Josh agreed to answer a few questions via email, so I asked him about the Zenpool payouts. His responses are in italics.
5. If there is some other source of payments that gets put into the Zenpool, can you tell me what that source is in a general way?
The majority of income comes from private companies leasing hashing power for us for specific experiences/projects they are doing.
Not bad. Basically a black box. I wonder though where those private companies are hiding that hashpower and why.
Except you can't hide hashing power, you can hide the location of the hardware, the company running it. But you can't hide say 100ghs being added to a coin who's network is currently 100ghs, your going to make a splash, unless you do like coinking and split your hashing power among several at the same time, but if you do that you lower your potential profits.
#5 puzzled me as well, but I assumed that anyone who would rent this power would not be using it for hashing cryptocurrencies. If they did, then we would be back at the same problem we always have with GAW hashrates.
So, what does one rent ASICs for? How could they do anything other than their set type of hash? You can't change that, so does GAW have a data center that is not comprised of ASICs then?