Bitcoin Forum

i vote 999 ONLY. Less math involved to calculate prices.

PM'd

Can someone explain to me why it would be better to invest in a mutual fund that is backed by silver as opposed to just buying physical silver and holding it myself?

Well, the point is, if you want to trade back and forth between LTC and physical silver, by investing in a mutual fund, you can't instantly trade your silver assets for LTC without having to deal with logistics of shipping and payments, as well as shipping costs. And should you decide you want to invest back, rather than finding another seller, you can just buy more shares.

I see. Okay that clears things up. Thanks.

Is this to be a dividend-paying asset?

If not, I do not see anything other than possibly the limitations of the trading platform that makes it anything more to do with litecoin than with any other asset, be it bitcoin or fiat or icecreamcones or packages of chewing gum or grams of gold or devcoins or groupcoins or whatever.

Once someone has some of these grams of silver, why should they not be free to sell them for devcoins, or groupcoins, or bitcoins, or anything else they would like to buy with them?

Possibly you are letting the tunnel-vision of some existing trading platforms blind you? A general purpose platform such as Open Transactions for example has no prejudice as to which two assets users can choose to trade, among all assets that the server has contracts for...

-MarkM-

This is not a dividend paying asset, as I'm not making any trades between the Silver and USD with the investors money. No weekly gains, except when the value of silver goes up, and no losses, except for when the value goes down.

This asset helps LTC by basically providing something to do with them. When you can't do anything with a coin, its not worth anything, so by being able to buy shares in Physical silver, not only are you guaranteeing you LTC will be worth something, but you are still playing the market, but instead of BTC:LTC or LTC:USD, you are playing the LTC:Silver market. If ice cream cones had a definite value, and I could resell them based on stock market prices, I suppose I could make an asset for them too.

Why aren't you free to sell them for devcoins, groupcoins, or bitcoins? Well, I suppose you can if you want, just not through the LTC-Global exchange. Just like you can't trade for devcoins, or groupcoins (what are groupcoins?) on GLBSE. I could come up with many practical uses

1. Shorting LTC, if you don't think LTC will hold its value, buy something that will. (see current silver trends)

2. Increasing the value of LTC, like I said, if you can't do anything with LTC, they are worthless

3. Buying Silver, buy the shares and cash out if you really want to, I'll send the physical silver to your house, and you can sell that physical silver for Devcoins if it floats your boat.

4. Use it as collateral as a loan, I just started seeing people using BTC collateral for loans, so I don't see why it wouldn't work for LTC. If you wanted a BTC or LTC loan, offer to let the other person hold your shares as collateral. Its the same concept if you went into a bank and listed your silver assets as collateral.

5. Just play the market, if you want to make more LTC, just buy the silver on its low days, and sell on its high days, and make yourself some LTC.

And so I ask, if someone wants devcoins or whatever other coin they want, why not just exchange your litecoins for them? If you really want, go ask GLBSE to offer BTC/LTC/DVC/NMC/SC acceptance, and I'll list my asset there. Also, I suppose the fact that I don't use any other coins besides Litecoins and Bitcoins has something to do with it, but the main point is, why should I or any exchange accept coins they don't want to? I honestly don't value Devcoins at anything. If someone wanted to transfer me 100 Million Devcoins, I don't think I would care too much, unless if I could exchange them for BTC.

Understood, it just seems a pity if there is a safe reliable silver vault in the cryptocoin community to limit its usefulness to just one type of cryptocoin.

If there is in fact a lot of interest in precious metal assets in the cryptocoin community I guess I should re-evaluate whether to start stashing such metals in a safe deposit box or vault myself so I can add such assets to the repertoire of my Open Transactions server (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0).

(I already rejected the idea of using some kind of e-gold / pecunix / liberty-reserve type service as back end for such assets, hence the need to have actual physical metal holdings of my own in order to offer such assets on my server aka exchange.)

-MarkM-

Your focus seems somewhat self-defeating in a way then, because if litecoin does in fact follow in botcoin's footsteps, becoming such a reliable long term growth of value asset that it outpaces silver, it seems rreasonable to think your success in accomplishing that will also result in lack of interest in your offering.

Thus to me it makes more sense to offer a silver asset to a panoply of all the currencies aka assets that happen at the time to not yet have reached that point where they are outpacing silver.

My primary problem with holding physical silver myself is I am worried that, due to its long history as a form of money in much of the world, it might turn out to be as fraught with ghastly legal minefields/regulations as fiat, making all the effort of avoiding having anything to do with fiat moot. (I do not want to deal with the stuff if it is so close to fiat itself that dealing with it is as much of a can of worms as dealing with fiat is.)

-MarkM-

Hmm evidently it was not clear that it is in the context of running an accounting/inventory system (server) that I want to avoid having anything to do with fiat. Killing people* to loot their corpses for coins the local magic-shop will sell you magic wands for just seems a whole lot less fraught with regulations than does killing people* to loot their fiat currency.

(* By "people", I of course here mean "people's characters/avatars in the virtual environment presented by their computer".)

Similarly, playing poker with a bunch of ogres and goblins to win coins to buy magic wands with seems also less fraught with regulations.

Being a magic-wand transmitter or even a coupons for buying magic wands transmitter seems to have less regulations around it than being a "money transmitter" in a context where what is meant by "money" is "fiat money".

Even merely offering any player who manages to accumulate a certain number of wand-tokens an ounce of real physical silver delivered to them via snail-mail might have regulations around it in some jurisdictions on the planet known as Earth (http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_planet_known_as_Earth)...

-MarkM-

I wonder how much dollars will be worth when silver is $310 and ounce... Postage might skyrocket too...

-MarkM-

Great job with the fund.
I am picking up a few shares myself.

Would you mind if I created a Gold fund (mostly) copied from your idea?

I formally give you permission to practically take my silver fund idea, and use it with gold. Good luck with the asset, lets make LTC healthy!

Excellent. I bought a silver coin with litecoin awhile ago  :)

Alright it finally arrived! 8 more Oz will be added to the fund today, I'll try and give a better timeline when I figure it out, but I'm trying to make sure as many people are available as possible, because I have been getting a little bit of grief from people that wanted to buy, and I sold while they were offline. Anyway, the fund is growing, and pretty soon the market should have a nice liquidity. I'll update with all of the pics in a few minutes.

I can't wait!!!!!!!!! gimme  This is right up my alley ... I have been looking for something to do with my LTC

This will be the update / Current status post

There are currently 341 Shares circulating

Pics to back up the current shares:
https://i.imgur.com/NSIoU.jpg

better to repost the link for easier read.

Just wanted to finally give Salty his due. I successfully made a withdraw from the fund and the entire process was smooth and professionally handled. Thanks Salty, and sorry for the extremely late reply. Newbie rules suck in this case.

The Official thread will be on the Litecointalk thread that I have listed, but I will try to keep both the BTC and LTCtalk posts up to date  http://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,616.0.html
https://i.imgur.com/w6Xrx.png

I also registered the domain www.litecoinsilver.com which I will be using as the Asset site, but I am still in the process of setting that up.

Anyway, below is the official Asset Statement, if you don't want to read it right now, you can scroll down to my next bolded message where I will give a briefer version.


My Goal is to increase the liquidity of Litecoins, by allowing the free and
simple trade between Litecoins and Physical Silver without all of the hassle and
added cost of continuous shipping.

OVERVIEW:

By investing in LTC-SILVER you are investing your Litecoins into Physical
Silver. Various forms of Silver Bullion will be obtained by the operator
(myself) ranging in brand, size, and form, but all silver is guaranteed to be at
least .999 Fine silver. The amount of shares in circulation at any time will
only reflect the amount of silver I have held physically in grams at any given
moment. One share is and will always be equal to one gram of physical silver.

WITHDRAW OPTION AND SHIPPING:

With the option to trade your silver shares back and forth for LTC, I will also
have a withdraw option, should you decide you want your shares of physical
silver mailed to you. To do this, please send me a message and I will give
further instruction. How this will work, is after you request your silver to be
mailed, I will ask that you transfer the share equivalent of how much you want
mailed back to the Asset Account. I will require that you pay the amount of
shares you want to receive in silver plus one additional share for handling. I
will also require that you pay the shipping expense, which we will calculate
upon request, but I should be able to give a generic rate for inside of the U.S
after a few shipments. Payment for shipping will be accepted in Silver Shares,
Litecoins, Bitcoins, BTC-E Code, and Paypal.
You will be responsible for the cost of all shipping features you desire, be it
insurance, or the use of another shipping company. (ie UPS or Fedex)

EDIT I will be cutting the no minimum withdraw from fund amount. People are hassling me to buy 1 gram pretty bars, but don't want to pay anything over spot for them, when in reality, they are going to cost me 300% of what I'm going to be selling them for. That just doesn't work well. So instead, I will be changing the minimum withdraw from fund amount to 1 Oz, and you may withdraw in any 1 Oz increments. This is still a fairly small amount, but it makes it so much more convenient for both parties. All policies regarding withdrawal and everything else will remain the same.

SHIPPING CONT.:

I will guarantee that all silver withdraws requested will ship out on my end,
and I will provide tracking via USPS at no additional cost, with paid cost of
shipping. However, although rare, the postal service can lose your packages. I
am not liable for post office mistakes, and it is your responsibility to request
appropriate insurance if you feel necessary. It is also your responsibility to
check all of your country's laws about silver importation. I will be shipping
from the U.S, so please look into local laws, and be prepared to pay any
applicable taxes or fees imposed by your country at customs should they decide fit.

THE (not so small print):

If for any reason I am unable to continue my obligations here, I reserve the
right to shut down operation. In that case, the first option available will be
to receive your Physical Silver via the mail. The above shipping terms still
apply, but the 1 share handling fee will be waived in this case. For those that
do not want to receive their Physical Silver, I will liquidate the remaining
silver on the LTC/BTC forums and pay out your share value at current Silver
market value.

All of that being said, just remember, your stock value does not have some
arbitrary value determined by LTC difficulty, how lucky you are to find blocks,
or how long you can profit from a ponzi before it collapses. Your investment is
100% backed by Silver. In theory, your stock value should never be worth less
than its weight in Silver. Of course, silver has its own price fluctuation up
and down, but it is your duty to make your own informed decision as to whether
or not this is an investment that suits your needs. I recommend you do some
research into Silver economics, look at the price trends, and decide for
yourself whether Silver is the best choice for you right now.


Condensed version it is  ;D

Ok, so the asset that I have just submitted for approval via https://www.litecoinglobal.com/ is LTC-SILVER

This is a silver mutual fund, operated and managed by myself, in which anyone who wishes to invest may buy shares in a Silver fund that I will be establishing, with each share being worth 1 Physical gram of silver. I will buy .999 Silver bullion, mostly coming from the BTC/LTC forums, and will first take pictures to prove the total asset amount, and will then release an equal amount of shares to how many total grams of silver are in the fund. The silver will then be placed in a very large and secure gun vault, and locked away until updates are needed. I have already talked to a few members of the Bitcoin and Litecoin communities that have been known to sell a bit of silver, and I am currently in the process of buying up a few troy ounces of silver to get this investment started! Another feature that this investment has, is the choice to physically withdraw from the Silver asset. In this case, I will send you your physical silver in the mail, of course I will require that you pay shipping, and there is a small fee, but that is listed in the shipping terms above. The best part being, since there will never be more or less shares owned and on the market than I currently have in the vault, everyone could withdraw at once if they really wanted, and no one would have to wait, and there would be no ponzi collapse. Although, I will mention, your best deal is to just own the silver shares, and not have them physically shipped. The whole idea of this asset is to give a liquid Silver:LTC asset, where you don't have to deal with your own country's taxes (VAT to be specific) and you don't have to deal with the shipping cost.

Anyway, if anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask.



IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT! the LTC-SILVER Asset has just been given the most coveted award known to Crypto kind! It is Franky1 Approved!!! For any of you that don't know, franky1 is the Crypto user with the most suspicions about any any business or asset, whether it be someone selling cars for BTC, or someone selling American Candies in the UK, they are all scams in Franky's book. Well, LTC-SILVER is the first asset/business to receive the thumbs up from Franky1 himself!!! YAY

http://i47.tinypic.com/a48x8m.png

I would offer shares in any size. You could chop each bar up in random lots or designate this bar as having 100 shares.. this one with 1000 ... ect..

Even if its just one Satoshi. ;)

Well I can't really offer say, 30 shares in a 1 oz bar, 200 shares in another 1 oz bar, etc. It has to be according to mass in some pattern, be it 1 gram per share, 1/10th of an oz per share, 1/50th of an oz per share, 1/100ths of an oz per share, etc.

Or how about offering some type of installment plan. Pools could add the option that would give the miners the opportunity to mine directly into their share(s) fund. A hybrid of merged mining, if you will.

Screw the API ! Just make it into a pool and charge the investors a premium for whatever lame excuse they may have for not wanting to mine. ;D

Part or all of the premium could be used to fund incentive programs such as sign up promos and bonuses for dedicated miners.

So it is definitely shutting down, not migrating to another exchange?