First off, let me say. I am new to the crypto scene and while I have tried to learn what I can from youtube and here at Steemit, I thought the best way to get my proverbial feet wet was to dive in. So since I'm no math wizz and don't want to lose alot of money, I thought I look at an ICO and plan for the very long term mega return.
So, I stumbled upon the Polybius Bank ICO project. I thought this project looked interesting well, because a) they are trying to fund a bank with the ICO, and b) owning part of a bank sounded kind of cool and the profits on banks are usually good. The founders have promised to use 20% of the profits in paying off the holders of the coin. As such, I guess they run afoul of some US laws in offering such opportunities to non-accredited investors, because there was a large array of questions asking if I was a US citizen, etc.
As such I made sure the actual investor was my wife and not me ;-). I spent some time going through all of the chats about the project on bitcoin talk...and it did seem mostly positive.
That being said and although I'm a novice I decided to do a quick check on the founders of the project. So what became obvious was that this bank is a project of the founders of Hashcoins. Well that's OK, again since I don't really know this space, I did find a few things "off". First, they apparently used to have hardware, but the state "HashCoins has been manufacturing mining hardware since 2013. Our hardware-software complexes run ASIC mining chips based on SHA-256 and Scrypt algorithms. A part of the equipment uses classical GPU chips. In 2015 we have changed our business model from B2C to B2B, working with business customers only as we mostly keep the hardware for the needs of HashFlare." This seems to me strange that they do hardware but use if all in house?
Next since they mentioned "HashFlare", well what is that? A google returned a site called bitcoinmining.org did indeed give them the second most reputable rating on that site.
Now what did give me pause where alot of negative comments about this company. One stated "Hashflare has been listed on badbitcoin.org in the scam list. Do not trust this site." and another colorful individual stated "this fucking website is scam they took my money and they can not be contacted". So I did hop on over to the badbitcoin.org site and take a look.
Not really good... "Hashflare.io/Hashcoins There is nothing credible about this operation, least of all the bs surrounding the datacentre. The author has connections to other scams 12/3/15"
Well, perhaps that should have killed it for me there, but again right now I'm completely green, and after finding this and even moving forward perhaps mentally challenged. I, whoops, my wife went ahead and bought a few coins. I hope my wife gets some return someday but probably somebody who reads this will probably know better.
