[Arm-netbook] EOMA68 / Libre RISC-V team financing

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 11:31 AM, Luca Saiu <positron at gnu.org> wrote:
> On 2017-12-27 at 11:25, mike.valk at gmail.com wrote:
>
>> How well guarded is the group? The biggest risk in these "markets" is
>> that if they get hacked the coins vanish at near lightning speed.
>
> I respectfully disagree.  The biggest risk is that those "programs"
> actually shuffle investors' funds under the false pretense of doing
> mining, then when the scheme inevitably collapses as recruiting slows
> down the organizers do a runner or provide excuses such as "we got
> hacked".  This happens all the time.

 well, luckily i had 0.65 BTC that wasn't doing anything, and i was
prepared to do the risk-benefit analysis and *personally* it came up
"can't ignore this opportunity if it turns out to be good".

 they *did* actually get hacked... or... a third party service got
hacked... and they're back online.

 i talked to my brother about this: he was scared witless by both the
amounts of money involved and the thought of "losing" (it's a family
trait i'm intent on stamping on, very hard).  i explained to him that
the pool stats, which you can see here:
 https://bitclubpool.com/index.php?p=stats
basically provide an underpinning which is NOT forgeable (if they were
forgeable then the entirety of bitcoin is forgeable and we're all in
the doo-doo).

 look at the pool stats.  then back-calculate 3% of total bitcoin
mining revenue.  i did the maths: you can check it yourself, it comes
to twenty four MILLION dollars a month.

 TWENTY FOUR million a month!

 the organisers - and they're a disparate group, not even a *small*
group so it becomes *even harder* to organise a quotes scam quotes -
would have to be absolute FOOLS to walk away from that kind of money
by trying to do something as stupid as SCAM everybody!!!

 remember: the mined bitcoin goes *out* of the network each day
(except if people choose to use it to buy more equipment,
automatically).

 to specifically answer the issue you raise, it might actually be
possible to do an analysis, do some estimates based on numbers of
people who would have joined, then work out if they had the money *to*
actually create a "scam" of the type that you're suggesting.  but...
honestly, given that it's a large *group* of people, rather than a
single person or even a small group, i don't think it's likely - at
all - that they will *all* wish to be scammers.  it only takes one
person to "rat out" the entire group of [potential / hypothetical]
conspirators.

l.