I have been a customer of GAW since April. I may be able to help answer some of these questions.
I have recently sold of 98% of my GAW Hashlets for a nice profit that recovered most if not all of the $1000s that I lost buying physical Hardware from them. I do not like the direction the company is going, so I started working on my exit last month.
In the forum ad (quoted above) I see "Never obsolete" and "Always profitable". How can that be? If the difficulty continues to rise, all existing hardware will become unprofitable and hence obsolete. How do GAW ensure that this never happens?
Well for one thing, Hashlets are not specifically tied into one type of hardware. They are interchangeable with new tech AFAIK. "Always profitable" could even mean that a 100 MH Hashlet makes $0.01 profit from mining 1 week after fees. I would hope they have a few rolls of pennies lying around if it comes down to that. What does "no pool fees" mean, when their site clearly says that pool fees are built in to the price. If pool fees are 0%, why do they need building in anywhere?
The "maintenance fees" should not be confused with "pool fees". A lot of pools charge 1-2% of all the coins you mine as a fee. GAW charges a flat-rate of $0.08/MH for scrypt no matter what pool you mine at.And what's this about being the first DIGITAL cloud miner? Were all the previous ones analogue? Isn't all mining digital?
I think this is just a situation where Josh(CEO) was trying to sound more technical than he understood. This happens often at GAW. You should se the "white paper" for the new Gawcoin(Hashcoin). It is ridiculously filled with terms that make it seem more technical than it really is. Claims like this make the operation look scammy - but maybe I'm misunderstanding something. Have these points been addressed somewhere before?
We have a 218 page thread going about GAW. I think most questions have been brought up there, but I do not feel like sorting through them. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=720844.0 Edit: Final thoughts: I do not trust GAW. But there are a few things in their favor.
- Bitmain confirmed GAW had purchased 5 Petahash of SHA-256 miners the other day.
- Stuart Fraser from Cantor Fitzgerald(a large Bond Trading Platform), is more than likely silent partner in GAW
- Josh Garza has his face on everything related to GAW and he lives in the United States. With so many different people yelling "Ponzi" from the start, he would have to be one of the dumbest criminals in the world to have his face attached to it.
However, there are many more red-flags than not. It is an interesting situation to say the least.