Bitcoin Forum

Not sure why Ukyo lets crap like this and Exchange.ESIF list on Bitfunder when it's immediately obvious just from the prospectus that they're scams.  There's now plenty of reasonable or half-reasonable assets on the platform - and scams like these don't actually attract much volume (and what they do attract the exhcnage only gets to see about 1.333 times before it vanishes).

Anyway, here's why this one is a scam.  Some of the stuff here you'll have to check out yourself - other bits you'll have to take my word for (or ask Ukyo to check).

1.  His description says "This is not a public company or corporation, but is a private business. We are using this service to manage shares and dividends. We cannot prevent shareholders from selling or trading their shares to outsiders using this service, but it is the best system available so we are using it."  Yep - according to this he wasn't listing to sell shares himself, but to help manage the accounting.  And he can't help it if some shareholders trade on it.

But that's not what happened.  Right after listing he slung up a block of 100k for sale.  We know it was him - as all the shares except 17 (yep - only 17) were in a single account.  And since then he's been trying to sell non-stop including posting a totally laughable news release.  So we aren't off to a good start are we - when he lies about the primary intention of listing.

2.  He hasn't even identified the business.  I'd have thought Ukyo would have the self-respect just to laugh at him and tell him to fuck off when he asked to list without identifying the business, but apparently not.  Think everyone knows the track record of past companies that didn't even identify their business.

3.  Another common give-away for scammers is that they don't actually mind what price they sell shares at : after all they haven't got to protect investors' interests or raise a specific sum, they just want whatever they can get.  So I thought I'd see just how low he'd sell shares at.

I slung up a buy order for some at 0.0001 - that's 1% of the price he was listing for sale at.

Not long after :

2013-03-01 21:30:29    BUY: (Biz27B-6): 1 @ ฿0.00010000/ea

Hmm, what to do next?  Well obviously put it up for sale just below his own sell orders (delay is mainly because I didn't notice I'd bought it).

2013-03-02 19:06:44    SELL: (Biz27B-6): 1 @ ฿0.00990000/ea

Ah well, only 1 share - would be different if he did it on a bunch.

Like:

2013-03-09 14:10:34       ฿0.00995000    1    ฿0.00995000
2013-03-09 14:09:31       ฿0.00200000    500    ฿1.00000000

Yup - selling 500 at 20% of price he lists at, then immediately buying 1 off his main Ask so last bid is still high.  Just hope whoever got that 500 knows to relist under him and keep lowering price down.  Do I KNOW that sale is him?  Nope - but it's easy enough to check from cached ownership lists on Bitfunder.  Just can't be bothered to do it myself - as I don't need convincing he's a scammer.

4.  None of the above is conclusive proof of scamming individually.  Put together maybe it is.  But here's the real kicker.  He talks about having transparent accounting - where investors can see revenue and expenses go in and out of the business' accounts.  Now I was sceptical of this - how can it be transparent when we have no idea who is paying or being paid by him?  How can we be sure he's not just funelling BTC through a mixer to fake up his accounts?  Turns out I was wrong - it IS transparent and laughably so.

I had a look at the accounts addresses and was amazed and amused by what I saw and by his total stupidity.

The revenue account (starts with 1BizRev) receives funds in from various addresses and sends funds on to the Expenses account (starts with 1BizExp).  The expenses account then disburses these funds to various addresses.

Where it becomes transparent is because if you look at these other addresses you find some where ALL the account does of significance is receive from his Expenses account then an hour (or less) later send it back round the loop to the Revenue account.  Yep - he was too dumb even to use a mixer and made his accounts totally transparent - he's cycling the same cash around to make it look like there's business happening.

Here's some examples :

http://blockexplorer.com/address/17MVKyVjFsMAnsFKidGmJCWGmUfstLUXRa

receives 1.3 BTC from his expenses account (which received that from his revenue account) then 10 minutes later (yep only TEN minute later) he sends exactly same amount back to the Revenue account.

http://blockexplorer.com/address/1NsnBcrk6jJQGcwWCCAmBHcdG9VJofSGRA

This time he waits an hour before sending the funds on around the loop.

I spat coffee all over my keyboard when I first saw just how obvious it was - had expected it to take at least 10 minutes to work out just how he was cycling the funds around.  I haven't looked at half the addresses.  Would assume some will be receiving withdrawals from Bitfunder and pushing them round the loop - the size of his transactions has slowly grown once he sold some shares so had some cash to move around.  And would also assume some of expenditure transactions will be deposits to his alt accounts on Bitfunder so they can buy shares and make it look like there's demand plus assist his pretence of having private investors.

Anyone still think it's legit (other than Ukyo)?

First off:
I can confirm from public history records that you are correct on those two trade. Both were traded back and fourth between the same two accounts.

Secondly:
I have already locked down his ability from issuing additional shares until he responds to a ticket.

I cannot release the private details that were presented originally as he wanted to keep it confidential.

There are a few things I am checking, but there are also some other things on the account that I cannot currently discuss because it is private information but needless to say, those things do make things seem not so bad.

Deprived, PM. :)

P.s. For what its worth, I checked, and have turned down more than 30 asset requests since BF started. :)

On a side note, if you look at the BF asset list: https://bitfunder.com/assetlist

You will see an address that hold 991,248 shares. I think it's safe to assume that is the issuer.

This leaves 8,752 shares that outstanding.

If you go through the trade history, its clear that that most shares were sold on BF, but obviously transferred directly to private entities.
A total of 620 shares (of of now) were bought. And from the public records of the asset lists, I can tell you that the majority were bought from other users, who hold and trade in other assets.

The asset itself has only ever had 26 trades total.

Moving the btc around that way is quite questionable though. :)

Oh - I wouldn't be surprised of he DOES have a website and some sort of fledgling business.  But it's still a scam as he's trying to obtain money based on false statements.

The main reason it shouldn't be listed (even without his rather dodgy accounts) is because there's no disclosure of the business.  That makes it a gamble rather than investment - and turns your site into a gambling site rather than an exchange.  His 'business' is Satoshi Dice without the odds being published or verifably fair - you send off some BTC and may get back none, a small amount or a large amount with nothing you can do to assess the likelihood of the various outcomes let alone influence them.

If someone won't disclose their business then there's no conceivable reason why an exchange should list them.

Of the shares transferred to other accounts, how many of those other accounts were his own (obviously you can't tell me the answer - but it's something you should look at)?  One of favourite tricks of scammers/ponzis etc is selling/transferring shares to other accounts of their own - to make it look like there's more activity than there is and to allow them to inflate apparent dividends whilst not actually paying out much.

When you say you've locked down his ability to issue more shares do you mean he can't sell shares or that he can only sell the 1 million he already has?  There's a big difference between "he can't sell anything" and "he can only sell 10k BTC ($400k) worth of shares".  If the former then I guess the 500 sale earlier would be one of his alt accounts dumping into the only open Bid as he realised he'd been caught.

I'm failing to see how you ever thought he had a company worth 50K BTC - the value it supposedly has with 5 million shares and sales being at 0.01 BTC each.

I did look at the accounts that shares were transferred to. They are all reasonably legit looking.

Again, I can confirm from public record that the 500 shares was moved from the large holding account.
That does look questionable.

As for the business, I had a hard time debating on this one. This was actually one of the first assets that got approved that was not a GLBSE asset.
It just took a lot more time than expected to go live. My issue with this, is that I have been presented with all the details that really need to be public.
I made him aware that not listing those details would cause problems, and that I honestly did not expect people would invest into something so blindly.
Judging by the purchase history, it was mostly correct.

Since then, I have setup a lot of rules and standards that must be met now to be listed on BF. Only one other asset got by early on before hand, and has
already been locked down recently until they comply.

These things have evolved quite a bit from where they started. Someone wants to get funding for this or that, without much to go on. Some have surprisingly
turned into great investments, others have turned into, well, you get the idea. :)

I decided a bit ago to try to step things up a notch or two. With some big events in BitFunder's near future coming up, listing will become more interesting. :)

As for valuation, I have seen some pretty good ones recently with big numbers sought after while providing very little.
As of right now, I will not force my opinion on people as to a min or max price the can launch their asset at.

Besides, this brings up an interesting question. If fraud was ever decided on an asset, how should it be handled? I am always open to suggestions. :)
I would like to think that going forward it should be less likely, but you never know when someone will just.. disappear. Such is the nature of online/anon dealings.
That is, unless you want to get super strict, and somehow enforce real contracts on all issuers, and do full id verification on all users to make sure none are puppets.

In the 'free' world, there is always a high risk when people don't use their brain and think before handing out their money.

Also, on that 500 share sell.

It was one big trade, that went to someone who was asking .002 (roughly 25% of the current rate)
There is always the possibility that the issuer was just trying to push shares out into the market.
It may have also been the only buy order.

It was the only buy order up.  I'd cancelled my .0001 one below it.

If a business needs to raise $X or values itself at $X then there's no way it can ever have a good reason for selling shares well below the price that would raise $X.  Aside from the impact on the business it dilutes other shares previously sold.  Plus it's classic scammer behaviour

One of key things all IPOs need to state is the pricing polciy of shares (be it in batches, in BTC/share or BTC equivalent of USD/share).  There's no reason why he couldn't have stated that in his contract even if he kept everything else quiet.

I'm NOT in favour of excessive requirements in terms of ID etc.  But there's a bunch of very basic stuff that absolutely needs to be in every contract.  And #1 on that list is disclosure of the business - without that it's impossible to assess anything as, even ignoring financial issues, the risks can't be determined without knowing what area the business operates in.

Similarly, I'm NOT in favour of the exchange being required to (or liable for) assessing the viability and legitimacy of businesses.  But the exchange SHOULD be responsible for ensuring that anything listed provides sufficient information for potential investors to make such determinations themselves.  That again means the business needs to be disclosed.  It also means that (as was NOT the case with the other scam one) if a business claims a record of past profits then they should be providing SOME kind of evidence of it that potential investors can investigate to make their own determination of whether those profits look real or not.

The single biggest deterrent to scammers (and way to avoid problems down the road for legitimate businesses) is to force them to publish their contract and answer questions here BEFORE they get to start trading.  It's pretty much at that stage on BTC.CO/LTC-GLobal now.  There WAS one that got approval on LTC-Global without a thread first,  At the time I posted about it calling whoever approved it idiots.  It paid one dividend then vanished.  Since then, no business without a discussion thread has made any significant progress on listing.  If someone refuses to handle criticism/questions over their business BEFORE selling shares then there's about ZERO chance that they'll satisfactorily handle issues that arise down the line due to unclear/incomplete/bad/not adhered to contracts.

I definitely couldn't agree more. I have been putting together more and more listing agreement requirements and throwing them at anyone interested in listing.
I think everyone noticed that there were similarities between ziggap and bitpride. The requirements will only get better from here.

As for "prooving" things, anything is easy to fake. Not saying it shouldn't be asked for. "Just saying" ;)

Right - I see your responsibility as being to ensure those listing provide some "proof" that they operate the business and of any claims they make in respect of its past performance.

It's down to investors to check the "proof" out and determine just how strong it is as evidence.  But if you don't do your part (making the issuer provide the proof) it's impossible for investors to do theirs (assessing it).

Agreed.

After this asset launched that was actually one of the new policy requirements. Assets will need to publicly show what it is, and where the funds are coming from.
The operator did contact me back, and also saw the posts here. I have advised him to post and make himself known. :)

great job deprived.  You are hereby promoted to head of the Bitcoin Police.

ukyo, please take the garbage assets off BF ASAP (or change the name to ScamFunder).  The exchange loses credibility every hour such trash stays listed.

If it was to happen.


Thoughts/suggestions on what a fair approach would be? :)

no need to reinvent the wheel, use criteria from IRL exchanges.

market cap.  Too small for too long?  Delisted!

volume.  Nobody wants equity after the IPO pump&dump?  Delisted.

transparency.  How you make money is a sekrit?  Delisted.

we want BF to be the NYSE, not the TSX venture graveyard of dead enterprises.   ;)

Exactly. :)

The question is, what should the process be for delisting.
Just disabled trading, tell users that the issuer has the list of users and share counts. Good luck. and that's it?
Give an X day notice, so ppl can sell off and crash the market for the asset first?

It needs to be fair to the users still.

WWND?

(wut would NASDAQ do?)

/can't be arsed to GIFY   :P

If you admit you are "vetting" assets and one turns out to be a scam it may cause  problems for the platform in future because if people cant go after the scammer they will look to the person who is responsible for allowing it to happen, and who admitted it on a public forum  :P

Although lets not kid ourselves the chance of any legal action happening with bitcoin securities pretty much approaches 0.

Problem here is that by listing it knowing all the secret details (and stating as much) you gave it credibility.  Essentially, you vouched for it.

Damage does seem to be minimal, call it a learning experience?

Its kinda like Gigamining giving pirate a +10 on bitcoin-otc....and also meeting him for dinner in vegas.

Let's be clear on one thing.

I am only stating that business description was provided, not proven, or authenticated.

I have had some messages with the operator and I am seeing what can be agreed to.
If an agreement is not reach rather quickly, then I will have no choice but to start the delist process.

There's a lot of conjecture here, but let's start with the most important one.

The claim is that the statement is false. No real evidence is shown other than that someone using the system was able to anonymously purchase some shares, presumably of a business that they know next to nothing about. How many people do you know that would buy shares in a company that they know nothing about?

Let me be clear. I am signing up investors in person, and using BitFunder to manage things and allow the investors to buy/sell between each other. I am doing this in part because I don't have the time to build my own version just for managing my shareholders. Nor do I think taking the time to manage the shares myself, manually or otherwise, is the best use of my time.

I talked it over quite a bit with Ukyo before listing. He pointed out that it would be very hard to get investors on my own, so I expected it would take some time to raise the capital we would like. Given the difficulty, I think we are doing pretty well.

As far as identifying the business that's only important for people who don't already know it, and they shouldn't be investing in it anyway. We choose to be anonymous for some very important reasons, reasons that the creator of bitcoin would understand. Who are we? None of your business and don't buy any of our shares please.

Now as to the accounting, maybe you can help. How would you account for non-bitcoin revenue? Certainly taking each non-bitcoin payment, converting it to bitcoin via MtGox or others, then sending that to the revenue address would be overly expensive in both fees and time. And if we were scamming, why bother to do such small amounts? Wouldn't cycling a bunch of larger amounts through many more times be more compelling for potential investors?

This really bothers me though.
You might not be capable of conceiving a reason, but that doesn't mean there can't be one. I have already given one, that we want to use the BitFunder site as a way to outsource share handling for our known investors. The reasons we need to remain anonymous are our own, but if you are using bitcoins and can't think of a reason why then you are clearly using the wrong alternative currency. Also, you must have some weird parents to have named you Deprived :-)

Our investors have seen our plans to take this business from not being anywhere near worth 50Kbtc to being worth far more than that. Our plan doesn't require as much as we're raising, but the higher amount would be useful in furthering our plans. It is also expected to take some time, as our description notes.

So let me say it again. Biz27B-6 is not intended to be traded by people who don't know what it is. We are signing up investors on our own, and they are trading their own shares as they will. Since we cannot see who is making bids and asks, we can only assume that they are legitimate investors. If he wants to, and he has apparently alluded to it earlier, Ukyo can confirm that most of the investors in Biz27B-6 are new accounts on BitFunder that were created specifically to receive the shares. And yes, most of the new investors had their shares transferred to them as they paid for the shares in cash or other ways outside of the BitFunder system.

We cannot and will not endanger our shareholders and our business merely because someone who has no business with us wants us to expose ourselves to unwanted scrutiny just to satisfy their own curiosity.

And as much as we can appreciate BitFunder desiring to be the bitcoin equivalent of NASDAQ, it can be so much more than that decrepit cesspit of regulatory capture and failed crony capitalism. We have a great opportunity here to allow small businesses to have access to the same tools as were previously only available to large corporations. Yes, the challenge of identifying and handling scammers needs to be dealt with, but the way to do that is to shine light on things and not to pass off the responsibility to some authority figure.

Thank you for allowing me to respond.

Sam Pryce (obviously not my real name)

So why did you sell 500 shares at 20% of your listed price to an anonymous buyer?  Or was that a pre-arranged sale to someone who knew what your business was (Ukyo can likely easily verify that if you claim it to be the case - so would be a brave bluff to lie)?

Why, for that matter, did you sell 1 share to ME at 1% of your listed price?

Why, for that matter, do you list shares for sale (of your own) at all?  You DO realise there's a transfer function?

Why, shortly after listing, did you immediately put up 100,000 shares for sale (you took it down within a day) whilst only have a few (from memory 17 - but was defnitely under 100) shares in the hands of investors?  Did you really have private investors lined up to buy 100K shares?  Weren't you at all concerned someone not knowing the business may accidentally buy them - not realising it was a private thing?

Why, do your (supposedly transparent) accounts have transfers from your Expenses account to an unidentified account, which then promptly sends the funds on to your Revenue account?

Why, if all your investors are obtained and contacted privately, did you post some fluff news post (about unidentified celebrities doing unidentified things with the unidentified product produced by your unidentifed company) to Bitfunder - in which you actually CLAIMED that most of your actual (alleged) investors hadn't even signed up yet?  Surely you sent an unexpurgated version to your actual (alleged) investors - making it only of use to attract investors who DIDN'T know what you're doing.  Which is what you claim is NOT your intent.

There's actually one more glaring thing that makes it all a mockery - but it'll be a few weeks before I can point it out without you being able to rectify it and claim it was just a mistake/late action on your part.  You don't mind me not disclosing it yet I hope - given your own love of non-disclosure.

You misunderstood my point.

There's PLENTY of reasons why YOU (or other businesses) would want to list on the exchange without disclosure.
My point was that there's no reason why the exchange should let you.  

Hence me saying "why the exchange shoud list you" rather than "why you should ask to be listed".

Two entirely different things.  Though I'll admit there IS one reason why an exchange would let you list - to increase short-term revenue/activity (at the expense of credibility).  So rather than saying "no conceivable" reason I should have said "no valid reason" or "no sensible reason".

EDIT: There would, of course, be absolutely nothing wrong with Ukyo allowing private companies  to use the exchange - with their shares only visible to those holding them.  Then the rest of us wouldn't have our screen-space and band-width wasted on meaningless stuff of no interest or value to us.  And you'd be spared the problems associated with people buying your shares in error, not realising they weren't for public consumption.  If you do it in private you can shuffle funds between your 'transparent' accounts all you want to simulate an actual business - and if your investors are happy with it then great.

I did have an advisor tell me to not list so many shares for sale, but he doesn't really understand the nature of a truly free market yet. That's why I changed the number of shares for sale, to keep an investor happy. He is still thinking traditional stock market.

As far as selling shares at a price that you might think is less than I should, opinions change. Who is to say what a fair value is? Since I have no way of knowing whether a bid is from a legitimate shareholder or not, I can only assume they are placing lower bids hoping to get a discount. Who else would bid on an asset that has no identifying information?

As far as transfer vs bid, maybe its just easier to let the system handle what the system was built for than to recreate the system's functionality by manual processing.

I already explained why the recycling of bitcoins through the various addresses happened, but to recap: we still have more revenue from non-bitcoin sources and to have the bitcoin addresses accurately reflect the revenues and expenses we need to recycle some of them. As I said earlier, if there was an intent to commit fraud, then why wouldn't the amounts recycled be much larger?

And why would I use the news system to communicate with my investors when I could send some of them emails, some of them facebook messages, some of them tweets, and walk over to others' houses and tell them in person? Jeez, let me think about that. LOL

I'm not going to say I'm perfect. Maybe I have missed something. But that doesn't mean that the asset is a scam. All this all means is that it isn't for everyone. In fact we are explicit that it is only for those who already know what it is.

But the tl:dr of this all is, if you don't know what it is then don't invest in it. That's pretty obvious and simple.

No, I didn't misunderstand your point. You want to make the exchange be an arbiter of what is acceptable or not, instead of allowing each individual make that decision for themselves. That is inherently authoritarian and leads inevitably to corruption.

The idea of limiting display of certain assets to current shareholders is a good one though. I would be glad for Ukyo to add that and use my asset as a first test case. In fact that's so good an idea I'll toss him a half bitcoin to do it if he agrees. (I know that's hardly enough, but I'm not rich.)

Yay, looks like this can happen. Thanks for the suggestion Deprived.

So you think the best way to inform your investors (who know what the business is) is to post a news item that has NO details in (becuase it's posted in public)?  And to do so at a time when (according to YOU in the news post) a lot of them aren't even signed up to Bitfunder?

Giving no information to half of them is the best you could think of?  Surely if they know about the business anyway you could actually send them .. I dunno -- maybe some actual information?  Or is it your intent just to give vague generalities about unidentified people doing unidentified things even to those who (allegedly) already know what the business is?

To answer a question you raised - why would someone who knows nothing about the business buy shares?  Well, speaking personally, I happily buy shares in businesses I believe are scams regularly (for my fund).  I do so because scammers, especially early on in the life of their 'business', are exceedingly predictable and easy to exploit.  Specifically, they'll happily sell shares at any price - but won't let the price crash : so you can back them into buying the shares back at more than you paid for them.  That's why I had an order up at 1% of your listed price - and I hope it's why the guy at 20% of price had his up (I pulled mine after he outbid me - as I don't like to go over 5-10% on blatant scams.  I'll go to 30-40% on more subtle ones where the likelihood of selling on to an idiot is much higher).

Other people, I guess, treat it like a lottery ticket - that's the ones who never research what they invest in anyway: so not knowing the identity of the business doesn't especially affect their (nonexistent or unused) judgment.

Well that would solve everyone's problems - yours and mine.  And Ukyo could still get revenue from the trading so it works for the exchange.  If he does it then he should add some way for people with zero shares to be white-listed to see it - e.g. some box where they type in a ticker name (given to them by the owner) and from then on it gets displayed.

Actually, it wouldn't be as vague as you think if you knew more about the business. And those not yet signed up can see it when they do. But go ahead and don't believe me.


Sure, a fool and his money are soon parted. People are free to use bad judgement, and hopefully they will learn from it. Some people do need to learn the hard way, and sometimes even idiots get lucky. Whatever. The private display functionality will hopefully be online soon enough and you can pretend you live in a world of perfect information once again :-)

Nope, I don't want to make the exchange the arbiter of what is acceptable or not.  I want the exchange to ensure companies listing provide sufficient information for investors to make that decision.

But requiring the exchange to define "sufficient information" is in itself a problem. Making the exchange get proof of information accuracy would be expensive and time consuming, a burden that isn't necessary. It would also expose them to the threat of lawsuits (or at least as much as can be done in bitcoinland). But if the exchange isn't required to have actual proof of the accuracy of the information, then why even require it? It would certainly be in the interest of most assets that are intended to be publicly traded to list all the verifiable information they can. But why not let people decide for themselves how much information is enough to decide? For most people, the lack of information itself should be sufficient to decide not to invest.

Hey,

I like his idea.

What if I make the asset a private listing.
Not listed on the market, and only shareholders can even view the asset page / interact with it?

Well an exchange COULD go down that route - but Bitfunder wasn't.  Ukyo has already he said he's rejected a lot more listing applications than were accepted.  So clearly some level of information IS required - the problem, in your case, is that he may have that information but investors don't.  So listing yours whilst rejecting a load of others netiher meets what you'd like OR what I'd like.

You'd apparently like an exchange where anyone who paid the fee could list, correct?  

I actually DON'T oppose that.  What I oppose is one where a significant number of assets are rejected due to meeting unspecified qualifications then a couple that fail to meet any reasonable set of requirements to allow informed decisions by investors are listed.

Either have no critieria for listing (other than paying the fee) OR have a consistently applied set.  Once some restrictions ARE applied that it's important to apply them consistently - as investors KNOW there's a barrier to being listed and so being listed at all gives some degree of credibility.  When the information on which that credibility was formed is not disclosed (Ukyo refers to himself knowing information that the public doesn't have) then some investors are going to invest purely on the basis that they believe Ukyo in way endorses the offering (as he rejected a load - so clearly only accepts one he believes are OK).

Let's just look briefly at what would happen if things went the way you say you'd like - where the operator of the exchange made no judgment on submissions for listing.  There'd be a TON more listings on Bitfunder (pretty sure Ukyo said he's rejected more than he accepted) and most of them would be utter crap.  And when people see uttercrap getting listed, every scammer/HYIP/ponzi merchant would be running their own.  So you'd have page after page of listings with no useful information provided.  At that stage the ONLY things that would trade would be ones giving full disclosure - as with 50 listings like yours (no identification and no proof of anything) none would get any significant investment.  It would NOT help legitimate businesses that didn't want to diclose information - it would help scammers (as ANY sales is fine for them).  And legitimate businesses with proper disclosure would be buried amongst page after page of junk - though would still get a decent amount of trade no doubt.

IF Ukyo had intended that to be how Bitfunder was, then I absolutely would NOT have made this thread.  As there'd have been dozens or scores of assets with as bad or worse information provided.  And at that stage it would be obvious to even the most stupid investor that there was a lot of crap around they shouldn't touch with a barge-pole.  This thread was necessary (in my view) because there's only TWO such listings that have managed to get listed (the other one is so obviously a scam that it didn't even deserve a thread).

The reason I still believe yours is a scam is NOT because I'm sure you don't have a business (I'm by no means sure of that -and have said so earlier in this thread).  It's because by being for sale amongst a bunch of securities it's falsely being portrayed as an investment opportunity - when, to those who know nothing about it, it's at best a gamble not an investment.  Plus there ARE rather scam-like aspects of it (such as the accounting - where you may have some reason for doing it, but it no way then meets your claims of transparency anyway: shuffling funds between your own wallets is NOT transparent even if it were representative of actual economic activity elsewhere.).

That would be a good thing.  New investors could get their first share(s) by transfer (payment would be off-exchange anyway) then thereafter trade with one another.  It would reduce clutter for the rest of us - and prevent anyone trying to get listed with the intention to sell to the public by claiming it was just for private management of shares.

Only shareholders should also see news-releases from it.  If the issuer wants to market to the public then they can give disclosure sufficient to make informed investment decisions like most of the other companies do.

^^I fixed it for you.^^

A good exchange ensures their listings meet certain minimum requirements (I.E. not a scam), then individual investors decide whether or not to invest.

It isn't that hard, it happens IRL all the time.  Your false dilemma is false.

I think this is more than good.
Then for other people who want to do private personal things, not even public, they can use bitfunders services as well. :)

I will try to get this setup and done tonight after one or two other releases. ;)

I was thinking this solution as long as I was reading the thread. So +1 to it.

They ass has been removed from the market list.

Anyone who holds shares can easily access the asset page from their 'My Assets' page.

I will will be adding a flag in the near future so that its news posts are not public.

I am still a bit in debate over making the asset only viewable by shareholders.

It would also be good to see it in the market list as well iff you are a shareholder. IMHO, for shareholders the site should act the same for private assets as it does for public assets, perhaps with some indicator when displayed in a mixed listing to indicate its private nature. Perhaps a superscript 'p' with a hover text saying "This is a private asset" or something like that. For non-owners it would still be not visible.

I do seem to remember that James/Nefario was working on splitting out listings into classes of assets, which might be worth thinking about. There are some big downsides to that though, like someone being responsible for determining the classifications. Overall, I think private listings is a better way to go, and it does fit in with my original intention of just using BitFunder as a way to outsource shareholder management.

And can we get this thread renamed? Since it is now a private listing, calling it "100% scam" is improper.

What are the plans for this asset with the changes at Bitfunder? Will it remain on Bitfunder, migrate to direct shares or another exchange (like 796.com, Cryptostocks), or shut down? Do shareholders need to do anything? Thanks!

The latest story seems to be that this was never intended as a fund-raising exercise at all and was merely intended to provide bookkeeping functions for existing shareholders. But there's a broader and ongoing problem here which comes down to woolly thinking: assuming without argument that what applies to individual consumers should apply to any entities at all, including businesses.

I appreciate the mathematical beauty of trustless systems in general and the quasi-anonymity of Bitcoin in particular, but none of the respect for privacy for individual consumers that is baked into the DNA of Bitcoin has anything whatsoever to do with institutions such as businesses and this fundamental fact about them: without identity, there is ultimately no accountability.

While identity might not be sufficient to provide accountability, it is a necessary condition for accountability.

And maybe I've been asleep at the wheel, but I've never heard one -- not even one -- decent argument as to why an exchange or an investor should tolerate someone aiming to raise money from other people to run a business without coming clean about their own identity. We're not talking about charities aiding political dissidents suffering under oppressive regimes, after all, we're talking about people in business to make a profit. Sure, there are plenty of assertions which boil down to "well, if you don't know, then I'm not going to tell you", but that's just mixing a spoonful of laziness with a dollop of condescension and hoping people will swallow it down without engaging their brains.

The bottom line is that if you are an asset issuer asking other people to fund your business without coming clean about who you are, you are asking to remain unaccountable. And if you're an exchange willing to list such assets, you're signalling that you're OK with that.

In my case, I bought 1 share during the brief time when it was visible to the public and have since held on to it mainly out of curiosity. But now I'm trying to do something with each of the assets I own on Bitfunder (either sell or migrate), so I'm hoping that the issuer will make some sort of announcement soon as to the future of the asset. Otherwise I will probably end up selling soon just so I can take 'deal with this asset' off my things-to-do-list.

What are the plans?
We will be going to direct shares managed by ourselves, at least until we can find another marketplace to list at that won't be as vulnerable to government threats.

What do shareholders need to do?
For now, please make sure your BitFunder public address is a valid bitcoin address that you control. We know there are a few shareholders who have non-bitcoin addresses there. The one with a postal address has already been contacted through other means. We understand that this means we will need to handle exchanges ourselves, and we need to develop a means to securely and privately issue buy and sell orders. We're working on that.

Dividends, when we have them, will be distributed to the public bitcoin addresses we get from the BitFunder site. Emails may be encrypted and sent to sampryce2@hotmail.com : the GPG key to use is
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We did actively raise funds, but in person. Most shares have been sold directly and the transfer functionality used. I'd bet Ukyo can verify that.

Most of the investors are personally known to me and they know what the business is and does. I'd bet Ukyo can tell you how many of these investors were brought to the website by me, and how many only own shares of Biz27B-6. Doing a quick check of the asset listing page, of the 45 investors in Biz27B-6 only 14 hold shares in other assets; which means about 70% of the investors only hold our asset. That 70% can be assumed to know what the business is, else they wouldn't hold just that.

The reason we keep our identity unexposed on these very public sites should be obvious. Our biggest threat is the government and those who would impose arbitrary regulation. The majority of our shareholders are quite aware of who we are and how to contact us. A few shareholders have already contacted us and we have already discussed our plans with them.

We've added this info as a news item on BitFunder so those who don't frequent this forum will also have it.