Quote from: Puppet on December 18, 2014, 10:53:13 AM

Quote from: Ghai on December 18, 2014, 10:40:37 AM

There are a few more pictures on their sites, also by night, but I don't think they give a much clearer image anyway. About profitablity, the most obvious scam imo, is the scam that promises you a x or y amount, but when you buy a contract does not pay the amounts promised. One of the worst examples I have seen is https://cloudhashing.com/.

I dont know what happened with cloudhashing specifically, so Im not going to comment on it, but any company that complies to my list if criteria, even if it breaks its contract, it can be held accountable. Which is more than can be said of the majority of anonymous scams listed.

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Ponzi's are harder to prove, also because a company (any company) can go broke at any time for numerous reasons. I think sometimes the bitcoin community is a bit too focused on calling companies ponzi's. Of course transparency is much needed, but also not easy to come by on the internet. Any picture can be fake, you can't visit companies because they are on the other side of the world, cryptocurrency are quite anonymous. All reasons why it is hard to determine if you are dealing with a legit company or not. In my opinion the best way to invest in cloudhashing is always to try with small amounts of money, see if they keep promises and if the payouts don't lower too fast and reinvest after you get break-even. Always spread your risks and never invest more than you can afford to lose. Even if they are ponzi's you can still earn money that way.

I wholeheartedly disagree. First of all, investing in a ponzi makes you complicit in the scam, as your goal of making a profit depends on luring in new victims that will not profit. Thats not how I would want to earn a satoshi. It also funds and enables the scam, while the chances of profiting are actually extremely slim. Very few ponzi's will live long enough.

Secondly, "testing" a cloudmining service doesnt tell you anything. Every well executed scam will pay perfectly. Until the day they pull the plug.

Lastly, spreading risk only ensures you will lose money because there are far more scams than there are legitimate services.

IN short, your strategy of spreading and testing and not asking too many questions is exactly what ponzi scammers want you to do. If instead of that, people demanded credible proof before sending them a satoshi, these scams would quickly be a thing of the past.

The problem though is that you have no hard evidence they are ponzi's, nor have I. A few signs are not enough. For example there are very trustworthy companies that also use referrals to advertise, most companies have secrets to protect their ideas from competitors, pictures say absolutely nothing, bad reviews can be written by competitors.

I just treat like my normal investments, research, test and spread. Btw I do ask a lot of questions usually and I try to phone them even if they have no phonenumber published (a helpdesk is the least a company should have), I ask other people how their experiences are and read a lot . If you don't take a risk in investing, you will certainly gain nothing. The higher the risk, the more you can earn usually. That's just how investing works. Since I am already investing in many various companies over 15 years, I can tell you my profits are really not so bad and yes sometimes, you encounter some bad luck, that is why spreading is essential.