Quote from: Jamis on January 14, 2015, 02:51:28 AM

Quote from: cfarivar on January 13, 2015, 08:15:48 PM

Hey guys,

Cyrus Farivar here. I'm a reporter with Ars Technica working on a story about GAW and Garza. I spoke with him by phone yesterday and would love to speak with anyone that has had direct dealings with the company and/or has direct knowledge of financials of similar companies. He made some claims that sound wild to me, but I want to check.

My previous work: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/digging-for-answers-the-strong-smell-of-fraud-from-one-bitcoin-miner-maker/

EMAIL ME:

cyrus.farivar [AT] arstechnica.com

PGP/OTR: http://arstechnica.com/ars-staff-pgp-keys/#cyrus-farivar

https://github.com/cfarivar/crypto-details/blob/master/README.md

Cyrus,
I started ordering from GAW the first week they opened for business on the 18 March 2014. On their new Web site they made a pretty wild claim: they would double your earnings for whatever mining power hardware you bought from them for one week (you get your hardware to mine plus they would pay you what it would earn for a week). Back then it was Gridseed ASICs and I didn't even understand how they could deliver on that wild claim. Well several weeks later, I along with all the other early customers were contacted and asked where we wanted our bitcoins sent. Plus, GAW doubled the already unbelievable offer for those of us who ordered the first week and gave us the equivalent bitcoins for two weeks of mining for the hardware I bought.
From Gridseeds GAW offered a range of scrypt miners up to 54 Meg (an unheard of speed that seemed a wild claim at the time) for a good price. After all of us ordered and paid good prices, GAW notified us that they had negotiated even better prices and would refund us all a pretty significant price difference; which they promptly did.
Next up was the wild claim that they would deliver a 500 Meg Vault Breaker -- understand this was back when Butterfly labs had been promising new hardware for close to a year and not delivering anything new. GAW even made the wild claim that they were not going to be beaten to market by their competitors and would pay for cloud mining if a competitor shipped before them. And, no sooner did we order vault breakers rated at 500 Meg, than GAW contacted us all and made the wild claim that they would upgrade our vault breakers to 750 Meg script hashing power for the same price; and they did: they added 50% to the power and delivered ahead of competitors (Titan).
Next was the wild claim that hashlets would simplify mining so that anyone could do it. Understand that at the time to mine we were editing conf and bat files with cryptic commands (-I 13 -g 2 -w 256 --thread-concurrency 8192 --lookup-gap 2 --gpu-engine 1080 --gpu-memclock 1500). Yet GAW delivered simple hashlets that anyone with no technical knowledge could use to mine. And mine they did: hashlets earned bitcoins like crazy last Fall. With just the bitcoins the hashlets earned in Sept and October, all the money I had paid to date was more than made up. Another wild claim was that when the Genesis hashlets were not meeting GAW ROI goals they would add 50% to the Genesis, and they did at no additional cost.
The next wild claim was to move from the frustrating chase for faster and faster hashing hardware to a proof-of-stake model. GAW would change the ROI on mining with a new approach and coin. The goal was for the coin to have a stable price targeted at $20 a coin, and be accepted as widely as credit cards with the ability to pay anyone in the world instantly. GAW is in the process of delivering on that. The coin is there, we are staking rather than hashing, and the infrastructure is being developed. It is not all there yet and is taking longer than everyone (I assume even GAW) had hoped. But if you want to do an article on software development delays see Microsofts repeated delivery delays.
Cyrus, most of what Im saying are not opinions. They are provable facts still in forums and available from snapshots of the GAWminers site at the WayBackMachine for you to see wild claims that GAW delivered on.
If you want to see a company that disappointed its customers you may want to look at Butterfly Labs where their August 2013 announcement of new hardware stayed as vaporware for a year and the US FTC actually took over receivership of them from September to December of last year.
GAW grew fast, I think way faster than they expected and they had challenges meeting the high demand of all their new customers. But as you can see by reading the complaints, praises, questions, challenges and support at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=529093.0 and hashtalk forums, when someone had a problem they worked to make it right. Im not sure if you are just looking for dirt or want to get the facts on GAW, but I think you are missing out on what could be a very important story by focusing on the negative.
If GAW succeeds with the paycoin effort, there is going to be a simple crypto currency that anyone in the world can use to pay anyone anywhere. If you wanted an article translated, you could find someone anywhere in the world and instantly pay them with paycoins for that work. The number of cell phones in the world is rapidly approaching 2 billion. And anyone with a cell phone will be able to pay, receive money, and place orders from anyone else using a paycoin app. Never before in human history has there been a common currency available across borders that worked simply and instantly. Bitcoins can take over an hour to complete a transaction, few people use them, and there is not an organization working to integrate bitcoins into merchant processing systems and make them simple and easy to use. GAW has a vision and they are working on a system that that will reward the mining community for handling the transaction processing, merchants will save the percentage they have to pay to credit card companies, and people will be able to pay right from their paycoin wallet. I cant believe you only want to look for scams rather that realizing the size of the story in front of you. It will be funny to look back if GAW succeeds and paycoin is adopted and really used throughout the world, to you missing the genesis of paycoins while asking about scams.
At a minimum you should change the title of your post to: What Do you think of GAW? Tell Ars Technica

FACT ...: Vaultbreakers NEVER have been designed, manufactured and DELIVERED to anybody , including youself...NEVER ... Wink

You are presenting your wishful imagination as a Fact(s) ... Grin

Simply DON'T ...Capisco... Huh

ZiG