Nobody lives in Missouri AFAIK.
Doubtful any of the news sites sent anyone there to report on it. So, probably just have to wait for posted transcripts or whatever.
Didn't read the whole discussion. What's up. They disappear and scam people money? I live in Missouri. Springfield is 15' away from my house.
It's storied. Ken Slaughter sold shares of profits for a new chip to be made and sold as an ASIC. He also sold preorders of the chips/boards to customers. He then did not produce the chip. He did purchase some Hashfast chips and got them mounted to hash boards, and delivered some of these (Not many) to people waiting on preorders as well as new orders. The bulk of investors and people who preordered received no refund, and no income from the shares. Slaughter apparently purchased resources but revealed no evidence (other than things he said) of where the money went. Millions of dollars... Poof. So the Missouri Trade Commission got involved, and basically is bringing Slaughter into court over his issuance of non-registered securities. And that ultimately he'll have to refund investors. However, it is likely there is no money to refund anyone, so not really sure what will happen then. We wait and see...
IMO, he did pretty well to keep us afloat so long given the storms and tempests of the BTC world. First off, I think was that we IPOed before there was any guidance as to official stance on bitcoin being seen as substitute money, and crypto securities being seen as "real" under law. That came some months later. Secondly, we were originally to mine on Avalon chips, on our own boards. Had these been delivered on schedule, or somewhere near it, bearing in mind that in all evaluations at that time, Avalon was the most capable and on the ball ASIC player, then we would have been doing good, they may have been able to hash profitably up until May or June this year, depending on the electricity deal. Anyway, that went to hell and screwed not just AMC/VMC but a bunch of others, Terrahash etc. Then while he was chasing the refund from that, we had the Bitfunder debacle. However, being kicked in the nuts twice, he still kept us theoretically in the game with a deal for our own chip. Again, had that progressed on schedule and I think it was eASIC selling us 28nm easy copy before it was ready to roll, and mis-representing when it would be available. Had that gone right, we'd have been online with the KNC Jupiters at about same efficiency and got about a year out of those until now... But again, an attempt to deal with what seemed an industry leader blew up in our faces. By early 2014 it became obvious that this deal wasn't good enough, now it was much delayed, and other options were sought, we bought another chip design, that didn't rely on less efficient easy-copy type process. This was also a decent deal at the time, but holding BTC in a merchant account at then "industry leader" MtGox, shot us in the foot again. Limping along I believe we got some return of funds from eASIC, that enabled a last desperate effort with the hashfast boards....
.... and we'd have made it too if it wasn't for those meddling kids.
Anyway. From what I've been able to put together, Ken seemed like he was making the objective at the time "right choices", and he was rolling with the punches, we took so many fucking hits, it's amazing we were still on our feet so long. Among other companies, one or two of the events above wiped them out of the game completely. It didn't work out, but I don't think it was a scam.
