Topic: HashFlare Turning Scam?? (Read 1590 times)

My friend just got in into this Hashflare website and he's voicing out that the management is always changing the withdrawal limit and has been making promises on a daily basis. Currently, we don't know if he'll get back his money from that company. The money that he put there is the one that he's willing to lose so he'll just think that he made a bad trading decision and everything went south. Hopefully, they'll get out of this stint and pay their customers on a timely manner.

On the other note, I don't have any faith to this cloud mining sites. It is just HYIP hiding in plain sight.

Oh my.. I thought Hashflare was only known for delays in payment, but this ridiculous!

"Update 20.12.2017 12:00 UTC: Bitcoin withdrawals are enabled in test mode, with the minumum withdrawal amount set to 0.2 BTC."

If this large minimum withdrawal continues beyond test mode, it would be totally unacceptable.

Now Hashflare rise their minimum withdrawal to 0.2 so i think they are really scam now.
Coz 0.2 btc is impossible for small investors like me now my balance in hashflare is 0.02 (is long for 1 month maybe)

So don’t invest in this site ( invest in genesis mining is good site and it’s pay auto withdraw )

YES, i think the same as they raised minimum payout to 0.2 btc today.
Last weeks they tell one after the other lie ans always blame there partner.
For example an withdraw takes 15 minutes they say but in real it can take up to 4 days.
Answers from the helpdesk takes a verry long time, sometimes upto 10 days and
if the answer it is the wrong one or does not match the
question you asked.

So my only advice is stay away from them!

I just noticed something else: The time of the transaction that hasn't been broadcast keeps changing. So, for example, a transaction that was supposedly sent 2 days ago now says that it was started less than 2 hours ago. However, the time for the transaction on the side of the sending address remains unchanged, which is weird.

So, for example, I took a look at a random transaction from one of their address started December 7th, and within their address the correct date is shown, but now it says it was started today under it's transaction ID:

https://chain.so/tx/BTC/b2b8f5163966f059a59d9aa56000a6ec9ab0d3fd58fe66eb628787237be692b9

That means it's not even operating on a proper queue, where we'd expect a first in first out order. Some transactions are confirming fast, while others take days to over a week.

I'm finding the types of delays in their transactions very suspicious. Ordinarily, when a transaction is sent, it appears immediately and then depending on congestion the confirmations might take up to a few days. However, when they send a transaction it doesn't even broadcast to the blockchain for a few days to even a week. They all say "unassigned" under block number when looking up the transaction ID on the pages they link to, but on literally every other site the transaction ID can't be found.

As best as I can tell, it looks like they are using an internal queue to send through a network that is independently congested, but why would anyone do that? Is it possible for them to send and receive coins that otherwise would have a transaction ID signed? I mean, I know this is possible with an offline network because the blockchain won't know until it is broadcast if the coin has been spent or not. Maybe they are just signing the transactions and putting in a long line on purpose to maintain the illusion that the transactions have been sent?

They claim the delays are due to unconfirmed transactions on the blockchain, but since the transactions have never even reached the blockchain - some not for over a week - how can blockchain congestion be responsible? That makes this even more suspicious.

My last withdraw was set just a day prior to their announcement that they are suspending Bitcoin withdraws until the congestion is resolved, but, lol, at this rate that might as well be never. Still haven't received anything from them though. All I know for sure is that during such delays I have no problems sending Bitcoin normally. It seems to me that if they really weren't running a scam they would have a transparent payment system. Maybe even pay to everyone in a batch whenever they reach their minimum automatically on a daily interval so a single wallet program could do it.

It goes to show it going towards at that point in the expense of exiting with obvious unwarranted increase. It happens to me before, I was scammed by buying hashing power, legit at first, withdrawals are given on time and boom the website is down. I have learned a big lesson, if I invest those on holding bitcoin then the risk is lower with high profits but I trusted a site that is untrustworthy. If you feel the same then leave that is best thing to do.

That's a bet on immediate futures though and there are some serious limits with trading such volume on exchanges. Sure, if I bought 13,000 worth of Bitcoin yesterday and then sold today for 15,000 I'd have made $2k in profit over night - very profitable, and easy to predict by comparing with various international market trends, but with buying and selling limits I couldn't, and with time delays even if I could it wouldn't be enough. Plus, if I was wrong, I'd have lost big money.

What you are suggesting is basically the same as stock trading, and it can be very profitable, or you can lose big. Mining in general - and I'm transitioning to full hardware mining myself - projects to have more consistent returns overall. Running miners also gives me insight into the minimum value of Bitcoin - that is to say, the lowest price Bitcoin can be for mining to be profitable. Without mining there's no transactions and no Bitcoin itself. My personal projections places the minimum price of Bitcoin at around $30,000 around the end of 2020 and an inflationary bubble growing to around 100k within a few years after so of course if I sit on enough money and wait a few years it would pay way better than a high interest savings account, but mining would still be better for me in my projections.

Do you guys really think that buying hash power (real or not) is a profitable investment in the time where bitcoin price might spike $5k within a week?
I've seen some big cloud mining companies turning scam in the past and because HashFlare is big company doesn't automatically mean that they won't go rouge someday.
As you some of you said in this thread - mining investment is too risky - aren't you happy with crazy high bitcoin price we have ATM?

Yeah bitcoin investment is really better than mining investments offering any ghost mining farm. Moreover those who had been experiencing difficulties regarding so called legit profitable mining gains, I guess most of them were just making nice presentations as well as convincing offers. If we talk over millions of profit, well mining in physical activities and in active operations as long as with good hardware then its our way to earn huger profits.

Indeed. With cloud mining in general you are essentially speculating on bitcoin price to rise anyways because if not then your maintenance fees will soon outpace the growth of your investment profits and get your contract closed by the company pretty quickly.

Not to mention hash flare has stupidly reduced all contracts from lifetime to 1 year which makes no sense whatsoever.

That's why i tell people who want to invest in cloud mining you're better off just getting some bitcoin, holding it, and profiting from it, or even trading altcoins. At least you have a chance to make a big buck in the end.

I can't argue with that. Had I held my Bitcoin instead of investing it in mining it would be over over a million by now, and my projections show that the price will have to be around 30k minimum around 2020 to keep mining profitable.  Then again, if I invested in physical mining and then didn't reinvest further I'd have millions more.

People investing into any sort of mining is nothing more than an idiot. Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars to build up a GPU rig in order to mine a bunch of shitcoins, people could have invested that money into Bitcoin and get returns that mining for 10 years straight won't even give you. People made this mistake years ago, and they still make it in today's time, so they haven't learned anything. People still invest into GPU mining, and people still invest in cloud mining, and that despite so much proof that buying Bitcoin and altcoins directly is far, but really far more rewarding. So no, people don't learn and likely never will....

Its not a wise thing to have that kind of goals in your mind on where you should invest on cloud mining while they are still new. The thing here is that you wont even know if that new site or cloud mining site isn't the same on most cloud mining scam sites which they do only pay up for a short period of time and then vanished.In case of Hashflare and genesis mining for those who did invest on earlier times for sure they did able to reach roi and possible income with the way of compounding. Changing rules on hashflare is really a sign that they do have been affected by difficulty and when you do try to read up the recent news that they are being hacked.

I agree with that overall. Generally speaking, when a cloud mining site first goes up it tends to be safe for at least a year and that's usually enough time to make ROI. My business partner invested in them and made ROI in 10 months and has been withdrawing for a few years and already made enough back to help get physical miners going. I invested less, but reinvested constantly for the last few years and now every 10 days I make double my original investment back. My dad invested $20 and now makes between $100 and $200 a month. At the point that they retroactively changed contracts I advised everyone I knew to stop investing in them. My dad took out a few hundred dollars and then set it to automatically reinvest again because, according to him, he got his money back and is willing to take that risk. For me, I'd rather run the hardware.

Another company I invested in though ran just a few DAYS after I invested $7,500 and that really sucked. The only reason I got into cloud mining to begin with was wiring issues, but I would have been better off and made more money if I invested in my wiring. To anyone who invests in cloud mining for that reason, I'd suggest to only invest once when they are new, then take those earnings to pay for the wiring upgrades you might need to safely mine at home.

The only thing about their operation that doesn't make sense to me - from the scam perspective - is why they announced a change to the contracts. Normally, a scam site just runs with the money, rather than remaining in operation while shooting themselves in the foot. If it was just that my assumption would be - at best - that they are just really really bad at business. Maybe they sold more than they had, maybe they assumed they could get hardware in faster than they ultimate could, and then realized the only way to stay in business would be to retroactively change contracts to free them from that burden and then use increased fees to try and glide back to profitability. Playing devil's advocate, that is the most positive way I could spin this, but even that wouldn't make them trustworthy enough in my opinion because by retroactively changing contracts they broke international law and are therefore vulnerable to several lawsuits.

Before, I ranked them higher in trust because their parent company - hashcoins - makes miners. My assumption was that they used the cloud mining contracts to help ramp up production and ran the cloud mining contracts during the hardware testing phase in which case the miners they sell would have been used for a number of months and then transitioned over. However, didn't they fail to deliver on product and then converted that product to cloud mining contracts? Has anyone ever received anything physical from hashcoins at all? and if so, was it recent?

Another way to spin this is that they built the cloud mining as a way to deal with their own hardware, but were out competed in the hardware department and couldn't keep up with orders or efficiency so are stuck using the miners from other companies and are too embarrassed to admit it.

Maybe they are really good at buying when low and selling when high and have introduced delays as a way to exploit those highs and lows to try and glide further.

Whatever the explanation - scam or bad business -I don't trust them. and that's a real shame too. According to my own profitability calculator that I wrote in Java to estimate how long it would take to reach a certain daily income through automatic reinvestment I'd make way more money from them in just the time it would take to get the AntMiners in the mail, even with one year contracts, but I just can't trust them. If, for example, they didn't change contracts retroactively and only had new contracts limited and if they didn't hike fees and withdraw minimums the way they did I might still be buying rather than going through the investment in my home electrical system. (Although, the first warning sign for me was learning that they don't honor referral bonuses if they use automatic reinvestment)

Oh, and if anyone is curious, here's my calculator. It's unsigned so you have to give it permission to run if your Java is updated, but it works: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Efbo-Y7EL7C0vBs43fXeS8lKaO5HRgbX I only spent around 12 hours programming it a few years ago and mostly wrote it to save me time later. It's based around unlimited contracts and so doesn't account for one year contracts. If there's any interest in that I might make a version two, or rewrite in C++ with a GUI, a program that takes expired contracts into account.

and, to anyone who actually wants to experiment with it and hashflare (which I don't advise) this is how much they are currently paying per TH per day after fees (based on last payment) : 0.00013627377

All cloud minings are good at first but in the long run it will turn to be scam becuase some of them have no real mining sites to support their investors or if they have mining site but it is not enough to supply the payout of more investors that is why if you gain profit at first just withraw your capital and leave the site.

For now i think all of the investors of this cloud mining site got some learnings to be used in the future.

I think they have expanded least withdrawal sum in light of the fact that it is possible that they have some issue with their mining homestead or they are not getting enough new ventures to pay to their old financial specialists.

I truly question on this cloud mining administrations, they are working like buildup nowadays. They may offer more hashpower than they really possess.

Yeah, they said the minimums were temporary, but it became permanent. Then, today, they increased the minimum along with the introduction of a higher fee:


So at a price of around $15,000 per USD the minimum withdraw is $172.50 USD and of that we have to pay them $22.50 for the privilege of being able to get paid at all - and note that they say commission. That's not a guarantee they will even use that much to send. According to my own tests of sending Bitcoin at 0.0001 BTC that STILL confirms faster than their transactions so these fees are not needed at all.

I also noticed they - quite frequently - blame third parties for delays. It's as if they expect us to believe that Bitcoin goes through a 3rd party payment processor just to send to someone. It's decentralized and they are responsible for their own transactions. I wonder what their scapegoat has to say about that.

Anyway, even if by some miracle they aren't running a ponzi scheme they are still scamming people. First by changing the contracts retroactively, then by implementing minimums that also go against the original contracts. Now, by having those minimums implemented, they scam people another way: Those who didn't pay much won't get anything back without reinvesting.

Now, if they didn't retroactively change the contracts, honestly, I'd have kept auto reinvestments turned on because even with new contracts being for a year long it would still be worthwhile. However, the moment they changed the contracts that were already established they proved to me that they cannot be trusted and so I will withdraw as much as I can and as often as I can to get as much out of what I paid for before they run with the money.

The only positive way to think of this is that maybe, just maybe, they started losing money honestly and couldn't afford the unlimited contracts, but that would still be an example of poor business decisions because the only way that could happen is if they spent money they didn't have or oversold. Additionally, someone has got to hit them with a class action lawsuit eventually and that means everyone else will be out money as well. Their risk factor is just way too high. So high, in fact, that I would rather put up with the 2 month wait to get new miners and pay to deal with home wiring just so that I could have the peace of mind of knowing for sure that my mining won't be taken from me.