Topic: Special Auction for 5x Denarium Bitcoin Decennium 2019 Gold Bars (Read 2477 times)

Denarium has been selling physical crypto since 2015 to all over the world and has been 100% reliable. We have produced almost 13000 physical bitcoins, here are some statistics: https://status.denarium.com/coin/

What is bought from us, will be delivered.

About the auction rules, the rules have been more or less the same since the first auction years ago. We simply copied the rules from Theymos ad slot auction (if I remember correctly) or some other prominent auctioner. They made sense generally. Now we'll make a small adjustment due to what happened here.

I think Denarium shared more than enough info to be honest, actually a lot more than expected.
and I am sure they have the 100 gold bars, or they are capable of producing them on a short time frame if orders were made, I dont see why it is relevant.
(if they failed an order, than its different question, but so far, any time I ordered, I got the shipment in a week or so)

Are any  of my questions not valid questions...?

You sound like you have a beef with Denarium/Technomage. Do you seriously doubt that Denarium does not have the gold bars they're selling, or what is this about?

Regarding your questions about who is "we", I see that Technomage means himself and other people in charge of Denarium products in the company called Prasos. I don't see why it should be relevant to you who are these other people working in the company. Companies usually do not share information about their employees anyway, and there is zero reason to demand such info.

Wait...   I have more questions......

Since you come here looking for investors....

and in Bitcointalk.org/collectibles  fashion

I am wondering the stability of such a company..

Can you show the forum a picture of  the 100 gold bars with your name on a piece of paper

Im sure some Pictures were taked of such a display to see....

Is this the reason for Auction rule Number 1  ....      


  you are on a roll with the honesty with the last few posts .........


Auction rules

When you post a bid, the bids in your previous posts are considered to be automatically canceled. You can put multiple bids in one post, however.
- If two people bid at the same price, the person who bid first will be first in line to win a bar.
- Bids are considered invalid and will be ignored if they do not specify the price of the bid and the number of bars (if it is more than one bar) the bidder is bidding for, or if they could not possibly win any slots.


 Is this the shit (WE) sit around in the boardroom thinking about  ??

 Do your 1500 investors know you promote Denarium products like this....   Do the Prasos board members know you promote Denarium products like this...

I'm happy I was busy and forgot about this auction, that was a seriously F***ed up rule 

Though pity I missed out, I was seriously intrested in bidding for one of those beauty bars

Large majority of the money Denarium has made is from the limited edition items made for collectors (gold, silver, bronze and so on). The brass/copper coins would have to be selling at different magnitudes of volume to make real money, and even if we managed to get that demand, then we'd run into major production issues with our current tools/methods. So it's challenging in many ways. Of course the cheaper coins have been good for spreading the word, so they are more for the promotion. They have been drastically improved as well, value for money is quite solid with the most recent gold plated copper 2019 coins.

We could try limited editions even smaller, but there we run into another challenge which is that the mint cost becomes significantly higher per item. And selling any type of limited edition series with a small margin does not work financially speaking. The constant employee costs are too high compared to the volume, margin and the rate of new product series coming out. And this stuff is difficult to make any cheaper, as the process has to be highly secure, supervised, and carefully done overall. Also we've tried to separate ourselves by really focusing on nice packaging, which is a lot of work.

In anycase I definitely appreciate this type of feedback and find it highly constructive. We don't want to drive away collectors as they have been the most important customers to us. We've made mistakes but we always work on them, and we try to make sure that we don't repeat the same mistake again. Just getting slightly desperate about this as the crypto collector market is a super niche already, and if we've managed to alienate a major part of it, then that's pretty much that.

Just a few pieces of advice from reading your orig. reply to dolph and jack.  A company going under doesn't necessarily make their products more valuable, if even at all...a limited mintage, well designed, and reasonably priced product is what will help make a collectible valuable down the road.  Collectors don't hope for a maker to go under, any one of us regulars here would kill for Smoothie and or Casascius to come back with a few more pieces!

The problem here with Denarium, as I see it, is trying to make the collectibles a sizable portion of your overall business, in which to make money to keep your shareholders profitable/happy.  In doing so, you're mass producing items at a cost well above what a new release should be at, and in return, driving potential buyers away for good.

I would also recommend reaching out to some of the biggest collectors here and ask them what the community is "dying to see".  There's no doubt that this sub here on btalk is by far the number one place in the world to buy/sell physical crypto items to the most passionate collectors on earth.  Heed the advice/suggestions of these collectors and you very well could see your items not collecting dust on shelves for prolonged periods of time. 

Taking this advice might not be as profitable in the short term, but sure could be in the long run, IMHO.  Hope you find this as constructive criticism and not bashing Denarium. 

Thanks for the response, this is useful. There are various shipping restrictions with gold even though the previous ones have the correct markings, but we have solved them with proper delivery partners and simply shut out some countries where the issue is insurmountable due to local regulations. We certainly hope this doesn't lead to any further shipping / customs issues as it is already a bit of a pain.

We recently invested in a metal engraving machine which we are going to use to offer customizable physical bitcoins, in theory we could use that to engrave the marking to these bars afterwards. It doesn't affect the gold content as the process doesn't remove any metal. Not sure if this is a legit way of fixing this issue or if it's simply unfixable, we will investigate this thoroughly. Definitely a bummer, as we worked really hard on this, but managed to miss a small but important detail.

Feel free to twist the knife guys but rest assured the me and the rest of the team are embarrassed to the max about this silly mistake.

There are ISO standards for just about every product, including precious metals, gems, jewellery, etc.

At a minimum your bars would likely not be eligible for any gold-backed IRA accounts as they bar itself does not contain both weight and purity stamps.

There could also be issues with respect to importation into various countries where a customs official or broker cannot properly determine a tariff value without both pieces of information being evident.  Yes, it has other documentation with it now, but assume 10 years from now when the paperwork is lost or no longer with the bar.  In theory these little beauties will outlast us all, so it should not have to rely on a degradable piece of paper always accompanying it to speak to its weight in gold.

Some countries may also have laws against importing bullion products without the proper stamping.  You'd probably just need to research to make sure you are in compliance with the laws of the countries you are shipping to.

Those are just some quick thoughts and reasons as to why it's an issue, besides simply not adhering to collector's expectations.  Also, if there was no room in the obverse or reverse for the weight, you could consider using the edges of the bar.

And this is why you should stick to Base Metal coins.....


maybe you shouldn't have spent all that money on that "CLEAN ROOM..."

We've been considering that for a while now, and the operation has in some ways been changed recently to cut costs. We might only publish one product for the year 2020 it looks like, if any. And this one is the last new product for this year. Except we'll probably continue auctioning all kinds of production prototypes of the past, they seem to be quite interesting to collectors.

What we've noticed is that even though we don't put out a lot of products, we still put out too much for the size of the collector market. The amount of products from all these little producers and all the old products, has completely oversaturated the market. Yes, some amount always gets sold, but it's problematic. We've of course been secretly hoping that even more producers go under, to balance it out. But new ones always pop up for a while until they figure out it's not solid business wise.

I explained already the most likely reason. We had discussion about the small size of the bar and its limitations during the production process and compromises were made with the contents of the graphics. The 1oz marking was skipped by the designer to save space, and it went unnoticed as no one thought it was that critical. Also this product experienced large delays for multiple reasons which distracted the team quite a bit. We meant to launch it pretty much in January-February originally.

This was clearly a slip up, any potential future precious metal products will again have the weight mark of course. Then again perhaps some one will think this is special in some way. Collectors sometimes value errors. But I guess we'll see about that


We had no idea about this until it was mentioned in this thread. As I tried to explain earlier I have difficulty seeing the critical importance of that, as did probably everyone else in the team. That's why it went unnoticed. I'm still lacking any answers as to why it's that important.

@technomage

If Denarium is not a profitable business, then you should honestly consider closing it down.  There is no reason to keep a company going that isn't profitable, or expected to be profitable at some point in the future, unless that business serves some greater humanitarian or societal need AND can at least be self-sustaining.  Minting physical cryptos is certainly not a humanitarian need and by your account it does not appear to be self-sustaining business model.  So why keep something going that is basically a losing proposition?  

Crypto fans will get along just fine with or without a Denarium.  Nice to have it as an option, but certainly not the end of the world for anyone if not.  To answer your question though, I have looked into it and decided not to mint physical crypto coins precisely because it is not profitable to do so.

All other gold and Silver  Denarium coins have weight marked on them.... Why did you do it there and not this one......  

and Real Gold bars with mismatched fineness marks and no weight ..   give me the perception that the maker doesn't know what they were doing...  maybe you should stick to base metal coins....

Was it a slip up and you just decided to sell it anyway,  or is this new to you after production and you don't know that you are doing???   because your auction skills show... you don't know what you are doing....
 

The questions about the purity markings have been explained in this thread multiple times, and also elaborated on by others. We put the .9999 there as it actually is .9999, and can be proven by a lab certificate. The lab itself only stamps and is allowed to stamp them to up to .999 by law, so that's why the stamp is different.

Just to clarify there are no "mint marks" in this product. The mint puts whatever graphic there that we specify, they don't add anything on their own. What is added afterwards are the lab stamps on the side (by the lab).

As for the 1oz marking, this simply wasn't on the design. The 1oz bar is very small in size and likely our graphics designer simply saved space, not understanding that this isn't the right thing to save space on. Why it went through to production? Good question. We can add this to the list of fuckups I guess! There is internal investigation about this ongoing so I really have no more to say about it at this stage.

Can someone explain to me why the 1oz marking is critical? Other than "it's supposed to be there like always"? I mean practically speaking. You can weigh it to verify it if you like. To me the purity marking is much more relevant. It was a slip up for sure but I have a hard time seeing how it's the end of the world.

It's not like we are the world standard in gold bars and anyone would just trust at face value that our bar is x weight if it has the marking on the bar. Right?

Again, that weight marking, missing or not, has nothing to do with the mint. It's something we either put on the graphic submitted to the mint or not. In this case it was not put in there, for one reason or another. I can get back to that later as we have clarity on this internally.

All that ........ And No comment on the mismatched fineness and no bar weight?   I think WE should comment on that topic also

JUPITYR & jackbauercsgo,

I really appreciate the feedback. This is the sort of discussion I'd rather be having.

First of all, I'm 100% taking the blame for the auction underbid/rules issues which caused this auction to go to shit. Even though underbids don't make sense in auctions generally speaking, the rules technically allowed that (at least in our interpretation of the rules), so we made a choice which seemed at the time to be the least worst choice of bad options. Afterwards it has become quite clear it wasn't. So I truly apologize for that and this sort of thing will not happen again.

I was really "triggered" about the shilling accusations which from a certain perspective are understandable, but they are completely baseless. There are valid reasons why our auctions have newbies bidding and they always will, as long as we hold auctions here. And there are some crypto collectors who mostly just collect our stuff, so they are bidding mainly in just our auctions.

As for the pricing of our products, that is a very interesting discussion. Are you guys aware why physical crypto manufacturers seem to disappear a few years after starting out? The real reason, when you look deeper through any possible excuses some of them might have, is that it is not profitable. The crypto collector market is extremely niche and for example Denarium has only been profitable in certain periods of peak bull market. Most of the time it has not been profitable and it is not overall profitable (nowhere near). Denarium still exists because it is subsidized by Prasos from its other crypto business lines that are significantly more profitable. And generally Denarium is 2 to 6% of our company's total revenue. Although I must say the increase in gold value recently has improved Denarium's overall profitability quite significantly, as we've had quite a bit of it in stock. This is a blessing since otherwise it's sort of on thin ice all the time.

We haven't figured out how to fix the profitability with pricing. Our pricing has been fairly dynamic and when we sell them too cheap, we end up in a situation where we have nothing to sell for 4-6 months. This happened in peak times of 2017, and for this we probably lost out on a lot of revenue. After that we've been extremely careful of not underpricing anything, as if we sell our stock, it will take many months before we have something new to sell. Other things affect this also when it is a gold product, as our company sees the gold as an investment as well. Thus we're especially not trying to get the gold products sold asap. They are selling though, just might take some time. For example, the limited edition 1 BTC parity gold coin is almost sold out (as is the 2017 1/2oz gold coin, which we've auctioned here recently).

The issue here also is that even at cost price the gold products are nowhere near spot gold. Now we actually have a mint from where we can get fairly close to spot gold products, but there are so many other costs involved in these products, as we put a lot of work on them.

Currently as it stands our other gold products are pretty much priced in this "cost + reasonable margin" manner. They have room for 10% discounts which we occasionally give to clients and this is the discount our employees & shareholders get. Still leaves profit. But there is no room to really go down more than that (with current gold pricing). Our pricing relative to gold is not dynamic, we do manual changes to pricing if there are major changes in gold value.

The only gold product that clearly has some extra margin is this one, the 10-year bar, as it is the current flagship product and we anticipate the interest to be high (based on how we like the product, how people have reacted to it and how people bid in the auction). And we have already sold many bars after the auction, so it is going decently well. But as I've mentioned before we will adjust pricing at some point for this one to be more in line with the others, in case the sales decline significantly. If they sell slow & steady, we'll keep it as is.

Denarium as a standalone business would've stopped some time ago, that I'm very sure of. The profitability of Prasos' other crypto businesses has kept it going, and improving. At least for now. For collectors I guess it's a good thing when a producer goes under, as only then do the products really start becoming true collectibles.

Echoing Jupityr above, the professional move is to admit some mistakes, take some responsibility for being at the center of this auction's mess, and move on.  To do anything different signals youth or unprofessional mindsets.  You don't want this.

Additionally, I would recommend building your business model to make some % return on each product and move on.  Let the 2ndary / resale market worry about capturing some profit because of how rare things are.  Did the crypto stamps sell for ~$6.90 retail or did they sell for $2,000+ "because they're rare and limited"?  Or did Mike/Smoothie sell his Cas coins at some massive premium because "they are collector items"?  You get my point - you can't play 2 markets at once.  Focus on one or the other.  

My 2 satoshis.