Two Cloudmining Platforms, Hashie and LTCGear, Mysteriously Offline

Cloudhashing or Cloudmining, the process of paying someone else to mine BTC for you, has been popular since the rise of CEX.io’s Ghash service. Numerous alternatives have risen to compete with Ghash such as Hashie and LTCGear. Many cloud mining sites have been revealed as poorly designed ponzi schemes over the last year, as anticipated by Gavin Andresen. It seems we might be seeing more now.

Update: LTCGear’s website is back online, though no payouts have been received.

Also read: Gavin Andresen Suspects Ponzi Schemes in Bitcoin Cloud Mining

Hashie Playing Games?

While literally no details are available on the LTCGear website, which just up and disappeared, Hashie.co has decided to really toy with the users of the site by posting an “alternate reality game” in place of any real explanation. The back-end of the website still works, and this journalist, who is a former Hashie user (and currently has over 100GHs in Limbo as a result), was able to get precisely no better information from the Hashie (official) representative in the chatroom.

Here is what they passed off as a press release:

Queen Elsa has frozen the servers of Hashie… not really. Hashie unfortunately has suspended operations due to an incident, the details of which are explained in a new alternate reality game. Hashie is working on recovering the lost bitcoins, however in the meantime users must solve the ARG in order to find out what has happened.

The problem was quickly noted by Andreas Antonopoulos on his Twitter account, as seen below.

Maddening

The whole problem is more than maddening for users of the platform, who for months have thought they were going along, quietly getting a better deal than Ghash or the others offer and slowly working toward getting their investment back. In the digital world, hack attacks happen, and people would surely be more graceful about the problem if Hashie were doing anything at all to allay their fears.

The supposed Hashie administrator, who could just as well be a hacker posing as such, stated that the total lost BTC so far was somewhere around 100. AMHash, who provided a lot of the hashing power behind Hashie, is offering users the ability to transfer their hashing over to it, although the details of how that is done are unclear.

As to LTCGear, this is not the first time the site has disappeared, so they may just be experience service issues. CCN.com will keep our readers posted as to their status.

Disclaimer: the writer is/was a user of Hashie.co.

Images from Shutterstock.