoin and have coinbase automatically purchase a similar amount to replenish their total bitcoin holdings.

I would imagine that the commission that retail stores get for activating gift cards is much less then 10%, maybe 5% at most, but more likely to be slightly above the cost of processing a credit card transaction.

In regards to the OP's suggestion, I would say that it would be possible however it would need to also accept cash bills as well (and likely offer a better rates with the bills). If the machine did not accept bills then the amount of bitcoin that could be purchased would be very small and few people would likely want to buy it this way

theymos has said that he will investigate any claim of a hacked account thoroughly enough so that he will not recover an account based on a signed message only. If there is evidence that the account was sold then he seems to not recover an account.

The primary function of a central bank is actually to regulate the supply of currency into the economy. Most central banks will increase the amount of currency when inflation is lower then it wants (usually via lower interest rates but they have other tools as well) and will decrease the amount of currency when inflation is higher then it wants (usually via higher interest rates).

I would argue that the Bitcoin protocol already serves this function for us via changes to the difficulty every ~2 weeks.

Well the main issue with freelance work is that, for most people it is not going to be steady work, the amount of work available is almost never going to be steady, and you are very vulnerable to variations in the health of the economy; this is very similar to being self employed, however you do not quite have the same upside

Well the issue is that you have two sets of people that need to be protected, the buyer and the seller. The buyer has much more power as many sellers are competing for the buyer's business.

The seller also has the option to take legal action against the buyer in the event that he files a dispute that is fraudulent.

This is horrible advice. Bitcoin is far from certain to succeed over the long term, and even if it is successful it is far from certain that it's price will continue to see the dramatic returns that we saw over the past few years.

In your "story" you failed to mention the overall value of your IRA as well as what happened to your investment gamble in bitcoin.

Wow that is a lot more then my crappy macbook air can do. I assume that in order to reach these speeds you would need to not be using your GPU for video, correct (you would need a separate video card to connect your monitor to)

Well, there is another possible, but unlikely way that the shorts could get squeezed: if people who hold long positions (and lend out their bitcoin) were to suddenly stop lending out their bitcoin and withdraw their money to a wallet they control then bitfinex would need to force people who are short bitcoin to cover their short position. This could potentially be caused by a competing exchange (that offers leverage or not) to fail and/or run away with depositor's money.

A country's war machine can actually help stimulate it's economy as massive amounts of money is spent on the war. Plus when the war is over (assuming the country wins the war) it's companies will often participate in the rebuilding in the country that lost the war, resulting in more economic activity

Well to be fair, it is generally bad for your health when things catch fire in your home, but this is regardless of any chemicals inside what has caught fire. 

The owner of BTCguild has said that he is in talks to have the pool sold and for him to stick around to help with the pool for a number of years. If the talks end up falling through he is going to restart the process of closing the pool and will not consider selling it

GAW accepts credit cards (why, IDK, and I am not sure as to the terms of the credit card payment - likek when you can withdraw your earnings for example).

It should also be noted that these companies have not proven themselves to be "legit" but are rather a list of companies that claim to own mining hardware they are selling/leasing to customers

In order to make an accurate comparison you will need to provide more information. The price for PBmining for example includes 5 years of electricity while the others will make you pay for electricity/maintenance out of mining revenue. Another example is that GAW will attempt to have the maintenance fee per Ghs decline over time as they add more efficient miners to their network