You quoted me before I added the parenthetical remark "at least not cloud mining in the traditional sense." It's unfortunate they use the term cloud mining on the website, due to its negative connotation.  

The idea behind NiceHash is that entities can sell hash power into the pool, and that entities can purchase hash power from the pool and direct it as they see fit.  Like I said, this can be interpreted as hashers selling their right to "vote with their hash power" to people who want to vote but don't also want to run mining hardware.  

Assuming that the service works as advertised, would you still consider it a scam?