Topic: Gigamining / Teramining - page 52. (Read 216459 times)

The contract would need to specify that the btc was simply a way to send USD value to the operator for this to work.

Only then could they have accounting in fiat.

Just say you have $100 sitting in your bank which you use to buy btc and send to the operator the only time your money is in btc is the time it takes to redeem the shares. In the same way the operator only has btc when they need to pay the dividends.

This would work if you dont use bitcoins you already own but buy them for the specific purpose of sending the fiat value.

That would all be fine and well if the investment was made in USD - but it wasn't.  I DO accept that BTC increasing so strongly vs USD may not have been anticipated by Giga - obviously it was never a certainty to happen.  But that doesn't alter a few facts:

1.  Investment was in BTC.  If contract is reversed then repayment would be in the currency originally paid.  Intent of reversing a contract is to revert the situation to how it would have been had the contract never been entered into.  Investors had 1 BTC in their wallet prior to purchasing so should have a BTC afterwards.  Not really relevant what would have happened had he took investments in USD, LTC, Russian Roubles or Zimambwean Dollars - as he didn't.
2.  By your figures this was basically always going to be a loss for investors from day 1.  Less than half investment returned so far and with block reward halving and ASICs imminent investors would die of old age before the remainder got generated in dividends.  Dividends generated are largely unaffected by exchange-rate - there's some small amount of impact rising BTC has on rate of increase of difficulty but for a fixed-rate bond the main impact on dividends for shares (reduced cost of power) isn't relevant.
3.  Note also that BTC increasing in value doesn't only cause hardware to depreciate faster, it also helps in the other direction by reducing the percentage of mining output that Giga needed to spend on power costs.

In short it appears that he sold a lemon that was never going to make a profit for investors - and now wants to make their loss even larger by forcing them to jump through hoops that he could (and should) have identified and disclosed before ever offering the contracts.  He's the one who fucked up by selling a wortless (compared to just holding BTC) investment.  He's the one who didn't bother working out what he needed to do to in order to comply with the regulations/laws in HIS jurisdiction - and has now belatedly decided to do so.

When BTC rose vs USD did he start paying higher dividends as his costs to operate had reduced?  I don't think so.  So when it's now suddenly convenient for him to refer to that change would it be fair for him to do so?

If he wants to play it by the book then that's cool - and whether he raises the funds by selling hardware, selling his house or magicking it out of his ass is not really any concern of investors is it?  If he was concerned about the impact exchange-rate would have then he could hedged against it or just done his homework in first place and made sure he dotted his i's and crossed his t's before accepting every BTC thrown in his direction.

Bottom line, cutting through all the crap, is he knowingly entered into a contract he knew was on dodgy legal ground.  Many investors may well have known they were on dodgy legal ground as well.  But now he's got cold feet over it, it's not investors responsibility to incur significant (for many, compared to investment) costs to cover HIS ass.  Same as it's not HIS responsibility to incur costs sending THEM every bit of paper and jumping through every hoop that they ask for.

Price of btc could have just as easily fallen. Paid in btc to operator... Operator should also pay in btc. No dollar conversion should be considered.

So the original contract is lost.
The gear is being traded in at full value.
Glcrapbse is gone and no way to determine fair price per bond/coupon/whatever.
The summarized from memory contract says forever you will be paid unless a forced buyback at 105% of glcrapbse price.

Seems to me that buy back price will be quite hefty. Especially since the contract was broken and mining profits not being paid as planned. Seems to me the operator has failed and the gear belongs to the coupon holders now. Liquidate and spread the money to them.

I was doing the math on this reversal idea earlier, and I think there is an aspect being overlooked.

There were five tranches of shares issued, starting at 5k and eventually reaching 40k.  Just for demonstration, I'll focus on shares in the first tranche.

If I understand correctly, the contracts were sold for 1 BTC.  This generated approximately $5.12 for Giga to spend in the normal economy on hardware and other business costs for the operation.

Counting up until the last dividend that was actually paid on GLBSE, the share generated a total of about 0.48 BTC for the owner, leaving 0.52 BTC to pay to the owner in order to negate the original contract, according to what has been proposed here.

But due to the dramatic increase in BTC value, Giga would actually have to spend about $7.01 this week just to cover that 0.52 BTC, significantly more than the dollar capital that the whole share generated in the first place to actually buy equipment, space, and electricity!

One other perspective that you might or might not find to be relevant: it is easy to calculate the fair market value in dollars of each dividend at the time it was paid.  The cumulative FMV of all the dividends that were actually paid through GLBSE is $3.68 on that trache of shares, or 72% of the $5.12 FMV that went in. If you sum all the way through the Dec 10 dividend payment in the queue, the total rises to about $4.84 in dividends, or 95%.  

That's assuming that each dividend is immediately cashed out into dollars.  If a holder of a share in that tranche has kept the whole 0.48 BTC in dividends in their wallet, its FMV now is $6.49, still a return significantly over 100% of the dollars it took to acquire the share at the time. Naturally, that ignores opportunity cost, etc, but it's till something interesting to know.

Regarding hardware depreciation, realize that the majority of gigamining hardware (in terms of hashrate) is BFL minirigs and Singles. These do not 'depreciate' in the normal sense; in fact they can be traded in for BFL ASICs at their full original purchase price until March 1, 2013. Or sold to someone else who wants to trade in for ASICs. Gigavps has already taken advantage of this program. So most (if not all) of the gear is still worth its full original value.

Remember that if the contract is totally cancelled then the amount refunded is issue price LESS all dividends paid to date (the dividends have to be cancelled as well) - as ALL transactions have to be reversed.  If mining gear depreciation has outpaced generation of dividends then it was a shitty investment in the first place (as by definition that means investors have made a loss).  It's not like block-reward halving, steadily increasing difficulty or technological advances were somehow unexpected is it?  I somehow can't see Giga claiming that he either totally failed to understand basic issues about mining OR intentionally sold an investment he expected to make a loss for investors.  So how could he claim that somehow at this juncture reversing contracts isn't financially possible - as surely that lets him keep all the profit made from investments that are now refunded at IPO price - total dividends?

I think you misread my statement.  I was referring to this being very cheap/free for US residents and potentially quite expensive for foreign residents.

Wrong and wrong. An apostille + getting a notary look at you while you sign something costs quite a bit around here not because my home country is fighting the US or something but simply because we have a much higher GDP and standard of living than the US. Also to open a bank account (and getting a credit card on top of that with a few thousand EUR limit) I need less paperwork than to finally get my ~5-6 EUR worth of dividends off shares that I bought for ~40 EUR worth at that time.

As far as I understand it, all I owned all the time was a simple contract that was bought from giga (or someone else who bought it from giga) that guaranteed me that he'd be hashing Bitcoins and send me an amount that was specified in the contract in certain intervals. This is not much more than any renderfarm or provider of webservers does. I guess all the fear and "lawyering" stems from the fact that Bitcoin might in the future(?) considered some kind of money which would mean I bought a contract for getting money and not a simple service. Maybe something along the lines of buying a money printing press collectively...

However, I'd like to see proof that Bitcoin are actually money first and/or creating Bitcoin is an act of cerating money and not equivalent to rendering a frame of Big Buck Bunny or Elephant's Dream (just with different algorithms running) before I comply with these regulations prematurely. Actually anyone sending their info to this lawyer (if he even exists/is a lawyer!) might get into far bigger trouble should Bitcoin really be considered money and Bitcoin mining be considered an act of creating money.

Well I could be wrong on it - but I had the impression that there was some issue with listing on GLBSE and at least some contracts were issued directly.  Even after it was listed on GLBSE some contracts were entered into directly with other parties rather than through the market (e.g. the one for the MP pass-through).

It's still not particularly relevant anyway - Giga chose the payment processor and so had the responsibility to ensure they met whatever requirements HE had for them to be legal in his jurisdiction.  If he's now saying he needs that information to take on the role of payment processor himself then he needs to be offering an equitable choice for those who don't want to meet the associated costs.  Or if he's saying he's obliged to obtain that information (by law or regulation) to even recognise a contract with the other party then he needs to be cancelling and refunding on contracts where it isn't provided.  If provision of the information is a pre-condition for the contract to be legally binding then in the absence of such information the contract has to be annulled and all payments already made in respect of it reversed.

Or do you seriously believe there's a case to be made that Giga wasn't the senior party in the contract?

EDIT:  Just scanned first pages of thread.  Seems like vast majority of first batch were sold by private arrangement rather then through the market.  Those were done by transfer - where GLBSE were not an intermediary between two unknown parties and were just acting as record-keepers.  Clearly Giga had the ability to request whatever information he needed from those purchasers - and ensure they met any limitations he faced on who he could enter an arrangement with.  Plus any requirement (legal/regulatory) on him to obtain such information would also compel him to ensure that any third-party he chose to act on his behalf met the same requirements anyway - as irrespective of who processed payments his obligations were still to (and in respect of) the beneficiary owners of the contracts.

This isn't something I was aware of.  The original post on this thread was on April 7th, and the second post is on the same day and is talking about GLBSE, so I was under the strong impression that all of these contracts were originally sold through GLBSE, with GLBSE set up to process the dividend payments.

If instead it is the case that these contracts were originally issued by Giga directly, with Giga as the actual payment processor of the dividends, and Giga failed (as GLBSE later did) to request the right information, then I am more sympathetic to what you are saying -- at least insofar as it affects those people who bought bonds before dividend the payment processing was moved to GLBSE.

Not sure this is at all relevant.  My understanding is that Giga initially issued the bonds/contracts OFF of GLBSE - only moving to GLBSE some time later.  He didn't require the information now requested initially - so GLBSE is, in that respect, totally a red herring.

Where you appear to be getting confused is in mixing up what was/is required of Giga to be legal where he is and what was/is required of investors to comply with whatever rules apply to them.  IF the scenario is that the information required by Giga is absolutely essential for him to have (debatable - but that's really for him to decide) AND that the cost of providing such information is disproportionately burdensome on investors (which it clearly is for anyone whose investment is worth less than the cost of obtaining an Apostille) then the standard remedy is to null the contract - reversing all payments made by both parties as though the contract were never entered into.

That is also the standard procedure in the UK (where I am) if someone sends funds to a regulated company then is unable or unwilling to provide personal identity information.  It's also standard in other countries - e.g. in India where Dishwara is from (Their Supreme Court or equivalent ruled that even banks can't freeze funds if someone won't provide ID - the banks either have to allow the account to continue to operate or close the account and refund everything in it).

If one party to a contract has onerous/costly requirements and expects that cost to be met by the other party then it's THEIR responsibility to disclose that at the start.  It's not the other party's obligation to try to guess what they're likely to need in the future when even the country in which the service operates hasn't been disclosed.  Your position (and that of Giga's) appears to be along the lines of:

"Sorry but I've now found out you have to incur a $100 cost to claim the $10 worth of benefit due to you from the contract we agreed.  You either have to pay that $100 or let me dispose of the $10 in some undefined way which won't benefit you."

That's totally against commonsense, decency and established practice.  And also specifically against the law/relevant regulations in at least some countries.  A proper position would be:

"Sorry but I've now found out you have to incur a $100 cost to claim the $10 worth of benefit due to you from the contract we agreed.  Either I'll refund the $100 costs you incur or we'll have to annull the contract as though it never happened and I'll refund the moneys paid to me less those returned to you already in the form of dividends."

Obviously cancelling the contract would mean investors would lose out on all the massive profit they would otherwise make from this investment - but I'm sure that's preferable to getting nothing.

It's HIS responsibility to ensure that he fulfilled whatever legal/statutory/regulatory demands are on him - not the responsibility of his investors.  Had he initially disclosed that he was in the US and was supposed to obtain such information (but wasn't doing so) then the situation would be somewhat different.  His mistake - he should pay for it one way or another basically.

You have a silly idea of the law: if you break it (especially the criminal one), then you did it. You can't reverse so easily what you have done. If you commit another crime to cover the traces of your previous crime, then you commited 2 crimes.

Giga knew perfectly well like anyone that GLBSE was illegal, but he played along until the going was good. So now he is just getting the chance for another hit at his investors.

edit: I personally don't trust to send my ID to no one here, nor to their lawyers. And Giga's bet is that many are of the same opinion.

BITBOND just pwned Giga by relisting on cryptostocks.

Gotta love competition.

Nefario apparently actually scammed people, is terrified of prosecution, and has crawled under a rock.  What you seem to be asking for here is the right to give your tax ID number and other identifying personal information to Nefario rather than Giga. 

Firstly, given Nefario's current attitude, it is extremely unlikely that anyone could convince him to re-open the GLBSE dividend system and open a repository of users' tax and ID information.  So someone would have to take protracted, expensive, uncertain legal action to try to force Nefario to do this, and in the meantime you would not get your dividends.

Secondly, from a personal security perspective, I find it hard to believe that there is anyone out there who would rather entrust their sensitive details to Nefario rather than to Giga's law firm.

There are actually two alternatives.  

One is that the contract was, unwittingly, not legal in the first place, and both parties bear responsibility for not doing enough due diligence to realize this.  Giga is now, having done the due diligence, executing his obligations in the nearest possible manner consistent with the law.  Since this thread right now is really about dividend payment rather than the fact that it was an exchange security, this alternative isn't super relevant to the current debate. But it still fits the situation as you describe it.

The other alternative, which is more relevant right now, is this.  GLBSE was not legal before in terms of its dividend payment processing system because it did not collect all the information it should have and did not issue the proper tax documentation.  Now, Giga is taking over this processing functionality, which used to be GLBSE's responsibility, and he is doing it differently than GLBSE did in order to be legal.  You are mad at Giga because you are now having to provide more information than you did before.  

But your anger is misplaced. The difference that you are experiencing does not stem from Giga changing his mind about what what he wants from you.  The difference stems from the fact that you are moving from one payment processor to another.  Your old payment processor, GLBSE, apparently didn't ask you for the right things.  Your new payment processor, who happens go be Giga himself but could just as easily be a different exchange or processing contractor, is now asking you for the right things.

If you want to be mad at somebody, be mad at GLBSE for making you think in the first place that you could receive these kinds of payments without supplying tax information. 

If You wants us, the investors to go in CORRECT LEGAL WAY to get back claims, then you MUST ALSO GO THE SAME CORRECT LEGAL WAY.

Are you ready to go jail, for not doing legal things, creating and issuing illegal security bonds with the help of GLBSE?

Why you not dragging nefario to solve this, instead you carrying on your head?
What is the dealing you have with nefario?
If nefario comes out, then all mess be easily solved.
why you showing soft corner to the nefario & screwing bond holders?

http://www.afternoondc.in/business-investment/the-fake-currency-notes-syndrome/article_65486


If even Indian government itself gets cheated, what is the proof that my personal details WILL NEVER USED BY ANY ONE TO DO ILLEGAL THINGS IN MY NAME?

That and he needs one if you have not noticed he went to criminal lawyer not a commercial lawyer who does business deals.