It's become more and more obvious when following GAW's announcements that Josh just does not understand currency. And to be fair, it's a very tricky
In general it seems Josh just doesn't "get" bitcoin. He talks about this new currency as being designed for institutional investors, for "business" - and for "miners", sorry, "stakers". He has built in a lot of bells and whistles with those Hashlets for the gamification crowd, making it more "complex" (more stupid, really). Those bells and whistles are useless for a currency. Actually, it makes for a less efficient currency (more time-consuming). A cryptocurrency either stands on its own legs (the genesis block) or it wont stand at all. Bitcoin has way too much of a head-start and will be enough going forward, especially considering sidechains.
I think Josh never really intended for this to be a scam as they moved from importing hardware to selling cloudy fluffy stuff marketed as "miners" doing "mining" (in reality nothing more than scripts and numbers in GAW's database).
He probably underestimated delivery times, got left cold after something failed and stopped the Vaultbreaker, tried to cover-up with Hashlets "mining", got the idea to turn everything into cloud gamification, got really cocky and fooled himself into believing he understands currency. Josh's reasoning indicates he thinks of cryptocurrencies as where they stocks in a company.
Regarding your second point quoted... I had similar thoughts many pages ago about this incredibly abrupt change of business model. Scrape away all of the "noise" about PayCoin and this is about the exchange... and most likely getting someone to acquire it to get the actual money men their money back. I can't argue that having a Coinbase-clone site w/ the added features of being able to fund a debit card is a bad idea, it's a good idea... BUT, GAW has changed their model in an incredibly ham-handed way that is just alienating to most people outside of the GAWsome protective bubble.
The most telling thing is found when you take a look at what was said during the much hyped BTC.com purchase... so many glowing quotes about BTC. Then just mere months later to do an about face and say BTC isn't viable, etc.
The intentions of Hashlets were probably good when it was devised... but there were obviously fatal flaws in the model.. first, the changing landscape of the value of hashpower tied to a business model going after the "little guy". Sorry, if you were able to sell me single MHs last year at the same time, it would have been brilliant... but to sell single MHs in the current environment (and small amounts of GHs for BTC mining) to me is irresponsible. You then encourage people to "reinvest" in a dying commodity is just going to leave a large share of your customers broke... sure the early adopters did well, but buy in Sept or even worse Oct/Nov.. .you're not getting anything from "mining" with GAW.
GAW was never a manufacturer... so the best they could ever get in terms of hardware is the best wholesale prices... which still isn't good enough when you factor in things like the overhead, customer acquisition costs (I would imagine this number was really high in terms of the cost/vs revenue).
I think Josh's ability to change face so quickly shows he just wants to be perceived as a thought leader, without actually bringing anything to the table...
Paycoin is just a diversion to keep their existing customer base around... I can't imagine there's much of an influx of new customers coming in... many people are still just learning to comprehend how/what BTC is... now you throw in a marketing push that says BTC isn't "the one" combined with a bunch of POS crap, lots of stuff about controllers, staking, etc... POS is not understood by Joe Consumer and they are doing a horrible job of explaining it, IMO.
So for me, all of this comes back to the exchange as the way out for them... I think the problem is they are really late to the development party and with their spotty technical record to-date... who, outside of the customer base, is going to be thrilled to give it a go?
