Even if this isn't a deliberate scam or attempt to defraud your investors, your lack of answers makes me feel like Seedcoin is not acting in good faith. Simply answering a couple questions, rather than attacking the people who may have invested, would go a long way to clearing that up.
Thank you for removing the allegations of 'scamming' on the Trust grading system of this forum.
We are not 'attacking the people who may have invested', I think you would find it hard to point at my comments that attack any of the investors. I do not understand how a consultation about a buy back offer or conversion in shares can be labelled 'scam or attempt to defraud investors'. Trading has been temporarily halted and will resume next Wednesday, no offer has been made yet.
The reason for doing the consultation is to find out if investors would be interested to sell their units at a substantially higher price than SF1 has been trading for the last four months on Havelockinvestments or to convert these into shares of Seedco Holdings Limited. There are legal and economic constraints that prevent us from being able to offer all SF1 unit holders to convert into SHL shares, this is why a minimum number of units is mentioned to do so in the consultation. However, for those unit holders who may wish to reach this threshold they could increase their holdings once SF1 trading resumes, on October 8th, 2014 at 12 noon time EST.
Seedcoin and SF1 (or SHL) are two distinct entities therefore if there were a buy back, Seedcoin legal entity would be the acquiring entity financing this buy back and paying the legal costs to convert SF1 units into SHL shares. Seedcoin has raised funds privately for sustaining its operations and to continue to provide services to the incubated companies such as the SF1 startups, part of these funds could be allocated to a potential buy back.
There is one important element of SF1 to be considered in the discussions, the SF1 startups. This is our main motivation from the start. We have raised funds on Havelock because we thought of it as a cost efficient way to finance bitcoin startups at a time when venture capital was limited and a way to provide exposure in (and to) the bitcoin community to entrepreneurs trying to build their bitcoin companies. Today these startups are doing well, providing useful services to thousands of users around the world, and despite your assertions we have communicated this to the community at large. Most of the SF1 investors are aware of the success of these startups, they should be proud of it and yes we are grateful for their help in facilitating this. To put it mildly, the SF1 startups' achievements - and our support that can go back one year for some of these - are not reflected in the SF1 unit price. The bitcoin investment space has been hurt by frauds and bankruptcies like MtGox and several others. The distrust generated by these frauds may be among the reasons why some tend to use words like 'scams' rather quickly on these forums. For honest, hard working entrepreneurs such as the startup founders we support, this can be quite frustrating.
We are assessing whether it is beneficial for the SF1 startups, and hence for the startup investors, to be available for trading on a market where numbers (volume, price, market cap) indicate a lack of interest in this type of investments. In one whole week of August there were 28 units of SF1 traded (or about BTC0.007 of trading), extremely low week but real nonetheless. You may think the status quo is fine but our main goal is to keep on helping SF1 startups growing and at this time I do not think a SF1 market cap of BTC300 - or less than 20% of the funds invested in these startups since the offering - is a good indicator of the value or potential of these companies. The SF1 startups are raising post seed funds through their own channels and through our contacts, a depressed SF1 unit price is not a positive element in that process.
Re. the voluntary aspect of a buy back offer, that would depend on the results of the consultation. If the vast majority of the SF1 unit holders were in favor of a buy back at the price mentioned in this consultation then leaving a small part of the units for trade on Havelock may not make much sense. The results will be discussed with Havelock and any offer would have to be approved by Havelock before being made. At this time nothing has been set yet, this is why a consultation has been opened. We are confident that unit holders will look both at their interests and at the wider picture, i.e. what is in the best interest of the startups and the unit holders in general.
