Gaw people are great example of the human tendency to "rationalize" rather than to think rationally. Lol, the hatred, wow.
It's not just GAW customers that rationalize poor decisions. I've done crypto off and on since 2011 and I've made plenty of bad decisions. Obviously, a number of HT members read this thread. For those of you lurking, here is my experience with GAW. Look at it objectively and tell me it wouldn't raise concerns in a rational person. I know I've had concerns for a long time. I apologize in advance for the tome but this is somewhat of a cathartic event for me.
I purchased my first rebranded Zeus miner from GAW back in June. Back then, GAW's promise was to your door in 5 days. Mine came on the 5th day. Many others did not get theirs in the promised 5 days. Now, in fairness to GAW, the supply chain was out of their hands. They had a vendor who shipped from China and GAW could not control the logistics. They were basically middlemen collecting the money and handling RMAs. There were complaints in their forums and things seemed to be mostly taken care of. They even issued a credit to customers that bought their miners right before they suddenly cut the price in half. Can you always make everyone happy? No. Mostly, at that time, they seemed to be in a little over their head by underestimating what they were in control of but trying to do the right thing.
Then I bought a used Gridseed blade from their website that was stated as coming from their Northeast data center. I had store credit so decided to use it. The miner did not come in the promised timeframe. This seemed odd as the miner was already in their control. I could never get a rep on the phone. However, the emails started to fill up with excuses. "I need to check with our warehouse in China." Yeah, it's used and coming from your US location. I got a ZenController (remember those?) which I didn't order but was told to keep it. After more excuses and a few more weeks, the miner finally showed up and it worked well. Now in my mind, they have a workflow management and customer service problem. The customer service problem is openly acknowledged on their forums and they hire more CS reps who are visible.
Up to this point, GAW sold physical miners but also offered hosting. I didn't utilize their hosting but there were often complaints from the customers about availability and uptime. It was clear that whatever facility was being used was not meant for the kind of power draw these scrypt miners were pulling. They announced they were building a proper data center with the required power density. There were even pictures posted. Fast forward a few weeks and GAW enters into an agreement with ZenMiner. Now you can purchase your miners from GAW and have them hosted at ZenMiner. If you want your miner sent to you, you can make the request and it will be shipped to you. Miners are also guaranteed to be up and running in 24 hours. To me, it seems like GAW is addressing their problems of scale and the hosted solution begins somewhat attractive to me. Customers can also have their GAW hosted miners transferred to ZenMiner. Customers are generally happy with the improved uptime. Fast forward a few weeks and GAW announces that they have merged with ZenMiner. Then there is an impromptu sale that evolves on their forum for a 27 MH/s miner with 3 months of free hosting. I decided to purchase a few. I like to touch my miners but I figured if I didn't like the hosting service, I would request that they be shipped to me. The miners were deployed, I selected my scrypt pool via the ZenCloud interface, and I was good to go.
In my mind, this is where things start to get concerning. Some people with one month of hosting ask that their miners be shipped to them. The GAW policy is not well defined and many customers make a lot of assumptions, many of them bad in my opinion. At that point, the policy is announced that miners requested to be shipped will take at least two weeks. The work will need to be scheduled, the equipment packed, and then shipped. After all, shipping miners is not our primary business or where we focus our resources we are told. Obviously, no one wants to take their miners off-line for a minimum of two weeks and pay shipping costs. This is where you first see GAW pushing customers in the direction GAW wants them to go. I have no idea if anyone ever received a physical miner from the ZenMiner data center. This was a real concern for me and I believe others. Additional questions were being raised. Where was the data center located? It's a trade secret was the response. There were questions about capacity. It's a trade secret was the response. At least post some photos. We will get some posted is the response. There are real, legitimate questions in their forums. They are answered but not really in what I would call a transparent or verifiable manner. It's also when you start to see rationalization by a group of customers. Eventually, pictures are posted. The geo metadata is left in the photos and people quickly discover where the photos were taken. Groups of customers essentially begin the forum equivalent of a victory dance and start in with "See, we weren't wrong." The general feedback to GAW is that communications are limited and something that needs serious improvement.
At this point, I'd come to the conclusion that while the service is represented as a hosting type of operation, it is really a modified type of cloud-based operation with virtual miners. You purchase a portion of hash capacity. How GAW delivers that hash capacity is not your concern. You may have purchased 10 MH/s of power but the underlying hardware could be a 100 MH/s device that is just logically carved up into multiple pieces or two 5 MH/s devices. That's not necessarily bad, but if that's how you are doing it, people should at least be told.
The questions continued even in GAWs forums. These are crypto logistical questions such as, if you are mining a scrypt pool, how come we're not seeing the hashes reflected at the pool? Customers even excitedly talk about pointing their miners to specific pools to see the hash rates jump. Hash rates at the pools remain static. Pool operators state that they are not seeing GAW hash power hit their pools. Why are the hash rates in the ZenCloud dashboard so consistent? Crickets. By this time, I have modified my belief somewhat about how GAW is operating. Rather than having a ton of power hungry scrypt asics mining and converting scrypt-based altcoins to BTC, a process that can be risky and involve losses, I believe that they are just mining straight BTC. Essentially, they have developed a way to abstract the user from the mining activity and create a virtual miner. They have created pool names, based on actual, real pools that people recognize, and assigned payout values to these pools, assigned a conversion factor for the "scrypt" mining users they think they're doing, and pay people. That's just my opinion based on general observations since the flow of verifiable information was limited. I've been an IT infrastructure architect on cloud solutions so this is how I thought what they were doing might be accomplished. At one point, it was almost a game among some forum users to speculate out how GAW might be doing some of the things they were doing. They wouldn't say since it was a trade secret. I had real reservations at this point and really felt that the trade secret veil was an excuse. You can describe in general terms what was being done without giving away the secret sauce. If you were telling people you were operating one way but really operating another, then that's really not kosher. However, I had hosted miners that I couldn't get shipped and didn't really want in my house anyway so I was in a holding pattern.
Vaultbreakers are announced. They are paid in advance like all pre-orders. They are exceedingly expensive with few schedule details like many scrypt pre-orders at the time. I don't do pre-orders after my BFL experience but many people do. Vaultbreakers are delayed with the occasional status update. A bit later Hashlets are introduced. They are initially described as the most advanced cryptocurrency miner ever which implied it was hardware. There are questions as to if they are really the Vaultbreakers just carved up to smaller pieces or if they are something else. There are multiple levels of Hashlets introduced each with a different price level but they are tied to specific "pools". They are promised to provide ROI. Maintenance fees will never exceed the payout. The Hashlet Prime is described as the best of the best and carry special favor. You can mine any pool with them. Another miner will never be required because the Prime is so advanced. Vaultbreaker owners are given the opportunity to convert their Vaultbreaker orders into Hashlet Primes. This failure to deliver the Vaultbreaker is only minimally noted on the forums because people are so excited they get to convert to Hashlet Primes. They are thankful that they aren't screwed out of their money like in other vaporware pre-orders. For those not versed in finance, these users just gave GAW an interest free loan. The introduction of the Hashlet is where the marketing hype really starts to climb to a fevered pitch.
My hosted miners are converted to Primes. GAW made it too attractive not to convert and my miners were essentially trapped there anyway. It was obvious they wanted to push all hosting customers in that direction. I'm getting daily BTC payouts but they aren't crazy. I figure if things don't go south before my three months of free hosting is done, I will have made back the money I spent on the original "physical" miners. I even buy some Primes at the intro price because I'm slow that way and have an OCD compulsion to make numbers even. I made that decision against my better judgement. It's not the first bad decision I've ever made and it won't be the last.
ZenPool is introduced. Again, it is not clear how ZenPool works and how they are able to maintain a payout better than any other pool. There are vague references to renting out hash power and crypto currency multipool type activity, trading altcoins and being better at it than others. Legitimate questions in the forum are beaten down with positivity. In my mind, this is not a good thing.
Honestly, some of the capabilities are neat and provide flexibility. The whole concept of a virtual miner that allows me to merge miners to make them easier to manage and split miners and mine against different pools is cool. However, as products and capabilities are rolled out, there are constant delays and issues. Many of them are development related. I've been a developer so I understand this world. What I experienced and was witness to was what we call "Cowboy Development." Essentially, it's a lack of real testing. I even question in my mind if there is a test environment. Occasionally, the problems are blamed on infrastructure or even system design. The payment servers are overloaded. The backend database needs to be redesigned. We will rerun payments. Withdraws will be re-enabled soon. Things will be fixed soon. Self-imposed deadlines come and go. People on the forums are always grateful to be told "what's going on" and respond with "You guys are GAWsome, you work too hard. You should get some sleep." In my mind, what they should be doing is deploying fully tested solutions that work on a scalable infrastructure. I understand there might be issues occasionally but I find it extremely unprofessional that they cannot get things right time and time again. This is what I do for a living so I'm really irritated at what would seem to be a certain level of incompetence. Especially for a company that has, in my mind, a fiduciary responsibility to its customers. Let me say that again. GAW has a fiduciary responsibility to its customers to deploy solutions that work.
The rest is kind of where things are now. HT is heavily and efficiently censored to ensure there is no dissent. Announcements come out filled with grammatical errors and present an image to those not blinded that GAW sometimes seems unsure of where they are going. Did you see the debit card reversal and re-reversal? I read the announcements section every few days just to see what the party line is. Delays continue and explanations are weak. The number of customers at GAW has probably grown exponentially. I suspect a number of them think that they are all going to be rich when Paybase is released and they can sell their XPY for $20 back to GAW. My sense is that there are people over there that have no idea what they've gotten into or have spent money that they can't afford to lose. You hear that a lot in investing, cryptocurrency, and even over on HT. A number of those customers haven't seen GAW from the beginning. What I would say to those people is read the text above. It should at least make you think about what you are doing and who you are getting into bed with. If you still choose to make that decision then that's just fine. Just remember what you were told as a kid: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Then remember what you probably weren't told as an adult in relation to investing: Pigs get slaughtered.
Having said all that, I still have some holdings in ZenCloud. I'm not counting on it for anything. It's paying me XPY which I sell. If XPY works out, great. If it doesn't, that's ok too. That's kind of been my attitude toward GAW since I discovered that my hosted miners were essentially trapped back in the summer. I'm not in the hole on this experiment and even if I was, it would only be my own fault. Based on the history I've seen with GAW and how things around XPY have been explained, I don’t see how the situation is sustainable. However, I’m a simpleton so maybe I just don't understand.
Again, sorry for the tome but this was a cathartic event for me and I had to just get it out.
