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?
The problem is you are selling dog feces along with the PROMISE of making money off of it.
Fact is, all hashlets earned dust for anyone who didn't get in during the first few weeks of zencloud or switch to mining IOU's.
This leaves all those people hoping to get rich quick stuck in a situation where they can only profit if they pass on their unprofitable investment to another naive/greedy cryptonoob. So we have a thing that will produce maybe $5 over it's lifetime, valued at $40 because a horde of greedy cryptonoobs must hype the shit out of it to see their money back.
It's a free market yes, but it's all just people passing on their shit to the next unsuspecting victim.
It is not a lie if you underperform because of the unaccounted circumstances.
I can buy this excuse for the first time the mistake happens. Maybe even the second time. But GAW has over promised and failed to deliver over and over again with no signs of stopping.
How many other companies make so many "mistakes" which always reward them with massive profit?
The fact that these "mistakes" happen and GAW tries to go back and erase/modify history as shapeshift says "This moves it from fool's errand to the realm of deception"
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).
GAW proved they have mining capacity, not THE mining capacity they claimed to have.
They claimed to have 40 PH/s+ worth of hardware. They have so far proven they own a single row of bitmain miners (~0.1 PH/s) and a SINGLE 5 PH/s order with bitmain.
Sure, this is easily enough hardware to payout everyone currently mining 1 satoshi per day (might only require an S4 or two) but the chances they actually have 40 PH/s sha-256 or ~1000 GH/s scrypt are slim to none.
It is quite interesting that you say people were misled and lost money
6 month hashstakers will, according to the rules, produce no more than ~1.75 xpy.
You were sold hashstakers for $20 based on the promise that xpy would be worth $20.
Now that xpy is worth ~$4, you paid ~5 xpy for a thing that can produce 1.75 xpy over 6 months.
You were misled and lost money.
I'm yet to meet one who truly owned a Hashlet and lost money on it
You could visit the bitcointalk thread. 90% of the "trolls" are actually former GAW customers who feel they've been scammed.
Otherwise there's this forum where the former hashtalk trusted members have taken refuge (tankjr, rootdude, daffy, allen1980, redacted, etc)
http://forum.gethashing.com/t/xpy-paycoin-discussion/90/