The point of me posting those links was simply to show that you can have "cloud mining" without any miners at all. Those services have 2 components, MINE and SELL and SELL has always been vastly more profitable (B.MINE=69.86% vs B.SELL=563.49% yield on Havelock) due to the size of the difficulty increases. Now, imagine running a service like that and keeping the SELL component for yourself and only allowing people to purchase the MINE component. That is essentially how you run a cloud mining ponzi.
Cloud mining ponzis like that will collapse once the difficulty increases drop below a certain threshold. With the recent low difficulty increases, some of the ponzi schemes may not have paid out as much as expected due to the above.
It is not a ponzi. They speculate with hash power. I did it too at hashie.co with profit, and this is the only reason my investment there is going to be returned. It is gambling, not ponzi. And it can not be done without actual mining.
No, the bitcoin difficulty derivative is NOT based on actual hashing power.
Put any start date in
http://retrocalc.net/ and you can see exactly how much 1 GH/s would have paid out over time.
For example if you started mining on January 1st you would have earned 0.0261 BTC/GH. That means any ponzi charging more than 0.0261 btc/gh would have made a profit without doing any mining. (You would have to subtract another ~0.002 btc/gh for future earnings.)
Point is that it is very possible (and not very difficult) for a cloudmining ponzi to never collapse if they price the contracts right.
The absolutely most profitable ponzi scheme is when you have some cheap BTC - probably stolen - and sell them as "cloud mining" - that's also called money laundering. But other than with ordinary money laundering where you have to give away a certain percentage to the launderer, you make money with those ponzis...
Guys, stop calling every scam a ponzi. Ponzi pyramid and money laundering are completely different crimes. It is like a murder vs tax avoidance. Both are crimes (edit: in many jurisdictions), but consequences are completely different.
And, by the way, thanks for information. I don't want to be involved into money laundering, and will be more careful when invest in cloud mining next time.
I think you're confused. He's just saying that it can make a ponzi more profitable to also launder money.
IMO it wouldn't be worth the effort considering you could create a decent cloudmining ponzi (by current standards) in less than an afternoon for someone with experience in web development.
