You remember incorrectly. MLMs are NOT illegal (at least not in all countries - all EU countries AFAIK allow MLMs as long as they are not built on the sole purpose of inviting people for their entry fee commission.
A great example is, again, AVON - all the sales rep are commissioned after their sales, not the entry fee. Or FLP - same MLM base, but better commission rates, AFTER sales. The key difference is that AVON reps are over-worked (at least here in Hungary), have to achieve a set monthly amount otherwise can say bye.

It is still not a Ponzi/pyramid scheme though, not entirely. Those are usually built on paying the commissions after the new members' entry fees, while MLM is pretty much paid after the product.

This.
People, learn for once that not ALL Ponzi or Ponzi-like "schemes" are fraud (yes, fraud, not scam). Yes, originally it was invented for fraud. Yes, a good 99% uses it for fraud. But there are well-working non-fraud Ponzi/Pyramid based companies operating (a great example would be Avon, Oriflame, Tupperware, and other MLM companies).

This one was obviously one of the 99%. Get over it.

I partially agree with you, but we still come back to the basis of free market - the match-making of supply and demand.
If you have a product that ONLY you make, can ANYONE make you change the price just because they don't like it? No, of course not.

And yes, indeed, GAW used this very tactic to market their legendary hashlets - which, turned out, can be converted into a timeless HashStaker, which might just prove profitable (the price of PayCoin will fluctuate, but should stabilize in a few weeks, hopefully).


If you buy a miner for 5000$, and two months later the same sells for 2000$, who will cover the loss of value? Nobody. This is capitalism, the value of each product changes basically every second. And the seller won't refund the buyer because the product's value lessened over the time.

Tell me ONE product, or ONE currency that does that - if they did, it would lead to bankruptcy in pretty much no time. When you buy something, you expect it to lose value over time - it can be a day, or a week, a month, a year, a decade. But it WILL lose value, even if it is digital (e.g. a videogame). And nobody will cover the loss of value for you.


Well, that way we can say you lost money buying your computer you're typing from - you bought it for x USD say, a year ago, and now its worth only half of it, if you were to sell it.  Also let me guess, you bought your hashlets, then when the price suddenly dropped, you panicked and sold most of them for a low price, to save yourself from further losses, amirite?  Basically you screwed up on trading stocks (the base is pretty much the same, so...)

Any way, we will see the legitimacy of GAW on the long run - given how much spotlight they got, people who've invested in GAW will get their money back any way (if they are not legit, there will be a huge lawsuit, all who've lost, been lied to, etc., will be able to reclaim their losses; and if they are legit, the system will pay out).

That is the freaking definition of free market, dammit. There's a main supplier (GAW) who sets the price, and there are individuals, trading it. Besides, it was never 50$ for 1MH as far as I know - the most expensive regular Hashlet was 15$ per MH, and if you bought more, the price went down.

The market was also a place to go if you wanted cheap hashlets. Most sold around 60-70% of original price, but this of course depended on other factors.

And indeed, the Hashlets were hyped, and did not bring the level of hype. It is not a lie if you underperform because of the unaccounted circumstances.  A great example would be Half-Life 3 - it is so hyped, no matter what it is when it comes out, many people will be disappointed.

Zens are trading at 2$ now, indeed. Why? Because everyone is on the Stakers now, and nobody cares about the simple mining equipment any more. Also the bad press resulted in a large amount of people breaking up their Hashlets and selling them at outrageous prices, bringing down the overall market.


It is quite interesting that you say people were misled and lost money - I'm yet to meet one who truly owned a Hashlet and lost money on it (except if re-sold it after a week, at third the price, to get rid of it fast). GAW proved multiple times that they do have the mining capacity: there were multiple pictures, non-doctored ones, showing their mining park set up in a warehouse (or was it an old airplane hangar? I can't recall, but it had a quite large internal height).

The 20$ floor is another example of GAW taking a bigger bite than they could handle. It is quite simple, if you check the exchanges - the price was indeed at 20$ initially, then the dumping began. Many who received XPY from their HashPoints started cashing out, at a lower price than the market (so that they would get the money faster), and it was at a rate that GAW could not counterbalance. We are talking about daily trading of 1000BTC value - at that time, it would've cost GAW daily 250-300k USD to buy up the cheap ones and re-sell it at the floor price.

I understand that my reasoning sounds like a "fanatic" speech to you, but it is simply a different perspective. You see this as a scam, because there were many like it, and many fell. And *IF* GAW is legit, they will fall too, because of the anti-hype generated by these exact discussions and speculations.

Indeed. BUT! It is a free market. If I were to sell you a handful of dog feces, and you offered 100.000 USD for it, it would still be a valid exchange.
Besides, I did not make money "off of them". You know it is called demand and supply. Or based on your statement, all trades that carry any kind of gain for any of the parties should be stopped immediately?

The trade was simple - someone (whom I do not know - the hashlet market is anonymous for the buyer) wanted a hashlet. I sold it for way under the official price (Zen Hashlets were going for 14.99 at that time, I sold mine for 7.59 minus the fees), and made about 2$ on the trade. The buyer was happy as he received an item at half the official price, while I was happy as I had 2 extra dollars in my pocket. Is it a win-win?

EDIT:
And before you take my first paragraph as me calling GAW products sh*t, I have to state, it was meant purely in a twisted-out metaphorical way.

Guys, just please fucking stop it. It is getting out of hand.

Yes, there are people who like GAW, and people who do not. There are even extremists, GAW fanatics, and GAW haters.

But you cannot just go on on a public forum and discredit people by calling names. First of all, it is against the rules, and second, only a weak man (or a man with a weak argument) fights the opponent directly, instead of the opponent's stance.

Also, about discrediting information - there *might* be some people here who disseminate false returns. Mine are not, I can assure you. I am ready to prove it with some details from my ZenMiner account. And I believe many others are not scams either.

I understand that many here want their stance, their statements, their view to be true. But the fact is, we can never be 100% sure about something, unless we know all the information - which we do not. We can speculate, we can extrapolate, we can draw conclusions which are likely, but those are NOT FACTS, let it be on any side.


However let me tell you a FACT. Yes, a REAL fact. It is pretty simple - I made money with GAW's offerings so far. Not much, because I did not invest much - but right now I'm standing at an approx. 250% ROI (I've already got back the money I invested in Hashlets, and my HashStakers are making XPY as we speak. All the requirements were from re-investing what I've earned, and I have 0.58XPY in there.

The Hashlets generated about 80% of their purchase price, and then I was mostly selling-buying Hashlets based on the prices going up and down. Then put it all in HashStakers. From my end, it was not an investment, and personally, I have no other attachments to GAW. It was a 0-input investment, which might or might not return some good money. Time will tell.

So please stop hating on each other. We all have our own views, and it is to be respected, as each of us are entitled for that. You  can agree or disagree, like or hate, but you must respect it!

That just-under-1% seems to be the HashStakers - it is incredibly close to their ROI.


So what if they're selling the pre-mined? They have 12m+ XPY, and it is possibly in one big HD wallet, which is behind the PayBase purchases. The fact is, we cannot say for sure which coin was bought by GAW, or if they bought any.

All we can do is sit, and wait out. So far, on all my purchases, GAW delivered. I've bought a single Hashlet, 10GH, back in September maybe. That worked enough so that it was upped into a 15GH one without activating auto-buy.

Ever since, all the money I put into GAW was returned full, and a little more. Yes, I was stupid, I was selling-buying hashlets like crazy, but at the end, I came out in the red, and I had myself two nice HashStakers (one 1XPY 180 day, and one 2XPY 90day). I had my HashPoints converted into XPY, put em into the money-makers, and so far I have 0.56XPY in a bit less than a month's time. Yes, a bit (a lot) less than the daily 1%, mainly because I did not have the exact 3XPY to begin with, only 1.5, and put it back nice and tight every day. The 90-day 2XPY one has been running for 23 days, and the 1XPY 180-day one has been running for 19 days. And I still receive daily 0.027-0.028XPY, without ever touching anything.

And yes, my account is not exactly active - I mostly come here to read, and I can do that logged out, without commenting.


How did you get that number again? Daily 1% means, in total, 365% a year (if you do not count the rising base). If you do count the increasing base value (which would not be used in my understanding, as each coin, to be staked, must sit without any movement for 30 days first) would indeed be at 3700%. But then again, most of the coin wouldn't even be the base of calculation because of the 30 day sitting rule.

Hey jim618,

Great work on the app! My favourite client to drag around on an encrypted USB drive
However, I have one teeny tiny thing that's been promised to be looked at, multiple times, in the past ~2 years. SOCKSv5 proxy.

I'm using Tails as a daily OS, and MultiBit refuses to connect. But I can't set the proxy either. Previously, the main reason of not-yet-implemented status was that Bitcoinj did not support SOCKS proxy, only HTTP - recently, this changed, see here: https://bitcoinj.github.io/networking

Could we please have some proxy goodness in the close future?