Sorry, I did miss that point on the thread, but have been following the thread on pbmining and whether it is a scam or not.

I don't think all mining-as-a-service companies are scams, but I do think several of them bank on the fact the newbie is not well informed about mining in general. Case in point, the 5 year deal that pbmining offers, what value are gh purchased today going to be worth in 5 years? Most hashing power purchased today declines rapidly in effectiveness towards an ROI. The only way that would change is if difficulty fell, which I don't see happening in the future at all.

So I think companies like pbming are banking on that, raising capital through sales quickly to fund the purchase of more hardware to fund more sales, rinse, and repeat. I don't think that's a sustainable business model. If anything, it's a pyramid model...

There's another thread here where a mining company looks like a ponzi, it sold bonds (LabRat) and then decided to change the payout structure per bond. Well, as you can imagine, everyone is flipping out because it turned a bond into something nearly worthless.  Check it out https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=251423.3720