rrrright, i've got enough information from the payouts and commissions to be able to reverse-engineer their operation with a reasonable degree of confidence.
key mistake: i initially *misinterpreted* the MLM commissions structure as paying out $200/day *guaranteed*.
what they *actually* do is, for each person who also buys a share, they distribute a percentage of that *upstream* to the previous backers. from the mining generated, and taking e.g. AntMiner S9 as a "baseline" i was able to calculate that the ratio of "equipment purchased that's definitely yours" to "money that's put towards rewarding people who encourage other people to buy equipment but also covering operational costs etc. etc." is around 62:38 give-or-take several percentage points... i'm really fuzzy on this maths stuff, that was last night, i'm now coming up with 25:75.... *sigh* someone please double-check this!!
the figures went like this:
* $3500 is a full share. * daily mining payout is around $13/day @ current exchange rates and difficulty * Antminer S9s cost around $2500 (if you can get them) and @ 13TH/s earns about USD $26/day * scale that up to $3500 and it's $37/day for an antminer-s9-scaled-up's-worth
so 37 + 13 = 50. 13 / 50 = a 26 : 74 ratio.
which seems to be awfully low, i must have made a mistake somewhere.
so this percentage (of what each person puts into equipment) which goes up-tree in commission would explain how they can stay afloat [AND NOT BE A PONZI SCHEME].
if someone can check the maths that would be great.
l.