i remember when sites gave away 1btc a day to each user

Oh the ignominy of it - stuck in the newbie bin after 24 years of internet use, 18 years of linux, 30 years of programming from z80 assembler and up,  debating C++ template semantics with Stroustrupp while I was writing a parallelizing C++ source to source translator (before I evolved into a philosophically an anti-C++ person preferring C), enjoying USENET flame wars in the old days and tittering about newbies ineptitude

So anyway hi I am Adam Back, inventor of hashcash (the bitcoin mining function... all those mining cores and ASICs are grinding away producing hashcash).  So yep I contributed to the environmental crime of so far 40MW continuous mining.  We installed a 3.5kW solar installation but it seems like a small offset :|  I also implemented the opensource library credlib which implements Chaum and Brands ecash.  And actually reinvented offline multiple transfer Brands ecash (turns out someone else already figured it out when I asked Stefan).  I consulted for Nokia on ecash crypto back in 2002.  I worked at Zero-Knowledge Systems from 2000-2003.  So anyway I know a few things about ecash, privacy tech, crypto, distributed systems (my comp sci PhD is in distributed systems) and I guess I was one of the moderately early people to read about and try to comprehend the p2p crypto cleverness that is bitcoin.  In fact I believe it was me who got Wei Dai's b-money reference added to Satoshi's bitcoin paper when he emailed me about hashcash back in 2008.  If like Hal Finney I'd actually tried to run the miner back then, I may too be sitting on some genesis/bootstrap era coins.  Alas I own not a single bitcoin which is kind of ironic as the actual bitcoin mining is basically my hashcash invention.  (The only difference being a double hash for a bit of added design paranoia, the switch from SHA1 to SHA256 and defining fractional bits - hashcash difficulty can only double or halve - just count leading bits - bitcoin variant of hashcash defines the challenge as to find hashes < 2^x where x is the log2(difficulty)+32 in bits which is the same when there is no fractional part).

I am a strong believer in distributed trust models.  I was one of the early and vocal technical voices on the cypherpunks list.  Worked on distributed trust privacy tech and anonymity designs at ZKS (ToR is a newer re-implementation of their freedom network which includes my forward anonymity contribution), understand the risks of centralization, vocalized concerns about the risks of CA model, decade before we saw diginotar and others bring those predictions to fruition with Iranians and other CA operators issuing rogue sub-CA certificates for gmail.  I broke a number of crypto deployed systems most of which under NDA.  I have some concerns about centralization trends and how to avoid them on bitcoin.  Oh yeah I proposed something namecoin like also a decade or so back.

But for now I, just gotta get out of the newbie trap.

Ignominy, my word for the day

Adam

depends on definition of scam. it is quite legit company, just incapable of delivering what it sold.
if you would preorder duke nukem forever, wait 10 years of delays and it was quite bad int the end, is it scam or not?