I've long since accepted that I've lost all the BTC I put in there, including 0.18 I put for 100 Gh/s a week before this all happened, but I'm wondering if PBMining does return to full speed payouts would I buy any more Gh/s or not?

If there is no mining going on, and the sales of new hash power remain closed, where are the payments ( small as they are ) actually coming from?

Either he's buying bitcoins using cash and hoping that by throttling the payouts he will be able to get enough together to reboot the ponzi,

or

he does have miners but they were significantly oversold and whoever it was making these threats screwed the scheme up by removing the necessary working capital that kept everything running smoothly.

I think if PBMining wants to show this isn't a ponzi, after payouts return to normal he should lower the oversell level to zero by purchasing more equipment and leave the new contracts closed for a few months. If payouts can continue as normal with no new sales going on for a significant length of time then he must be mining or else have huge amounts of USD to be continually buying new BTC to make the payouts.

He should also add a few extra months, or a small % of extra GH upgrade to everyone's contracts to cover this downtime.