Thanks HorseRider to bring this up.
Generally I'd agree, better ensure the venture can be realized at all than to speculate on better exchange rates and potentially higher reserve funds.
The only issue I have is: do we already know that the IPO will pass successfully? If not and we need to exchange to fiat and then back to refund the coins, this will inevitably cause losses. I personally stopped calculating in fiat, and it would hurt to get only 80% of my invested BTC back.
if we sell 8000 bitcoins right now, even if the exchange rate have a 50% drawdown, we will still have enough money push this venture into masking process, and have enough time to raise more money we need.
50% sharp drawdown happened only 4 times in the mtgox trading history. ((2010/11/9-11, -61.9%; 2011/6/11-13, -70.3%; 2011/10/19-25, -60.3% and the most recent one) It won't likely to happen again very recently as we already have such crash a week ago. Giving all the shareholders and friedcat agree, we will have time to sell more shares and won't delay the process.
but if we keep all the capital in bitcoin, a 20%-30% drawdown will make the IPO a failure, or delay the process. All previous 50%+ crash follows a down trend to test the bottom of the crashes. If it works the same way this time, we could test 7-8 usd in coming future weeks, when it is the time for Bitfountain pay its bills.
This motion is trying to prevent ASICminer from the exchange rate risk. This will secure the IPO and secure the opportunity, no matter which direction the exchange rate goes. If we have a rally, the IPO will definitely be successful. the 3k-5k bitcoin will benifit from the rally. If we have a drawdown and even a sharp drawdown as much as 50%, the project will still alive.
