You seem to be mistaken as to what a red herring is... all of your arguments are red herrings and I demonstrated exactly WHY they were all red herrings. Me pointing out that you can buy stuff from illegitimate companies and legitimate companies can scam you is a direct response to YOUR red herring and therefore can't be considered a red herring.
I started this thread mostly because I thought it was obviously a scam and I was concerned about my bitcoin friends being ripped off and I thought some discussion would be good.
As more information has become available, I think that it's probably not a scam and if it were one it would be a truly fantastically epic one. I'm not sending in money yet either simply because there are lots of reasons that it could fail or be delayed even excluding scams.
I agree with inaba here, the points raised are red herrings they're not actually relevant to the questions that matter to people here.