Topic: btt - page 95. (Read 407344 times)

Yeah, don't pay dividends from the treasury (unless you're running BTCS&T).

Changing the dividends paid from 70% of mining revenue to 100% for now (until we get Avalons) might be a good idea.

I don't like the idea of paying "fixed" dividends.

What is the reasoning behind offering more dividends at the expense of the treasury reserve?

If the idea is to sell more shares, then you would be paying dividends from the capital raised by selling these shares. You might as well just sell shares at a lower price.
If the idea is to create "investor value," then taking from the reserves to pay out more dividends now seems like robbing the opportunity to purchase more mining power in the future. To me, more mining power is more valuable.

I think dividends should only be disbursed with funds earned through mining.

Throw in a motion 

As our daily yield continues to decline with each increase in difficulty without a corresponding increase in hashing power, I'm considering a motion that would change our daily dividend to a fixed yield rather than the 70% of mining revenue it is in the original contract(changed to 100% by shareholder vote) until our batch 2 Avalon arrives. The company has reserves of 424BTC so I think we'll remain well prepared for whatever scenarios unfold in the foreseeable future. Since the company was originally structured with a Dec/Jan BTCFPGA equipment delivery date timeline I think it's appropriate to return a portion of the funds raised to shareholders. So I propose the following:

Currently
Current IPO share  price = .37
Last daily dividend = 0.17026836
Last daily dividend APY = 7.8326235%

Proposed
Current IPO share  price = .37
Fixed daily dividend = .2174
Daily dividend APY = 10.0007562%

Then when we receive our first Avalon both this motion(should it pass) and the motion that increased dividends from 70% to 100% of mining revenue would be reversed and we'd return to the terms of the original contract.

Thoughts? This seems like a win win for shareholders, but I don't like surprises in my investments and I doubt I'm alone in this.


 

All GPUs are again mining BTC. I'll switch at least some of them back if there's another surge in the LTC/BTC exchange rate.

Update:

We spent some time submitting nothing but rejected shares earlier...looks like we lost about 30mins of work before I noticed the problem. The pool op over at bitparking is looking into the problem, which is apparently on his end. Meanwhile I've shifted the GPUs over to bitminter and I'll leave them there till I'm sure the coast is clear. Nasty problem as CGMiner doesn't switch to backup when shares are continuously rejected, so you just keep mining away without credit. I'll sell some alt coins to make up the lost revenue. Our dividends are looking pretty skimpy as it is while we await our Avalon orders.

The recent expansion plans announced by the ASICMiner team led me to conclude that we cannot afford to sit idly on a pile of BTC waiting for the ASIC picture to clear and remain competitive going forward.


Thanks! It's why I get the BIG bucks!

...now if you gentlemen will excuse me, I have to change.  

Good executive decision IMO.  

I can't wait to get the ASICs mining. Diff is only going to get worse.
I'm glad bASIC-MINING is working to stay competitive.

Sometimes you just have to put on your big boy pants and wade into the deep end of the pool. Tough to pay this much if you think in fiat terms, particularly as BTC was breaking through $74 just as I was clicking send, but I believe these are the guys that can deliver the goods.



Order process absolutely flawless. Kudos to team Avalon for patching it up. No surprise Bitpay could carry the load, they're consistently awesome.

 

Due to the recent BTC difficulty increase and LTC difficulty decrease I'll be working on shifting our GPUs to mining the LTC blockchain as time allows today.

Thanks as always for the analysis Deprived. As you probably know BTC difficulty has just re targeted to 6.695M. While this is just one of many increases since BFL announced their SC product line, this is a rather large increase and is caused in no small part by ASICMiner and Avalon both of which were originally scheduled to deploy after BFL's initial shipping date. I believe this further increases the risk of BFL becoming insolvent. I do tend to believe also that BTC will continue to rise vs fiat also making a BFL order paid in BTC less appealing at this time, but I haven't ruled out the possibility completely. Recent news releases from BFL have been anything but encouraging.

Problem with waiting is that if you place your order later then it definitely WON'T arrive earlier than an order placed now and it definitely won't cost less in BTC than an order placed now (BFL may not increase prices but they surely won't lower them).

So if you think BFL will deliver (even without any idea of when it will be) there's no real gain in delaying placing an order - and a definite risk of a big downside to it.  If you think there's a chance BFL won't deliver in any sort of reasonable time-period then, provided you can assign a percentage to that chance, you can actually calculate whether waiting is better or not.  If you believe there's a high chance they'll raise the price as soon as they prove they can ship then waiting ceases to be a feasible option - and the choice is between spending all on Avalons or ordering some BFL now (as if they'll raise the price once they prove they can ship then waiting gets you the biggest delay without the cost saving - and so only makes any sense if you're confident BTC will rise vs USD).

Assign percentages to the various uncertainties then do the math - then play with the percentage to see where the boundaries are.  Doing it quickly in my head I think you need to have in the order of 75% confidence BFL won't increase prices significantly once they've proved they can ship to make waiting worthwhile.  I don't see how you could be that confident - given a price rise would make sense for them AND for their very pissed-off customers with pre-orders in.

That's really the problem and it makes it tough to seriously consider a BFL order at this time. On the other hand due to the incredible rise in the exchange rate a single SC is a mere 20BTC, making it a more reasonable gamble. I think late summer for an order placed today is optimistic.

I wouldn't trust any BLF estimate until something ship.  How many estimates have passed already?

If you order now from BFL, isn't the estimated delivery like late summer?

I'd be tempted to hedge your bet and order some Avalon batch 3 and also order some BFL NOW.

Much as I dislike the way BFL operates, if you're going to order from them you need to do it BEFORE they start clearing their back-log.  If they start shipping and getting production running them I'd expect them to also hike their prices up - to somewhere a bit below Avalon.  That would raise them extra revenue and also act as a sort of reward for those who pre-ordered - by removing the current situation where those who wait until they're shipping to order have done massively better than those who paid in BTC at a much worse rate.

Noone else looks like being close to market with ASICs for sale yet - so no reason for BFL to continue selling at a massive discount to Avalon once they've proven they can ship.  The price war won't start until either ASICMINER starts to sell (not likely for a long while yet) or one of the other dubious-looking claimed manufacturers turns out to actually be real.

With BTC looking (to me) a bit shaky at its current value (it may go higher but it may fall back) this is probably not a bad time to be spending it.

It's a shame that all 3 ASIC manufacturers turned out to be a bit dodgy.  Does anyone believe the delay between Avalon shipping batches 1 and 2 is to give time off to workers?  Or does everyone else believe, like me, that it's to allow batch 3 orders to be made raising the funds to finish paying to get batch 2 made (in the same way no batch 1 shipped in any quantity until after batch 2 had been paid for).

EDIT: To be clear, when I say all 3 ASIC manufacturers being a bit dodgy I mean the companies who took pre-orders to sell ASICs.  I do NOT mean ASICMINER.

I agree to a point, it's theoretically better to have additional gear on order than not, but there's always the possibility that a new player will bring gear to market priced in fiat or BFL will stop being BFLish.

Entertain this scenario for a second. We go all in on non-refundable Avalon batch 3 units. This yields us 5 more Avalons in a few months(+330Gh). All seems peachy...until BFL FINALLY gets their house in order and units start flying out the door. Now our wise purchase looks a whole lot less pretty because we could've hopped on their overly long order queue with a minirig order(+1.5Th). Even though the Avalons would almost surely arrive sooner, it'd likely be better to get the minirig later.

I agree that BFL / ASICMINER (and others) may change the game significantly. But then surely it is better to have more mining assets rather than more BTC sitting in cash doing nothing. If ASIC farms come online in the next few months then profitability will suffer regardless.

Price of Avalon batch #3 seems appropriate to me. BTC-wise it is in the middle of batch #1 and batch #2 as I understand. I don't bother with the USD comparison - surely the only way in which USD are relevant are in the operational cost of electricity.

No way to count batch 3 as it's not open yet so I've no idea where we'd be in the order queue if/when we order and no sense yet of how many FPGA trade-ins will head their way. Anyway +100Th by the time we receive a batch 3 order is probably pretty close to worst case unless BFL stops sitting on their hands between then and now.

Don't forget about batch 3.