Quote from: cloverme on March 12, 2014, 03:33:04 PM

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

Given the answers received from pbmining when asked reasonable questions about their farm, I'm convinced there absolutely isn't a farm and payouts are not the result of bitcoins being mined.

Many users do understand the service companies are claiming to offer, there just are several companies out there (like pbmining) that aren't actually offering the service they claim to provide.
The accusation towards these companies isn't from the lack of understanding their service, but rather from the lack of even remotely plausible evidence being provided by these companies regarding the existence of their farm.