Topic: [GLBSE] Introducing: Bitcoin Syndicate, a new mining op trading publicly! - page 3. (Read 23210 times)

can't trade syndicate on glbse

Cross post from our forums at: http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=129&p=2546#p2546

Quick update. Wire is sent, boards are bought and paid for. And the money wasn't stolen this time! Woohoo! (yeah I know, I went there...)   

Anyway, the boards are paid for, once they arrive we will begin the lease period. We will owe Enterpoint 1480GBP for the leased boards. This will eat up 100% of our "Growth" fund until the debt is paid. Which shouldn't take too long.

So that means there are 8 shiny new Cairnsmore1 Boards being shipped from Enterpoint ASAP to begin mining for the syndicate.

I'll post another update once they arrive.

After converting at the canadian exchange (virtex canada) and paying their fees (and digging fairly deep into the market depth), and then paying the fees to withdraw it, exchanging it at my bank and sending the wires (paying the bank their fees/commission on the exchange of course) and so on. We have paid for the boards, and there is $264.42 CAD remaining. Which I will use to pay for any duties/fees to recieve the package when it arrives, and any bits and such I need to get them mining (cables, psu, fans, whatever).

If there is leftover after that's all done, I'll re-deposit it as BTC.

Also one more update. I just heard from Nefario. Trading has been re-opened on GLBSE!

This means the BTCSYN asset is now open for all trading again on the market!

It's not easy, but Glasswalker finally start to get up again from the disaster.

Rebuilding Announcement Post (cross post from our forum at http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=129)

Ok, the motion is complete, and here is the plan of action based on the results of the motion (for the details of the motion results, see the motions forum, and my post of the results):

#1a - I'll contact Enterpoint and finalize negotiation for the hardware purchase.

#1b - (at the same time) - I'll withdraw our full balance to $CAD (the amount is smaller this time than last time, so I don't have the same tax concerns). And this way there is less exchange risk like last time.

#2 - Once the negotiation is finished, and the money is in my account. I'll wire it directly to Enterpoint.
(I will provide a record of how many $CAD I got out, and what exchange rate, and wire fee was and so on).

#3 - Any remaining funds will either be used for supporting bits needed to get the boards hashing, OR re-deposited (if it's excessive) to the syndicate.

#4 - We will await shipping of the hardware

#5 - I'll get it all operational and hashing

#6 - On the next "dividend payment time" that comes up (beginning of the month) following hashing beginning. We'll resume our 80/20% dividend split

#7 - IMPORTANT Until the lease from enterpoint is paid off, our full 80% growth fund will be going towards paying this off. This is to mitigate risk from the liability of the lease.

#8 - Back to business as usual after that

Any questions?

I have already emailed Enterpoint to finalize negotiations. I expect the whole forex/wire process to take about a week. Once Enterpoint have received funds I expect boards to be here within another 1 week. That means by the 1st of Oct, we should have boards here, ready to hash.

Crosspost from our internal forums (thread here: http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=107&p=1372#p1372)

The motions have finally closed!

Here are the results:

116 (Option 1 Rebuild FPGA)
PASS
Total Votes: 2994
Yea Votes: 2749
Nay Votes: 245
Pass Margin Absolute: 2504
Pass Margin % Volume: 20.8%
Pass Margin % Voted: 83.6%

117 (Option 2 Rebuild ASIC)
PASS
Total Votes: 2702
Yea Votes: 1573
Nay Votes: 1129
Pass Margin Absolute: 444
Pass Margin % Volume: 3.7%
Pass Margin % Voted: 16%

118 (Option 3 Rebuild Hedge)
FAIL
Total Votes: 2262
Yea Votes: 321
Nay Votes: 1941
Pass Margin Absolute: NA
Pass Margin % Volume: NA
Pass Margin % Voted: NA

119 (Option 4 Wait it out with lease & 50/50)
PASS
Total Votes: 2251
Yea Votes: 1617
Nay Votes: 634
Pass Margin Absolute: 983
Pass Margin % Volume: 8.1%
Pass Margin % Voted: 43.6%

120 (Option 5 Wait it out, with 50/50)
FAIL
Total Votes: 2160
Yea Votes: 58
Nay Votes: 2102
Pass Margin Absolute: NA
Pass Margin % Volume: NA
Pass Margin % Voted: NA

121 (Option 6 Close up shop)
FAIL
Total Votes: 4558
Yea Votes: 190
Nay Votes: 4368
Pass Margin Absolute: NA
Pass Margin % Volume: NA
Pass Margin % Voted: NA

FINAL CONCLUSION:
What I can conclude from these results are several things:
- I'm very happy to see that of every vote, the one our shareholders felt the STRONGEST about was option 6. And they all CLEARLY did not want to close up the syndicate.
- There was interest in the ASIC option and FPGA option (but not hedging, which was interesting).
- There was some interest in waiting as well.
- There was a clear winner. Meaning I did NOT need to exercise my voting power at all.
- Most (all?) the founders did not exercise their votes either. Meaning this was a 100% community shareholder decision.
- The clear winner was Option #1. (Rebuilding Via FPGAs). It has more than 12% lead over the other options in terms of pass margin by total volume.

Thank you all for your patience, and support through this process. I'm extremely happy to see this coming to it's "conclusion" and allowing us to move on.

I'll be making an official "announcement" post shortly outlining exactly what's coming next.

Once that post is live, I'll ask Nefario to unlock trading on our asset.

seems like a major announcement. bump.

Motion Announcement:

Multiple Choice Motion. As per Announcement Post at http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=106
These motions are up for 7 days. This is an important vote, deciding the future of BTCSYN, PLEASE if you own shares VOTE on these.
They should expire at approximately 10PM Sept 11th 2012 EST.

Option 1 (Rebuild FPGA):
Motion ID: 116

Option 2 (Rebuild ASIC):
Motion ID: 117

Option 3 (Rebuild Hedge Our Bets)
Motion ID: 118

Option 4 (Wait it out, with Lease & 50/50 split)
Motion ID: 119

Option 5 (Wait it out 50/50 split)
Motion ID: 120

Option 6 (Close up shop)
Motion ID: 121

As per instructions in the announcement thread:
- I will be withholding my votes. I will not vote on these motions. I will hold my vote back as a swing vote.
- Anyone can vote for/against one or more option you wish to pass/fail.
- If more than one pass, then provided one of them has a lead over all other of at least 10% measured using the pass margin, that one is the winning option
- If no such option presents itself, I will use my remaining share's voting power to make a final decision between all the passed motions.

When I say the 10% is measured by pass margin, I mean if 20% vote no on option1 and 30% vote yes (of total volume of shares) that gives a pass margin of 10% of total share volume. If option 2 gets 30% no, and 60% yes of total share volume, then it has 30% pass margin of total share volume, meaning it has a lead over option 1 of 20%.

Original post: http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=107

Ok, so it's been a long haul. But I've finally got the pieces in place (minus one, which I'll mention below) to get our plans of action to carry forward.

First a brief summary after the theft:

The police responded, I worked with the investigator, to explore all the leads I had dug up, and any other potential options he could think of. He was surprisingly knowledgeable about bitcoin, and aware of the situation quite well. Unfortunately because the money is still sitting in one wallet, it's un-traceable at this time. IF further useful evidence presents itself, and he'll consider acting at that time. The case is now essentially in their cold-case files, and will be re-opened if we call them with further evidence.

I'll be getting a hard copy of the full police report and posting it up for everyone to see shortly. (right now I'm very strapped for time, and so I don't have time to go down to the police station and wait around for paperwork to get done, as I have to go down in person, fill out a formal information request form, and pay a fee for it). But that will happen soon.

In addition, I've re-deposited the bitcoins that I had (rather the Canadian Dollars I had, converted back to bitcoins minus exchange fees and such). So that explains the random transaction for like 55BTC you saw. (I withheld enough CAD$ to pay the fee to the police for the hard copy of the police report).

So basically nothing at MTGox has turned up any real leads, the police are no longer investigating, and the money is basically non-recoverable (unless we get lucky in the future and they move it in a traceable way).

Also to touch on current hashrates, we're doing our best. Several of the founders rigs are experiencing hardware problems now, and I have not had time to tackle it. I expect we will be able to resolve this soon. Until then we've been doing our best to maintain as much hashing power as possible.

Now, onto the plan(s) of action:

I propose the following options going forward, I've put a lot of thought into these, and hope that collectively this presents good options with the interests of the shareholders in mind, and a wide spectrum of available actions to choose from.

Option 1 (Rebuild FPGA):
I've been doing much work with Enterpoint (I'm essentially the lead developer on their bitstreams for their boards right now). As such they are willing to do 2 things for us:
- Still give us a discounted price from the now full retail price (current retail on their boards is 600GBP, we get them for 400GBP)
- Give us 4 boards on a "Mining Lease". Which means that 80% of those boards hash power goes in to paying off their purchase price (at 400GBP). (after electricity/overhead costs)
- Once the boards have been paid off, we own them in full.
Currently the Enterpoint Cairnsmore1 board is pulling about 800-820Mhash on average. I expect the bitstream to advance in the next little bit to boost that as high as 1Ghash - 1.2Ghash.
If we redirect 100% of our current funds (which is what I'm proposing here) into the boards, that gives us approximately 1650GBP (at current exchange) which should be enough to cover 4 boards purchased, plus shipping, and any supporting parts needed. This combined with the 4 leased boards means an instant jump of 6.4Ghash in mining power (note the icarus boards we sold off were rated for a max of 6.6Ghash). Of which for the first little bit we're paying off 4 of the boards. But consider there is a high chance that hashrate will increase "for free" to be 8Ghash - 9.6Ghash in the near future.
Overall this gets us back to where we were in hashing power. But we lost about 3 months of FPGA hashing during that time. So the net effect of the theft was basically 3 months of FPGA hashing. Which isn't bad all things considered. On the other hand the Opportunity Loss was still high, considering where bitcoin value went, and how many enterpoint boards we could have had, but we have no control over that now, so this I think is one of the best options. Also to consider is Enterpoint are highly experienced and have shown good business practices. They already have a Gen2 FPGA product on the horizon, and a likely ASIC product. Aligning ourselves with them now, gives us the ability to take advantage of this relationship going forward. With this option we would resume normal dividend payments at an 80/20 split as before, after the initial "rebuild" purchase of hardware has completed.

Option 2 (Rebuild ASIC):
It has been suggested (by mila) that we buy into ASIC boards from BFL at this time. This idea can't be discounted fully. BFL has a REALLY bad track record, they don't deliver on time, and rarely meet their projected performance goals. Their business practices are questionable and best, and so on. We dealt with them once, and they nearly screwed us out of our money. But that said, they did EVENTUALLY deliver on the singles, and the mini-rigs. And the mini-rigs are much closer to their advertised specs than the singles were. They might have been very late, but they did in fact deliver. So now we're posed with the dilemma, they announced their ASIC products. Which are FAR faster hashrate per dollar than the current FPGA offering. And better power efficiency. IF they deliver as promised, and on-time, these are going to be a game changer for mining. I don't think they will destroy the profitability of FPGA mining for quite some time, but GPU mining will become un-profitable overnight. So that said, we have the option of taking all our current money and investing it into ASIC boards from BFL.
The risk here, is that we invest, and they take months to deliver like last time, and we're still left "out in the cold" for some time. Or that their hardware doesn't live up to the offered specs. Also another big risk, is that with the major surge in hash power, there is a risk that the bitcoin mining protocol could change (even slightly) to protect from possible attacks (with easily available cheap hash power). If that happens, the ASICs on the market get invalidated. If this change is going to happen, it would need to happen before ASICs take over the network, as very few running ASIC miners would invalidate their own hardware, so the whole ASIC movement COULD fail within months of it's takeoff... That's another risk we need to consider here. But the potential hashrate gains are high if it all works out well.
- We take out 250BTC we have now and put it towards ASICs from BFL.
- The "Jalapeno" works out to be 23.5Mhash/$
- The "SC Single" works out to be 30.8Mhash/$
- Our current funds at approximate exchange rate of $10/BTC is $2,500 USD
- for this money, including shipping, we can get one "SC Single" and approximately 7 of the "Jalapeno" models.
- This equates to a total (advertised) hash rate of 64.5GHash/s
This option works for me too, it has a much higher potential gain, but with a higher risk profile. The question is, do we want to support BFL? And do we want to accept the potential wait until sometime in the newyear to get the product? And the risk it may not pan out as expected for one reason or another?
With this option we would resume normal dividend payments at an 80/20 split as before, after the initial "rebuild" purchase of hardware has completed.

Option 3 (Rebuild Hedge Our Bets)
A Combo of option 1/2 I won't go into full detail, but basically we buy 2 enterpoint boards, do the hardware lease, and throw whatever funds we have left at "Jalapeno" boards from BFL. With this option we would resume normal dividend payments at an 80/20 split as before, after the initial "rebuild" purchase of hardware has completed.

Option 4 (Wait it out, with Lease & 50/50 split)
Due to the upcoming "ASIC Revolution" for bitcoin mining, combined with the reward drop in December. There is a lot of uncertainty ahead. And we are still recovering from a major blow. It may be wise in our position to simply wait, gather assets, and see how things unfold. Then we can decide what to do once the dust settles. There is risk in this option too, if bitcoin value crashes hard, we loose most of our value. But in general I think bitcoin itself will be fine, and not having invested in any particular solution means once the dust settles we can make an informed decision (which may be to simple close up shop at that time if the business is no longer viable in the new "state" of things). If we hold onto our liquid assets until the new-year, we can see the outcome of the ASIC revolution and the reward drop, and decide what to do then. But since the hardware lease from Enterpoint is essentially "Free" we can still take advantage of that at this point, and get that 20% boost in mining power from those 4 boards, with the boards paying themselves off. Once paid off this gives us another 3.6Ghash - 4.8Ghash of mining power until we decide what to do with our gathered assets. If this option is chosen we would continue with a 50/50 split, 50% of income paid to dividends, 50% to savings until the newyear. At our current hashrate I expect we would gain another 200BTC by the end of the year approximately (depending on how the difficulty goes, and how fast we pay off the leased boards). So at the "decision point" (accounting for dividends) we would have around 200BTC to decide what to do with (estimated).

Option 5 (Wait it out 50/50 split)
This one is just pure wait. Don't do the lease, minimize all risk, and just sit on what we have until Jan 1 2013. Then decide what to do at that time. Same 50/50 split as proposed in Option3

Option 6 (Close up shop)
This last option isn't the one I want to take personally, but I have to present it for the shareholders to consider.
Basically we just cut our losses, pay out 100% of the current liquid assets to dividends, and cease operations.
With the current assets this would mean 0.02BTC roughly per share in dividends. Nowhere near the amount invested, but considering the previous dividends, that does put us in a position to be better than the current share price at least, and not a 100% loss. I don't personally like this option, but if that's what the shareholders decide I'll support it.

Ok, so those are the options I'd like to present. My plan is this:
Put up 6 different motions all at once. All with 7 day timeframes.
I will be withholding my votes. I will not vote on these motions. I will hold my vote back as a swing vote.
Anyone can vote for/against one or more option you wish to pass/fail.
If more than one pass, then provided one of them has a lead over all other of at least 10% measured using the pass margin, that one is the winning option
If no such option presents itself, I will use my remaining share's voting power to make a final decision between all the passed motions.
When I say the 10% is measured by pass margin, I mean if 20% vote no on option1 and 30% vote yes (of total volume of shares) that gives a pass margin of 10% of total share volume. If option 2 gets 30% no, and 60% yes of total share volume, then it has 30% pass margin of total share volume, meaning it has a lead over option 1 of 20%.

Once this vote is concluded, I will ask Nefario to unlock all trading on GLBSE so that trades can commence, and we can then see what happens to our share price. (based on people making informed trades knowing our actual business plan going forward). And from that point forward, we would resume operation and paying dividends as per the chosen option.

The motions for these are going live in the next couple hours. I'll post back with confirmation and motion IDs in the Motions thread once they are up.

There are a few other options/actions we can take as well, but they will be more applicable once we have resumed operation in one form or another (ie extending further investment opportunities and so on). We can explore those options once one of the above choices is chosen, and we have gotten things rolling again. (or not if option 6 is chosen).

Thanks for all your patience and support during this trying time, Based on the outcome of this next decision, we will move forward, and past this difficult incident in our history.

Please see the original post on our internal forums: http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=106

Lol, fair enough. in fairness you didn't ruin my entire day, I was only grumpy for an hour or so.

It's perfectly fair for you to comment as a third party, and hearing you have zero shares helps put that into context. Though I have been a bit on edge based on the amount of crap flying around (when I'm already coping with personal crap on the side and so on, example, my wife and I were hoping to take a trip for our 10th wedding anniversary, but we had to cancel it due to money being too tight, we scaled back to a roadtrip in the USA, which ALSO ended up being too expensive with money being tight. So we stayed home and went out for a cheap dinner...)

It's tough when you're trying to do something positive, it blows up, and then you not only have to deal with the repricussions, but also have everyone accusing you of being a criminal, it's not fun

Anyway, I digress... I'll stop snapping at you now. (and yes you have a valid point, I shouldn't be trading publicly if I don't want to have to deal with the downsides of public opinion).

An on another note.

Incoming announcement post in 3... 2... 1...

zero.

I questioned your honesty in my mind after some of your post. Of course, at that time I had no solid evidence. I just feel your personality is really like someones I saw in the financial history. And then sold all the shares quietly. Later, when I nearly forget about BTCSYN, a friend informed me that shit happened.

It's a public company. People who have no investment in pirate40 talk about pirate40. I talk about BTCSYN. If you don't like it, next time you just raise money from your friends and make it a private company. I manage a bitcoin investment fund for friends, and I don't make it public. So that I can scam the money without any question been raised publicly



You're really kindhearted, but I bet that lots of people's mood was worse recently.  why not have a try on this?
http://motivatethyself.com/10-tips-to-help-you-keep-a-smile-on-your-face/

I could say "It's none of your bloody business" or "Do you mind disclosing exactly how many shares you have in BTCSYN that justify you causing such a stink over this?" But no, I'm not that much of an ass... So...

To answer your question: I own exactly 163 shares in ASICMINER right now. I spent all of about 10BTC in total on those shares, (I was able to do a bit of back and forth trading during the volatility in their share price). I've been monitoring all the ASIC mining threads because I'm fairly heavily invested in FPGA mining (via the syndicate, and via my work with Enterpoint). I thought that ASICMINER was an option that may pan out, so throwing a couple BTC at it might help me with a bit of extra income in the long run. I probably should have cashed those BTC out to pay my bills with, or you know... Buy groceries... But it was already available to me in BTC, and I thought this might help me in the next couple months if it pans out.

I'm sorry if what I spend my personal money on isn't satisfactory to you.

As to where I got the money? I have a dev board (now a couple) from Enterpoint because I'm writing their bitstreams for them (as I've shared on here several times). That dev board has been mining on and off at various times (up until very recently at a significantly reduced rate). And so I earned up a bit of cash. I had earned like 4BTC via that method over the past several months. I also had a 1-2 BTC left in my GLBSE account that it made no sense to withdraw from previous dividends. Then I recently won (split between 3 people) a bitcoin bounty for releasing the bitstream for the Enterpoint FPGA solutions, which I threw in a couple more BTC from. (the rest of which was split between the 55BTC I paid back into the syndicate, and the remainder I am holding onto for personal use because I put HUNDREDS of hours into that project, I think I earned it).

If you're done getting on my case about this, I'm going to get back to being busy as hell at work, and in what little spare time I have working on trying to get the syndicate back off the ground and operating again.

Also, as I mentioned, the police report wasn't available to me until VERY recently, I'm now simply strapped for time to go get a hard copy to upload for everyone's review. I'll be doing that shortly.

This accusational suspicion bullshit is getting really old, normally I don't let crap like this get to me, but this situation, and the reaction of some people to the situation have really worn me thin. I realize so far it's been a select few individuals who have pulled this crap, and so I'm pushing on to rebuild the syndicate into something worthwhile because I believe in it. (and to help the majority of the shareholders who have been supportive through this situation).  But let me say, for those of you who can't just let this drop and move on with life... That you're all lucky I didn't just liquidate the syndicate immediately after this happened, and call it quits, saving myself much time/energy and pain. Because it was well within my power to do so. But no, I wanted to push on, and rebuild. And I'm doing my best. I'm sorry if that's not good enough for you.

Thanks for putting me in a bad mood for the remainder of this already hectic day with this post. I appreciate it.

Glasswalker have posted in the ASICMINER thread. He said something about how to know whether an investor hold enough shares to be a board member.

Glasswalker, could you disclose how many shares have you invested? if it is large amount of money, can you explain where did you get the money? I remember that you said didn't have any savings to compensate the BTCSYN investors( of course I know, you think that you should not be blamed  for the loss while you don't use 2fa on mtgox, and you still have not show us the police report by now.)

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1143278

The post is :

transfers work fine. no fees atm for otc trades (over the counter)
syndic has 189 global balance accounted as 7.49 in dividend fund
leaving 181.5 to be split 145.2 growth fund 36.3 dividend fund
dividend fund june-august total 43.79 btc 0.003649 per share
updated balance 'growth fund' 145.2
updated 'global balance' 145.2
updated balance 'dividend fund' 0
reset mining clock (for coins mined after current block) / current block 195816
what about voting for that? a

Not yet, I'm hoping to have this, and some other info available next week sometime. If all goes well I'll have a large update in the next 1-2 weeks, allowing us to vote on a course of action and unlock the GLBSE fund for trading. (and resume operation).

Unfortunately my day job exploded (as any of you following my FPGA dev exploits in the mining hardware forum will know) and I've had to put all bitcoin related stuff to the side for the past week or so, and the next upcoming week (possibly). I've been working from 8am to 1-2pm each day, with some extremely tight deadlines, so I haven't had the time or energy to wrap this stuff up.

But if all goes well, and a few other outside pieces fall into place, I should have everything I need to propose a plan, and give a general update so that we can get back to "business as usual". It won't be what we had before, nothing (short of catching the thief) will fix that, but we can at least begin rebuilding in a reasonable way, with the hope of getting back to our former glory in a reasonable timeframe.

Thanks for your patience.

Is the police report available to you yet, Glasswalker? It's getting close to the two month point. No idea about your area but it's usually possible to get a self copy of a reported incident fairly quickly. Police know these are important for insurance purposes and such.

Unless the transaction is to an address nobody has the private key for, that's basically the same as burning a pile of money.

objection. funds lost in the gox event did not burn but exist and are technically spendable
or did I miss any small print?

Thanks for updating Mila.

To kick in what info I have at this point (which isn't really anything new from previous updates):

No real updates as of yet, as per the previous posts:
- Still waiting on law enforcement. I'll try following up with them this week to check on status. (they told me it could be "several weeks" when I filed the report)
- As for dividends I have been holding off until we have a couple courses of action decided on, and a vote carried out.
- Currently none of the possible "plans" I had come up with have finished unfolding yet to a point that I can present them.

The plans/ideas I've come up with so far are/were:
- MTGox helping us out, turns out that is a loan in my name, requiring personal guarantee... Can't do that one
- Enterpoint helping us with some hash-sharing lease on hardware of some kind. Yohan at enterpoint has been very busy so no traction yet
- Additional investment as proposed by Mila. I have a few investors that might be interested, still pursuing this one
- Adding to my shareholder loan in the form of a few FPGA mining boards of my own, to boost production for a while as we recover
- Using the remaining funds we have (minus dividends, to be voted of course) to buy more mining gear

So through any combination of the above, we'll get our operation back up and running, but it's taking time to explore all the options. And form a specific set of "options" which can be voted on in a motion.

Right now I've been busting my ass in most of my spare time developing the bitstreams for the Enterpoint Cairnsmore1 boards, trying to get it working fast and stable. Which may result in me getting a bit of compensation in the form of donations in BTC, and possibly some free boards. Which is where the "increase shareholder loan" option above comes from. I'm in no position right now to buy gear to add in, but if I can aquire some via this work, I'll loan some additional hashing power in.

As always, I'll post more when I have something concrete. But hopefully this update helps clear things up so far.

Thanks for your patience.

the statistics and financial pages are both up & running. at the time of writing there were about 155 + 7.5 btc in the books
7.5 for dividends where the growth fund 80 % of income were already accounted
and 155 btc growth + dividends.
not really sure how to account for the funds gone with the gox.