▁ ▂ ▄ ▅ ▆ Cloudmining 101 (ponzi risk assessment) ▆ ▅ ▄ ▂ ▁

[gollumist]

Hey Puppet,
Greetings for nice job you have done with this discusion!
Can you please evaluate this "new" cloudmining - hashocean.com ?
For me is clear scam and rumors say - there are the same guys which did hasprofit before.
Regards
G

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[MrTeal]

AMHash hasn't been running a ponzi.

So where did the payments in January/February come from? Certainly not from mining?

Of course they ran a ponzi for a couple of months, stop splitting hair. They paid customers' money back to them. It's irrelevant that they weren't signing up any new ones IN THAT PERIOD, if anything that just hastened the collapse. Don't forget that mining ponzis are not your classical investment ponzis - you don't have to pay back 120% or whatever, you can slowly bleed the suckers by paying back 90% of the initial investment and everyone will be happy - hey, it's mining, sometimes you don't get 100%+ ROI.

Now whether you want to hope they will rise from the dead and pay everyone back - that's another story. I hope for that too, I have a couple of BTC invested there unfortunately. I got paid back for the Prisma fiasco, which also looked quite hopeless but still far from this clusterfuck.

You have an incredibly loose definition of the term Ponzi. The hallmark of a Ponzi is that it takes in customer/investor money and does nothing with it but use it to pay back earlier investors. If AM took in money for 5PH/s worth of equipment and deployed 5PH/s of equipment, it does not make it a Ponzi if there is a service interruption and they pay customer dividends out of profits/reserves until such time as replacement hardware can be deployed. It just means there's a service interruption.
Now, if FC and/or the AMHash team does run off with all the equipment and coin, it's still not a Ponzi. It might be a theft or a scam, but that is a much broader category than a Ponzi. It would only really be a Ponzi if the entire farm was an elaborate sham, and they've been paying out customers from their own funds this whole time.

[suchmoon]

AMHash hasn't been running a ponzi.

So where did the payments in January/February come from? Certainly not from mining?

Of course they ran a ponzi for a couple of months, stop splitting hair. They paid customers' money back to them. It's irrelevant that they weren't signing up any new ones IN THAT PERIOD, if anything that just hastened the collapse. Don't forget that mining ponzis are not your classical investment ponzis - you don't have to pay back 120% or whatever, you can slowly bleed the suckers by paying back 90% of the initial investment and everyone will be happy - hey, it's mining, sometimes you don't get 100%+ ROI.

Now whether you want to hope they will rise from the dead and pay everyone back - that's another story. I hope for that too, I have a couple of BTC invested there unfortunately. I got paid back for the Prisma fiasco, which also looked quite hopeless but still far from this clusterfuck.

You have an incredibly loose definition of the term Ponzi. The hallmark of a Ponzi is that it takes in customer/investor money and does nothing with it but use it to pay back earlier investors. If AM took in money for 5PH/s worth of equipment and deployed 5PH/s of equipment, it does not make it a Ponzi if there is a service interruption and they pay customer dividends out of profits/reserves until such time as replacement hardware can be deployed. It just means there's a service interruption.
Now, if FC and/or the AMHash team does run off with all the equipment and coin, it's still not a Ponzi. It might be a theft or a scam, but that is a much broader category than a Ponzi. It would only really be a Ponzi if the entire farm was an elaborate sham, and they've been paying out customers from their own funds this whole time.

It's not incredibly loose. Maybe a tad wobbly but not a lot. There HAS to be some threshold when a business paying out funds collected from customers (and not business profits) can be considered a ponzi regardless of their prior good behavior. To me a couple of months while keeping vital information from customers is more than enough.

In other words, if someone deploys some miners, sells some mining shares, then at some point decides that mining is too much trouble - or gets robbed or whatever - and switches the business model to just keeping slow payouts up to 90% of collected cash back to customers, what do you call that?

Also keep in mind that even though AMHash didn't have a new IPO during that time, their failure to disclose such important information kept the price up on Havelock and anyone who purchased in Jan/Feb has the right to call this an outright scam, if not specifically a ponzi.

[MrTeal]

AMHash hasn't been running a ponzi.

So where did the payments in January/February come from? Certainly not from mining?

Of course they ran a ponzi for a couple of months, stop splitting hair. They paid customers' money back to them. It's irrelevant that they weren't signing up any new ones IN THAT PERIOD, if anything that just hastened the collapse. Don't forget that mining ponzis are not your classical investment ponzis - you don't have to pay back 120% or whatever, you can slowly bleed the suckers by paying back 90% of the initial investment and everyone will be happy - hey, it's mining, sometimes you don't get 100%+ ROI.

Now whether you want to hope they will rise from the dead and pay everyone back - that's another story. I hope for that too, I have a couple of BTC invested there unfortunately. I got paid back for the Prisma fiasco, which also looked quite hopeless but still far from this clusterfuck.

You have an incredibly loose definition of the term Ponzi. The hallmark of a Ponzi is that it takes in customer/investor money and does nothing with it but use it to pay back earlier investors. If AM took in money for 5PH/s worth of equipment and deployed 5PH/s of equipment, it does not make it a Ponzi if there is a service interruption and they pay customer dividends out of profits/reserves until such time as replacement hardware can be deployed. It just means there's a service interruption.
Now, if FC and/or the AMHash team does run off with all the equipment and coin, it's still not a Ponzi. It might be a theft or a scam, but that is a much broader category than a Ponzi. It would only really be a Ponzi if the entire farm was an elaborate sham, and they've been paying out customers from their own funds this whole time.

It's not incredibly loose. Maybe a tad wobbly but not a lot. There HAS to be some threshold when a business paying out funds collected from customers (and not business profits) can be considered a ponzi regardless of their prior good behavior. To me a couple of months while keeping vital information from customers is more than enough.

In other words, if someone deploys some miners, sells some mining shares, then at some point decides that mining is too much trouble - or gets robbed or whatever - and switches the business model to just keeping slow payouts up to 90% of collected cash back to customers, what do you call that?

Also keep in mind that even though AMHash didn't have a new IPO during that time, their failure to disclose such important information kept the price up on Havelock and anyone who purchased in Jan/Feb has the right to call this an outright scam, if not specifically a ponzi.

I don't disagree that them not disclosing the information to investors is scammy behaviour. They have definitely handled this poorly even if they are running a legitimate company.

For your example, I wouldn't call that a Ponzi, especially if they disclose the fact. Again, all examples here are assuming they are acting in good faith which remains to be seen. If the company at this point is fatally compromised due to the robbery, paying out whatever's left to the investors isn't a bad thing if there's no further path forward. By definition they would have had to invest some of the original funds into hardware to be able to sell the hashrate to begin with, so you wouldn't expect to get everything back. Saying they're paying back from customer funds and not business profits is difficult to show though, since business profits come from customer funds in any business. If Asicminer takes in $X to deploy 5PH/s and it costs them $Y to actually do so, then $X-$Y=$Z is their business profits along with whatever margin they charge on maintenance fees. If there is downtime in the equipment and they cover payments out of what they have left after purchasing equipment, that doesn't mean it is a Ponzi. It's actually much preferable to the alternative, which is "We got robbed, so we're suspending service."

[Puppet]

Lets not argue semantics on what is or isnt a ponzi, what really matters is what is or isnt a scam. To be a scam,  there has to be an intent to defraud. Even if AM/AMhash imo clearly should have disclosed what was going on, being asked not to by friedcat along with promises of a fix in the form of replacement hardware, is not an entirely unreasonable explanation and I do not (yet) believe the intend was to defraud their customers. The fact they didnt IPO anything after they were informed of the magical disappearing act, testifies to that.

[suchmoon]

Lets not argue semantics on what is or isnt a ponzi, what really matters is what is or isnt a scam. To be a scam,  there has to be an intent to defraud. Even if AM/AMhash imo clearly should have disclosed what was going on, being asked not to by friedcat along with promises of a fix in the form of replacement hardware, is not an entirely unreasonable explanation and I do not (yet) believe the intend was to defraud their customers. The fact they didnt IPO anything after they were informed of the magical disappearing act, testifies to that.

They clearly defrauded everyone who bought on Havelock in the last two months. The fact that they (AMHash) did not directly profit from that does not make it not a scam, it just makes them incompetent scammers. Had they disclosed what happened at the time it happened the price on Havelock would have reflected how much trust there was in getting the replacement hardware deployed, and it would have been a fair game. The fact that they tried to cover it up is about as much as I need to know about their intent.

Again, that's just my threshold for BS, I'm fully aware that in this Wild West that is Bitcoin everyone can have their own definition of what's acceptable or not. But after the GAW meltdown I'm much less tolerant to these kinds of shenanigans.

[Puppet]

I think we agree, its just how you phrase it, ie, semantics.  Even the dictionary tells us we are both right, its just that you pick definition 3, Im using the first one:

fraud (frɔːd)
n.
1. deceit or trickery perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage.
2. a particular instance of such deceit or trickery: mail fraud; election frauds.
3. something that is not what it pretends.

[SpanishSoldier]

AMHash hasn't been running a ponzi.

So where did the payments in January/February come from? Certainly not from mining?

Of course they ran a ponzi for a couple of months, stop splitting hair. They paid customers' money back to them. It's irrelevant that they weren't signing up any new ones IN THAT PERIOD, if anything that just hastened the collapse. Don't forget that mining ponzis are not your classical investment ponzis - you don't have to pay back 120% or whatever, you can slowly bleed the suckers by paying back 90% of the initial investment and everyone will be happy - hey, it's mining, sometimes you don't get 100%+ ROI.

Now whether you want to hope they will rise from the dead and pay everyone back - that's another story. I hope for that too, I have a couple of BTC invested there unfortunately. I got paid back for the Prisma fiasco, which also looked quite hopeless but still far from this clusterfuck.

You have an incredibly loose definition of the term Ponzi. The hallmark of a Ponzi is that it takes in customer/investor money and does nothing with it but use it to pay back earlier investors. If AM took in money for 5PH/s worth of equipment and deployed 5PH/s of equipment, it does not make it a Ponzi if there is a service interruption and they pay customer dividends out of profits/reserves until such time as replacement hardware can be deployed. It just means there's a service interruption.
Now, if FC and/or the AMHash team does run off with all the equipment and coin, it's still not a Ponzi. It might be a theft or a scam, but that is a much broader category than a Ponzi. It would only really be a Ponzi if the entire farm was an elaborate sham, and they've been paying out customers from their own funds this whole time.

It's not incredibly loose. Maybe a tad wobbly but not a lot. There HAS to be some threshold when a business paying out funds collected from customers (and not business profits) can be considered a ponzi regardless of their prior good behavior. To me a couple of months while keeping vital information from customers is more than enough.

In other words, if someone deploys some miners, sells some mining shares, then at some point decides that mining is too much trouble - or gets robbed or whatever - and switches the business model to just keeping slow payouts up to 90% of collected cash back to customers, what do you call that?

Also keep in mind that even though AMHash didn't have a new IPO during that time, their failure to disclose such important information kept the price up on Havelock and anyone who purchased in Jan/Feb has the right to call this an outright scam, if not specifically a ponzi.

I don't disagree that them not disclosing the information to investors is scammy behaviour. They have definitely handled this poorly even if they are running a legitimate company.

For your example, I wouldn't call that a Ponzi, especially if they disclose the fact. Again, all examples here are assuming they are acting in good faith which remains to be seen. If the company at this point is fatally compromised due to the robbery, paying out whatever's left to the investors isn't a bad thing if there's no further path forward. By definition they would have had to invest some of the original funds into hardware to be able to sell the hashrate to begin with, so you wouldn't expect to get everything back. Saying they're paying back from customer funds and not business profits is difficult to show though, since business profits come from customer funds in any business. If Asicminer takes in $X to deploy 5PH/s and it costs them $Y to actually do so, then $X-$Y=$Z is their business profits along with whatever margin they charge on maintenance fees. If there is downtime in the equipment and they cover payments out of what they have left after purchasing equipment, that doesn't mean it is a Ponzi. It's actually much preferable to the alternative, which is "We got robbed, so we're suspending service."

I understand that you are trying your best to recover the lost glory of FC. But, they have literally raped him over here in front of thousands of people => https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=974058.0. I think, even Josh Garza was not treated so bad on BitcoinTalk. I was doubtful about FC, but did not expect this for him really...

[MrTeal]

I understand that you are trying your best to recover the lost glory of FC. But, they have literally raped him over here in front of thousands of people => https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=974058.0. I think, even Josh Garza was not treated so bad on BitcoinTalk. I was doubtful about FC, but did not expect this for him really...

I really don't give two shits about Friedcat, and have no money on the line. I'm merely stating that if AMHash had enough hardware to back their sales, "lost" the hardware for a couple months but paid up out of company coffers, then ends up replacing it, that doesn't make them a ponzi. Likewise, if they had all the hardware and were paying dividends out of mining revenue, but then stole all the hardware and ran with the money they are still not a ponzi. They're a bunch of thieves, but it's not a ponzi.

PS - Unless there's pictures in that thread of Bitcointalk users sodomizing FC, I don't think you have a very good grasp on what the word "literally" means.

[armedmilitia]

Wow. I can't believe how much of a clusterfuck that turned into.
And to think how much street cred AM had, and then dropping completely off the radar like that. Like the 'pac says, trust no one.
I think I'm going to start using escrow when buying from SP-TECH and bitmain now. 

[Puppet]

I think I'm going to start using escrow when buying from SP-TECH and bitmain now. 

Be sure to use multisig, otherwise one day your escrow agent will just run off.

[ATCkit]

Anyome know anything about this new site: https://multimine.net/

Sounds to good to be true IMO.

[Deathwing]

Anyome know anything about this new site: https://multimine.net/

Sounds to good to be true IMO.

Agreed, no fees at all because they are "paid from profit on trading".

[eneloop]

Anyome know anything about this new site: https://multimine.net/

Sounds to good to be true IMO.

1+2+3+4+5+6+7 -> 100% SCAM

[ligeros]

Hey Puppet,
Greetings for nice job you have done with this discusion!
Can you please evaluate this "new" cloudmining - hashocean.com ?
For me is clear scam and rumors say - there are the same guys which did hasprofit before.
Regards
G

I'm sure hashocean is hashprofit-2
they have similar design, the same set of 3 referral links (home, pricing, signup pages), send the same daily e-mails about profit

[Puppet]

Downgraded Kryptologika to ponzi. Its a 'secret' passthrough of AMhash but the owner deems it unnecessary to tell this to his investors, even now that Amhash is pretty much gone.

Kryptologika may continue to pay out, but currently there is nothing backing the hashrate and the owner IMO is acting in bad faith, so I have to rate it a ponzi.

[SFMiner]

Lets not argue semantics on what is or isnt a ponzi, what really matters is what is or isnt a scam. To be a scam,  there has to be an intent to defraud. Even if AM/AMhash imo clearly should have disclosed what was going on, being asked not to by friedcat along with promises of a fix in the form of replacement hardware, is not an entirely unreasonable explanation and I do not (yet) believe the intend was to defraud their customers. The fact they didnt IPO anything after they were informed of the magical disappearing act, testifies to that.

This is bad news for AMHASH, and even worse news for unsuspecting customers.  I was really hoping FriedCat would produce the BE300S, it sounded promising!

I looked back at my ROI on my (very) small investment in AMHASH shares via Havelock, and I was surprised to see I made a 2% profit over 2 months.  I originally invested in mid-November, and I closed out my position in mid-January.  I was going to write a cloud mining review based on my experience, but looks like that would be pointless now.  I'm surprised AMHASH waited so long to let the public know.

I agree with others that this was more of an outright theft than a ponzi... but I must admit, you've been pretty accurate with your ponzi risk assessment so far!

[Snipe85]

Downgraded Kryptologika to ponzi. Its a 'secret' passthrough of AMhash but the owner deems it unnecessary to tell this to his investors, even now that Amhash is pretty much gone.

Kryptologika may continue to pay out, but currently there is nothing backing the hashrate and the owner IMO is acting in bad faith, so I have to rate it a ponzi.

So the whole backed by silver act was a bullshit?

Amhash was supposed to be one of the most trusted operations. I remember when Hashie started to show signs of a scam people were defending it by saying: 'but it's backed by Amhash, so it has to be legit'

[Puppet]

So the whole backed by silver act was a bullshit?

Have you done the math? 1oz of silver is like $15.
Whether its bullshit or not, that never made any sense. Its like saying my house is "backed by gold", its got a gold plated chandelier somewhere.

Amhash was supposed to be one of the most trusted operations. I remember when Hashie started to show signs of a scam people were defending it by saying: 'but it's backed by Amhash, so it has to be legit'

Hashie at one point resold AMhash hashrate. I also considered AMhash "legit", even though I had always said hashie was a scam operation, and their previous 'gen 1' and later 'firecrackers' or whatever imagined mining products, where clearly non existent. They just used reselling of amhash to confuse customers and gain appearance of legitimacy. Worked well too.

When hashie collapsed, amhash did back their hashrate sold through hashie,  at least until this whole friedcat disappearing act hit and no on knows what to think.

FWIWI dont think AMhash set out to scam; I do think they made a huge mistake by not disclosing this earlier,  but I still believe they had honest intentions, but they were completely dependent on AM. Whatever happened at AM, I also do not believe it was a run of the mill heist, it makes no sense if you think about it, AM has already paid out many times more in dividends to investors then it ever collected, it has delivered on all its hardware sales afaik, and it could have stolen so much more if they had wanted to, by selling the widely anticipated BE300 chips and hashrate. I can only guess, but something like an escalated internal conflict between FC and the general manager resulted in the company breaking apart, perhaps with both people taking a crucial element (bitcoin wallet, asic design) and creating some sort of Mexican standoff.  Whatever the truth, its probably better than most fiction.

[l3sny]

I have responded Puppet in privete communication yesterday what I think of his 'revelations' Basically he does not care of the people who invested in our shares. So be it.

This is my answer on our main bitcointalk thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=732733.msg10689024#msg10689024

I was just wondering when Puppet will show his true colors and start spreading FUD. I am really disgusted with you.
At some stage a few month ago I considered Puppet to be trusted and worthy member of the bitcoin community as he did a decent work endorsing scams. I have disclosed to him some of the details of our operations. He refused to check our hashrates then. I thought he could be trusted but now I can see how much damage he can make to our brand, my name and kryptologika users.

Kryptologika since the beginning has used many services always looking for the best prices. Before that we mined on our own equipment, at various stages used different providers. And we still do so. We mine, we p[ay dividends and we are not going to go belly up any time soon. I have communicated this to Puppet in private communication. But no, he wants some attention

I hope you all can judge for yourselves. Should this cause panic and major sell off.... well it is your decision.

Nothing has happened, I have nothing to communicate to our customers, business as usual.

PS

Puppet you're an idiot. You have no idea of how mining operations work. All that you see everywhere are scams, and ponzi schemes. I will not address in any way your accusations or revelations in the future as I am sure they will be more. Basically you're a danger to reliable and trustworthy businesses in mining. You just cannot be trusted.