The whole story smells.
An organization as big as Nicehash that was keeping all the hash-rate sellers payments in non-cold storage wallets? I don't believe they would/could have been so stupid. It's an exit scam IMHO. They kept raising the minimum payout so they could get that kind of ridiculously high amount that they owed sellers sitting in their hot wallets, waited until it was REALLY high, then they let someone "hack" them and shared the proceeds. That's my tinfoil hat theory, but I think it makes sense.
I think that the majority of their sellers were just people who were too lazy to work out what to mine for themselves, and/or didn't know enough to be able to, so they also don't understand how the explanation Nicehash is giving is pretty weak and lacks credibility. There are just SO MANY noob miners out there. Like I said - what kind of organization manages the huge amount of hash power they were working with, and the huge amounts of BTC they were supposed to be paying out - and doesn't use cold storage or multi-sig wallets for payments?
They were a huge honey trap. Maybe they didn't start out that way but it was probably just too much of a temptation for them. Obviously I don't know even a tiny amount of the facts but from where I stand I don't trust them and never will again. They were one of my 5th or 6th fallbacks and owed me maybe $60-$100 in BTC for small amounts of mining over the last few months, but I never used their wallets so if they had used a fair payment scheme I would have most of that BTC now, but oh well. Maybe if they pay me what they owe me I would recover some respect for them but as if that's going to happen.
Well they were running 175 ph in btc sha-256 alone.
that is about 28 btc earned by hash sellers
and about 28 btc paid by hash renters
56 btc x 3% = 1.68 coins a day income from sha-256 with on book hash
now they had say 30 al-gore-rhythms
so 1.68 x 30 = 50 coins a day income or 800,000 a day income
now if 50 btc coins a day was income for them x 33 = btc 1650 coins was renter and rentee money
since 4700 hundred coins were stolen and it was about 3 or 4 days worth stolen the math is close .
So is giving up 50 btc coins a day for year worth 4700 coins in one shot?
And the company said fuck it lets grab and run. last I heard they are sitting in a wallet.
What I don't understand is why all in one wallet.
and if I cracked a wallet with 4700 in coins. I would first pull say 100
they pull 4600.
they did 700
then 1000
then 1000
then 1000
then 1000.
all to one wallet.
So that gives security more chances to catch the thief and shut down wallet.
Smells inside to me but an IT secondary employee makes more sense the the ceo.
The whole story stinks. I have no idea if it was an insider or an outsider.
But based upon the above, if they could get the market share back, they could pay everyone back in 94 days. Call it a year. So maybe, they might come back.
Somehow, I think my .0109 BTC is gone. Permanently.
I remember reading advice on this forum and others that say to keep your BTC offline. If someone else controls the keys, it is their money. Heck, even if you have it on your own personal PC it is at risk.
The only reason I had that much at Nicehash was because I sweep the account only when it makes sense compared to the transfer fees. It does not make sense to transfer 0.001 BTC with a .0003 BTC fee.
