With thousands of streams I also mean any "payments" coming in. A friend of mine who I referred got a free Genesis 10Gh/s and bought another one. That 0,018 BTC is inflow for GAW. They don't collect all those bits and pieces until they need 475 Gh/s extra and order 1 Ant S3 (for example).
According to the latest CCN advertisement, they should be getting thousands of BTC per day in new purchases that can immediately be spent on hardware.
If they for example are pointing their mining income to a cold wallet address it could just stack up there and be spent on new hardware once BTC goes up a bit. With low rates it makes no sense to convert BTC to USD and into hardware. Waiting for BTC to raise 10% in value will give you 10% more mining speed for the same BTC.
If all streams coming in are big enough to fund the outflow in payments and withdrawals, then yes, effectively newcomers pay the income for older clients. Difference in that sense with a ponzi is that there is the actual mining result that's flowing into the cold wallet. So by itself having "payments in" being used for "payouts to other clients" isn't by default a bad thing.
Yes, they technically could have a secret mining address but I find it incredibly unlikely.
I would say it is definitely by default a bad thing that they are using new customer payments to payout "mining earnings". (i.e. mimicking a ponzi scheme)
Why can't they payout from actual mining earnings? Why can't they disclose their mining address? What benefit does it provide them to mimic a ponzi scheme?