whoever says this was a scam should think about if he maybe have the least reason to do this. it's easy to blame the pool operators, but those who made such comments probably have never had to do with us, so just shut the fuck up.
i understand doubts but amateur sherlocks that make that stretch from an expiring domain name in 6 months to a scam just make me wanna puke.
wtfman, I'm sorry if I sounded like accusing you being a scammer. Pretty sure you are not, since loosing credibility for less than 2.5k$ is a bad deal. But no matter what, miners lost their BTC, and this adds up to the line of bad things that periodically happen to Bitcoin. Just because some idiots don't see that (in the long run) they can make more money using it for what it was designated instead of misusing it.
That said, I assume operating a pool needs a very long time horizon to get profitable. Even operating deepbit hardly can make [Tycho]'s a living, if my math is not fully wrong: currently it generates 100 BTC per hour; with ~3% fees thats less than 13k$ per month. Minus operational expenses, still a good salary - but for the price of carrying responsibility for a third of miners worldwide? No, thanks.
I'm not expecting you will get the lost BTC back or reimburse them from your pocket. I'll take it and wish the best if you decide to try again.