Escrow is just a beard, without that magic word they'd have been denounced from day one. Still not sure what the angle is but I'm sure it's there somewhere. Either an escrow scam, or 'Orama thinks it might be a delay scam, an indirect scam, to tie up money in a fictitious product so as to reduce the overall difficulty of the network, thus making existing miners overall more profitable.

To do that you'd need to:

A. Maintain anonymity so they have no one to get mad at when it all falls apart.

- check

B. Make your offer as incredible as possible ($/GH), offering a beautiful case design to visually snooker people, offer as many guarantees against loss as possible (difficulty guarantee, shipping delay guarantee), capture as many price points as possible (from beginning miner to whale with a range of products). We see all of that here.

- check

C. String people along for as long as possible with fake / manufactured yet plausible information, updates, etc., while not spending very much of your own funds.

- check, and continuing to this day.

I don't know why anyone would go to this length. It seems far to go just to reduce investment into ASICs generally. I suppose they must figure that if they could tie up a few hundred thousand dollars as long as possible that the difficulty growth curve would be extended and they'd personally see profit if they had a very large mining farm. That's the only thing that makes sense from a financial point of view. Someone with a large interest in mining and a plan to make others tie up money for no reason.

Perhaps it's just someone doing it for jollies.

I even considered the possibility that it was someone doing it as a fake-out, only to come out later and say 'Wow you guys are idiots, I could've scammed you in ways X, Y, or Z and this whole thing was an experiment to show how gullible this community STILL is.'

As always however, time will tell.

The surprising outcome to me, at this point, will be if Xcrowd is actually legitimately attempting to build a miner. We shall see.