First, it has ZERO chance of being a scam.
I wish both of you (kilo17 & sidehack) all the best, but you've only expressed your intentions.
AFAIK kilo17's professional background is MD (medical doctor) in the USA. If that is true, then this is the most over-regulated and over-protected of all professions. You probably have very little experience in unregulated business and with sharks preying there.
I did quite a bit of consulting for the electronics companies set up by cardiologists, and let me pass to you advice of one of them: "admit to yourselves that we've been mollycoddled by the AMA and we have much to learn from those who work in other fields in the USA. Or even the same field, but internationally, with much less regulatory oversight."
In my opinion you (kilo17 & sidehack) need to obtain services and advice of some civil contract lawyer and private investigator. Lawyer would check the contracts and agreements you enter into. PI would check the background of the prospective partners and important customers. IIRC both of you already have experience with "promise and don't deliver" businessmen. That was comparatively cheap lesson compared to other "promise and steal" or "promise and sue" business operators.
Your good intentions will not protect you from scammers and extortionists.
Edit: cypherdoc is no longer posting on this forum. After his brief involvement with Hashfast he had to settle the lawsuits against him. You'll have to research this yourselves, I cannot post links.
I don't remember to be aligned with this guy,2112, in one single direction ever, but, OMG, it is happening, somewhat though, ... somewhat
I have to mention a point and I'll leave this thread as I have been asked, afterwards ...
The point: Blockchain has enough potential right now to fix most of the scam and extortion stuff, I proposed semi-smart contracts for this purpose.
Another point: (Ok. I'm leaving, just one another point
) This forume, bitcointalk, holds a huge amount of
social capital (which I have almost zero share in it, being a newbie here) to be brief my proposal is about using both the Blockchain infrastructure and this forum's 'network of trust' (to be defined later), one can implement a semi-smart contract and run a semi-automated distributed organization.
oh, I follow my campaign here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/financing-a-community-miner-project-are-you-in-1528750