The market isn't very efficient here, sadly. The market is not factoring in the fact that I only pay out 50% of the bond dividends, the other 50% is going into the growth fund (which is now just buying more bonds).
The market isn't very efficient regarding what? The price of DMC? or the price of other mining bonds?
It still doesn't change the fact, that you are giving a rebate to people who do a share swap. It's kind of a early adopter discount, which is fine I guess, except that it didn't apply to the very first buyers, who got in at 1 BTC.
All those differences between DMC and other mining bonds are really not relevant, if you simply compare two situations with the exact same starting position: Namely starting out with 3 BTC and do either:
a) buy 10x YABMC, then swap for 5x DMC
b) buy 3x DMC at IPO price
In both cases I had 3 BTC and afterwards I either have 5x DMC or 3x DMC, showing that the share swap gives a discount. (And since I started out and ended up with no other mining bonds, it's really not relevant what benefits they have or how they compare to DMC.)
Its about 200 shares being sold by people who think they're flipping shares by trading me bonds and selling their shares at a slight premium. They cannot effectively do this without raising bond prices (although, for now, there IS a profit to be made). Existing investors, both those who bond traded and those who bought straight out, have been buying them as fast as possible because they see it as a good deal and want to take advantage of the flippers.
No, it's not a good deal to buy a share from a flipper. Only if you don't want to put in the effort to get the share swap discount yourself makes it sense to buy a share from someone who already did that, but then of course adds a premium for his 'work'.
Cost efficiency isn't the issue. It already is efficient enough that it only takes 10-15 years to pay for itself in Maine. The problem is we have no fall back if mining becomes unprofitable: that insurance policy is a very important part of DMC, it is something we offer that no one else does; additionally, having that second revenue stream is also a very important part of DMC.
I have to disagree here as well. So much disagreeing today, sorry. ;-) But yes, I think cost efficiency is the issue. Solar isn't some magical way to make cheap energy - and you have pointed out as much, quoting a payback time of 10-15 years. So there is a guesstimated price to your own solar electricity and it's a rate which does not greatly differ from the rate you get from the electricity grid. So if mining becomes unprofitable, then you will also reach the point where it falls below your "internal" solar electricity rate at which point it is better to the sell the electricity back to the grid than waste it in an unprofitable mining process.
That said, I don't necessarily think that it's a bad idea. Bitcoin mining is an ideal electricity consumer in the sense, that it can quickly scale down and back up to match supply. So it's a good fit for any fluctuating renewable energy source. And of course consuming your own electricity will usually be preferable to selling it back to the grid where you are paying middlemen and possibly other fees/overhead. So combining a solar farm with Bitcoin mining might give a unique advantage compared to other solar farms which just feed back into the grid and pay this overhead. I just want the economics of this clearly spelled out.