MoneyBeat, a blog hosted by the Wall St Journal, has published a second article discussing accusations levied against Josh Garza's GAW Miners. Michael J Casey, who authored the piece, concludes that his research is unlikely to placate the "highly vocal critics" of GAW Miners. Garza appears to be quite happy with the article, proudly tweeting it to his followers via @gawceo.
Unfortunately for him, the article only serves to confirm what critics have suspected all along; that GAW Miners are a scam and that Josh Garza is operating a ponzi scheme.
On October 18th 2014, an account by the name of GAW Miners_CEO, assumed to be Josh Garza, posted the following on the Bitcoin Talk forum:1
After a conversation with one of our customers, I decided that there is more I can do to create more transparency without giving up any competitive information. So I am creating this thread to ask Bitmain to confirm some of our orders.
Bitmain, can you please confirm that GAW Miners most recent order was over 5 peta hash?
Bitmain responded:
Dear Josh and Teams!
Thank you for your purchase. We hope you’ll enjoy our hard-working ants! Oh yes,
it was over 5PH/s of ants and they are marching your way to join GAWSOME”
At the time, it was not known if this was the first order GAW Miners had placed with Bitmain. Bitmain have confirmed the existence of that order in the article published by Michael J Casey but they clearly state GAW have only made a single order. From the MoneyBeat article:
Separately, Jihan Wu, the CEO of bitcoin mining equipment maker Bitmain, told us GAW was “a very important participant” in the industry and confirmed delivery of a single Bitmain order to GAW worth 5 petahashes per second. (For context, the overall mining power of the bitcoin network is currently 288 petahashes, or 288,000 trillion hashes per second.) Mr. Garza says Bitmain is just one of GAW’s major suppliers.
This makes clear that the post on the Bitcoin Talk forum does not confirm GAW Miners "most recent order" or "some of our orders" but the first and only order. Confirmation of this order also conflicts with claims Garza made in a Q&A held on the 1st of October 2014.
Question – What kind of hardware do your scrypt data centres use. For example, which chips, manufacturers, etc
Josh Garza – What we can talk about is everybody, so, we quite literally use every major manufacturer in the world, so, bitmain, we're actually in discussions right now with bitfury, *inaudible*, I mean, every single company. We are in the process of beginning to build our own chip, we do have hardware that is not publicly available that created economies of scale for us, kinda all over the place, probably a less glamorous answer than you were looking for but we actually are putting the finishing touches on one of our biggest data centres yet in the next couple of weeks, I actually spoke to someone a few days ago who saw it and he's never seen that many miners and flash computers in one place.
Ignoring the fact that Bitmain is not shipping scrypt ASICs until later this month and that their SHA256 ASICs cannot be used to mine scrypt based altcoins despite Garza's claims of doing so, how is it possible that Garza was already using Bitmain hardware in his data centres if confirmation of the first order and its shipment occurred at a later date?
Even if one chooses to accept Garza's mixed up timeline and version of the events in regards to the Bitmain order, MoneyBeat have still confirmed for us that GAW Miners is a ponzi scheme. From the article:
In investigating these claims, BitBeat viewed a bitcoin address at Blockchain.info that was cryptographically proven to belong to GAW and in which almost 28,000 bitcoins — currently worth more than $10 million – have flowed from mining operations over the past two months. We were told this was just one of a number GAW mining addresses.
The act of Garza signing an address which confirms his possession of almost 28,000 bitcoin does not disprove the accusations of him running a ponzi scheme but in fact, confirms it. How stupid can you be to deny you run a ponzi and then sign the address where the ponzi funds are held?
If the 28K BTC that he holds are GAW's profits, it would figure that customers have received mining payouts of a far greater number, which is not possible given the current players in the mining industry. If this amount of bitcoin are not the profits but in fact the coins that customers have mined or more likely, purchased by Garza using the funds that he has scammed, why is it that Garza and not the customers are capable of signing an address with 28K bitcoin?
I can tell you why it is possible. It's because GAW Miners is a ponzi and like all ponzi schemes, the guy at the top holds all the money.2
Bolding by Qntra. ↩
Even if Josh attempts to delete his posts/video/content, as he did when shopping around for a tummy tuck and titty job for his wife Jessica Garza, all the content is fukken saved! ↩
I am going to have to comment on this because either your reading comprehension is off, or you are actually consciously publishing lies.
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About the single 5Ph/s order:
You seem to mix up the concept of confirming an order at the request of the customer and disclosing all past business with a customer.
This piece of text means nothing more than what it says: "confirmed delivery of a single Bitmain order to GAW worth 5 petahashes per second".
According to bitmain, GAW have purchased 5Ph/s in a single order. That's what it says, nothing more. GAW could have ordered 10Ph/s before in smaller orders and this statement would still be correct if they have made a single order for 5Ph/s.
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About the data centres.
While listening to the audio, it seems easy to miss the scrypt part of this question with the crappy mics that they are using but she does say it.
If you leave out the scrypt part of this question, the answer becomes a plausible one.
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About the address which received 28,000 BTC:
This is what the bitbeat article says(emphasis added by me):"Blockchain.info that was cryptographically proven to belong to GAW and in which almost 28,000 bitcoins … have flowed from mining operations over the past two months"
This simply states that the address received 28,000 BTC(possibly all mining inputs because of the words used). Not that it holds 28,000 BTC.
So after reading the quote above you seem to completely disregard what was said(emphasis again by me): "The act of Garza signing an address which confirms his possession of almost 28,000 bitcoin does not disprove the accusations of him running a ponzi scheme but in fact, confirms it. How stupid can you be to deny you run a ponzi and then sign the address where the ponzi funds are held?".
That address received 28,000 BTC. Those coins could now be in 100,000 wallets and the statement would still be correct.
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Do not misunderstand me: I am not sure if the hashlets are backed by anything but customer funds(they guaranteed profits when the hashlets were introduced so that makes me extremely weary). However reporting like this only helps them because it undermines the credibility of the news outlet on this issue.
Thanks for the constructive criticism, it is appreciated.
I deny the claim that I am "consciously publishing lies" or that my reading "comprehension is off." (EDIT – It was in the case of address issues you raised.) I am not involved in the success or failure of GAW Miners; I am not involved in bitcoin mining; Qntra does not run advertisements for competing businesses. I cannot think of what I would stand to gain or how I or Qntra would benefit even if what you said was true. I don't care what happens to Josh or GAW Miners, it's nothing more to me than a spectacle in the same vein as Butterfly Labs.
RE: single 5Ph/s order.
I believe the way in which I have interpreted "confirmed delivery of a single Bitmain order to GAW worth 5 petahashes per second" to be fair, if not correct. Yes, GAW Might have a string of previous orders, who knows. I guess you could argue it's an ambiguous statement which is why I contacted Bitmain to clarify but received no response. I will contact the author of the MoneyBeat article and ask that he attempt to clarify with Bitmain.
RE: data centres.
It's quite clear what was asked. Scrypt doesn't remotely sound like SHA256 and Josh's body language and response clearly indicates he is uncomfortable with the question. Even discounting that, it's utter lunacy for you to suggest that his answer is a plausible one if you leave out part of what he said in order to make the rest fit. If he misspoke, he should clarify once the allegations have been put to him.
This suggestion of leaving out parts of what he says is what enables him to claim working relationships with companies such as Target, claim that his Hashlet miners will soon appear in their stores but later state what he really meant was that you can use the Paycoin debit card to purchase products that Target sell in store.
RE: 28,000 BTC address.
I concede this point and will strikeout that section of the article. Still, it's not asking much for him to publish the addresses and this charade of being unable to do so due to proprietary business whatevers is a lame excuse.
If someone was motivated to do so, they could calculate a ball park figure as to what amount of coins have been mined by unknowns.
Fair enough.
Although the rather out of proportion response about the success or failure of GAW is kind of weird, I guess this is the standard way of operating.
I hope that you'll get clarification so that we will actually know that GAW is a ponzi(or not).
It's not really out of proportion given criticism of GAW is often rebuffed with accusations of working for the competition. I wanted to make it explicitly clear that is not the case here.
Don't forget to strikeout the headline, second paragraph and – why not – the rest of your biased "article" while we wait for Paul, Mickey or Jihan to answer to your queries… *lulz*