Topic: ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It - page 1140. (Read 3917568 times)

Thats exactly right. Please furuknap do your research before spending all this time talking about irrelavant arguments.  See my post above this. Dont buy shares if your not confortable with the risk.

You do realize that the PROMISE that was made by the ASICMINER project was that all shares would be paid back in full from what they cost when they were sold.  Each share cost .1 BTC and this is all the money that ASICMINER ever collected from the initially sale.  That was paid off already.  Initially investors are free rolling at this point. That promise was fulfilled.  
You keep talking about the debt owed by the company to the shareholders..  There is no more debt.  That was completely paid off in the first 4 dividend payments.  Your entire write up above makes it obvious that you have no idea the history of ASICMINER and of the shares that were sold.
 
Think of these shares more as venture capital that ASICMINER sought after and gave those who put in money a slice of the equity in the company.  That amount was repaid in full.  Now we are trading around those slices of equity based on what we feel they are worth.  
Friedcat owes you nothing.  The promise he made to repay shareholders was upheld.  Now it is our job to decide what we want to pay for these slices of equity.

Stop thinking of these shares in the fashion you consider publicly traded companies.

Well you got to look at it from a potential investor standpoint too. This isnt like Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) where you know exactly what your getting into.

Here your going on the word of something all but anonymous. While it was nice 200 some odd pages ago to throw a few nickels and dimes about in a lemonade startup, this company is much deeper then that now and that is a good thing.

 Now it just really needs to catch up with itself, asicminer is basically in a battle with avalon much like Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) and Apple Inc (AAPL) for supremacy in the asic market. BFL is due to the nature of all their hangups, the red headed step child of the industry. Sorry BFL but for all intents and purposes you know this is true;)

Yet we hardly know a thing about any of them?

For me, it's not about this distinction. I'm a patient Investor #1 who prefers good solutions to unreasonable demands.

We could also discuss #2 vs. #1, but I don't observe that the recent debate is focused on that.

I enjoy reading this thread but last 5 or so pages have been a buncha jargon that needs to be sumed up in a nice and tiddy post

Investor #1 wants a good company, complete with a brick and mortar establishment and marketing built for a growing company. Something that will stand out more with better transparency. #1 is probably thinking to himself does anyone even know what these guys real names are, what they look like anything?

Investors #2, 3 enjoy the the lemonade stand style structure currently implemented and stand by good ol buddy systems of honesty and good neighborly business practices. Problem is where is the lemonade stand? In a basically anonymous series of internet forums...

Now while the lemonade stand may have been good for a few funny monies here and there, i see this company as way overdue for a upgrade.

just my 2 satoshi's

I'm truly glad you focus on red herrings, so why don't we make this discussion about accounting instead, then?

.b

Debt and equity are fundamentally different things. Your name is Schmoe, and you have no business here.

I have not questioned friedcat's honesty or dedication, so stop those strawman arguments.

Look, why don't you put your money where your mouth is? There are plenty of PT shares for sale 

.b

Exactly!

In other news, hashrate is climbing slowly again. 13.5 TH/s.

Then don't.  The door is that way.

Friedcat has been 100% honest, and every thing he has said has worked so far- Blades sold and shipped immediately, hashing power visible and going up, etc.

You are demanding more transparency at the same time everyone else demands that he move faster and deploy the 50 TH/s tomorrow.  Stop acting like a bunch of whiny children.  There is a direct inverse correlation between the size of Friedcat's updates and the work that AM does for that week.  For the last 6 weeks he gave lots of updates, and mostly not much was happening.  Now everything is happening at once, and everyone who isn't whining here like you wants Friedcat to focus on deployment & manufacturing first, then communications and corporate structure.

I'd look that up with an accountant if I were you :-)

A share is a declaration of debt in the form of ownership. In other words, a shareholder gives the face value of a share to the company and the company acknowledgeds that debt in the form of a share of ownership. It is generally an irredeemable and interest free debt unless the company is liquidated at a balance, but it is still a debt.

The premium a shareholder gets from that share is the share price, the debt owed by the company to the share holder is the face value.

Yeah, technically, the term debt refers to something that will be paid off and earns an interest, whereas stock equity is not paid off and any 'interest' paid is called dividends, but in practice it is the same thing. You sell shares and increase your debt (or stock equity).

Otherwise, issuing shares would be an income for the company, which it certainly isn't.

Look, the technicalities of book keeping is irrelevant to the discussion. Even if a share holder is comfortable with the return they have gotten, that return is still tied to a promise made at the IPO by the company and the expectation of the share holder that those promises will be kept. The risk the share holder puts on the possibility of a default on those promises, plus whatever earning they expect from their investment, is the price they expect to get from an eventual sale.

At this point, it seems nobody has any clear answers to how we can evaluate that risk. That uncertainty should make an investor uncomfortable at some level, regardless of whether they believe in a bright future for Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in general.

.b

I am feeling a little uncomfortable with the amount of my very modest BTC fundage I have in this investment. I gauge that "a little uncomfortable" is about right for the level of risk/reward as I see them at this time. My downside risk is ow-worthy to be sure, but not devastating.  However, there's a whole lot more room on the upside.

I've done the startup thing as well, and it is...intense. And that's without the constant Fx challenges friedcat faces between BTC/RMB. I doubt he pays the power bill in BTC.  I have no doubt that he could use a helping hand. But that in itself is a lot of work, even if you have a skilled and trustworthy candidate already lined up.  I know friendcat needs his sleep, and I hope he understands that even though we're all interested in more detail, at the end of the day (or night) we're cheering for him to succeed.

I am hoping that friedcat can become that poster child you mention, and I have money on that. In terms of poster-child candidates, our bench is not yet very deep in this space.  If friedcat sets a terrific example, that situation will improve.

Sounds like you'd prefer to have less direct access to info from the CEO. Then when AM starts operating more like an American corporation, you'll say "You used to tell us whenever you took a nap!  WTF!"

Hiring people is also work.

Exactly.  The confusion may be because debt and equity are on the same side of the balance sheet.  But they are not the same thing.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_equation

Please don't take this the wrong way, but we have no insight into how the company is run so there's no way to know whether this is exactly what happens. I trust friedcat until he proves I can't, I understand the strains of running a startup (I've done it multiple times myself), and I know it's difficult to cater to every whim an investor craves.

Nobody is claming friedcat, AM, or BF is in any way deceptive. Out story so far indicates the exact opposite; friedcat has been very forthcoming with information on a short-term basis. That's great, we're kept in the loop on day-to-day operations and that certainly has value.

AM has the makings of something really, really big. They are first movers, they have proven reliability in delivery, and they hash faster than anyone. This could very well be the next Apple, valued at hundreds of billions in five years.

However, it can also be the next complete and utter failure, not from any malice but from not anticipating some factor that we can't predict now.

My point is that AM can prove to the world that BTC investments are real, that they are valuable, and that we can play the game of big money. That game, however, is played with some predictability and with some plans longer than "I'll pay tomorrow once I get some sleep". That sleep is probably more deserved than anyone's has ever been, but for investors to even consider putting any real money into this game (and I'm not talking speculating in BTC/USD in general, I'm talking BTC investing) then we need to have a poster child for how an asset is run.

.b

from contract:
"...Board members could ask for details of Bitfountain, as well as inspecting and monitoring our financials..."
I didn't find in contract any weekly updates, so strictly by contract I don't deserve even them.

In order for asicminer to maintain the level of network hashing that everyone keeps dreaming of, there will always be an insane amount of workload unless either more people are hired or the network hashrate vastly diminishes.

Yes, preserving the money is added risk. However, if what the shareholders want is predictability and accurate accounting, then I don't think that can work in weekly intervals. You need to pick one or the other. People are talking about Apple, as if what Apple is doing is transparently available to the shareholders in real-time.

Having said that, I'm sure we will receive a satisfactory post from friedcat when this phase of deployment is over. They have an insane amount of workload now.


Good point. Not sure if even they know it yet though. Since the pass-through share price has increased so much, people are wondering whether they should sell or not. I understand the worry, but friedcat might not have the remedy yet. It's better to wait a few weeks more to start pestering.