GAW ZenCloud ZenPool Hashlet - does it really exist? ALWAYS MAKE MONEY :-)

[eightcylinders]

FACTS and some serious questions/concerns, plus speculation from a large-ish GAW customer (me!)

My Background:

I currently have 500 Mh/s in scrypt hashing hosted by GAW, and another 3+ Th/s in hosted SHA256 hashing at Zencloud.  So I have a bit of stake in this "game" if that is what is going on.  I have some serious questions/concerns, but I also have some speculation that might explain what is up at GAW (not all bad).  However, for the sake of good customers like me, I am begging Josh to get on here and answer some of these very troubling questions directly and without all the marketing gobbly-gook.  PLEASE JOSH provide some solid answers/responses for us soon.

I also have hosted units elsewhere, and I have my own rack at a local data center.  So I have a pretty decent idea of data center, hosting, etc.  In addition, I had about 200 Mh/s in scrypt hosted with GAW before converting some (but not all!) to Zencloud and later to hashlets.  I also have a pretty good idea of what GAW can/cannot do at least with traditional hosting.  I very recently agreed to have my hosted units transferred to the Zencloud hosting, and then soon thereafter the hashlet came out and I "converted" several of my scrypt hashers.  


I have had several problems with GAW's hosting before now, but none with Zencloud.  Just troubling questions some of which others have asked but I am hoping that GAW will answer coming from a real customer and also collected here in one post:

(1) What are the "terms of service"?  I have seen NOTHING which is surprising.  Here are some specific terms of service questions that need to be answered:

(a) Can the rate of $.08 per day per Mh/s ever INCREASE?  Or is that the maximum?

(b) Your ads state that hashlet cost will go DOWN over time as a result of economies of scale, more efficient future mining chips, etc.  How much of the decreases in your operations cost be passed through to us?  50%?  75% 100%?  How are you calculating cost reductions and in particular how are costs required to "upgrade" equipment to more efficient mining included in this calculation?  If we need to pay for more efficient hashlets, that would seem to contradict the whole idea.  But if not, it is hard to see how overall costs could go down per Mh/s without swapping out for new equipment.  Or, as suggested by the graphics, does the .08 per Mh/s already include estimated upgrade costs in the future??  

(c) How can you possibly promise that the hashlet will ALWAYS be profitable?  This seems like very misleading and reckless statement.  You might mean that hashlet's are designed to be profitable in MOST likely price/cost situations but it can't be always true.  If LTC drops by 75% tomorrow, would you reduce your "costs" to ensure profitability?  How long could you maintain a losing operation before you have to pay the piper?  I don't want crazy marketing promises, what I WANT is to understand why you think you can maintain profitability even under MOST circumstances with constantly falling prices per LTC, and increasing difficulty.  I assume you AT LEAST believe that you have solved this problem, which by itself (even if imperfect) would be a tremendous reason to buy hashlets  -- so explain without the superlatives please.  I am open to rational explanation here.

(d) How are mining costs paid to Zencloud?  Are they deducted from the daily profits?  Or will I get a bill?   If I forget to pay, will I lose my hashlets or will you just take it from future mining profits?
 
(2) Is Zencloud really just a big farm with virtual/shared hosting?

(2a) How is it possible that the units I had hosted with GAW could have been "moved" to Zencloud with almost no delay in hashing?  I would have thought that Zencloud and GAW hosting were really the same thing, but that is unlikely.  GAW's hosting had power issues galore that caused periodic down time.  Sometimes my miners would not reboot and required intrervention.  Not so with Zencloud which has had zero down time as promised.  But that is impossible if the miners stayed in GAW's facility. But how could my miners have moved instantly to a new facility that presumably has better power?  I have been through several data center migrations and they are NOT instant!!  And how can they hash at Zencloud with no down time at all?  Even the best miners occasionally require a reboot.   A

(2b) I "upgraded" several of my miners to hashlets last night.  I can confirm that the "upgrade" is INSTANT.  It took no more than a few seconds before my chosen miners were hashlets.  Now, if my miners were really "upgraded" to a totally new hardware solution called the hashlet, I would be impressed and very happy.  Presumably, in that case, GAW would continue mining with my old hardware for their own account until the could sell the used miners. But that means literally thousands of miners would be flooding the market as customers migrate to the hashlet.  Where are these miners?  GAW appears to have ceased most sales of equipment.  Are they being sold to farms?  Or, were my miners just added to the "virtual" farm when I made the change?


[SPECULATION] Based on the questions above, I am speculating that the hashlet is really just a marketing gimmick to allow GAW/Zencloud to virtualize all of the hardware that is being hosted.  I suspect there was really no change to the underlying hardware when I "upgraded" to a hashlet (and for that matter, when I transitioned my units to Zencloud, where I suspect the initial virtualization happened before hashlets were announced).  My speculation is that it is more cost efficient to manage a massive farm and then allocate profits as shares in the resulting profits (based on Gh/s or Mh/s purchased) so the transition from GAW hosting to Zencloud to hashlet is really about virutalizing the hosted mining operations.  If that is the model, I am still very interested but I think GAW needs to be much more upfront (at a minimum, disclosure of mining costs/profits and accounting is required under SEC and state laws as such "shares" would appear to be securities).  Also, as promised by Zencloud, a virtual unit never goes down which is nice.  While I would remain very supportive of such a concept, GAW needs to be more upfront that I am essentially exchanging my OWNED unit for shared virtual Mh/s that is much more like shares in a group buy.  And a lot more detail about how profits are calculated, costs deducted, etc. if mining is virtual/shared.  If my speculation is wrong, I think GAW needs to explain much more than they have about what the hashlet really is and how it is different from shared virtual Mh/s.
  
(3) Proof of actual mining operations and profits.  GAW has delivered on every promise it has made to me. So don't take this as an accustation, but given the virtual nature of the hashlet, there has to be a way to provide comfort to us customers that this is not going to turn into a ponzi scheme or fraud.  In other words, identify the mining address(es) that Zenpool is using so the mining can be confirmed, and so that we know that there are in fact profits at least equal to the profits claimed.  I find it startling that Zenpool is already outperforming  all other offered pools by almost 190%!!  Consider:

G-Black #2 (Wafflepool) last 24 hours profit: .00814927 BTC
G-Black #5 (upgraded to hashlet only 16 hours ago and put on Zenpool) last 24 hours profit: .0133628 BTC!!!

I have seen differences in pools, especially multipools, but this is far too large a difference to be so easily explained.   Even accounting for zero pool fees this large of a performance difference seems unlikely (after all, over time mining should yield identical results on average after accounting for costs).  What is going on?  This could be explained by mining new alt coins and doing a better job than Wafflepool or Multipool.us - but I can't believe that; it is like the stock broker who claims to have outsmarted wall street.  So what does account for this great increase in profits per Mh/s?

I am very hopeful that we will see some answers soon.  And even more hopeful that some of these answers will make sense and I will invest more in hashlets if that is the case.  I have faith in GAW but after being burned by AMT and Black Arrow, my faith meter is running on near empty. So, Josh, please explain.

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[suchmoon]

(d) How are mining costs paid to Zencloud?  Are they deducted from the daily profits?  Or will I get a bill?   If I forget to pay, will I lose my hashlets or will you just take it from future mining profits?

I think I can answer that, at least for the hashlets. The maintenance fee is deducted daily from your BTC balance. There is nothing to forget although I'm not sure what would happen if you have insufficient balance (maybe impossible according to the "always make money" promise).

[MOB]

Well said eightcylinders.  I have been thinking these are essentially shares as well as that is the only thing that makes sense given that they are instantly issued and Josh says the hardware was always already on. However, if these were shares then the payout amounts should dwindle as more are purchased or there should be a cap on sales.

Either way, the Hashlets are returning just too much.  These are pirate level ROI.

As far as the question regarding when fees are taken, those are being subtracted starting with the second payout (in my case anyway).  They amounted to 25.73% of my payout.

Sure is optimistic how many Hashlets they are willing to sell you

[bathrobehero]

I have seen differences in pools, especially multipools, but this is far too large a difference to be so easily explained.   Even accounting for zero pool fees this large of a performance difference seems unlikely (after all, over time mining should yield identical results on average after accounting for costs).  What is going on?  This could be explained by mining new alt coins and doing a better job than Wafflepool or Multipool.us - but I can't believe that; it is like the stock broker who claims to have outsmarted wall street.  So what does account for this great increase in profits per Mh/s?

I think they are mining with everything but the kitchen sink to their own pocket and when you buy a hashlet which is basically a virtual share, they not actually putting any new hardware to work, instead just subtracting your share from their overall share. It has been said that they are mining several different coins at once instead of jumping between them to avoid downtime and if that's the case they might calculate hashlet profits at the end of the day based on the most profitable coins to attract customers while they are still profiting from the rest of the coins mined. If they keep their own hash power in the same relation to hashlets as it is now this could work long term.

[reyhan12]

Data enter pictures have been posted. https://hashtalk.org/t/data-center-pictures/6448


chill with the conspiracy theories now 

So which one of these is a hashlet now? I can see some Ants and some Zeus and Innosilicon (?) hardware.

Although there is some useful data in it:

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=89.246497W+31.210067N

Brand new warehouse?

It's unclear. Street View is dated May 2009. Google needs to do another drive by.

You can do satellite view. Map data is 2014. Still the same warehouse though.

[coinGeek]

Going back to the question in the title, "Hashlet - does it really exist?" I agree with others who have already basically said no, in the sense that it's not a physical piece of hardware in a data center that you bought and own. It's an cloud miner that acts like hardware but is really emulated on shared hardware.

One example of "acts like" is in the Zencloud Dashboard, where it shows your hash rate every hour. It fluctuates up and down a little like a real miner. Presumably your payout will be a product of this virtual hash rate times whatever payout rate your chosen pool is said to be paying.

This leads to several interesting (and some might say troubling) questions. And thay all boil down to this:

The Zencloud is a black box.

One thing you have to wonder is how the hash rate and payout rate is determined. We know it's virtual but what is the algorithm that generates them? Will it ever change? (Probably). Will we ever know?

[bathrobehero]

One thing you have to wonder is how the hash rate and payout rate is determined. We know it's virtual but what is the algorithm that generates them? Will it ever change? (Probably). Will we ever know?

It's just speculation, but let's say they are mining with everything they got and that they divided their hardwares into equal sectors for simplicity, each sector mining something else:

Sector 1 mining coinX
Sector 2 mining coinY
Sector 3 mining coinZ.

Now let's assume coinX was the most profitable from 0:00 to 12:00 and after that coinY yielded the most profit for the rest of the day while coinZ was the least profitable all day.
At the end of the day they might give us profit if we were mining coinX from 0:00 to 12:00 then coinY resulting in the most profit for us. Why? To lure us in with their high profitability while they are still making profit even on coinZ with their excess hardware. If you chose to mine on any other multipool they don't actually change pools, they are just pay you based on those pools actual payout rates which are always smaller.
If they are not selling all their hashrate as hashlet shares they can pretty much keep this up. I mean they get money from us buying hashlets and from mining to their own pocket with their unsold hardware which they can spend on developing more efficient hardware.

The hashrate fluctuation might just be a fake number based on a simple algorithm or it could really be in relation with their overall hashrate (or a sector's hashrate). Both could explain why the number starts changing the second you activate a miner.

[suchmoon]

Going back to the question in the title, "Hashlet - does it really exist?" I agree with others who have already basically said no, in the sense that it's not a physical piece of hardware in a data center that you bought and own. It's an cloud miner that acts like hardware but is really emulated on shared hardware.

One example of "acts like" is in the Zencloud Dashboard, where it shows your hash rate every hour. It fluctuates up and down a little like a real miner. Presumably your payout will be a product of this virtual hash rate times whatever payout rate your chosen pool is said to be paying.

This leads to several interesting (and some might say troubling) questions. And thay all boil down to this:

The Zencloud is a black box.

One thing you have to wonder is how the hash rate and payout rate is determined. We know it's virtual but what is the algorithm that generates them? Will it ever change? (Probably). Will we ever know?

When you say "virtual", I'm assumin you mean (a) it mines actual coins, exchanges them to bitcoin, etc? And we just get a small slice of the massive pool (which stopped at 138742.75 MH/s today for some reason).

Or (b) is it just crunching numbers and paying out but not mining any coins.

To me that's a big difference but when I asked this in another thread some replied that it doesn't matter as long as we get paid 

If it's (a) we should be able to see the hashrate somewhere.

If it's (b) we can stop worrying about any proof 

[coinGeek]

Going back to the question in the title, "Hashlet - does it really exist?" I agree with others who have already basically said no, in the sense that it's not a physical piece of hardware in a data center that you bought and own. It's an cloud miner that acts like hardware but is really emulated on shared hardware.

One example of "acts like" is in the Zencloud Dashboard, where it shows your hash rate every hour. It fluctuates up and down a little like a real miner. Presumably your payout will be a product of this virtual hash rate times whatever payout rate your chosen pool is said to be paying.

This leads to several interesting (and some might say troubling) questions. And thay all boil down to this:

The Zencloud is a black box.

One thing you have to wonder is how the hash rate and payout rate is determined. We know it's virtual but what is the algorithm that generates them? Will it ever change? (Probably). Will we ever know?

When you say "virtual", I'm assumin you mean (a) it mines actual coins, exchanges them to bitcoin, etc? And we just get a small slice of the massive pool (which stopped at 138742.75 MH/s today for some reason).

Or (b) is it just crunching numbers and paying out but not mining any coins.

To me that's a big difference but when I asked this in another thread some replied that it doesn't matter as long as we get paid  

If it's (a) we should be able to see the hashrate somewhere.

If it's (b) we can stop worrying about any proof  

I'm guessing (a), they are mining coins, but I'm working on slim evidence. If they aren't then I don't know how else they would expect to make income to pay "miners" (or really, investors). At least long term.

How else could (b) be funded?

[suchmoon]

I'm guessing (a), they are mining coins, but I'm working on slim evidence. If they aren't then I don't know how else they would expect to make income to pay "miners" (or really, investors). At least long term.

How else could (b) be funded?

From sales? E.g. pay back 90% and that would still be a much better ROI than any Scrypt hardware has achieved since ~ April.

[coinGeek]

I'm guessing (a), they are mining coins, but I'm working on slim evidence. If they aren't then I don't know how else they would expect to make income to pay "miners" (or really, investors). At least long term.

How else could (b) be funded?

From sales? E.g. pay back 90% and that would still be a much better ROI than any Scrypt hardware has achieved since ~ April.

Of course, option (a) includes sales too...

Pure (b) seems dishonest if not illegal. It's not clear to me what they are doing exactly, but they are strongly implying that mining is going on and customers are buying into a share of that.

I'm going out of my depth now as far as what I know about the law and what I know about Zencloud.

Interesting topic.

[Flep182]

I have a GAW Fury 1.3 Mh/s running in the ZenCloud and have the option to upgrade. Has anyone tried this and seen what they get in hashlets? As they're only per 1 and up I assume I won't be getting a fractional hashlet. Although with the raised points earlier that shouldn't be a problem.

[Kimonio]

I have a GAW Fury 1.3 Mh/s running in the ZenCloud and have the option to upgrade. Has anyone tried this and seen what they get in hashlets? As they're only per 1 and up I assume I won't be getting a fractional hashlet. Although with the raised points earlier that shouldn't be a problem.

You will get a hashlet with a speed that matches your fury. I upgraded mine yesterday from the zen cloud to a hashlet and it appears as follows:

https://i.imgur.com/3QuesEG.png

You can see the payout I received having the hashlet mining at the zen pool for yesterday is 0.000807 which is pretty good even taking into account the 8 cent maintenance fee.

[Flep182]

I have a GAW Fury 1.3 Mh/s running in the ZenCloud and have the option to upgrade. Has anyone tried this and seen what they get in hashlets? As they're only per 1 and up I assume I won't be getting a fractional hashlet. Although with the raised points earlier that shouldn't be a problem.

You will get a hashlet with a speed that matches your fury. I upgraded mine yesterday from the zen cloud to a hashlet and it appears as follows:



You can see the payout I received having the hashlet mining at the zen pool for yesterday is 0.000807 which is pretty good even taking into account the 8 cent maintenance fee.

Nice! I've got the hostingfee for the Fury waived untill 7 november but I think the extra payout is worth the switchover. If they keep that up at least!

[Kimonio]

I have a GAW Fury 1.3 Mh/s running in the ZenCloud and have the option to upgrade. Has anyone tried this and seen what they get in hashlets? As they're only per 1 and up I assume I won't be getting a fractional hashlet. Although with the raised points earlier that shouldn't be a problem.

You will get a hashlet with a speed that matches your fury. I upgraded mine yesterday from the zen cloud to a hashlet and it appears as follows:

https://i.imgur.com/3QuesEG.png

You can see the payout I received having the hashlet mining at the zen pool for yesterday is 0.000807 which is pretty good even taking into account the 8 cent maintenance fee.

Nice! I've got the hostingfee for the Fury waived untill 7 november but I think the extra payout is worth the switchover. If they keep that up at least!

Nice! Looks like you got the same free fury as I did. Any free time you had remaining on the zen cloud is automatically transferred across. So if you were to upgrade, the fury won't be billed till the 7th of November.

[manfred87]

Manfred87's Picture Proof of the Hardware:

Interpretation is on everybody himself.

Fact: In only two month they build up a very large Mining Center in the East
( https://hashtalk.org/t/gaw-miners-generation-a-hosted-update/1347 )

Could be Fake: Datacenter West ( no Pictures from inside )


















Mirrors:
http://www.xup.to/dl,45783567/zenminer.zip/
http://www.file-upload.net/download-9405717/zenminer.zip.html
https://www.sendspace.com/file/ufsvvh

[KriszDev]

If this is cloudmining then why they need my address?

Billing address perhaps?

When I wanna pay with bitcoin? Why they not ask it first?

[MOB]

Why is Zenpool, since GAW's involvement, offering a 7-10% APR on BTC balances you let ride?  There are also no automatic withdrawal features like every other pool.

Presumably, this would be because GAW is making more than 7-10%.  How might this be so?:
A) Speculating with the floating BTC
B) Reducing the psychological barrier to buy more mining equipment by having it just a click away and not even on the blockchain
C) Something else?

Miners are effectively getting paid to keep those BTC off the blockchain and being cashed out.  Why is this?

If this were a Ponzi (option B, coingeek) then convincing people to keep their BTC purely in Zenland would allow the Ponzi to continue much much longer as the payouts would not actually exist like they would in most Ponzi schemes.

If you have anything mining on Zenpool, then I highly recommend you transfer the BTC to another wallet regularly.  No point in leaving all your eggs in one basket.

[suchmoon]

Manfred87's Picture Proof of the Hardware:

I have to commend you for the effort and let's hope nobody quotes that wall of pictures

Edit: so much for that then 

[alienesb]

Manfred87's Picture Proof of the Hardware:

Interpretation is on everybody himself.

Fact: In only two month they build up a very large Mining Center in the East
( https://hashtalk.org/t/gaw-miners-generation-a-hosted-update/1347 )

Could be Fake: Datacenter West ( no Pictures from inside )


















Mirrors:
http://www.xup.to/dl,45783567/zenminer.zip/
http://www.file-upload.net/download-9405717/zenminer.zip.html
https://www.sendspace.com/file/ufsvvh

Interesting, thanks.