However let me tell you a FACT. Yes, a REAL fact. It is pretty simple - I made money with GAW's offerings so far. Not much, because I did not invest much - but right now I'm standing at an approx. 250% ROI (I've already got back the money I invested in Hashlets, and my HashStakers are making XPY as we speak. All the requirements were from re-investing what I've earned, and I have 0.58XPY in there.
The Hashlets generated about 80% of their purchase price, and then I was mostly selling-buying Hashlets based on the prices going up and down. Then put it all in HashStakers. From my end, it was not an investment, and personally, I have no other attachments to GAW. It was a 0-input investment, which might or might not return some good money. Time will tell.
The bolded part is how much you made from "GAW's offerings". The rest of it is from other GAW customers. I hope you can see the difference.
Indeed. BUT! It is a free market. If I were to sell you a handful of dog feces, and you offered 100.000 USD for it, it would still be a valid exchange.
Besides, I did not make money "off of them". You know it is called demand and supply. Or based on your statement, all trades that carry any kind of gain for any of the parties should be stopped immediately?
The trade was simple - someone (whom I do not know - the hashlet market is anonymous for the buyer) wanted a hashlet. I sold it for way under the official price (Zen Hashlets were going for 14.99 at that time, I sold mine for 7.59 minus the fees), and made about 2$ on the trade. The buyer was happy as he received an item at half the official price, while I was happy as I had 2 extra dollars in my pocket. Is it a win-win?
EDIT:
And before you take my first paragraph as me calling GAW products sh*t, I have to state, it was meant purely in a twisted-out metaphorical way.
I'm not against free market, and I support everyone's right to lose their money however they deem appropriate.
However hashlets were never a true free market. Who in their right mind would pay $50 for 1 MH/s of Scrypt mining, or even $20? The only reason these products had that value was because GAW had a monopoly on them, hyped them beyond belief, and yes - lied about them. Always profitable at 1 satoshi. Zens that you mentioned are now trading at $2. Who covered $7.59 to $2 and why? Not a win-win as far as I can see.
Now I'm not arguing that you didn't make ROI or that you personally somehow cheated the buyers. All I'm saying is that whoever bought the hashlets from you did so while being misled by GAW as to their true value and likely lost or will lose money. In other words you making money with GAW isn't the only fact in this story, there is the ugly other side.
Even if we give GAW the benefit of the doubt and assume that they had mining power to back the hashlets (that would be where your 80% came from), there doesn't seem to be any real revenue entering the system now. Neither HashStakers nor XPY have any real value, it's all speculative based on GAW's promises, and we can see from the Zen example, or the $20 floor example, how well that works. Also facts.
PoW, nuff said.