Cloud Mining Service Hashie.co Disappears With User Funds

Cloud mining is risky business. Bitcoin mining in general can be risky business, but cloud mining in particular requires a lot of trust. Essentially, you are sending someone money on the promise that they will send you more money back. There is a lot of talk about hardware and cloud mining and state of the art facilities with giant server racks filled with powerful ASICs. At any given service, those things may or may not exist and few things can be done to make sure they exist.

Hashie.co, a cloud mining service that claims over 40,000 users, has suspended operations. Users have lost their hash tokens but users who purchased AMHash tokens through Hashie.co are able to move their tokens to AMHash. In a bizarre twist, someone has turned the site into an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) and the first few clues have already been solved.

Yes, let me repeat that for you: A site that sold virtual hashing power to mine a digital currency “in the cloud” has vanished with user funds and has replaced the service with an online ARG, and users are playing along.

Several days ago, users started complaining about missing payouts at Hashie.co. Hashie.co was already suspect in the minds of some users, because it didn’t publish public Bitcoin addresses that proved the owners were actually mining any bitcoin… CONTINUE