Mixed feelings have trailed Roger Ver's announcement of his plans to start a cloud mining project soon with some respondents crying scam while others being fairly neutral.
Basically, the move somewhat contradicts the Bitcoin Unlimited champion's view about mining, expressed last year. He'd stated in a post that he doesn't think Bitcoin mining is a good investment for various reasons. They include the fact that everyone can see the Bitcoin price, the mining difficulty, the price of electricity and that everyone has access to similar mining hardware.
Exploiting vulnerability
The post also states that it is those who have an advantage over the price of electricity and mining hardware that could pull through in Bitcoin mining. This assertion is now leading to suggestions that Ver could be counting on using the contentious AsicBoost from Bitmain which reportedly gives Bitcoin miners a 20 percent advantage over others by exploiting a patchable vulnerability in the protocol for his cloud mining operation.
Several cloud mining projects have failed in the past and millions of dollars worth of investment vanished. Tying such projects to bitcoin.com - which is run by Ver and is usually one of the first landing sites for newbies to cryptocurrencies - could create a media frenzy for Bitcoin in the event it fails.
BU chances
Others think the cloud mining project idea is a way to improve BU's chances at signaling for changes to the Bitcoin protocol through its generated hash power.
This is particularly interesting considering that his announcement comes as reports show that the Bitcoin Unlimited nodes crashed in its capacity. On April 22, the number of functioning BU nodes dropped briefly from 649 to 223 according to Coin Dance. There are 5,764 Bitcoin Core nodes as at the time of writing.
However, despite the pessimism, others in the community think he is an ideological person and his agenda should be supported in some ways.
This is hinged on the view that whether the cloud mining project will be a good investment for anyone or for Ver is still not clear.
Another argument is that it could be improper, on the other hand, to automatically assume that he could be up to something unworthy simply because he is on the BU side of the scaling debate instead of being in support of SegWit.