Topic: Special Auction for 5x Denarium Bitcoin Decennium 2019 Gold Bars - page 3. (Read 2477 times)

I did get an e-mail from Denarium, with a link to this auction. This e-mail was probably sent to a wide audience with vast majority not being regulars or not interested at all in Bitcointalk or its Collectibles section. There are crypto collectibles buyers and collectors outside this Collectibles community, sometimes this is forgotten by regulars here... BTCC had newbie bidders as well and everyone knew that they were mostly Chinese people who do not use these forums. Like with BTCC, Denarium should be reputable enough already to be known to not employ any shilling or anything like that.

I see absolutely nothing shady in these newbie bidders when they are vouched by Technomage/Denarium to be legit, and I actually wonder why regulars here do not take this vouching seriously and keep questioning it. Denarium has been in business since 2012 and is a very reputable company. Regarding their company owners bidding or buying their items.. Well, there are loads of small owners, myself included, and there should be nothing shady or controversial in that either. I can see how this could be controversial, but in this case it is not as everyone is treated the same and big owners of the company are not bidding, AFAIK.

Regarding these auction events, I think it should be implied by "auction" that bids cannot be lowered. I.e. you can't cancel a bid if it's a winning bid. Especially when this is not stated in the auction. Of course obviously erroneous bids should be cancelled/invalidated though.

That's how you handled this auction.
You managed to piss of the whole bct coin collector community.

Thanks, it's nice to receive some other feedback than 100% shit. I'm quite okay in taking the blame for the auction underbids / rules fuckup and I truly apologize for that. But I'm not at all okay with the shilling accusations. That is not something we do.

We've thought of setting up our own auction system for a while, but it hasn't been a dev priority. So we're sticking with this for the time being.

As for discounts please email [email protected] and we can probably figure out something.

We price only the gold plated coins in this "cost + reasonable margin" manner. All the other coins/bars are limited edition collectibles, which we price on the perceived attractiveness of the product for collectors. Due to this the prices might sometimes also change drastically if we were wrong on our perceptions. Note that it takes a huge amount of man hours to get these products out and usually it's 6 months or something for a 100 piece series. In addition we've done a lot of website development, statistics improvements, coin database improvements etc.

Additionally our company has no problem holding the gold, we see it as a good place to hold value. So we're not in a hurry to empty the reserves. Also if we sell them too cheap we might end up in a situation where we're not selling anything for 6 months (has happened before).

These products are not comparable to regular investment gold, they are special collectibles. This one is probably the best one we've come up with so far. Which is why the initial premium is higher than in our other gold products.

As for discount codes, we rarely offer them by our initiative but often give them if a customer asks. The email is [email protected]. They are given if a customer is making a major order or has just recently bought something and is buying again. We don't give them for one-off purchases.

Our marketing at Denarium is not the best, we probably would be better off providing these codes to regulars on our initiative. Something to work on, for sure.

What a f*ckup. Glad I didn't waste my time.
And 1100 over spot is waaaaaayy too high.
Guess they will be stuck with 100 bars.

I got my pitchfork out and agree it looked very shady but based on my investigation (with evidence I won't share publicly for privacy reasons), here's what I think happened:

1. Denarium sent an e-mail to all of their listservs which attracted some people who aren't regulars here. This also explains why they always show up here for just his auctions.
2. They are not regulars here so they screwed up the auction.
3. Denarium allowed them to screw up the auction with his weird rule change and takes the vast majority of the blame.
4. The bidders in the thread are not shills.

Obviously I have 0 tolerance for auction shenanigans and I think the auction should've been re-run. It's also important that we police these auctions because the possibility of scams/fraud is very real.

I'm just trying to warn against lambasting the newbie accounts because at least some of them are definitely real people. I don't think they really stand to gain from the issues with this auction and some of them could eventually become members of this community if we don't scare them off.

@Technomage:

maybe you guys could develop the auction on your own website. Should not take long dev to set up.

then, I am also customer some time, buying once a year for 4 y now, but do not recall any discount codes.
maybe you could DM me one if poss? Cheers

Even if you can bid lower than yourself, you shouldn't be able to bid lower than other people:

So you are pricing these bars on your website based upon auction prices realized here for the low edition number examples?  Shouldn't it just be cost plus a reasonable margin?  

Spot gold is around $1550 USD.  A $1000 USD premium is really excessive.  I could understand $400-$500, but $1000 for non 1-5 numbered bars feels excessive.  

Note that when you auction the 1/2 BTC gold coins, they typically go for something close to spot, but you still have them marked at a heavier premium on your site.

And for what it's worth, I have bought several items from Denarium over the past few years.  Happy to provide you the details privately to corroborate.  I've never been offered a discount code or coupon.  So not sure how that works.

So it's only ridiculous when a non-Denarium investor and friend lowers their bid, gotcha. 

It will also be less weird if these people who are willing to overpay for your collectibles would also, you know, maybe do something other than bid in your auctions.  Perception is reality. I have no proof, and it's not worth any more time than my 0.02 of observations over the years. And a fair warning to other collectors. 

We tell you every single auction.. advice to help with skepticism. Guess how much of that advice you take? Absolutely zero. Skepticism remains.
1+1=2
(Using lots rather than serial free for alls, leaving positive trust feedback for repeat newbie bidders, requesting upfront proof of funds)

The more people yell shill when we see your poorly held auctions the less an outsider can view the above suggestions as shillproof now. There isn't much you can do that I wouldn't figure out a way to have a shill get around it.. and of course my mind stays with the still version and I don't bid.

Wanna know the way out of this one? I request that kebab77 get together his/her:
2oz 2018 Denarium Gold Bar
2x 1oz 2019 Denarium Decennium Gold Bars
1BTC Gold Parity Coin
Username and date on a piece of paper.

Hardly intrusive at all, I just attributed all of those coins belonging to them just through post history.

Just to add, an admin of Bitcointalk could investigate the account activity in our auctions. I'd be happy to even sponsor that work, in order to get some proof against these shilling accusations. As it is really getting quite tiresome.

As for the pricing at the website, these special bars were bid in the end 0.414 BTC on average, with the lowest being 0.29 BTC. Based on that and the other bidding activity we priced the bar at the website at around 0.25 BTC. This is the starting price for now, we will adjust these as always in case it's necessary. But it is a limited edition and we'll see how it goes.

Just a reminder that we often give discount coupons for website buyers if they buy multiple products or multiple units of a major product. So feel free to ask for those.

This is total bullshit. I'm really getting tired of this. kebab77 is a prominent bitcoin enthusiast who invested in our company some years ago and is a fan of our products. But he has no position in the company. He trusts me and our company probably more than most other crypto wallet creators so he buys from us. But he is not getting any discounts for the auctions, as is nobody else. For website orders we have discounts for shareholders & employees, but that does not apply to auctions. Due to privacy issues I'm dead locked with this as I can't reveal anyones identity. Not only is that crappy practice but that would be a GDPR violation which would be very bad for our company. So there is nothing I can really do to disprove this conspiracy bullshit other than say that it is absolute BS. You, or anyone claiming this, has the burden of proof, in my opinion. No proof is here, or has never been presented before.

As for rsincognito, we had no relationship to him in the past, he caught wind of this from here or our other marketing and came to bid, just like anyone else. And he paid for the bars just like everyone did, as they have before. Even though we have some newbies bidding everyone has always paid. But it is a sure way to stir up this conspiracy shit.

With the rule change in this auction we thought it would've been a worse move to invalidate rsincognito's bid as it technically follows the rules (to my surprise), than to just let the auction continue. We allowed it to continue. Then it soon became clear everyone else (kebab & lebnor) started doing the same thing, so the auction became ridiculous. That's when we made the move to change the rules, in order to be able to close the auction in a decent timeframe. If we haven't done that, playing around with over and underbids would've continued for maybe hours more. It was already 2 hours past deadline. To us that seemed the worse option. Perhaps the right move would've been to invalidate the lower bid of rsincognito right away, or cancel the whole auction, it's always nice to think about things after the fact. But what was done was done and that's that. We'll learn from this of course.

But overall this continued issue with newbies bidding - there is nothing we can do about that. Our company has 90000 customers in our various crypto services, 1500 shareholders and we promote Denarium stuff to them actively. This always leads to some new people coming to the auctions that are new to Bitcointalk. We can't reveal anyones identity here so it's basically up to you to either trust us or not. I just want to make it clear that there is no proof we have had shills in any of the auctions and in fact I can guarantee that there has been 0 shills in any of our auctions. At least not sponsored by us - it's of course possible some bidders have their own shills. To us what matters is that the products get paid and so far we have a 100% paid rate for our auctions.

What is your solution to this? Deny newbies access to these auctions? And by doing that we disable access to these auctions for the 100k or so people in our network. To be honest I'd rather move the auctions off from here entirely. We've worked now for 4.5 years on Denarium trying to improve our products and make them great collectibles for all of you and what we get increasingly from here is shit. So yes, thank you very much indeed.

Realy like this product but this is indeed a heavy premium price 

Technically the rules don't deny many, many things.   You don't need a stipulation for everything.

What's weird about this is Denarium stood to make an extra 0.4 BTC by simply letting Kebab's higher bid stand.  But they went on a limb and allowed them to lower it, against all logic and convention. Why?  

Because was a clever ruse to drum up interest and get a whale to outbid someone for #1. Nobody took the bait and FOMO bid at 0.81.  

So, they had a tough choice.  Allow the shill to lower the bid and take a reputational hit, so that someone might try to outbid the lower 0.4 instead (because 0.8 was clearly off the mark).  Neither strategies worked, and it's backfiring completely.  

Making matters worse, Lebnor wisely caught wind of this strategy, and also lowered his bid.  It wasn't until this happened that Denarium took an even bigger risk. He stepped in to change the rules for Lebnor using this strategy! Even though Lebnor was lowering it by much less than Kebab did.  Why?  Because the scam was being used against them in away they didn't anticipate (by an actual bidder).  

MUst be a hard core fan of Denarium products.. 

The premiums that Denarium charges on gold products is crazy.  $2646 USD for a 1 oz bar??

And here I thought the US Mint's premiums were bad.

Funny how Kebaba77's.   only posts .......are for your auctions..