Bitcoin Forum

I would like to introduce to you, the Bitcoin Syndicate.

We are co-operative of individuals working together to mine, earn profit, and seek out ways to benefit the bitcoin economy and community as a whole.

I'll keep this brief, as there is a ton of information over on our site for you to read through:

• Aggressive Growth: We are using an aggressive growth profile as our primary strategy. Our current forecasts show 100% growth in the first year (shares double in value in a 12 month period)
• We are primarily a mining operation, but we intend to do so much more We are currently a mining operation. And that will be our primary means of growth/profit for the immediate future. However we have several awesome initiatives in the wings, which we will use to expand into new areas. We don't plan on putting all our eggs in one basket long term (mining), though it will always be a prominent feature for us.
• We currently operate a 6GHash/s GPU Cluster, and intend to grow FAST! Our founding members have given us a kickstart with enough GPU based mining hardware to build a 6GHash/s cluster. That's pretty big already for a publicly traded mining op. But we intend to use 100% of the funds from our IPO to invest in a large FPGA mining cluster, and to grow the size of that FPGA cluster by a fairly large margin each month!
• We are open, transparent, and honest: One of our primary goals is to stay as open, transparent, and honest as possible. we will openly share information, our identities, our financial records, and anything else of value or importance to the community and our shareholders. See our site now for our live financial records, and realtime stats of our mining. We'll be expanding this over time to be more robust (based on shareholder feedback!). We will try our best to answer any questions, and make our investors feel at ease with their investment. In addition we will be going through the full extent of identity verification processes with GLBSE 2.0, so you will have a face, name, address, and so on to put to our key members, and the organization as a whole.
• We are passionate about bitcoin, and want it to thrive. we are also passionate about our own success! We are all passionate about bitcoin as a concept, and want it to succeed and grow. So many/all of our initiatives are designed to achieve this goal. What's good for bitcoin is also good for the Syndicate! Also, we are passionate about the syndicate, and will ensure we always continue to drive towards growth, and success. We won't let our momentum fall!
• We are profitable! We will be paying dividends, but primarily we will be focusing on growth. 80% of all earnings (this number is open to a motion of course), will be dedicated to expanding our operation. The remaining 20% will go into dividends to be paid out each month. This may sound like you don't earn much, but consider that your investment (and shares) represent a share in ownership of Syndicate hardware, as it expands, the value of those shares expands with it! In addition, if all goes according to our forecasts (Which of course it may or may not, but we feel we've used conservative estimates in the forecasts) an investment in the Syndicate at the IPO, allowed to grow over a 1 year term, will result in overall 5% more profits for the shareholder, than the same investment planted into a purely dividend based mining operation. And after that, the growth will increase your profits drastically.
• We're in it with a long term game plan We are in this for the long haul. We're not looking for quick returns, and fast get rich ideas. We want to build a long term, sustainable, and overall profitable organization. Which is a positive contributing force to the bitcoin community, and economy. And we want to maximize our overall profits (and therefor those of our shareholders) over the long haul.

If this sounds interesting to you, we'll be doing our first public release of shares VERY shortly (if all goes well, within the next 24 hours, so by the 21st of Feb at the latest).
In this IPO we have issued 12,000 shares. Of which the founders were compensated for their initial contribution of mining hardware (at rates according to public value, all documented clearly in our bylaws). So the founders start off with approximately 45% controlling interest in the Syndicate. That remaining 55% of the shares will all go on sale during the IPO, at a price of 0.25BTC per share. A mere quarter bitcoin will allow you to get in on this excellent investment opportunity.

For more information, check out our website at: http://www.btcsyn.com (http://www.btcsyn.com)

And of course if you have any questions, or feedback, we would love to hear them! Please feel free to post here, and I'll do my best to answer promptly!

EDIT (02/21/2012 4:09PM EST):
We have scheduled to do our full public IPO at 10PM EST tonight. That's 10PM EST Tuesday Feb 21st. Approx 7000 shares will be released at 0.25BTC per share via GLBSE For Asset ID: d84ef5271950f7d41bad3ea51059fdb4f25d6b8d455456c0bf8339471242b538  (ticker: BTCSYN) Looking forward to seeing what kind of interest we generate!

EDIT (02/21/2012 10:13PM EST):
Our IPO is delayed by a few minutes due to a minor transaction error on GLBSE. Working with Nefario on it now. I hope to have the IPO completed within 15 minutes.
Sorry for any inconvenience from the delay.
Thanks for your patience!

EDIT (02/21/2012 10:42PM EST):
The IPO is officially live! The shares are now publicly trading in the wild!

and as of today 2013 feb 11 (monday) it seems to be the end of the syndicate.
it did not last a single year - see Paul's OP

founding members failed to meet their end of the loan of 6 GH/s.
what they did not fail is to claim the rights stemming from the shares (dividends and votes)

5.8 GH/s now. I'm guessing there's some rounding going on.

Glasswalker, though your post and website are both well-written, I feel they lack some essential concrete information. If you want investors in a project led by someone with (no offense) no reputation on these forums or IRC that I know of, you'll need to provide more details. A few points of note:
1. "We intend to do so much more". I appreciate broad-mindedness, but people want to know what they're investing in. A general statement of expanding beyond mining could indicate anything from beekeeping to car sales. You will not be able to sell shares if you do not tell people what else you plan to invest in.
2. "Our current forecasts". You mention transparency as one of your main goals, yet nowhere on your post or site can I find these "forecasts". This smells a bit fishy. You cannot be "open, transparent, and honest" while concealing financial growth predictions.
3. Your share assignment to the owners (bylaws section 4.1) seems a bit overdone. 0.18 BTC, at the time of registration of your domain name, February 9th, was equivalent (1 BTC ~ $5.60 USD) to $1 per Mhash. That would be perhaps a fair rate for FPGAs, but certainly not for GPUs. Even with extraneous parts like cases, you can easily get $0.75/MH, and with optimization, below $0.50/MH is possible. Seems to me like the rewards are a bit overblown.

Whois info for anyone interested:

You requested questions/feedback, here you are. I'm always supportive of new Bitcoin ventures, and I'd certainly consider investing, but I would appreciate more information.

Read further... this is not a purchase of the hardware, the hardware is merely being LOANED!

It is probably a crazy-high price to buy used gear, to pay it just to borrow the gear is what? Reasonable as lease of hashing costs more than outright buying used gear? Crazier because buying used gear might be a lot cheaper depending on how much it costs to maintain it?

If the gear fails, do the founders it is being leased from guarantee to replace any missing MHashes by for example leasing some elsewhere at their own expense to make up the shortfall?

This kind of plan could be a great way to put some used FPGA gear on a local market for easy convenient purchase, notice the founders can force the thing to shut down and sell its assets (which do not include the initial hardware, which is merely leased/"loaned") for the founders to pick up cheap without even shipping costs...

I want to put together a shares setup for buying FPGA gear but I certainly don't plan on this kind of piracy, heck I didn't even imagine for a moment one would have any chance of getting away with it, as in actually selling any shares. How gullible *are* the buyers on GLBSE?

-MarkM-

You are indeed correct; thanks for pointing that out. I had simply assumed the price was for purchasing, because it was listed as "this rate is calculated based on the average "street price" of building a mining rig at the time of the formation of the syndicate". Rather deceptive.

With that in mind, glasswalker, you have some serious explaining to do before you release shares.

your add here:

free tip: keep your contribution scarce and valuable.

Until Glasswalker explains more, my recommendation would be not to buy, that is correct. If my assumptions were incorrect or he can satisfactorily answer my questions, I'll buy; I always think it's a good idea to support the Bitcoin economy.

EDIT: He had indeed explained more, please continue reading and disregard my above statement.

Hey guys, sorry for the delay in response I was out for a good chunk of the day.

I'll try to answer all of these questions/comments to the best of my ability.

First, THANK YOU for the feedback, and critical thinking! I'm glad to see people are thinking this through initially and asking questions. Blind investment is not what we're looking for.

First, the deviation in MHash/s, that is the rate calculated from our mining proxy which proxies us to the pool. This is the standard un-modified bitcoin mining proxy from github (https://github.com/cdhowie/Bitcoin-mining-proxy)

Our site polls data from the miner database, and shows the current average rate for a one hour window. So that rate will fluctuate (According to the readme for the mining proxy) based on fluctuations in luck and rejected shares.
In addition, we have one mining rig offline at the moment, which will be spinning up shortly, that rig will contribute another 600MHash/s (this is Andrew's rig).

Now, as for the reason for the pricing. To be honest, buying retail mining gear, according to prices on the wiki for mining hardware comparison, and retail "new" prices for gear, we came up with that number (local prices in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, or cost of online purchases shipped to our location). And frankly buying new hardware, without spending days/weeks/months seeking the ultimate deals I find it difficult to build a full rig, including adequate cooling/chassis/power for under that cost per mhash/s. BUT if my calculations are way off, and someone can point me at a better source for hardware that brings that cost per mhash down significantly, I'd be interested in seeing it (and hell I'll likely use it lol).

As for the concept of the loan. Most GPU mining gear is intended to pay for itself within 1 year time. We are using this hardware to kickstart the syndicate. And with or without outside investors we plan on going ahead with this (unfortunately at a slower growth rate). Our hope was that with outside investment (with 100% going into purchasing additional FPGAs) it would allow a faster growth curve, and allow some better economies of scale. And benefit everyone. We recognize that with the current model, running GPU rigs in a central location right now, day one, and making it profitable is not feasible as a business model. Electricity and cooling costs would be a problem, and so on. With the loan, each founder is responsible for "best effort" to ensure 100% uptime, and to provide their MHash. If gear fails before the end of the loan period, they would be responsible for replacing those MHash. And they are responsible for all upkeep, maintenance, and electricity/cooling costs for those rigs. This way the syndicate is getting MHash, raw. And that's it. I think that does bring a fair bit of value to the table.

Before moving on, to qualify my statement above about it not being a feasible business model, I mean at our current scale, we can't justify renting space and/or paying for hosting for a large scale mining cluster (6-10 GHash) based on GPUs. We have no one central location to handle that, so we are co-operating until we can transition into a large enough scale to justify that location. And we are using the existing GPU rigs as a transitionary step to move towards FPGAs which are much more sustainable as a long term model.

Anyway, so to recap on the previous points. The loan period is meant to be our contribution in MHash to the pool, to get it started. To help kickstart things so to speak until the syndicate is self sufficient with the FPGAs. Your investment is not in the hardware of our GPU rigs. It will be a share in the purchased hardware which will be fully owned by the syndicate, and it will be an investment in a share of the profit/growth to come for the syndicate. The loan period provides that I think, and I don't think that is unfair. But again I'm willing to hear other arguments to consider other points of view.

Now moving on... About the future opportunities information, some of these are up in the air, only because they will be fully dependant on a motion. Right now the only solid venture is mining, but we have several ideas (some partially executed, and waiting in the wings) which once we are in operation, the IPO is done, and we are turning a profit, we can raise a motion about adopting them as additional official ventures under the syndicate. Some of those ideas (summarized to point form) are:
- We are engineering our own FPGA solution. Will be mass produced, and distributed, and we'll be able to tap economy of scale to buy FPGAs at a much more efficient rate in the near future. The FPGA solution is intended to be a professional grade, targeted mining board, designed for high density clusters. With a better cost/mhash ratio than anything else out there (that I'm aware of).
- I have a site nearly complete, designed to be a user rating/evaluation portal for bitcoin based businesses. Allowing the community to establish trust levels for the various businesses and ventures out there. It would be 100% community driven, but with the option of the syndicate providing impartial checklist based evaluations of a business for a small fee. All scores and methods of calculating the scores would be published, and the rating system would be fully community dependant. With additional features such as conflict resolution, and mediation as well.
- A bitcoin based kickstarter type service (yes I know a few have tried, but I haven't seen any that have really "pulled it off" yet.
- Our own mining pool (once we have enough internal hashrate to justify it for our own purposes, then we could open it out, would need to develop some benefits to make it worth while of course for people to mine on our pool).
- Leasing our hashrate out through things like GPUMAX, provided their rates are better than our direct mining payout. (to be done on a case by case basis).
- A bitcoin based competitve gaming league (e-sports). (not betting, actual competitve tournaments, using bitcoin for the base currency, based on accepted ESL games).

That's a sample of the ideas we have pending, but initially we want to stabilize the syndicate first, get the IPO done, and then look at other opportunities. Some of those are merely ideas, to be discussed, and refined (or rejected if we can't make a real business case for them), and some are actually underway already, but will be voted on, and either run under the syndicate umbrella, or driven forward independantly (or abandoned once again if the business case falls apart).

Next point. About my forecasts. The math was rather simple really. We didn't get extremely deep into it yet, but we calculated based on the following:
Average earning rate per MHash/s
Expected trend in that earning rate
Expected reduction in block chain payout
Current MHash/s of the syndicate (with our GPU rigs).
Share price we intend to sell at (0.25BTC per share).
The number of FPGA boards we can buy with that capital (if successful, approximately 15 boards).
The hashrate of the new syndicate, and the number of new boards we could then buy per month for the first 6 months.
Increases in FPGA efficiency expected from our new design and costing.

Based on all of the above, we expect to be able to buy 2 additional boards for the first couple months, increasing to 3 new boards after that. Some of the costing on our new designs are up in the air, but we're very confident we can beat current hashrate/cost ratios. So based on that (and dealing with the manufacturing directly), we expect the total value of the assets the syndicate owns, (based on the initial investment from the IPO at 0.25/share) to grow by 100%. (so for example, if we buy 6GHash/s of FPGA gear directly off the IPO, we expect this to increase to 12GHash/s by the end of one year). That means the held assets, and profitability of the syndicate will have doubled, meaning the "raw value" per share should double within that time. When considering the growth in value of the shares, combined with the payout rate over the year, the total payout comes out to be about 105% of what we would expect with our own mining gear with equivalent investment (if we took our miners, never did the syndicate, and just mined for ourselves, we would end up with slightly less profit than we would have in total value gained with the syndicate, not purely mining power, but total value).

I can break down the math in more detail than that if needed, but ultimately we are basing it off of round numbers which I felt were "conservative" based on what I've observed of the bitcoin economy over the past while, and what I expect to happen. Also not accounting for any other possible gains from our other ventures, or on any unexpected wins that may happen (economy shift, another bubble, or whatever). I wasn't intending that number to be a hard guaranteed number, purely an estimate of what we expect ourselves.

Next point, to touch on the clause to let the founders dissolve the syndicate. This one is a negative point sure, but it's also standard fare. Every other mining op trading on GLBSE (that I looked into) had a similar clause in their terms. This is plain common sense. The founders are physically responsible for maintaining and operating the gear. We are incurring expenses. And if the entire economy collapses, or something else catastrophic happens, we need to protect ourselves with the option to call an end to it. We are not giving ourselves a universal "run away with your stuff" clause. We're trying to make it as fair as possible (And please read the segments of the bylaws on liquidation) we try to create an impartial and fair way to decide on the value of the gear, and to then liquidate the gear. Paying back shareholders from the liquidated assets. Also keep in mind if there are loopholes in the bylaws, I'll be glad to adjust them (provided the adjustment is justified). I'm not a lawyer, and we aren't hiring a lawyer to write those up. I personally wrote them all and got an agreement from the other founding members. But this is the first public review, my wording may not be airtight, so give me suggestions! But that said, the "bail out" clause for the founders (who are physically responsible for the operation) will remain. That's as I said, standard fare.

If it helps at all, we have NO intention of that happening. Hell if things are going well, I'll likely (and I know most of the other founders will as well) continue to contribute our GPU gear regardless of the end of the loan term. Just to help the syndicate succeed. But we needed a firm decision so there is a set expectation. I know we all plan on doing this either way. This is not a cash grab to get free money. We're running this syndicate for ourselves even if we get no investment at all. But we wanted to open it up, and hopefully allow a pooling of more resources to open up opportunities for us that wouldn't otherwise be available (yet). If the community ultimately decides it's too risky, that's fine, we'll operate anyway, and revisit at a later time. But I think this really is a GOOD opportunity, that offers great potential. And I really hope more people get on board, to help us do something great.

Anyway, this has been a long post, I sometimes ramble. But I really hope this has put some of your concerns to rest, and at least answered many of your questions. Please feel free to fire more back, as I said I'm actually really glad this feedback is coming in, this is great!

Lastly, a couple other points:
Registration info is in my name, as showin in whois. My identity will be validated by passport/drivers license as well as physical mail validation of my address. The "office address" is my home address. My info is all over the net, you won't have trouble finding details of who I am and what I do. and I have nothing to hide in that regard.

About the IPO itself. We're waiting on one of the founders to sign off on the release of shares, we hope to be able to do the public release of shares tomorrow sometime. (Tuesday the 21st). I'll post an update when that happens.

In the meantime keep the conversation coming!

I'm not going to quote due to length; this is in response to the above post.

No worries about delays, we all (or I should say most of us) have lives apart from Bitcoin. Thank you for taking time to read, consider, and honestly answer questions; that is quite impressive.

The "Mining hardware comparison" page is not really accurate on prices. For example, here is a priced out rig:
HD 5830 x3 @ 109 ea. (off Ebay, refurbished with warranty) - $327
OCZ ZS 750W 80 Plus Bronze @ 100 ea. (new off Newegg) - $100
ASRock 970 EXTREME4 @ 110 ea. (new off Newegg) - $110
AMD Sempron 145 @ 40 ea. (new off Newegg) - $40
Kingston 2GB DDR3 @ 11 ea. (new off Newegg) - $11
Cooler Master HAF 912 @ 60 ea. (new off Newegg) - $60
Total cost: $648; adding in ~$50 for shipping comes to ~$700
MH/s: ~310 per card (can be achieved with minimal effort), ~930 total. $700/930MH = ~0.75 $/MH

That's with an unoptimized rig using all new component excepting the GPUs, including a case. It took me about 15 minutes to configure. Your price is your decision, not mine, but I think $1/MH is simply unrealistic.

Loan-wise, a one-year loan seems reasonable for the same price as to buy with hardware maintenance & electricity included. But I'm unclear on what exactly your method is for maintenance. "responsible for replacing those MHash" is not concrete. Are they required to replace it within a certain time period? What happens if they do not? Is the downtime paid back at the end of the loan? What happens if someone chooses to leave? I'm sure these people are trustworthy, but a year is longer than it seems, especially for an industry so volatile as Bitcoin. I would like it, as a potential investor, if you have a plan for what to do if someone departs the Syndicate.

Future opportunities-wise, you have some novel ideas and some already implemented. If you want more detailed feedback, PM me, but it isn't really relevant to this thread. What I do not understand is why any of these, possibly excepting the first, should be coupled with a mining operation. A competitive gaming league, for example, may be a good idea, but is entirely unrelated to a GPU/FPGA mining operation, and at least in my opinion should be run as a separate company. Investors are not investing in you. They're investing in your company.

Your forecasts seem reasonable enough, though I obviously cannot audit them more closely without numbers.

As for the dissolution, I understand such a clause is necessary, but I still have a few reservations. "Failure to participate in this timeframe results in your shares being counted as "pass" votes" is the first. I'm not sure what the intent is here, but it seems to leave a significant legal loophole. With no method of voting defined, one could simply call a vote, not give any way for anyone to vote, and close the syndicate. I'm not implying that I think it likely you would do this, but it seems something that could easily be changed, and would reassure me.

Secondly, "all liquid assets that the Syndicate holds (all Bitcoin Values) will be used to clear any debts/expenses outstanding for the Syndicate" also concerns me. Unless you are buying gear on borrowed money, since you stated that the electricity costs for the GPU miners are paid by the syndicate members, the only possible expense would be FPGA electricity cost. The chances of FPGA mining becoming unprofitable in the next year are virtually nil. What possible debts are you talking about?

Your identity seems perfectly legitimate. (Though the website listed on your Twitter account, http://www.samuraipotato.com/ (http://www.samuraipotato.com/), gives a 403 error)

Again, thank you for answering my questions. I certainly will "fire back", in what I hope is a perfectly friendly way. Understand I wish the best for you and your operation; I just think investors would much appreciate some clarification. (And hopefully, it will help you too!)

Hi, nice posts, interesting exchange of ideas. anyway I collected some math about present glbse stock

formula: nr of shares x 30d avg price / mining capacity = cost per Ghash / s (ghs)

oldest publicly traded gpu mining operations
BMMO 4000 x 0.357 = 1428 btc for 4 ghs (357 btc / ghs)
MergedMining 5500 x 0.133 = 731 btc for 1.62 ghs (456 btc / ghs; 420 btc / ghs corrected by btc reserves held)
TyGrr 1500 x 3 = 4500 btc (375 btc / ghs)

and the only comparable fpga operations
FPGA.contract 6000 x 0.359 = 2154 btc (770 btc / ghs)

without the fpga purchase would the syndicate model look sour
IPO 12000 x 0.25 = 3000 btc for existing mining gpu 6 ghs (500 btc / ghs) - way too much

but you do it differently
valuation of existing 6 Hhash/s @ 180 btc / ghs equals 1080 btc worth (shares worth 1080 btc distributed among founding members)
remaining shares valued ca at 2000 btc will go to the IPO offer

some mumbled numbers
at 500 btc / Ghash/s it would be 20 - 40 % more expensive than existing traded mining capacity
at 180 btc / Ghash/s it seems like an 40 - 60 % discount (DIY rigs vs assets at glbse)

using the FPGA.contract value as price guide, you could be able to start mining with 2.5 Ghash/s fpga
2000 btc / 770 btc/ghs =~ 2.5 ghs
this added to the 6 existing equals 8.5 ghs and 3000/8.5 = 352 btc / ghs
again very competitive price per Ghash/s as well the ratio gpu to fpga (70:30) making it an interesting mix with lower electricity bills

I'm going to read the bylaws again, check the "small print"
you published a lot of info and your model is not that straight forward as other assets (dividend oriented)

nevertheless, watching you and wishing you good luck raising 2000 btc in the IPO

... on the second look it makes more sense.

Hey, thanks for the response again BinaryMage!

Yeah sorry I felt the need to apologize because we had an unexpected visit from my Sister-in-law this weekend, and I was busy being a host most of the weekend when I had intended on focusing on the launch of the Syndicate. Anyway, I was able to reasonably well balance the two... lol

Also sorry again for the length, I tend to be a bit... Verbose... Sometimes lol... :)

I appreciate you going to the trouble to quote a rig. I hadn't actually done a full build myself. Are you counting shipping to Canada for those parts? Many sources in the USA charge a LOT more to ship to Canada. (and many won't ship to canada at all).

We've checked the local ebay scene, and our local classifieds as well (kijiji). And local sources (computer stores and so on). For example the cheapest "In canada" for a new, or certified (warrantied) refurbished card on ebay I can find is over $200 per card.

I wasn't able to find any "used" that list that they ship to Canada for the prices you quote, except ones listed as "as-is" with confirmed damage.
Also from newegg, I'd likely end up paying $50 in shipping for the hardware (excluding the GPUs).

Not trying to argue with your math, obviously from where you're standing my price is "higher than market" and I appreciate your openness in accepting that we each have our opinion on the price we set for our goods/services ;)

That said another thing to consider, is that the shares have not been issued to the founders yet. The Syndicate still holds 100% of shares. And the current BTC price is about $4.30. At that price, $0.75/BTC as you suggest is actually 0.1744BTC/MHash which is very close to the 0.18 we set as the value. (Also we all paid a fair bit more than that for our rigs, we were considering that our own loss since the prices fell on BTC and hardware somewhat.)

In light of the above, I still feel 0.18 is justified. But that is of course our opinion ;) Though as I said, I really do appreciate the level of thought you're putting into this. It helps draw out information and ideas that may not have been thought of during our closed process with only our founders. I really sincerely want to be as open and transparent about everything as possible. But I knew I wouldn't be able to achieve that 100% with the website at launch, that's why these forum discussions are so valuable.

For the decisions on the hardware loan, we discussed it, but because we are all co-workers and/or close friends. We overlooked some of the legal items you mention (for what-if? scenarios). But ultimately because the GHash during the loan is intended as a kickstarter, and we're each running it on our own (and have families and lives as you suggested earlier). We didn't want to be bound legally (creating significant liability) to a fixed timeline to replace hardware. For example, as I mentioned, aquiring replacement GPU rigs is not cheap, or easy right now, so doing it in a very short timeline (with a hard legal deadline) puts a significant amount of stress, and potential cost on us in the event that happens. As I mention in the FAQ, we're in it for the long term, and longterm, a loss of 1GHash of mining power for a few weeks even (at the longest I would expect) would not translate to a significant overall loss to the profitability of the syndicate as a whole. But I definitely see where you are coming from. As investors you want assurances. Well I guess what I'm saying is that the "guarantee" would be "best effort". The same as uptime. For example if their home internet provider goes out for a 24h period, that's outside their control. They will get it back up as fast as they can within reason. And I can't hold them accountable legally to hit a full SLA. I spent the past 10-15 years working in senior IT Management of some complex (and critical) infrastructure. I know ALL about SLAs... But an SLA is only as good as it's supporting contracts. If the services backing your service fail, and you have no good SLA to support them, you can't offer your own SLA that's higher than that. It's an impossibility. So if/when the time comes we've grown to a scale that justifies a datacenter to host our gear (which I had planned for and expect to happen). Then we can begin offering full SLAs on things. Until then, it's all "best effort". And while I agree, as a large scale business investment that's a bit shaky, but comparing against the other alternatives in the bitcoin community, I would be surprised if you find a much better alternative for the same price.

Anyway, moving on... The thinking is that the syndicate is STARTING as a pure mining op. And mining will always be our "bread and butter". But we are a bitcoin business, not a mining business. We will undertake initiatives and ventures which span the full gamut of what bitcoin is, and in any way we feel benefits the bitcoin economy. That's why I list that everywhere on the site and in the initial post. It's not a "Mining company" (though I agree the choice of those words in the subject is questionable lol, but that was to reflect it's CURRENT state). For example, long term (beyond 2-3 years) mining is not a guaranteed income. I suspect it will be, but the economics of mining may begin to shift drastically as the block payout changes. Because of this we need to look at other means to diversify ourselves.

I understand what you're saying about people investing in the syndicate and not me. And I intended that to be the case. That's why I pointed out that all shares are voting shares, and every new venture requires a passed motion (voted on by ALL shareholders that choose to vote). If the shareholders view the venture as not a sound investment, they will vote against, and the syndicate won't be involved (at which time I can choose to personally pursue the venture, or abandon it). If the vote is positive, then the new venture would be a Syndicate initiative (and it would be branded as such). And would be fully owned by the syndicate (meaning that investment in the syndicate would include that venture as well).

For the dissolution vote, we force the vote because that keeps people who choose not to participate (or who are absent, or ignorant to the vote). Our thinking is, every one of the shareholders have known each other a while, work together every day (or at least talk nearly every day). Chances are in the next year, short of death or major illness, this will continue to be the case. So the chances of someone "not being able to cast their vote" tend to fall into those extreme cases. Because the dissolution is a safety net, and the case in which it would be called on would be a critical one (we wouldn't do it unless it was critical), we need to be able to act fast. And if people are unavailable due to vacation, illness, or other major issue, we need to move ahead regardless (even if the remaining members may be against the vote for whatever reason.). We stuck that in there intentionally to allow for this kind of circumstance. Though if you can suggest any wording changes I'd love to hear them.

The debt/expenses clause is intended as a future proof clause. Right now there will be NO DEBT. We are buying hardware for cash (bitcoin) up front. We owe nobody anything. And this will be the case for some time. Any business decision to change that would require a shareholder vote. There are valid future cases where expenses or debt would be incurred. If we move to a datacenter, datacenter hosting costs would be incurred. Or if there is a significant business opportunity requiring more investment than we have in liquid capital, we may vote on taking that opportunity (the vote would likely be to issue more shares to raise capital, but if the shareholders decide credit is the way to go, we will go that way). It's all open to shareholder vote. But you're right, right now, under our immediate situation, there will be no debt. Any expenditure requiring "creating" a debt would need to be approved by the CEO and Treasurer, and passed by a vote of the shareholders. So it's not like we would arbitrarily say "oh the syndicate owes me $10,000 so I'm paying out all assets to myself MUAH HAA HAAA HAAA!" lol... because the bylaws regulate that behavior. If that wording is unclear, by all means I again request any suggestions that might help clarify it.

lol, as per my twitter link haven't updated it in a while. Samuraipotato was a random blog I shared with a close friend. He hosts it, and it's likely broken right now (haven't posted to it in ages lol). I should get it back up and running though, as there were some amusing posts on there. I'll talk to him about it.

As for your questions and "friendliness" lol, no worries at all :) I take it as that, you're being extremely concise and clear in your intent, and wording your questions courteously and professionally. I hope that I am doing the same. I see this as a professional and helpful discussion to clear the air and make sure everyone is on the same page. As I have said several times. Openness and transparency are important to me. I want to ensure the right info is out there so people can make informed decisions. I don't want to screw anyone, I don't want anyone to get screwed. I sincerely want the Syndicate to be a booming success and make us all (founders AND public investors) a fortune... And that won't happen without the full understanding, and support of all our investors. (and a little passion from all those involved lol).

Mila: as to your post/questions:

I'm not quite sure I'm following your math clearly. The one example I used as a similar comparison (which I was able to glean enough info from directly) was FPGA.contract, which is run by a respected member on these forums, and is also one of the FPGA manufacturers currently available. Their setup was 6000 shares which were issued at 0.25BTC same as ours. That money was used to buy FPGAs, which currently mine around 3GHash/s if I'm not mistaken right now. (but they have ramped up to that over time, overall longterm averaging more like 2.5Ghash/s). That means that an initial investment of 0.25BTC earned you 0.5MHash worth of mining hardware (FPGA) that was owned fully by the organization (and shareholders). In their case their business model is different, they pay out 100% of all mining proceeds to dividends, and keep a small number of shares for the organization to pay for electricity and such. If they want to grow, they have no planned growth budget, so they must pass a motion to issue more shares (potentially devaluing existing shares, but in theory keeping them "the same" in value). This said, their shares have actually increased in value to 0.35BTC for some reason (which is fair, that's what the "market" decided they are worth).

In our setup, we have 12000 shares, of which about 5000 (rounding off for quick math) are issued to founders for the GPU gear loan. The remaining 7000 are sold publicly for 0.25BTC (same price as FPGA contract at their IPO). That money will (if the IPO is successful) raise a total of 1750BTC, which should be enough to buy 15FPGA boards, totalling 6GHash/s roughly. (all round numbers, will depend on BTC exchange at the time, and how successful the IPO is). That 6GHash is owned equally by each share. So that means that it's divided across all 12000 shares. Which works out to 0.5MHash per share. the EXACT SAME as the IPO value for FPGA.contract. BUT what this doesn't consider, is that those shares ALSO own a share of the 6GHash of GPU power, for the first year. Which means they actually control 1MHash of mining hardware for the first year, after which it drops to 0.5MHash. But... By the end of that first year, we'll have bought more than enough FPGA gear to replace that 0.5MHash lost from the conclusion of the GPU loan (if not a lot more). And beyond that point it will continue to grow at a rapid rate.

So overall 0.25BTC for our investment (the way I look at it, over a longer term) is a much better investment opportunity than the FPGA.contract. Both options have their merits (I'm by no means slamming them, Fizzicist is doing awesome work). But each has it's niche. Theirs is a smart short term investment. You spend BTC and get a dedicated hash rate to pay out to you. But it offers no growth opportunity to a given investor. The Syndicate method over a long term stands to be worth much more due to the growth potential, and it will pay out much more eventually (once it grows), but from day one, your initial dividend payout will be less than you would see from FPGA.contract. The risk with the syndicate is that things change, and potentially something negative could happen during that growth period while you're waiting for it to pay off. But that's why we'll be actively seeking out (And voting on) the best ways to optimize our growth and long term stability. So that over that timespan we're constantly adjusting, and rolling with the punches to take the best course of action as we go, and ensure a solid return on investment for our shareholders.

:)

If you could explain the math you've done there, I'd love to understand your point of view so I can better discuss it.

And again, thanks for your feedback all of you! Keep it coming!

And I hope that I'm so far doing a good job of answering questions, and alleviating concerns/fears.

In the end I'm just a guy, who's passionate about bitcoins and their potential for our society. I've convinced my friends and co-workers to get involved as well, and some of that passion has rubbed off on them. We're now co-operating, so that we can pool our resources to achieve bigger and better things (and yes, make a buck of course). And we feel that by opening that up to the public, we not only allow more people to benefit from that, but it gives us a bigger pool of resources to do great things. And that's what we want. To seek out ways to do great and amazing things in the bitcoin community. This is (hopefully) our means to do that. (and your means to be part of it!)

Doh, I've done it again. Sorry for the wall of text. Hopefully these posts will get siginficanly shorter over time lol...

Hey Mark, sorry I should have addressed you directly earlier. Since you were the most directly "negative" of the comments, I'll take the time now to respond to your comments.

For one, I don't appreciate the reference to "Piracy" but you are of course open to your opinion, and I'm not going to take direct offense, as it was pointed out my initial release may have been lacking some of the clarification needed.

Ultimately what this boils down to is:
- The hardware is loaned in, for one year as a kickstart to get things off the ground (because we had the gear already). The plan is to transition fully to FPGA, so longer term doesn't make sense anyway (and since most GPU rigs are designed to pay off within a year anyway, that's the useful lifespan of the investment anyway.) This is explained in more detail in my previous couple posts.
- The FPGAs are being bought based on shareholder vote and approval from known retail sources. And we are operating them in a central location. Anyone else is welcome to do the same thing. We have chosen to do this, and to offer shareholders a way to buy in. If you disaggree, and feel you can do it better, I suggest you either do this yourself, and do it better, and prove us wrong in our methods. In which case hey we may even decide to buy some shares in your operation! Or, give us suggestions on specific methods/ideas how we can do it more efficiently or "better".
- IF it came down to the syndicate coming crashing down, sure we could liquidate the gear, and we would have the OPTION of buying it ourselves (provided we had the assets to pull that off). But if you read in full the method of liquidation, it requires a fairly open process in deciding on the value of the gear. The lack of shipping for us is a bit of a silly point, as this would apply to ANYONE who happened to be local to where the gear was hosted. (if you hosted the gear at your location, you could buy it out without paying shipping if that opportunity presented itself). And as I point out in my previous posts, this clause is STANDARD in all mining ops trading publicly, it's a "cover our ass" clause for the founders (who have the responsibility of physically managing, operating, and maintaining the equipment, infrastructure, website, and so on, as well as managing the syndicate). A service for which we are not directly PAID. (aside from some initial shares for the hardware loan we kicked in). If things go south, we need a way out without major financial or legal liability. While doing our best to make sure our shareholders get some form of payout as well so nobody gets completely screwed.

Ultimately we want this to succeed, we're starting a business around bitcoin. We are running that business one way or another, regardless of what happens with the IPO. We would like to let others in to get involved, and in doing so it increases the overall pool of our resources. The increased resources allow us to pursue larger opportunities (such as larger bulk orders of FPGA gear) which we couldn't do otherwise.

All I can offer is all the information I've posted here, and on our website, and my personal assurances we have no intent of this being a scam to get free/cheap FPGAs. This is a legitimate business venture which we want to succeed.

As for the price of our shares, if you check GLBSE, there are other mining operations trading at similar pricing to ours with lower or equal returns. So I think we're inline with the "going rate".

Hopefully with the clarification from earlier posts, and the answers above, this puts your concerns to rest. But as I said if you have ideas about ways to do it better, I suggest you either go ahead and do it yourself, or let us know what you suggest, and we'll look into doing it ourselves (So you can feel better about investing, and improve the outcome for everyone else at the same time).

Thanks (and in the future, probably best to reserve final judgement, allowing the opportunity for people to respond to things, before throwing accusing, or negative terms like "Piracy" out there in a public forum, while you're entitled to your opinion, such things can reflect negatively on both yourself, and the person you're talking about, if taken the wrong way. Especially if they later redeem themselves through a response). As I said, not taking offence, just offering advice which helps keep discussion mediums like this forum a little bit more civil ;)

Glasswalker: Yello


I did some mistakes (wrong premises) at the start of the math so the model is not applicable to each glbse asset
but one can say that existing operations provide a total mining capacity (in GHash/s) value estimated nr. shares x price
this estimated value of an operation is then divided by the capacity. thus a comparison of gpu mining assets

BMMO 4000 x 0.357 = 1428 btc / 4 ghs (357 btc / ghs)
MergedMining 5500 x 0.133 = 731 btc / 1.62 ghs (456 btc / ghs; 420 btc / ghs discount for bitcoin reserve held per share)
TyGrr 1500 x 3 = 4500 btc (375 btc / ghs)

once dividends are added to the above data, P/E can be calculated.
this are roughly the initial costs per mining capacity per selected glbse asset.

but again, those social contracts are not limited in time. while btcsyn is a 1 year mining contract that might not pay itself off (some fringe configurations of exchange rate and difficulty may render this activity a non profit venture). especially since this is the last year before the mining reward halving. the relation to mining hardware in the above assets is a kind of ownership or exclusive use rights that do not expire.
btcsyn is a 12+ month hardware loan and the gpu capacity will cease to exist.

I wanted to know what's my hashing power ;) since I do not mine myself but want to mine bitcoins badly, this is a nice match.
btw it's 216 MHash/s

those figures need to be correlated with electricity prices at the hosting location but as an initial rough guide they're what's easily available.
who would like to enter fpga mining at the quoted price, would need roughly 770 btc to have 1 GHash/s up & running. for rough estimates what's doable with ipo btc it's better than wild guessing. thinking in terms of assets, their prices, mining capacity their represent it does not require an arm and a leg for monitoring, maintenance, utility bills and ad hoc effort to keep it mining. they all are optimized for dividends but that can be easily abstracted as equal to the growth budget contributions from mining.

now it boils down to keep it profitable to raise funds for the fpga boards.
i've found my initial mistakes (as why the initial formula is not applicable for this ipo)
hope this helped to give you an insight what the numbers should represent
some of the numbers should be even comparable with the wiki mining hw comparison

plus I keep in mind the rumor that gpu's have two years to live in average
thus a 1 year mining contract should not cost 100 % of the hw but more or less 60-70 % (that's my opinion on pricing of such goods & services).

Indeed a growth oriented stock has not manifested itself. It makes the reinvesting easier ;)

Well Red Star Mining RSM which I'm just starting with two Radeon HD 7970's is only 250 BTC per GH/s and that's if I only get 1.2GH/s from the two 7970's 1.44 GH/s is possible and I'm looking to expand to three Radeon HD 7970's pretty rapid.  By far the best deal for a mining company offer on the GLBSE but I understand it may seem a gamble to a lot of people as it's brand new that's why the low price.  3BTC get's you a 1% stake in the company.  Shares are being sold for 0.3BTC.

Hey, I'm loving the discussion going on here ;) lol

So to answer these last 2 posts.

Mila:
I think the best way to compare apples to apples, is the value of the share itself. If you ignore dividends, and look at raw MHash/BTC you get for your investment.
That's what you are "Buying" for that money. The dividends end up being part of the business model (the means of making profit).

So a breakdown comparison using this method of the ones you gave examples of (using the numbers in your post) is:

Bitcoin Syndicate:
After 100% successful IPO, the syndicate (and so the shareholders) will own 6GHash/s of FPGA mining power.
We have 12,000 shares total.
This means 0.5MHash/s per Share
That means that at a price of 0.25BTC per share (our IPO price) you get 2MHash/s per BTC invested.
Features:
- We have 6GHash/s of "Additional" mining power for the first year (doubling the effective MHash/s per BTC to 4MHash/s per BTC invested during that first year)
- If our forecasts hold (which I admit they may or may not) at the end of the first year, when the 6GHash of GPU power ends. We will have added enough FPGAs through the growth fund to make it still worth 4MHash/s per BTC invested at that stage, and going forward indefinitely beyond that (and continuing to grow).
- We will grow in value rapidly due to 80% of mining power being re-invested
- We pay out 20% of all mining power to dividends monthly

BMMO:
Currently owns 4GHash/s of mining power.
4,000 shares total.
This means 1MHash/s per Share
Current share price: 0.357BTC per share
Current mining power per BTC: 2.80Mhash/BTC
Features:
- 100% dividend payout? (don't see this on their site at first glance)
- No growth plan that I can see

MergedMining:
Currently owns 1.62GHash/s of mining power.
5,500 shares total.
This means 0.3MHash/s per Share (rounded up slightly)
Current share price: 0.133BTC per share
Current mining power per BTC: 2.25Mhash/BTC
Features:
- BTC discount (I'm not following how that works just yet)
- No growth plan that I can see
- 100% dividend payout? (again not seeing this clearly defined, but assuming it's the case)

TyGrr:
Currently owns 12GHash/s of mining power.
1,500 shares total.
This means 8MHash/s per Share
Current share price: 3 BTC per share
Current mining power per BTC: 2.66Mhash/BTC
Features:
- 95% dividend payout
- No growth plan that I can see
- Nice warranties
- SLA on the uptime (though I'd love to see the backing contracts for this, and/or penalties they offer if it's breached).

Does that make sense for a nice apples to apples comparison of the other alternatives available out there? :)

And according to this, over the short term, and the long term, you are looking at a minimum of a 30% improvement in ROI from the Syndicate than you will get from any of the above mentioned options (only factoring in the asset value of a share).

Well in RSM it's 4MH/s per BTC invested in the IPO  ;D and that's if I don't decide to extend the IPO to buy three Radeon HD 7970's which are all having the GPU's overclocked to 1200MHz minimum and gRAM underclocked to 600MHz.

That's not too shabby, that's a good return. Though are you considering that if you extend the IPO to cover additional Radeon's you will still have a similar ratio? (if you add more shares it divides further, or if you increase the value of a share it balances the average out).

So if you get 2 Radeons for 200BTC (random numbers for easy math) and each radeon does 1GHash, that's 100BTC per GHash, or 1BTC for 10MHash. But if you alter it to buy a 3rd radeon that's 3 radeons for 300BTC which still only works out to 10MHash per BTC. (does that make sense). There is potential for bulk savings, but it's my experience that there is little in the way of bulk savings to be had on GPU tech (unless you're buying at least $20K or more worth of hardware at a time, and even then it's more like 5% - 10% savings, maybe 20% on a damn good day with your sales rep in a good mood). ;)

Also consider your GPUs will be consuming AT LEAST 10 times more power than my FPGA rigs will in the long run, if not closer to 15-20x ;)

But either way 4MHash/s per BTC invested is a great return, I wish you the best of luck with your venture!

Just wanted to address this to avoid spreading misinformation.  I believe the BTC discount that was referred to is the current displayed company holdings of close to $100, 1,000 NMC & 60 BTC.  You also say we have no growth plan, that is untrue.  The company was started with no rig, no money & no mining power of any kind.  We continue to grow by leaps and bounds and are currently raising funds for our next leg of expansion.  I would say our entire plan is a growth plan...  You also assume a 100% dividend payout.  This is most certainly not true.  We use profits for share buybacks, expansion, reserves and upgrading existing equipment.

Hey! thanks for the post, and the clarification. By no means did I want faulty info posted. I was simply repeating the raw data posted by mila, combined with what I could see with about 30seconds (literally) of research lol...

If you have more accurate data for me to put in there I'll gladly edit that post to reflect the actual data.

For example, what ratio of reinvestment do you do? Versus your percentage payout to dividends?
Also I didn't mean to imply by "no growth plan" that there is no growth. (for example FPGA.contract is doing additional share releases to fund waves of hardware). But their growth in value per-share is not planned for. They issue new shares which are fully allocated to new hardware. I'm assuming by your response that you have a more complex growth plan, based on re-using some of your internal profits from mining to re-invest and expand the value of existing shares.

Please let me know and I'll update it, as I said I definitely don't want to be posting false data about the other mining ventures. We can keep this to a friendly competition right? ;) lol

(In reply to Glasswalker's earlier post in reply to mine)

Sorry for the delay, I also have had a busy schedule.

Length is not an issue, there's nothing wrong with being verbose. It's much more important that you convey your points clearly, which you have.

I did include an estimated $50 for shipping for the hardware, but you would certainly know the shipping situation better than I, living in Canada as you do. Just do consider the fact that you're competing with US-based businesses, in many cases. Again, it's not what I'd price the hardware at, but it's your call.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to use the USD/BTC conversion rate at the time of the IPO; that's just not what's stated in your bylaws. ("this rate is calculated based on the average "street price" of building a mining rig at the time of the formation of the syndicate")
If you change that, I think the price would be much more reasonable to investors.

"Best effort" is understandable. As long as you have at least considered the legal issues, I understand guarantees are tough, and I certainly wouldn't want you making promises you couldn't keep.

I'm afraid I still don't understand the reason to run multiple unrelated ventures under one banner; you aren't (I assume) being taxed. But as long as you would require a majority vote on each one, I can acquiesce.

A future debt clause is fine. Just wasn't sure what you were referring to there. (wanted to make sure I wasn't misinterpreting anything)

Thanks (again) for answering all of my questions completely and professionally. I look forward to (hopefully) seeing this business prosper.

BinaryMage: I'm not at my computer right now but I will make your suggested alterations later tonight when I do the IPO. Would you by any chance be willing to add an "edit" to the end of your earlier post where you reccomended against investing? If not, I understand. But if you would I would be grateful, as I think seeing that post early may discourage some who may not read the thread from investing. I'm not asking you to edit the post content itself simply append a note.

Thanks again for your questions and suggestions.

Just an update, the IPO is delayed slightly, we are sorting out a minor transaction error on GLBSE, I'm working with Nefario on it now. I'm hoping to release in another 15min or so.

Sorry for any delay.

Thanks!

It turns out there was no transaction error. Everything is fine and I approve the launch of this IPO.

I have verified Glasswalker's real life identity, passport, and online profile for facebook, google+ as well as his home address and place of work, and his whois details.

I called him to verify his phone number.

Glasswalker is indeed a real person, and is relatively well known in his field.

I am keeping a record of this information.

Nefario.

Thanks nefario!

The IPO is now live, the shares are trading in the wild!

Some trades have gone through already!

Thanks everyone, and I look forward to seeing how it turns out!

Also, as always, please don't hesitate to ask me any questions, or bring up your concerns.

Happy buying!

Edited. I don't generally do that, because I think it likely that any potential investor would read the whole thread, and edits can make it hard to follow a conversation, but I'm willing to comply with your request in this case.

You don't need to thank me, but gesture appreciated nonetheless. Thank you for reading and honestly answering those questions. I can say that I do now recommend investing in this company. (Not that I'm an expert by any means)

Glad to see the IPO went alright! I do plan to invest, but it's late here and I'm exhausted. It'll have to wait until morning.

I placed my orders before IPO to see if it crashes ;) the BTCSYN code was advertised, so I created a test buy with real btc
I hoped it would execute as first thing after the IPO would launch at glbse (wanted to see if glbse sorts orders by timestamp of creation)
My observation was it executed quite early, probably triggered by the ipo start and it was probably the first public trade after founding members swapped their gpu mining commitments for shares and the rest went public.
as soon as it was possible I acquired 10+2 shares but forgot to note order in which they were created and this test result is not available.
it's still visible in the trade history

Glasswalker: can I lend you FPGA as you borrow gpu rigs? read: I get it back in 1 year, in the meantime you collect the mining reward and develop the company. I keep stock and get the board in 1 year back? similar to current gpu loan, shares for mining capacity borrowed
smiley

edit: FAQ on homepage answer this question ^^

First of all, Thanks BinaryMage! (I know you said no need to thank, but I do appreciate it, and I also want to thank you for your (future) Investment/Support of the Bitcoin Syndicate!)

Mila, Also Thank You for your investment!

To respond to your points in order:

- I understand the point you are making, that 1GHash of mining power in somewhere with 50% electricity costs will profit that much more. However in this case, the electricity to run the GPU gear is "free" to the syndicate (provided as part of the loan service by the founding members). But this will eventually come into play with the FPGAs once we have enough of them to justify moving it into a datacenter for higher quality hosting. However I have a plan in place (and an existing relationship) with a very good Datacenter which I suspect we can get a fantastic deal on hosting (well below market price). Or possibly even free hosting in exchange for some shares. We'll explore those options (and vote appropriately) once the time comes to justify that move.

- Also consider, the dual 7970 mining cards that red star is talking about, that rig likely consumes approximately (this is a rough educated guess) 700 - 800W (and that's not counting extra wattage to keep the GPUs cool which on larger operations can easily get up to 50% of the power consumed by the Rig itself)? Let's assume I pay 10cents per KWh (the going rate roughly) and he pays 5cents per KWh (just to illustrate a major difference in electricity costs). If we use the lower of the two (700W) that's roughly 504Kwh in a month. At 5cents thats $25 in electricity. Now those do about 1200MHash for the whole rig (with 2 cards, tweaked well). So to match that we need 3 FPGA boards, which each draw around 18W. Now if we take that (lets round up to 55W). That's 39 Kwh per month. So at my 10cents that's $3.90 in electricity costs. Though I agree, if someone is using those same FPGAs to mine in a low electricity area, it makes a difference. But since electricity is such a small percentage of the total with FPGAs it reduces that advantage to a tiny percentage. (enough that operational efficiency and so on makes the difference). Hopefully that helps with figuring out the economics of FPGA mining versus GPU mining ;)

- the 6Ghash of FPGA power I write about are based on the successful IPO. If/When we sell all shares, we WILL buy 6GHash of mining power immediately. That mining power is guaranteed provided we sell out our shares. Even if we don't the IPO period will result in SOME profits, which will be used fully to buy FPGAs right away. So that mining power can be counted in the share value. (because if the shares do not sell, they also aren't diluting the value of the other shares, though I need to figure out the mechanics of this with GLBSE). Either way I fully expect/hope that the shares will sell out within the IPO period. And we will be able to buy our target 6GHash of FPGA mining power. THEN after that initial wave of buys, we will grow from there. So basically much like the other operations that started from zero, got investors, and used that investment to buy mining gear. We are doing the same. Except in addition to that we also have 6GHash of loaned gear to start with. Giving us an "edge".

- For lending your own hardware. Normally in the spirit of co-operation I would LOVE to do this. It would allow others to pitch in, and grow the pool even faster. The idea I love, and I tried to come up with a way to make it work. The challenge is by opening that up, it becomes a management nightmare. People all over the world either contributing hardware (or shipping hardware to us) and figuring out how to host it, manage it, and the legal liabilities involved. It opens up a lot of legal and financial risk, which is unwise. In addition to creating much more management overhead. The only reason this works at all with the founders, is we are all physically in one location, we see each other every day, and we know and trust each other. So the management overhead is nullified, and the liability is minimal because each controls their own gear, and we can co-operate physically to help one another when needed. So I'm sorry to say, for now we can't offer that option for aquiring shares to the general public. Though I do have an idea which is not completely formed yet on how we could offer a similar service under the syndicate umbrella, but I won't discuss it in full until I've finished hashing out the details (and got the basic IPO phase of the syndicate done and things running smoothly)

Thanks again everyone for your interest! We already have several sales, I hope we see several more rolling in to buy up those shares! The faster we sell the shares out, the faster we can order our first batch of FPGAs and increase all our profits!

Just another quick update, I've made 2 minor alterations in wording to the bylaws purely to clarify the intent as discussed earlier on this thread.

Those alterations are:

Under section 4.1:
"This mining power will be assigned a value in BTC at a rate of 0.18BTC per MHash (this rate is calculated based on the average "street price" of building a mining rig at the time of the initial share release to the founding members)" (was changed from "at the time of the formation of the syndicate" to better reflect the pricing model that was ACTUALLY used rather than the planning phase info)

Under section 3.5:
"all liquid assets that the Syndicate holds (all Bitcoin Values) will be used to clear any debts/expenses outstanding for the Syndicate (note currently there are no debts/expenses, but in the future with growth and addition of operating expenses this may come into play)" (was changed to show that currently there are no debts, and no need for "expenses" right now, but over time as the operation grows, there may be needs for this, which is why this clause was put in place).

Hope that helps clear up the legal mumbo-jumbo a bit ;)

Because these changes do not effect anything, and are purely clarifications, I did not hold a motion to make the adjustment. If any shareholders dispute this, I will gladly hold a motion.

Thanks!

For the immediate term we are pointing at deepbit. That's not our intent long term (And wasn't the original intent). We have our proxy pointing at deepbit with failover to slush. We originally had it pointed at slush, as I'd rather mine there than deepbit to be honest, but we were for some reason seeing extremely high rejected share rates there, so our payout on deepbit was better. As soon as we have enough MHash to justify it (and I can complete setting it up) we'll begin mining solo (Against the bitcoin network directly, rather than through a pool) to cut out the added fees the pool charges, and allow us to contribute to the security of the bitcoin network without giving too much strength to a single large entity like deepbit.

If you have any suggestions for a mining pool that we could try out other than deepbit (I have not yet tried eligius for example). We had the deepbit and slush mainly due to stability and lower variance at least while we were getting stabilized. For now the focus is on getting things rolling, then once we are operating the other thing to consider is the target of our mining power will be open to vote by shareholders (the choice of pool will be voted on, and the same goes for the decision to move to "solo" mining, or our own pool).

Does that help answer your question? :)

I agree completely about the principal of it, and our intent was always to not contribute to deepbit. But because at the time we were pushing for a quick launch, we went with what was easy and fast, which was deepbit/slush (with the intent being to focus on slush with failover to deepbit). But because of the unexplained spike in rejected shares we dropped off to deepbit as our primary. Also we hadn't had the time lately to do a ton of research in pool options. Back when many of us started mining deepbit and slush were the ones to go with. A lot has changed, but we just stuck with what we knew and what worked. I never worried about it too much with the Syndicate because my feeling was always that a pool was merely a short term stopgap (we would quickly reach a hash rate allowing us to mine solo, and so would not need any pool, or would start our own).

That said, I would LOVE to switch to P2Pool from what your describing. But I will need to do a bit more research to validate this. And unfortunately at this point, it's not up to me anymore ;) (any change at this stage would require a motion to be raised and voted on). But if my review confirms what you're saying here, I agree, it would be a no-brainer. Likely easier than setting up our own dedicated pool, and would be a great stepping stone to move towards fully solo mining.

I think the setup you describe is inline with many of our goals longterm. So I'll review and let you know what I come up with (and if we raise a motion to switch it).

And yes, we are definitely very serious about bitcoin and the future.

I am in definite agreement with Holliday; I don't want to (no offense to you or them) support Deepbit in any way, shape or form, simply due to my concerns about centralization of mining power. I agree p2pool is the best long-term option, but for a short-term, easy to switch to one, there are many options other than Deepbit. BTCGuild & ABCPool both offer low-fee PPS, EclipseMC offers zero-fee double geometric. (close to proportional, hopping-proof) At least in my opinion, any of those would both be more profitable (lower fees) and less potentially damaging to the future of Bitcoin.

I have looked into it further and P2Pool definitely looks like the way to go. It won't be a technical challenge at all, with my IT background setting it up will be a snap. The only thing holding it up is a bit of time.

So likely tomorrow depending on how my time looks I'll raise a motion to vote on the idea of switching to P2Pool. At which time I'll build out a dedicated secured P2Pool install (independent of our main webserver and not touching our wallet of course) and redirect the mining proxy setup over to the P2Pool box. That should result in zero downtime.

Provided the vote passes, I'll post an implementation plan, as to how we're going to do the transition, and what the timeline will be (we'll schedule a test for 1hr to confirm it's working well so that we can fall back if something goes wrong, and if it succeeds we'll continue there for now).

Any other shareholders I'd love to hear your opinions on this topic as well.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to point out we have our own forums at forum.btcsyn.com (can be linked to under our main page at www.btcsyn.com too) and I'd love to see the contributing members of this thread register there too. Conversation can continue here for sure, but that forum lets us keep things like polls for decision making, and more internal planning on a seperate board controlled by the syndicate. (It also allows shareholders to register and be identified so that we can centrally communicate to announce motions and such).

I'll keep this thread as the main "info portal" for the bitcointalk forum, and post motions and dividends here as well, just to have the info easily accessible at multiple points of course.

Thanks!

Sorry for the double post, but I felt this one deserved it's own post...

I just want to say THANK YOU to who ever just invested in 1500 shares of BTCSYN!

I know myself, and the other founding members (And the other shareholders) all appreciate your support. That's FANTASTIC!

The faster we sell out the IPO the faster we'll purchase our FPGA miners, and move ahead into the growth and profit phases of our operation. (and begin pursuing other initiatives as well).

So once again, GOOD JOB COMMUNITY!

So far we've sold nearly 50% of the shares released for public trading in less than a 24h period. This is just FANTASTIC!

Thanks again! (and keep up the good work! lol)

:)

You already have the highest 30D volume of anything on GLBSE - after one day! Congratulations!

I'm investing, just waiting for the transaction to confirm.

EDIT: Confirmed, shares bought.

also online the forum.btcsyn (http://forum.btcsyn.com/)

day by day trade history, from the (http://charts.glbse.com/markets/BTCSYN.html)  charts (http://charts.glbse.com/markets/BTCSYN/trades.html)
traded total: 2,903 shares
volume current day 23/2/2012: 127 shares
volume first day 22/2/2022: 2776 shares

this just data aggregation and not an investment advice

also interesting page (http://www.btcsyn.com/financial) with more numbers

would be nice to see some official summary of initial distribution between ipo and founding members
my guess is 6704 shares on ipo on glbse exchange. it will be obvious after stats are reliable
or an confirmation will do. or maybe there is on the home forum, did not see all categories yet ; )

glbse waits for 6 confirmation to credit incoming paymens, while waiting
please export & backup your glbse keypair of the account you fund.

1)
go to Account Management or List Accounts
and click on Export Accounts

2)
save content of the popup window (if you use a web client)
optionally encrypt it with and protect it with a passphrase (built in feature)

the keypair is stored in your browser memory and will be lost when you clean locally stored browser files.
you can import it on multiple browsers or create always a new one if you wish just to observe at the source.
and don't mind the keypair would be lost from the local browser storage

Here is how the breakdown of the initial distribution of shares looks (I rounded off hash numbers to the nearest 50MHash division due to day to day fluctuations). Also Warf's miners were acting up at the time we issued, so I used previous averages from an earlier period. And we estimated 600MHash for andrew based on his rig which is 3x 6770 GPUs as this one will be back operational in the next day or two (expecting 200MHash per card).

BTC Per MHash/s - 0.18BTC as per bylaws

Paul: 2,200 MHash/s =  396BTC
Warf: 600MHash/s = 108BTC
Isaac: 1200MHash/s = 216BTC
Jeff: 500MHash/s = 90BTC
John: 1700MHash/s = 306BTC
Andrew: 600MHash/s = 108BTC

Total MHash: 6800MHash (as I said a couple of these are rounded up by a couple mhash, and Andrew's 600MHash approx aren't in the pool yet so this number looks to be accurate).
We only advertised 6Ghash because of this discrepency and the numbers on the chart fluctuate due to error rate and luck. (as mentioned earlier in the thread)

Paul's initial contribution in expenses registration, asset creation, domain, hosting, site dev (about 30 hours work), and so on: 100BTC

Based on the above, and a price per share of 0.25BTC for the IPO (market IPO price):

Paul: 1,984 shares
Warf: 432 shares
Isaac: 864 shares
Jeff: 360 shares
John: 1,224 shares
Andrew: 432 shares
Total founder shares: 5,296 shares
That will leave 6,704 shares for release in the IPO.

Of those 6,704, only 3,885 are still available. after not quite 24h.

With a 100% successful IPO, that's 6704 x 0.25BTC which is 1676BTC. Which should be enough for about 15 FPGA cards (when combined with the output of our mining efforts leading up to the end of the IPO, which currently totals about 25BTC). Perhaps more if we can negotiate a good volume deal.

At 15 FPGA cards, at approx 400MHash per card, that adds another 6GHash, as I predicted in some of my earlier posts, bringing our total to approximately 12GHash immediately following successful IPO.

So get buying up those remaining shares! :) the faster we sell out, the faster we can end the IPO period and get those additional FPGAs ordered and on their way so we can profit that much faster!

Hope that helps keep things transparent!

Thanks!

(edit: altered wording about warf's miners acting up, it was worded to sound like they ARE acting up, in fact they are not, but they were at the time the initial shares were issued, changed the wording to be more clear).

For anyone who wants to see the latest trades on GLBSE in near realtime visit GLBSE on Twitter (https://twitter.com/#!/GLBSE)

Thanks for fixing the link mila.

In the news!

http://bitcoinmedia.com/crowdfunding-gets-some-back/

Wow! :)

That's awesome coverage!

Thanks Bitcoinmedia & Nefario!

Sorry to jump in your thread but RSM is offering 4.56MegaHash/s per BTC invested.  1.664GH/s for £20 of electricity a month.

A competitor's IPO thread is not the place to advertise your own company, regardless of the price.

 :-*

My reply was serious. If this was a comparison thread, advertising would be welcome, but it is not. If you have a valid reason, please enlighten me.

Only helping potential investors in finding the best profits available on the GLBSE   :-*

That would be exactly the point of a comparison thread. If you want to advertise what you believe to be better numbers, that would be a great place to put it.

I've posted before and Glasswalker wished me luck.  Whats your problem feel bitter at choosing the wrong investment vehicle   :'(

And you'll notice I didn't make a fuss about your last post. One post I don't have an issue with, two I can live with, three is just spam. You've already made your prices clear, please don't clutter the thread.

I don't want a flame war, so I'm ending this now. I have expressed my opinion, if you are unwilling to acquiesce so be it.

OK dude but I want to finish on that within four months I'll have my third 'bfl single' and 4.56MegaHash/s per BTC invested or the 1.664GH/s for £20 of electricity a month will soon be growing by 50%.  The first one is already being ordered ;D

Yes I did wish you luck. I sincerely hope for the success of new business ventures with bitcoin. However your posting here in blatent advertising of your own venture is actually inappropriate, and disrespectful. The Syndicate is paying for advertising to lead people to this thread. And the subject clearly says it's about the Bitcoin Syndicate. People will come here expecting to read about the syndicate. I did offer some basic comparisons of the available competition at the time because it was asked for, beyond that, it's disrespectful to come in here advertising your organization.

This is basically the digital equivalent of an employee from Tony's Pizzeria going a couple blocks down the road with a big sign that says "Tony's Pizzeria charges $1 less than this guy for pizza" And picketing it right outside the entrance to Joe's Pizzeria. It's impolite, and disrespectful.

If you want to educate the masses and convince them that yours is a superior investment, I suggest you post the facts in your thread, and provide abundant and clear information. And let them make their own decision.

Perhaps you were unaware that this was poor etiquette, but I'm now respectfully asking you to please refrain from blatant advertising of your investment in our thread. If you have something legitimate which is about The Bitcoin Syndicate to add, please feel free to do so, or if you find that information posted here is incorrect, feel free to offer corrections. But do not come in here specifically to try and derail the interest we've gathered in this thread, and the advertising that our shareholders have paid for.

Also:
No need for this to degrade into flaming and attacking other members of the forum. I think we're being extremely professional and polite, and respectfully requesting that you stop advertising here.

If you're concerned about public opinion of your goals and ventures, I suggest you think carefully before demonstrating behavior that could be considered of questionable ethics on the public forums. It will go a long way to helping improve peoples opinion of you, and their faith in this and future investment opportunities you might present.

Thanks!

OK what's your MH/s per BTC invested?  I was just saying I'm offering 4.56MH/s per BTC invested at absolute minimal electricity costs with the chance to improve on that within four month by 50%!  Why are you getting hot under the collar?  Maybe for being expensive?

At this point you are simply trolling. Two people have respectfully asked you to cease and desist, and you have both not done that and blatantly insulted Glasswalker and myself. Post reported.

Your trolling about trolling!  I'm not even bothered if you got me kicked for enlightening your readers as I've all ready ordered my first unit and will finish the IPO by buying all the shares myself if I have to once I've got all the funds!

Also this is a PUBLIC forum not your private business!  If these con-artists manage to get me kicked RSM share holders can find me on the blog or at the CoinConnect group!

Wow, I gave you a great opportunity there to demonstrate you are willing to take the high road, and leave quietly, and you not only failed to take it, but you basically took the opposite approach.

Anyway, To quickly answer your question (And not dignify your other comments with a response).

Our MHash/BTC is approximately 4 right now. That will increase rapidly each month.

As for your power numbers, you already claimed you were using GPUs earlier. But if you are now switching to the solution offered by butterfly labs, that's (possibly) an improvement over GPUs. Currently there is some skepticism about their products, though their price/MHash is very attractive. I have contacted them myself asking some very pointed questions to try and clarify some of the more vague specifics on their site.

For example, it makes no sense why their product uses TWICE the power that the current more "diy" grade FPGA solutions (like Icarus, and X6500) consume.

In addition I have concerns that their marketing speak is getting in the way here. And that when they claim 832MHash/s they are in fact talking about raw SHA256 hashes. Which anyone with familiarity with the details of bitcoin mining, is aware it takes TWO SHA256 hashes to result in one "bitcoin hash". So if they are in fact trying this marketing doubletalk, then you're only going to see 416MHash of bitcoin performance out of that "Single" box of theirs. (if it is able to pull off 832MHash for the price they offer, that is awesome however).

I do hope they are able to come through on their promises. If they can in fact, their "Rig Box" is a fantastic deal, and I may consider aquiring one for the syndicate. But if they can't come through and deliver as promised, the Syndicate has some tricks of our own up our sleeves (for one I'm in the middle right now of developing our own FPGA solution that should come close to the price performance ratio offered by butterflylabs while doubling their power efficiency numbers) giving the syndicate a distinct growth advantage. (though if butterfly labs comes through there is no sense re-inventing the wheel).

I've emailed them to clarify this, and am waiting on a response.

Also I hope you've thought out and planned your advertised growth rate, to confirm if you can actually meet the forecasts your advertising. If you can, more power to you, and I applaud you for your success. But if you find your calculations were way off, and you fall short, you might have a lot of angry shareholders on your hands. I'm not saying you can't do it, but your growth numbers you are claiming here appear at first glance to be a little "too good to be true" (some of which might be the better price performance ratio of the butterflylabs gear, which is still to be confirmed).

Anyway, I don't hope to get you banned from the forums, and I do agree this is a public discussion place. You have your right to free speech. But with that right, comes the ability to choose when and how to execute that right. And choosing to behave in a way that's established as poor etiquette, and disrespectful of others, and then continuing to do so when requested very politely to stop does nothing but demonstrate that you are being aggressive and confrontational for the sake of confrontation.

Best of luck!

Thanks for the link holliday, that helps answer one other question I posed for them (a testimonial from a happy customer).

In followup interestingly enough, butterfly labs contacted me back only moments after posting that previous message. I have gone back and forth a couple times with them, and their answers certainly seem valid. They confirmed they do in fact mean "Bitcoin MHash" not raw SHA256. And that the power usage numbers are because the architecture of their chips is significantly different than conventional FPGA setups.

I'm negotiating with them now to confirm payment options (right now they don't accept payment via bitcoin which is a deal breaker for the syndicate, but they mentioned mtgox codes which may work for us).

If this is an option it will be considered alongside all other options for our first expansion wave. And whichever gives us the largest number of MHash/s for our BTC investment will likely be the way we go (based on voting of course).

So far this looks like it's superior to FPGA options. I'm impressed, I didn't expect that to come around so quickly... Well as always, we aren't tied to a single tech, our goals are to seek out the best means to grow, so we'll evaluate these seriously.

Ok, I've done the research on the various mining options. For those of you who are shareholders, PLEASE register on the btcsyn forums, and contact me via the contact form to provide your username and transaction id for your share purchase. So I can grant you shareholder access..

I've posted a poll at http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=13 so that we can vote to decide on the best option for our mining hardware purchase. Please vote ASAP so we can move onto raising a motion for the purchase.

Here is the data I collected (if you are one of these manufacturers, and I got something wrong, let me know! Or if you would like to offer/suggest a better option than what's listed, we're open to that too!)


ZTEX:
210MH/s 9.4W $350 USD (in batches of 10 at a time). $65 in flat rate shipping on whole order
So for our total of 1700BTC (successful IPO) we get:
24 boards = 5.0 GHash/s @ 225 Watt

Icarus:
380MH/s 19.5W $500? USD (in quantity, waiting for accurate quote )
So for our total of 1700BTC we get:
16 boards = 6.0GHash/s @ 312 Watt

X6500:
400MH/s 19.5W? $550 USD (in quantity 10+)
For our total 1700BTC we get:
15 boards = 6.0GHash/s @ 292 Watt?
(Exact per-card wattage unconfirmed)

Butterfly Labs:
832MH/s 80W $599 USD ($34 USD shipping flat on whole order)
So for the 1700BTC we get:
14 units = 11.6GHash/s @ 1120 Watt

Also our share value will likely increase significantly after our IPO is done and our mining gear wave 1 arrives. So now is your chance to get in still at 0.25BTC per share!

The numbers in the poll are based on ALL shares being sold (I'm pre-emptively deciding on tech. The reason being we may do a partial order midway through IPO to get the mining going while the remaining IPO completes).

So to do apples to apples, I'm comparing how much we could get (MHash/Watts) for 1700BTC with each option

Also the BFL Gear is 2X more power, not 4X. (FPGA options are 400MHash but 20W, BFL is 800MHash but 80W)

The BFL Singles are less efficient for sure, and aren't sustainable in the long run. But at double the power, for the first batch, that loss in efficiency is acceptable, at the benefit of DOUBLE the performance for the same price. To get us started. That means day one we jump to 18GHash/s instead of 12Ghash/s and that means we can buy more gear each month, growing that much faster.

The BFL Rig boxes are equal in power efficiency to FPGA, and way better price/performance point, but unfortunately we have no way to access a $30K box right now.

I agree longterm I would prefer either:
- A large FPGA setup using Icarus/X6500
- A large FPGA cluster using our own design
- A BFL Rig

As those are the best possible ROI right now (I've calculated full 2 year projections for all options).

But we need to get established and begin our growth cycle first to prove our success. Then we can seek methods to fund a larger investment in more efficient gear (And then resell the BFL Singles once they have been replaced with more efficient gear if we decide that makes sense)

Just my thoughts on the matter though.

I've raised a motion to spend 8BTC of current mining profits to extend our ad for one more week while the IPO completes.

It's Motion ID 77, and it will run until the 26th, (the deadline to renew the ad is the 27th)

Please log into GLBSE and vote on the motion.

The motion text:
Motion to pay another 8BTC from our current mining profits as an operational expense in order to secure another ad slot on bitcointalk.org for 7 more days. Our current ad expires Monday. The current ad has resulted in driving 73 clicks directly to our page from the ad. In addition it drives traffic to the bitcointalk forum thread, which also links to the site (resulting in 380 more overall clicks this week). So at 8BTC for an estimated 250 relevant clicks, I think this advertising is worth it until the IPO completes. This purchase is still pending approval from the treasurer, and even with successful motion will not be completed without treasurer approval.

Quick Update. I'll be running the poll until 10PM EST tonight for deciding on mining hardware. That leaves approximately 12 hours to get signed up and cast your vote.

Thanks!

Glasswalker I have a question.

In Bylaws it says founding members loan mining hardware in exchange for shares and an algorithm is described for quantifying the number of shares each one receives. This loan can be interrupted in the following conditions (copy-paste from bylaws):


And calculations for Butterfly Labs solution:

That means that in about 1 month of receiving singles (if this will be the approach voted) founding members can halt their loan and remain with the shares although the initial idea(and calculation for shares) was for the loan to last about 1 year?

I'm glad you brought this up

You're correct, though we didn't forsee the butterflylabs gear as a possibility when forming the bylaws. I will be raising a motion if we choose to pursue that hardware method (based on the poll being carried out now) to alter the bylaws to increase the GHash limit significantly. The intent was to keep it close to 1 year for the loan, and we'll adjust accordingly to match that. (provided the motion passes, and I assure you as the largest current shareholder I will be voting for this motion, I want to see the syndicate succeed, and I will continue to contribute my hardware to ensure that).

In addition, most of the founding members have stated they intend to continue mining for the syndicate with their GPU rigs (And even spinning up additional GPU rigs not part of the loan and contributing them to the syndicate free of charge) to give things a boost, and ensure success and rapid growth. I know that's not defined in a hard way in the bylaws. But we really do just want this to succeed.

As I said, once the poll completes, if the BFL gear gets chosen as our course of action for the IPO funds, I'll immediately raise a motion to extend the terms of the bylaws to reflect that (based on growth forecasts adjusted to account for the BFL gear in the beginning).

Thanks!

I've raised a motion after careful review, which reccomends we switch our mining power to P2Pool going forward.

The motion ID is 79, and it will run until Feb 29th 2012.

Please log into GLBSE and vote on the motion

Motion Text:
Motion to switch our mining power over to P2Pool. We think this is beneficial overall, and will result in higher mining profits. It's also inline with our goals as an organization to support Bitcoin and it's success. Please see the implementation plan at http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=18 for further details. This poll cutoff date is Feb 29, 2012

A few people asked if I could post my growth forecasts. Well I've revised them and updated with current data.

They are posted here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Aua5nCpbs-RcdEpUeWExN1h2RFZPVWRnZjdMa25UOUE

If anyone wants to take a look.

Note that with the BFL option (even using a Single) at our current rate a 0.25BTC investment in the Syndicate will result in a nearly 600% ROI after 24months. And that's assuming no other sources of revenue, and that we don't have any other "positive" developments (which I fully expect we will).

The BFL Rig options both assume a loan to finance the Rig, since we won't have enough capital from the IPO alone to buy one. This isn't likely to happen right away (unless there is anyone out there who has $6KBTC kicking around) lol... So we'll likely re-visit that option once we've grown a bit.

But it's interesting to see that even with a loan, we can recoup the investment remarkably quickly.

Hope someone finds these interesting.

Quite impressive. Those seem well thought-out. The only thing I cannot find is difficulty estimates. Are you assuming a constant difficulty, and if so, what?

Not so much constant difficulty as "constant profitability" I'm assuming that the current profitability of bitcoin will be more or less maintained, with a drop of X% (the dropoff in dec) at that time. So if difficulty rises, price will balance it out. (to some degree we can control this by timing any purchases that rely on exchange to be at beneficial times).

Trying to predict the actual rate of increase/fluctuation of difficulty is a bit futile since it seems to have reached a plateau and is now more affected by market situation, public opinion and other factors. (at least for now, I have some ideas on that). Much like the markets, it's dependant on too many "environmental" factors (such as the release of cheap fast mining hardware by a certain company lol).

That's all just my opinion of course, but it's the basis for how I've done those forecasts. (and I'll likely continue to revise them, and leverage some additional tools as I can to hopefully help in making informed decisions going forward).

Does that help? :)

I've reaised a motion based on the decision to use BFL Singles for our initial wave of mining gear. Since there is no benefit to doing large bulk orders (and such orders are actually complicated further by mtgox payment method) I'm raising a motion to purchase an initial 7 BFL Single mining rigs immediately based on the funds available from the IPO so far. Then as the IPO completes, we can use the remaining funds to buy a second batch. This is important I think to get things rolling early. And to avoid possible delays due to high demand. Lastly, having them actually on-order, (and once they arrive) may help kickstart the remainder of the shares to sell quickly, allowing us to bring the IPO to a close, and begin normal operations and dividend payouts.

The motion ID is #80 and will run until tomorrow due to the high priority of this purchase. (Feb 27th 2012).

Please log into GLBSE and vote on the motion ASAP.

Motion Text:
BTCSYN Motion: Motion to purchase 7 Butterfly Labs Single Mining Rigs using capital raised so far from IPO. ($4227 USD at exchange rate at the time or purchase). Purchase will be made via MTGox USD Code. Since there is no volume discount at all offered, there is no benefit to waiting for IPO completion, we should purchase what we can now, to get the miners operating earlier, and increase our throughput now. (and to avoid potentially longer lead times due to high demand)

Since the decision has been made via poll to work with BFL mining gear at least for the initial batch. This brings the unexpected side effect of possibly adding as much as 12GHash of mining power in the next month. This would essentially end the shareholder loan under the current terms. The original clause was not intended to end the loan so early. It was intended to carry a loan approximately one year. So this motion is to alter that clause to reflect a more reasonable GHash target based on current growth forecasts (50GHash).

The Motion ID is #81 and it will run until Monday Feb 27th 2012

Please log into GLBSE and Vote ASAP.

Motion Text:
BTCSYN Motion: Motion to alter bylaws to increase the MHash limit on the terms of the founder hardware loan. Since we did not forsee the availability of gear with the growth potential that the BFL gear offers, our initial wording would potentially end the founder loan early. This was not the intent of this clause. I would like to re-word this clause to reflect a more realistic number based on current growth forecasts. Based on current forecasts we can reach 50GHash in just under a year. I suggest we re-target the GHash clause in the second bullet point of paragraph 2 section 5.1 of the bylaws to read "The average mining power of hardware fully owned by the Syndicate (measured and averaged over a 30 day period) exceeds 50 GHash/s"

tx id 1a19fe903bf52623df85ef4c80b3ebd0adc39c3b8f23706aaf6585f919e05d47
says that IPO funds were moved from glbse and you write that they go to gox to pay for the cards.
so far so good. you missed .005 glbse fee somewhere.
is the 2ac884cb91edf79f3208964ebee3b78960bf9a35ba8fc1a32c1a3cfd21bed1db source of the error?

talking about this page http://www.btcsyn.com/financial
that is not in line with blockchain. how exactly is the treasurer in the loop ; )

& btw the fees glbse paid to miners for this tx were .008 (ipo funds to syndicate)
& thanks for fixing the expiry date of the loaned mining power from the founding members

Yes, sorry I forgot to mention the .005 glbse fee in my list. The web interface is rounding down to 2 decimal places for all numbers right now. I'll likely adjust that to go higher.
I had thought that forcing all 8 decimal places would look too busy when most transactions are in whole bitcoins, or bitcents. But it turns out the rounding is going to cause a problem. I'll play with the code to get it to display better.

The treasurer is aware of every transaction. As I said the error is merely a display rounding error on the web interface.

Thanks!

i'm already suspicious about myself, nitpicking for .005 btc
i call it "help to find sw errors" ; )

http://www.btcsyn.com/financial
also on that page under network info "dificulty" should be "difficulty" 2 "f"s

marked

lol, ok the difficulty spelling is fixed. Thanks for the heads up!

As for the 2 digit issue, it appears my code which is pushing the data up from the wallet is sending it as 2 decimal places. I'm looking into it. (the data in the wallet/blockchain is of course accurate, but the way the site is interpreting it is a problem). I'm looking into the problem now. Once I correct it, it should update all the transactions on the site.

just a quick math exercise. there are 9100 shares ruling 11.6 GH/s of power
how much is (will be) that per share?

Seriously? http://lmgtfy.com/?q=11600%2F9100 (http://lmgtfy.com/?q=11600%2F9100)

I will suffer through the flash animation later today ... I know that site and google syntax for calculator emulation.
I used that post as note to myself. sorry for spamming the forum. Elsewhere I posted the math to prove some other user not telling the whole truth and pimped the hash rate per stock by counting only sold shares and counting imaginary mining capacity as capacity available. dirty ol' tricks but newbies should be trained to see the difference and avoid (if possible)

I was just giving you a hard time, no worries.  ;)

I refuse to sit next to you on the next shareholders meeting : (

;)

My, that was harsh. It would be more of a threat if having a physical meeting was remotely likely...

relax, we could sit opposite each other ;)

but on likeliness of a physical meeting, we could for sure rent a space in second life and meet there once the syndic rapes the first %

Lol, I saw mila's post last night, and was going to come and reply this morning, only to see this exchange lol... Nice.

And why secondlife? I could setup our own opensim server fairly easily (which still works with the secondlife client and it's opensource forks), and run our own virtual meeting space... Amusingly enough, that's not that bad of an idea lol... Anyway, I'm too busy to tackle that right now, once the syndicate is into "operational" mode, my work load will reduce. Right now lots of work in orchistrating everything, and piled on top of my work in R&D on our own FPGA mining solution, as well as sorting out a few of the other things I already had started. (and of course my full time day job) lol...

But yeah I kinda like that idea.

Anyway, you may resume your feigned political intrigue now ;)

(also I'll have an update later today about our first order of mining gear!)

That would (seriously) be really cool. But I agree, it is of second priority to R&D on FPGA mining. Great job with what you're doing, by the way; it's extremely impressive and well thought-out.

Just posted this in one of the water cooling discussions. Thought you guys might like to see it:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=63879.msg773846#msg773846

:)

im in with 0,5% of BTCSYN or 60 shares

Excellent! welcome to the syndicate! Have you sent me your transaction id via PM or email? and registered on the btcsyn forums? (then I can grant you shareholder access)

Also mila, thanks for the heads up. Not sure where that came from. Might have been as simple as a cat running across the keyboard when I got up for a drink lol... (the code is checked into source control very regularly, so no concerns about that). random nonsense removed from page ;)

Also sorry for the silence. I've been busy with a couple things:
- Getting our BFL gear order sorted out (order done, waiting on confirmation)
- Server build for P2Pool, and new dedicated mining pool box
- Migration to that server
- A few other things ;)

Anyway, once I wrap the rest of this stuff I'm hoping to do a nice big formal update post. Just a little longer.

Thanks!

I'm still rather busy, but I've posted the Massive Braindump Of Doom on our btcsyn forums. For those interested in sifting through the jumbled insanity in my head, please feel free to head over and read it at:
http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=31

I'll post more meaningful updates as I complete some of these ongoing parallel tasks.

Thanks!

Thanks for keeping us in the know. Hopefully BFL will get the order processed soon.

The demo version of GLBSE2.0 has been updated.

Since this is going to be the system you guys will be using it very soon please go over to http://dev.glbse.com and give it a try.

Create a new share, sell them (create a fake account to test buying them), create some new motions, pay dividends and play around in general.

2.0 is a big step away from the current system, and it's important that you're ready for the change over.

Here's the release notes
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60489.msg781561#msg781561

Hey thanks for the update Nefario! I look forward to playing with it a bit!

Also, a quick update. Still no word from BFL. Since nobody else is hearing back either, I'm assuming they are busy with shipping orders. We'll give them a bit more time, but not too much. Our shares are selling like crazy, and the IPO is almost done. If we sell out completely, I'll send a "strongly worded" email to BFL (and perhaps try to track down a number for them to call). If that results in no traction in a reasonable time, we may have to default back to the next best option.

The concern is that if we spend months waiting on BFL, even though it's faster gear by a bit, if we waste 2 months of potential mining, it counteracts the performance advantage.

Anyway, I REALLY want it to work out with them, as their products are exciting, but we have to look at the best solution in the here and now.

As for the server move to P2Pool, it's progressing in testing now. Unfortunately we suffered some technical difficulties with our main mining proxy server which resulted in a mining downtime today. This has been corrected now, and things are running again as usual.

I'll post another update soon, hopefully with some real progress!

Thanks!

(by the way, seriously shares almost sold out! as of the time of this post, there are 554 left for sale! That's it! And once we get our first batch of gear in, expect those shares to soar in value, a lot higher than 0.25! So now is your chance to grab them while they are hot!)

Was waiting on some confirmations but too late, oh well I did get some  at .25, just wanted more. - Gone! Ask - .33

... i wanted to increase my position to at least 1% untils the IPO is sold out. to late. but im anyway comfortable with it. should have been faster, maybe i spare some coins for the next IPO (if you do one at all?). lowest asks now > 0.33.

Another big update:

First let me say WOOHOO! Congrats to everyone on making this IPO a major success!
And a huge thanks to all investors!

IPO is now 100% sold out, and shares are trading on open market (and the value is already increasing!)

Also, We're now testing on P2Pool actively, it's working well so far (right now one worker working on P2Pool). But our mining proxy doesn't play nice with it (which is why the Paul worker is not showing active, it's on P2Pool). So we'll have to do a full cut-over to P2Pool directly soon. I'll leave my test running a little longer to confirm everything is good, after which we'll cut over all the miners, and switch the website to point at the P2Pool stats. this will interrupt stats reporting somewhat on our public site, but will NOT affect the actual mining speed. (only what's reported, since we have to cut over hard, no soft transition possible).

Lastly, there is some concern of late with the timelines, and viability (not to mention growing concerns of an elaborate scam) revolving around the ButterflyLabs hardware. We had planned on a purchase of their gear (and have an order in, but unconfirmed and unpaid due to their silence). We are now re-evaluating this. There is some discussion, and a poll on our forums about this, and based on the decision we may decide to cancel the order and go with an alternative FPGA option.

This isn't a decision we make lightly, as the BFL gear offered the best price/performance ratio, but if it's going to be months before it ships (or worse, it's a scam) it is not worth it for the added performance. And right now we have approx 1700BTC to spend on mining hardware. We want to make sure we make the right decision with that money.

Please head over to our forums at http://forum.btcsyn.com/ and check out the announcement and polls section for more info on all of the above. And feel free to jump into the conversation in the other threads too.

That's it for now, I'll post more updates as I have them.

A quick update. I thought this should go here to notify those of your curious about the status, of our BFL Hardware order.

I have received 2 good responses from BFL at this time. And you can see the full thread, along with our shareholder poll to make a decision going forward here:

http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=37

Here are the full emails:

Here's the email I Sent them:


And their response:


I've informed them that the poll is in effect, and that they have until monday to respond and possibly sway the vote in their favor. But they have to answer several questions, and provide a guaranteed ship date in that email. Hopefully I'll get another response.

Here is the response back from Sonny at BFL to my questions. Seems I've got his attention now (he put my questions inline):
(as before you can follow the discussion and poll at: http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=37 )

Based on the decision in the poll to switch to Icarus mining hardware, this motion is to go ahead with that purchase. This motion is under a tight timeline so please vote promptly.

The Motion ID is #85 and it will run until Tuesday March 6th 2012 at 5PM EST.
Please log into GLBSE and Vote ASAP.

Motion Text:
BTCSYN Motion:
This motion is to spend the 1700BTC we have on 17x Icarus FPGA Mining boards (including shipping) as decided in the poll on the forums. In addition 25BTC will be paid out to the CEO (Paul Mumby) to compensate for approximately $120 in hardware required to support the FPGAs (new power supply, DC connectors, some wiring, USB hubs, and cooling fans, as well as some materials for the chassis). These parts will be aquired locally to avoid shipping charges, and will be paid in cash, then sold to the syndicate for 25BTC flat price. This motion has a short timespan, and will end on the 6th of March at 5pm EST. Note this motion will be immediately considered successful earlier than this (in the interests of time) if at least 7201 yes votes are received, 60% of total circulating shares).

Edit: Note: as of 4pm EST March 5th, the motions aren't working apparently on GLBSE... I've contacted Nefario and am hoping for a resolution soon. Unfortunately I can't extend the timeline much without risking our deadlines, so please watch for an update... Thanks for your understanding.

Edit: As of 4:30pm EST March 5th, issues resolved. Motion 85 can be voted on now!

just a quick update there are two very similar motions #85 and #84
you instruct shareholders to vote in the #85 motion. just to parrot what I understood

yeah this is a result of the issue on GLBSE, I'll have nefario delete 84 so it's not confusing. There was a date shift happening somehow, so the motions were "auto-expired" I recreated it thinking I did something wrong the first time, but it also autoexpired, so that's how we got 2 similar ones.

Problems resolved. Thanks Nefario!

Motion now live and can be voted on!

Congrats everyone!

Our first order of FPGA miners is now bought and paid for. We just successfully ordered 17 brand new Icarus FPGA miners, which have been confirmed, and we have a confirmed ship date of the 11th of March via EMS Express.

Once I have a tracking number I'll let you all know. (but for security reasons I won't be posting the tracking number publicly)

Once they are on their way, I'll go out and pick up the remaining hardware needed, so we can have them up and running within a few days of their arrival!

Woohoo! 12GHash/s here we come!

What happened today?

It slowly started dropping about 5 hours ago from ~4.5 GH/s down to about 1.75GH/s 4 hours ago, and has since slowly started rising to a touch over 2GH/s.

marked

Check our our forums at http://forum.btcsyn.com
(specifically: http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=34)

I guess I should have posted it here too ;) lol

We're currently transitioning miners over to P2Pool. They are still mining for the syndicate but because our mining proxy (Which gathers the stats) doesn't play nice with P2Pool, it's one or the other. So while we transition over the graph shows a decline, then once we're over, I'll adjust the site to source the graph data from P2Pool so that it shows the correct values.

Yes I could build some kind of hybrid, but that would take a lot of effort and I don't have a lot of time right now ;) lol

If you want to see the specifics you can look at the stats page. There is a graph there from P2Pool showing where the added mining is going.

Lastly there has been a slight hit to one of our miners due to some uncontrollable circumstances causing power outages for him. That's causing some of his miners to be popping on and offline over the next week. But that should only see fluctuations of around 1Ghash. The big dip you're seeing now is because of the migration over to P2Pool.

Oh I see; the P2Pool chart is roughly inverse of the main chart give or take a few pixels to the left.

I was looking at the stats page but didn't register that it was in essence two charts for the same thing.

marked

Just a quick update, sorry about the delay in fixing the stats chart. I hope to have it resolved in the next 24h. Until then please refer to the P2Pool chart.

Thanks!

Hey everyone, just another quick general update.

• Our first batch of FPGAs should be on their way today! I'm just watching the thread and my emails closely for a notice from ngzhang that he has shipped our 17 Icarus boards!
• Our stats page is repaired. And all stat graphs are working again. Also I've added a "detailed stats" page to show all the more detailed P2Pool Graphs.
• P2Pool migration is complete
• We are experiencing an outage on John's miners, as discussed in this thread: http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=40 we hope for it to be resolved this week.
• We are also experiencing a momentary downtime of Andrew's miners as per this post: http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=26#p156 it will definitely be back up and running Monday at full strength.
• (so the above 2 points should help to explain why our hashrate is short 2GHash from what it should be).
• Also wanted to point out that our share prices have been steadily climbing after the IPO completion. We're up over 0.40BTC now! WOOT! that's a jump in price of approx 40% in a very short time. And our first batch of mining gear isn't even here yet! I imagine that will see another spike in value ;)
• Also in reference to the IPO, I've been busy last few days, but I'll raise a motion early next week, and run it for a week, to end the IPO period early, so that our first dividends can be paid out in early April.
• Lastly I've been continuing development on our FPGA solution. And following FPGA news in the bitcointalk forums closely too. Looks like our investment in FPGAs will be a good one, since there are plenty of very good things on the horizon in the form of bitstreams that boost performance. Looks like we might get very close to the same price performance as the BFL offered in the end (in a few months time, possibly earlier).

Overall things are going extremely well so far!

you see your mistake?

hint take your hands of the pockets if counting on fingers. it's not decimal anymore
it would be 40% if the price on your mind was 0.35
hard to tell or choose, it changes daily

edited & big thumbs up for the fixed stats. I like graphs

I got the shipping confirmation and tracking number last night! The 17 new Icarus FPGA Miners are on their way now, shipped via EMS Express from China to Canada.

From past experience with shipping from china (I used to run a business regularly importing from china) I expect they will arrive somewhere between the 19th and the 23rd (likely closer to the 19th though). Provided Canadian Customs doesn't have a problem.

Just wanted to post this great news!

Also I already have all hardware and parts needed to get them up and running, so once they arrive I can start spinning them up right away (I'll likely do them in small batches so we can monitor and validate them as we go, so I expect it will take me a total of one week or so to get them all up and running in full power).

12+ GHash/s here we come! WOOHOO!

(and yeah after re-reading my previous post, I realized my math was broken... thanks mila)

Since the IPO is sold out, and we have our first batch of hardware ordered, I see no reason to continue the "IPO Period" through to the end of March as stated in the bylaws. We can end it early so we at least see a partial dividend payment in the beginning of April, followed by our first "full" dividend payment in the beginning of May. This Motion will run for a full week to allow adequate time for vote.

The Motion ID is #87 and it will run until Monday March 19th 2012 at 5PM EDT.
Please log into GLBSE and Vote ASAP.

Motion Text:
BTCSYN Motion:
Motion to end IPO Period Early. The IPO has now sold out, there is no need to continue the IPO period any longer. Ending it now will allow us to begin making dividend payments as of the beginning of april (for the March period).
This IPO will run until March 19 2012 according to GLBSE. If the vote is successful, at that time I will move all remaining funds to the Growth Fund, and consider the IPO period complete. All remaming funds earned after that will be divided as usual at the end of the month, and dividends paid in the first week of the following month as per the bylaws.

hi folks,
the http://btcsyn.com/financial page should only display last 100 entries (so I've heard) and since the switch to p2pool the payout is for every block that is found (instead of a mining payout 2x day) we will soon loose the tx history for early transactions and slowly also medium history and so on.
one shareholder offered help with accounting, I call him (yes, you) to cooperate in spontaneous control of the published numbers. PM me or reply here. I'm collecting the data every few days to be able to reconstruct the flow of bitcoins in and out and have an independent view of the syndicate's balances. observing, providing alternative view (even if the numbers should be the same). It does not have to be this public (this forum or the syndic forum) but I believe it should be done. I'll try to post bi-weekly updates of my observations and am willing to disclose them for a peer review before posting.

bitcoin accounting is relatively new and has its specific issues (p.ex. there will always be unbalanced accounts while waiting for 120 blocks maturity of new coins) plus syndic specific book entries like the unpublished gox history and operational spendings (glbse fees, forum advertisement). I'm not interested in all of it. I'm just interested in keeping the most important records and see if we come to the same conclusions.

To clarify, the web interface only publishes the last 100 tx. But the database that backs the site holds all tx ever on the wallet. (so it's merely a ui change to add some pagination, or an "advanced" page to the financial page that gives all transactions or something... Just haven't taken the time to write that code yet lol...

The other problem is right now I'm pulling the transactions (last 100) from the bitcoin client, so once the transaction falls off the last 100 it will stop updating confirmation count and status changes this shouldn't be a problem for the forseeable future, and I can always crank up the number of transactions to grab I believe. (so it grabs the last thousand or whatever).

The reason this could be a problem is if we mine more than 100 transactions in say 24-48hr. Then the mined transactions may not have time to update to "generated" from "immature" (this wouldn't affect the real wallet, only what's shown on the site, but still not ideal).

Anyway, this week sometime I'll try and add a makeshift "advanced" page which shows ALL transactions (and later once that gets too big, I'll write the code to paginate it lol)

In theory the maximum number of mining payouts per day is the number of blocks per day (and that's only if P2Pool was mining 100% of all blocks lol). At 1 every 10 minutes (plus say a 50% buffer for absolute safety) that's 216 tx per day max... So once we get close to 500+tx, I'll have the wallet start pushing out the last 500tx instead of the last 100tx, which should solve the "stale data" issue, and as I said, the transactions will live in the db indefinitely. So it's just a UI change to have it show more than 100.

Thanks for bringing this up though mila, as I hadn't thought about it.

And of course if other shareholders/members want to undertake their own accounting initiatives using the blockchain (or blockexplorer) please feel free!

It would be interesting to see what you come up with, and if something good comes out of it, I may consider merging it into the official site's financial pages.

Thanks!

I'm just after getting back from London(gone since Tuesday),  charts.glbse.com is not showing any updates since the 12th.

For the moment, all the latest trades for GLBSE can be found on it's twitter feed here (http://twitter.com/#!/GLBSE/).

I'm contacting the operator of charts to find out what the story is.

Nefario

Thanks for the heads up Nefario!

Our Icarus FPGA Miners have arrived!

SUPER fast shipping from EMS to Canada. I was shocked actually.

The order, which was shipped on the 11th was delivered this morning!

First I'd like to say, FANTASTIC packaging job ngzhang! Very professionally and well packaged. Nicely done.

The package included each board wrapped in an oversized static bag, and sealed, and then 2 of those packages packed in a small box. Several of these boxes were then packed into a larger shipping box lined with bubble wrap.

In addition in one of the boxes there was 1 Icarus (since we had an odd number) along with the Xilinx platform cable and dev kit from ngzhang. (and I had suspected at first a "third party" platform cable, but in fact it's the original xilinx package).

In addition the box contained a healthy pile of power connectors/leads (I ordered these without the power bricks to cut down on shipping weight, and plan on powering the cluster from an ATX supply). And a big bundle of USB cables as well. Also several bags of assorted size brass standoffs was included as well.

I have to say, I'm thoroughly impressed!

Unboxing photos attached below (sorry for the bad pics, they were taken on my cell)
I'll post more pics of the finished cluster once I have it up and running :)

I will be doing testing of the cards for the next day or two to confirm all is well. Then I'll begin building the cluster proper this weekend.

I expect to have it mining by the beginning of next week!

http://www.btcsyn.com/pics/icarus/IMG_20120315_125825.jpg
http://www.btcsyn.com/pics/icarus/IMG_20120315_125834.jpg
http://www.btcsyn.com/pics/icarus/IMG_20120315_125856.jpg
http://www.btcsyn.com/pics/icarus/IMG_20120315_125924.jpg
http://www.btcsyn.com/pics/icarus/IMG_20120315_132509.jpg
http://www.btcsyn.com/pics/icarus/IMG_20120315_133315.jpg
http://www.btcsyn.com/pics/icarus/IMG_20120315_130156.jpg
http://www.btcsyn.com/pics/icarus/IMG_20120315_132448.jpg
http://www.btcsyn.com/pics/icarus/IMG_20120315_133255.jpg

you have a script for cross posting or you do that by hand?

but more important hooray! 4 the cards
... and let's try them : )

I do it by hand :)

(and I intend to!)

(...try them that is) lol

well, I did not want to suggest to plug them all in ... some testing and precaution was kinda expected (like don't fry them all at once if something goes horribly wrong ; )) aaand I was a bit suspicious if you did your part of the shopping (power adapters, usb hub) but was too shy to ask and just suggested if you'd try one of them. seeing it plugged in and up & running would solve all my doubts ; )

No of course not. I'll be testing them in a controlled fashion, then this weekend firing up the cluster if I can get it assembled by then.

I have done most of the shopping, still need to pick up some more hardware for the cases, 3D Print the mounting brackets, and pick up some more USB hubs. I have the cooling fans, power supply, and hardware needed to mount that, and rig up the power adapters from ATX to the Icarus DC inputs.

I'll post pics once I get into building the cluster.

good luck in your work and thanks for the update


I'm looking forward to the pictures of the finished syndicate tower
(I saw the pics of the testing rig after assembly before shipping, hope this rig will be proportionally impressive)
and also the 3D parts you'll print
I saw some prints and this technology fascinates me
roommate had access to commercial printers at the school where he led the 3D modelling lab
and the local hackerspace has rep-rap printers.
the quality and approach to printing are very different but they seem both to do the job.

I've been involved in 3D Printing for some time. And I have access to a couple commercial grade printers (unfortunately the one in my lab at work is out of commission for repairs right now, and the other is a bit of a pain to get to for large print jobs), I also have a RepRap and an Ultimaker at home. The RepRap will be more than enough for this job though. It doesn't need super precision, just simple mounting "slots" for the cards to be vertical in the case. And some mounting brackets for 120mm fans to blow air past all the vertically mounted cards.

I'll show pics once I get them printed to explain better what I mean.

It's not the finished product. The plan is to have a custom rackmount case fabricated from steel. But that will come later. Right now I'll be using a wooden mock-up case which will be mounted in my rack taking up approximately 3U of space, and having room for (I believe) 36x Icarus boards. Then once we get a few more (24+) I'll get the custom case made so we can get it all prepped to move it to a professional datacenter at that point.

All that's way down the road though. For now it should be fairly impressive looking lol. And I'll definitely post pics of the build, as well as the finished rig.

Here are some more pics for you. The build is taking a little longer than I wanted, I hope to finish and have it fully operational tomorrow.

Ran into a few issues, one of which was the power supply failing. Had to go pick up a different PSU (went with a slighly more expensive model to give us some room to grow)
Also the Testing was becoming problematic with multiple miners on Windows. Apparently this is an issue with the driver, and Linux is expected to resolve the issue, so I moved onto the build and will finish testing on the actual host machine. May have also been related to the psu failing (was giving voltage dropouts on the 12V rail under load)

Anyway, things are rolling along now, so...

Here are some pics of the build along the way (a little more eye candy for you to look at):

A block of 4 being tested together:
http://www.btcsyn.com/pics/icarus/DSCF5622.jpg

My RepRap producing a prototype of the brackets to hold the cards:
http://www.btcsyn.com/pics/icarus/DSCF5623.jpg

The RepRap producing 4 brackets at once:
http://www.btcsyn.com/pics/icarus/DSCF5625.jpg

Getting ready to dry fit the parts in the wooden rackmount box:
http://www.btcsyn.com/pics/icarus/DSCF5626.jpg

Fans mounted, and cards on brackets (still dry fitting):
http://www.btcsyn.com/pics/icarus/DSCF5627.jpg

Close up of the rig so far:
http://www.btcsyn.com/pics/icarus/DSCF5628.jpg

Still left to do:
- Solder 2 more power leads (bundles of several power leads for several cards, back to either a molex, or a PCIE connector to distribute load on the ATX supply properly)
- Adjust the standoffs on the blocks (in this config with the dry fit there isn't enough room for 8 wide without causing airflow problems, if I reverse the standoffs there will be)
- Screw everything down
- Run all the wires and clean it all up
- Install the host OS (Linux) on the computer
- Mount it all up in the rack, and get mining!

I hope/expect to get done tomorrow. Worse case Tuesday if something holds me up tomorrow.

where is the promised 12G/s hashing power? will it be there in 12 hours?

As stated in the previous post. I'm working on getting our FPGA rig up now.

Unfortunately I injured my back (just a pulled muscle) yesterday so was only able to get a minimal amount of work done. I expect to be finishing it up tonight.

Once it's done it will bring 6+ GHash online. The remaining hashing power is online now (with the exception of approximately 1.5Ghash of mining power from John, who should be coming online this week, due to the renovations of his house, you can see details on this in our forums at forum.btcsyn.com)

Thanks!

the referenced thread is here: http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=40

:) any pics from the cabling progress?

I just wanted to drop a note and say this is the first investment I have made on GLBSE and am very excited to see where it goes, keep up the good work.

Glad to have you aboard!

Things have been moving a bit slow last couple days, and we've had some technical difficulties. But you should be seeing some major jumps forward in the VERY near future ;) (as we get our FPGA rig online, and some of our technical issues get resolved).

Make sure to get registered on our private forum at forum.btcsyn.com and send me a PM with your share purchase transaction ID so I can grant you shareholder rights.

why not a weekly dividend?      :)

Administrative overhead primarily. It all amounts to the same regardless, paying out monthly and doing spending/purchases monthly and so on is less admin overhead.
Also it goes along with the spirit of the investment (it's a longterm game, not a short term one). If you're investing in BTCSYN for the short term, you're doing it as part of day trading essentially, in which case you're trying to ride shifts in the stock values. The dividends are going to be small compared to the percentage return you expect from trading the stock. So anyone investing "long term" shouldn't mind if it takes 4 weeks to get their dividends instead of 1 week. (at least that was my reasoning when deciding to do it that way). If the shareholders convince me that the majority would prefer weekly, I'll raise a motion for it.

Make sense? :)

lol, ok that was a long drawn out battle... But the FPGA Rig is officially working at 6GHash/s...

Right now it's mining against GPUMax to get a bit of a bonus payout. Using Slush as a fallback.

We still have issues with P2Pool, and I want to give it several days to mine against a "normal" pool first, to ensure the hardware is in fact stable...

Once we have the stability confirmed, we'll look into moving the FPGAs over to P2Pool. But it may mean we have to wait for a software or bitstream update if P2Pool continues to be a problem with the FPGA rig.

Here's a pic of the mining rate at GPUMax to show the current hashrate:
http://forum.btcsyn.com/download/file.php?id=1

there was a 5.1 btc mining reward that came in few days ago. was it already FPGA mined from the early days of 50:50?
I noticed that because usually the reward from p2pool blocks is .60-.80 and this looked like a regular pool payout

and congrats! I'll celebrate tonight : )

edit: I almost forgot to ask, how does the cabling look like finally? can be posted in the other forum. I just ask here while I'm logged in

Could you please give some pic? So happy to hear this.

I don't have pics of the rig running, if you like there is a thread on our forums at http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=52 which has more pics. I still have some cable cleanup to do before I consider it "done". For now it's running stable, but I want to give it a bit of a burn-in test. Before I finish the case off and consider it done (for now).

Here is one of the pics of it on my workbench before I put it in the rack (this has the old (bad) motherboard on it, and the old USB hubs) but it shows how the cabling is run right now, I'll be removing the motherboard and re-arranging the cables to make it more neat and clean. (and improve airflow). I'll take more pics once that is done.

http://forum.btcsyn.com/download/file.php?id=2

2 New motions are posted. Please see http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewforum.php?f=8 for details.

And pop over to GLBSE and vote ASAP!

Thanks!

Wait on the voting, I'm currently fixing a bug, caused because in some instances we divide by zero.

OK, bug fixed, carry on voting.

what time zone are you in? here's probably fixed -1h
; )
I'll retry every 10 min or so to see is up again and edit here

I'm in a hotel in Riga, Latvia right now. I was giving a presentation to some bankers at a card payment conference yesterday and today.

But I don't have an official timezone, I'm on a kind of rolling clock really, I work until I can't anymore, sleep, repeat. Sometimes I even wash :P

@Glasswalker, did you type the end date for the vote in ISO format or the US way? the motions 2 & 3 look closed / expired to me.
to play it safe, could the next motions end 4/4 ; )

@Nefario enjoy the trip!

Yeah I think I did the same thing as I did in the posts, put march instead of april. Ugh... I'll email nefario and see if he can correct the dates on them

why not to create new motions?

the old ones can not be accessed unless you guess the url and even if you do, can't vote

Mainly because then I'd need to go around and adjust all the posts to refer to the new motion IDs. Also it's sloppy :)

If nefario can't do it, I'll go in and create duplicate motions. For now I've emailed Nefario, to see if he can just adjust the date.

Mila, you'll find on each assets page a link to old motions and their results.

Glasswalker, just create a new motion, for the date say:
x days from now
where x is the number of days(actual numeric  like 1 or 5, not the word).

I'll just delete those two motions.

I found this post from HorseRider evaluating BTCSYN very interesting
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=74044.msg820353#msg820353

Thanks for the heads up mila. HorseRider makes some interesting assessments, but he also made a couple of accusations directed at myself/btcsyn I didn't appreciate. I've posted a response in the linked thread. :)

I do think your company is a great company at the IPO price ,and the price has lots of potential. The FPGA.contract once get to 0.5BTC which confused me so much.The shareholders will have to spend near 50 month to cover the investment cost suppose that the net income stay as today. FPGA.contract is a great mining farm, but not very good investment decision to purchase it at that high price since there are shares of BTCSYN which can be purchased at 20x of monthly net income.

Hey, so it's officially April 1st, and so it's time to take up our earnings from the partial month of March, and divide them up into Growth and Dividends.

Woohoo! First Dividends!

I'll do the payout for dividends later today. But to announce the numbers:

Exact Total Balance: 105.36151360 BTC
62.37295882 BTC Total in earnings since the end of the IPO period.

80% for growth: 49.898367056 BTC
20% for dividends: 12.474591764 BTC
at 12,000 shares the dividend being paid per share: 0.00103954

I've moved over the appropriate amounts to growth and dividend accounts. As I said I'll do the payout later today!

Congrats on First Dividends!

Glasswalker, could you please add those 6G FPGA mining power rig's status onto the statistic webpage, even if with a simple number and a simple explanation? Hopefully that it will not be troublesome. or As Mila posted on the btcsyn.com forum, give it a link at the page. So the potential new shareholders won't miss that 6G in their decision.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

waiving good-bye to to cheap buy orders ... (misinformed sellers are better than no sellers)

Someone has already discovered the secret of the BTCSYN, and put up a 300 shares ask order!

if bought on the last day of ipo the price is not that bad (from potential seller's point of view).
fpga.contract sells around .50 today and btcsyn under .30 is a nice discount imho

and people are already selling into it! 2 trades according to twitter so far.
interesting. thanks for the tip

Woohoo! First dividends paid!

Total of 12.47448 paid from partial earnings from march (for some reason GLBSE altered the total, I said to pay 12.47459176 but it decided to pay 12.47448, not sure why that happened).

So a total of 0.00103954 per share has been issued!

Here's looking forward to a nice full month of earnings for April!

It's a rounding issue, essentially the dividend payment doesn't split perfectly for all the shares, so it will pay the closest available.

Congrads on the first payment.

Ahh ok, thanks nefario! That makes perfect sense now that I think about it lol :)

FYI the remainder left over is still sitting in the GLBSE account, so it will wait until the next dividend payment and tack onto the total then. I'll just let these tiny rounding error amounts accumulate and keep paying out each month.

I was searching through the posts but could not find the answer.  Are dividends released weekly?

(*) dividends are monthly
and are split 20 % payout as dividends and 80 % to reinvest in more mining gear

* https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64638.msg761356#msg761356
- We will grow in value rapidly due to 80% of mining power being re-invested
- We pay out 20% of all mining power to dividends monthly

& http://www.btcsyn.com/bylaws
- The "Growth Rate Percentage" is defined as 80%
- Each month, the remaining Earnings/Profit after deducting monthly operating expenses, and the Growth Budget, will be added in full to that months Dividend Disbursement.
- The dividend disbursement will be paid in full within the first 7 days of the following month, to the shareholders based on their volume of held shares in the Syndicate

Those of you who own shares, please see this post on our main forums. Please read and respond ASAP if possible.

Thanks!

http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=69

Syndicate hashrate down from ~12 GH to ~3. What's going on?

I guess the power is being redirected ;)
I saw a moment when the FPGA rig was mining at 1 gh/s, as if the majority of boards was reconfigured ... it was dropping since then.

Without a motion? Huh?

Sorry actually there was a power interruption in my house and I had to get home to correct it. The FPGAs should be mining again shortly. Sorry for the confusion (and odd timing) lol...

Glad you got it fixed, hopefully stats will come back up shortly.

Well not fixed yet, shortly ;) I JUST got home. Working on it now.

My other miners came back up but for some reason MPBM on the FPGA miner is crashing. (It runs for a few seconds then locks up) I'm working on it now.

Well all miners appear to work, but something has gone terribly wrong with MPBM. It now locks up hard after anywhere from 30seconds to 10minutes of mining

No ideas why. I'm working with TheSeven now but there might be a more extended outage unfortunately. I'm trying to work with TheSeven (maker of MPBM) and do troubleshooting but this is a bizarre issue. I'll keep you all informed as I have more info.

What is this MPBM you speak of?

In any case, seems strangely coincidental that it would stop working right after a power outage... A corrupted file, perhaps?

Modular Python Bitcoin Miner. It's the mining software I'm using to drive the FPGAs.

And yes I am leaning towards a corrupt file. I'm going to try reinstalling everything clean, and trying again. It appears to be a USB driver level lock up. So it could be something wacky in the software, or a corrupt OS file of some kind causing a problem.

Hopefully re-installing will clear up the issue. If it doesn't I'll have to continue to divide and conquer. For now my plan is to reinstall the software, then re-add one miner at a time to confirm it mines. If I can sustain that more than 10min then I continue. If it starts locking up again after a certain miner, I backtrack, and see if it mines longer on the previous miners. If that happens I can test that chain then (the fpga, usb cable, hub port, motherboard port, hub cable, and all other parts in the chain between the "triggering" FPGA and the software).

Failing that, a full OS reinstall might help. But I think that's a bit drastic.

To clarify the power outage did not affect the miner at all.

I have 3 UPSs, all 2KVA server grade UPSs in this rack. One drives my GPU miner, one drives the FPGA miner (the host server and the FPGAs themselves) and one drives my household server and network infrastructure (router, firewalls, switches, wifi and so on). When the power outage happened the one handling my household stuff failed. So I lost internet for like 5min while the power was out. The remaining gear kept running completely unaffected.

But when the internet connectivity went out, the FPGA miner locked up. After that it began "misbehaving".

Anyway, I'll keep you informed. But I expect the outage to last into tomorrow. Hopefully I'll have it resolved by then.

Thanks for your understanding and patience.

I see, thanks for clarifying. Best of luck and thank you for your dedication in pursuing this enterprise!

@Glasswalker Did you installed UPS?

2 posts back: :)

U R right, there was another reason for the falling mining rate ...

OTOH, catch of the month:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4484040/impossibru.png

(FPGA rig mines on/off as it's being checked card by card so I'm glad to catch a moment when it's off and got a look at the founding 7 all mining and well above 6 Gh/s; by well above I mean adjusted for dead shares - those afaik are not included in the mining speed)

thanks, made my day

Yup John's miners are back up for now. The contracting still isn't done in his home yet, but it's at a point where they can run for now. Hopefully it will be permanent soon.

Anyway here is an update about the FPGAs. This issue is once again driving me insane.

After much troubleshooting I have learned the following:
- The software is locking up because USB communication at the driver level is failing.
- When the failures occur I occasionally (but not always) get errors in dmesg showing that the USB device refused to accept the ID being assigned it by the Kernel
- the "high end" 10port USB hubs I bought, internally are actually 3x 4Port hubs which are daisy chained (so port 1-3 is hub1 4-6 is hub2 and 7-10 is hub3)
- All the FPGA cards work fine when plugged in individually
- If I plug in cards to one of the usb hubs starting at port 1, and adding cards one at a time, when I reach port 7 the lockup problem begins.
- If I keep it to only 6 cards on port 1-6, it will run perfectly fine
- When I plug into ANY port 7-10 (individually or as a whole) the lockups begin. Which implies it's a problem with the 3rd "internal hub" on those 10port hubs.
- When I plug into port 7-10 and the problem starts. It affects ALL ports on the hub (the whole 10port hub goes nuts until it's been 100% power cycled and re-detected)
- Once the FPGAs are affected by the problem they will sometimes (about 25% chance) refuse to mine, they will detect, and show active, but report 0MH/s. Power cycling the FPGA solves this.
- Both 10port USB hubs exhibit the exact same problem, only allowing up to 6 cards only on the first 6 ports.
- I can run both hubs with 6 cards each (total 12 cards) just fine, and have tested this for 24h to confirm it works
- After that test, I plugged the other 4 cards into a seperate 4port hub (powered brand name hub which I had at home for my PC), and plugged that hub into a different PC altogether, installed fresh software and began mining there. As soon as I did that, the other 12 began locking up again. (which makes no sense because the 2 PCs were 100% seperated).
- The only common thread between the FPGAs at this point that could span multiple PCs like that is the power supply
- The power supply has tested as outputting clean power, the load is divided evenly between it's rails, and I'm running 16 cards on that PSU (the 17th is plugged into it's own supply for dev/testing). Each card draws 20W, of a 750W supply, that's only 320W of draw, evenly distributed, and the PSU ONLY supplies the cards, (and 3 fans which only draw a couple watt each).
- If the problem is the PSU, I don't have another PSU to test it with.

So at this point I'm a little frustrated lol. I spent all weekend fighting with that damn rig, When I had tons of other things I should have gotten done around the house. My wife is pissed at me now because I wasted the whole weeekend on this, and I STILL wasn't able to solve the problem.

We'll get it figured out one way or another, but for the immediate time being I'm at a loss. I'm back at work today so I can poke a bit in the evenings this week. But I have other things I have to do as well. I'll talk to ngzhang and see if he has any suggestions, as well as I'll discuss with TheSeven, and a few others who have worked with it a fair bit. Hopefully I can get a few more suggestions to try.

It's really troubling me why we are having so many problems with these FPGAs when everyone else is having such an easy time of it. Though from what I've seen, other than 1-2 other individuals, we are the only ones with this many cards at once.

If we only had several hundred more bitcoin, I'd almost be tempted to offload the Icarus boards and place an order for something like a Mini-Rig, (or at the very least invest the money in an alternative). The Icarus boards appeared to be the preferred solution, but after the problems we've had with them (for a device that ultimately should be "plug and play") I'm not so sure at this point.

Anyway, I'm done ranting now. If anyone has some suggestions let me know. I'll continue to poke at it over the next couple evenings. But I can't spend a lot of hours on it this week. We are travelling Thursday night this week, and I have things to get done before I leave. I'll be gone until Monday. And I've already spent at least 20+ hours this weekend fighting with these and researching solutions and so on. And other than learning a lot about the problem, I have yet to come up with a solution (short of ordering a bunch of individual "wall wart" power adapters for each card, and dividing them up between the founders in blocks of 4 to reduce the number of cards in one place, which seems to be the root of the problem) But that will still cost money, the cheapest I can find 12V 2A AC Adapters (including shipping) is nearly $10 each. We need 16 of them, which totals $160 (32BTC). We can consider that as a last resort. I still don't see why we can't have 16 of these in a single rig. ngzhang was running far more than that at once during testing with no issues. (and they worked beautifully for us for 2 weeks).

This pained me to read. I hope you get it fixed somehow.

oh it WILL get fixed ;) I don't doubt that. Just frustrating that it's taking this long.

I have tested each individual card and they all work fine on their own. Nothing is wrong with the FPGAs it's something at a higher level. (and resulting from the combination of all of them).

As I said in my last post, worst case, we divide them into smaller rigs of 4 cards each, and divide them amongst the founders. That should get them all mining again as an absolute last resort. But I intend to fix them in their current rig arrangement.

I'll post more updates as I have them.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

GLBSE prediction market launched (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77859.0)

Quick update:

New motion ID #18. This is a short timeframe motion, if you are a shareholder, please check our private motion forum, or log into GLBSE now for full details and vote on this motion.

Also, I'll be paying out this month's dividends later today.

April Dividends paid!

Requested Amount to pay out at GLBSE: 31.89214316
Actual Amount Paid Per Share: 0.00265767

Woohoo! another month of earnings out!

I have a sneaky suspicion that this number will be much larger in the next 2 months ;) (sorry no more details on that just now) lol

Official announcement: http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=76

very unofficial May dividend forecast 0.00280
; )

Lol, you beat me to it Mila! :) yeah sorry I was quite busy yesterday and didn't get to do the dividend calcs. I'll do them now. Will do an update post shortly with the numbers.

Hey, it's that time again. Sorry I'm a day late on this one. Have been pretty busy (especially with the FPGA stuff I've been working on).

Anyway, it's been a bit of a slow month due to the FPGAs being less than 100% all month. But the good news is that due to some financial delays on the sale of the Icarus boards, we have mined with them for the whole month (rather than having downtime for a few weeks). So we still got a decent month in.

Anyway, the funds have been shuffled around already, I'll do the move to GLBSE to pay out the dividends later this weekend. But here's the numbers so far (which are reflected on the finance page now)

Global Balance: 175.40754011
Mining Payout: 0.03496557
Total New Funds: 175.44250568
80% for Growth: 140.354004544
20% for Dividends: 35.088501136
Actual Dividend Fund Balance: 35.08850114? (not sure why this is different... Must have made a typo somewhere)
Actual Growth Fund Balance: 335.80905165
Estimated Dividend Payment Per Share: 0.00292 (only a rough estimate until the money goes through to GLBSE)

I'll post another update once dividends are paid!

I cut off the earnings at 31/5 while you include also matured June mining payout. that should explain the diff between my forecast and your calculations. otherwise hooray for another month dividends \o/

May Dividends paid!

Sorry for the delay people. LOTS going on at the moment and I let the actual payout slip a bit. But they are paid now!

Actual Amount Paid Per Share: 0.00292405 (which is up from last months 0.0026!)

My sneaky suspicion from last month is obviously out there now. Provided the new boards come up in time we should see much higher mining earnings starting later this month. Might not be enough for high dividends end of June, but July should be smoking!

Isn't it a typo of "May Dividends Paid!"? ;)

LMAO... DAMMIT! :) You would think I could get at least one announcement done without a bloody typo ;)

New Motion:
To buy new FPGA boards.

Motion ID is #62
This motion will run for 24hours from now (approximately 11am EST June 16th)
Please log onto GLBSE and vote ASAP.

Please see our private motions forums at http://forum.btcsyn.com for more details/discussion.

more infos please!

Money exchanged out to USD at the peak of the exchange rate last week. We have about $12K USD (a little over). I'm still negotiating how to get this to Enterpoint to pay for the new order. I'm trying to work out a deal with MTGox to send a wire directly to Enterpoint in GBP but that's not finalized yet. The challenge is we can't simply withdraw the cash and wire it directly, because in Canada I would be taxed on that money as if it were "income". So I'm taking a bit of time to sort out the proper payment. (I'd rather loose a few more days or a week of mining than loose $3000 in taxes). I will post more info once I know what's going on. I've set a goal for myself of the end of this month to have SOMETHING figured out, so that money isn't sitting idle too long.

I think you'll run into AML issues trying to wire to someone else's account. Search for the thread on what happened to Goat, and that was even for a related person's account. You best bet is if you can send a Gox code, or find someone to do it otc in exchange for the Gox code or bitcoins.

I'm well aware of AML regulations, I won't be wiring directly to another account. I'm discussing directly with mtgox staff, as well as with Enterpoint to try and work out a suitable arrangement. Obviously a simple mtgox code would be ideal, problem is Enterpoint doesn't currently accept this, and while they are eager to accept something "bitcoin friendly" they are a large business and have many things to consider (and are busy fulfilling orders right now, so not much time to be researching financial options). I'm working on sorting it out in the best way possible. I hope to have some kind of firm answer to post on this one soon. As I said absolute worst case I wire myself the money, then relay it to Enterpoint (less income tax). Not ideal, but a suitable fallback since we did turn a tidy profit on the exchange luckily.

Thanks! :)

12k money sounds good ;)

...thought im not any more sure if the enterpoint-fpgas are the best choice when it comes to ASIC mining. Maybe the syndicate could aquire some shares of a trustworthy, good managed company, investing into ASICS soon? im thinking of BTC-mining or Ognast, e.g.

think about this.
it would diversify bitcoin syndicats assets and lower risk while boosting profitability in the future.

greets

week after week there happens nothing, and this is reflected in the market capitalization of the bitcoin-syndicate.

will you act? i see no growth or anything happening, also you don't communicate with the shareholders.

i will sell my stocks if you don't do better.

does anybody else has a problem trying to put an order on BTCSYN?
it says BTCSYN not found

The same.

Hey guys, to answer your questions, there has been a major announcement put up in the announcements forum on btcsyn.com

Please see it here: http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=84

Thanks.

password It was re-used on 3-4 sites only, and most of those are full financial institutions.

You can't reuse passwords on any sites anymore, 1 password for each site. There was news about 60-70 banks that got hacked a week or two ago, possible password stolen from your bank.

People need to start using google auth or yubikey.

GLBSE needs a better system for notifying people a symbol is locked...

hm, different error message would make more sense. sure

LOL

So.. basically BTC-SYN will be worth 700 canadian dollars in some months. 700/12000 makes 0.053 Dollar per share! woohoo!

when the fuck did you put up this new contract?!! i didnt vote on it and i doubt anybody would!

..explain this to me. 

bitcoin syndicate lost 3000 bitcoin in under a year?! 100% of its value?

...

we would probably be better off with you beeing a player and loosing half the money to a casino..  :-\

i put 50 btc into this, cause you were sooooo promising. should have sold them 1 month ago, when i stressed that nothing is happening.

..reminds me of southpark.

"AAAAAND ITS GONE."

http://orangepunch.ocregister.com/files/2011/11/burning-money.jpg

Gewure: What are you talking about? Your whole post was way off base... See inline responses below:

That's completely incorrect. IF we were to liquidate today, we would be worth 700CAD plus the bitcoins still in our wallet right now. But I don't intend to liquidate. I intend to keep operating, and I am trying to piece together several plans of action which the shareholders can then vote on (one of which may be liquidation, but it will be up to a vote, and honestly I would prefer if we can keep it afloat to recover some of the loss).

Lastly, I'm still trying to recover the funds.

Plus if we continue to operate, in a couple months we could have mined a fair bit still even at 5-6 GHash. The 700CAD we have is enough for one cairsmore, which should soon be at 1GHash, so that's a bit more mining power, and so on. And all that is if none of the other plans pan out (help from mtgox, and help from enterpoint, or recovering the stolen funds).

Umm what the hell? The shareholder loan clause was in the bylaws originally BEFORE the IPO. It was altered only once, which was to EXTEND the terms of the loan (to make our commitment longer). That was the only alteration, and it was done under a passed motion. Specifically Motion ID #81 for which more details can be found here http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22

So if you didn't like those terms, you likely should have read further into the bylaws before investing. Most of our other investors had no problems with those terms.

Also, I'm not sure what that has to do with anything related to the theft of the $12K, or why you're bringing it up now.


I'm not sure where you are getting any of these numbers from. We lost $12K (about 1800BTC roughly, don't have the tx in front of me). not 3000BTC. We never had 3000BTC to loose in the first place. Our stock price fluctuated, and our total stock in circulation might have been at 3000BTC at one time, but that's purely market speculation on our total value. Our actual assets were approximately 1700BTC originally which at the time was worth about $9000, since then we sold the icarus to buy cairsmore, the money from that plus some of our mining profits, totalled up to about 1800btc. Which we sold for $12K USD to use to buy cairsmore boards. Which all said and done would have doubled our mining capacity in mhash/s. But the  $12K was stolen... That's the short version of the syndicate history. I'm not sure where you see loosing 3000BTC anywhere in that.

Overall: There is already enough panic going on around here, not to mention the witch-hunt that has started in the other thread about this theft (apparently I underestimated this communities thirst for blood, that thread has mostly been pure speculation, and aggression toward me personally, without caring about any of the facts, so I refuse to return there, I will however continue to respond here).

Anyway, point being please double-check your facts before throwing additional accusations or statements out there and contributing to the chaos.

Thanks.

You used the same password on 3 different financial sites .....

Where is the police report and can you prove you have actually submitted it ?

The police report was submitted with the Ottawa Police. I have a reciept from them for it's submission on paper. And I have the name/badge number of the officer that took it, along with an open case number with them.

I will not be posting all this info on the public forum just yet until I hear back from the investigating officer, because I don't want to complicate their case by them suddenly getting inundated with calls about it from speculators and such on this forum.

I can however confirm I have sent scanned copies of this reciept to MagicalTux at MtGox, as well as I have sent the details (and will send the scanned copy upon request) to Nefario at GLBSE.

Yes I can prove I've submitted it. And if you want validation, you can ask one of those 2 individuals. Please keep in mind this is a sensitive situation, and until I know what I can and can't do, I'm being careful with things so that I don't potentially negatively impact the investigation.

As for the password repeats... I maintain, while it's "best practice" to use 100% strong passwords, never repeating, and 2 factor everywhere, VERY FEW people even in the security industry actually do this. I can't quote an exact number, but I do know the percentage is extremely small. Hell, we have national banks here in Canada which don't even ALLOW passwords longer than 6 digit numerical passwords... And none of them that I know of support 2 factor auth for anything less than major corporate accounts doing frequent international wire transfers over $10,000. (and at a significant cost). None of the creditcard companies (or banks who offer creditcards) support 2 factor auth for those at all (to my knowledge)

Have I learned from this, and ramped up my security? yes. I now do use 100% strong passwords, with no repeats, and 2 factor where possible. (and I am still rolling passwords for things, it will likely take me weeks to roll them all). All the ones using this compromised password were rolled already, but I have hundreds of passwords that need to be migrated to the new "proper" setup. (and no that number is not an exaggeration, also it's taking a long time because I already did my best to avoid overlap as much as possible in that large volume of passwords).

And yes I did use a secure password facility for most of the "really important" stuff. But this was my personal mtgox account, which usually doesn't handle more than a couple hundred btc at most once every few months for less than 24h at a time. It wasn't worth the effort/cost in my opinion. But under this freak situation I ended up stuck moving large amounts of syndicate money through that account, and it got stuck there for a long period of time due to circumstances beyond my control.

Lastly, this breach impacted me more heavily than any of the shareholders can even understand. Not only did I have more invested in this than anyone else (to my knowledge, if I'm mistaken, then I apologise). But I also have access to many highly sensitive systems, and classified information. (most of which is not protected to the level everyone here suggests I should have protected my personal mtgox account with by the way). And even the remote chance that my accounts were compromised means that my employer now needs to do a full security audit as well. And lastly there is the reputation hit this causes, combined with the added stress of dealing with the lynch mob that has formed here on these forums. (and attacks on my practices which I'm pretty sure at least 50% of the attackers don't "practice what they preach" but since it isn't their accounts under a microscope they can feel comfortable slinging their hypocrisy at me)

Anyway, sorry if I'm getting a bit touchy on this topic, but it feels kinda shitty when you try and really do something positive, and are trying your best, and it not only blows up in your face, but suddenly people are accusing you of being a criminal because of it... And I'm stressed out dealing with this, and dealing with trying to maintain my day job at the same time (which is very demanding as well right now).

I would like to leave this here, as a backup.
It's a copy of your (http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=84) post at btcsyn forum.

Fair enough, thanks. The main reason I only posted in one spot was to try and contain constructive chat to a single spot so I wasn't constantly posting in several spots, but as it seems that's unavoidable... Thanks!

Just tell everyone what's your plan for compensating the external shareholders. If you have already announced such plan yet,  ignore this post.

FYI, I have no shares anymore since long time ago. It's sharp declining price on GLBSE that draws my intention here. As Glasswalker once claimed ,they don't forced anyone into buying their shares. Those words were said during some not very pleasant topic which ask them to compensate the company when their promised hash rate cannot meet. Glasswalker said, those hash rate is not hard promised, the contract said they will only try their best to do so. So after they say those words, I started to sell shares, a large bunch of shares, until I have none of them.

However, I want to say, talkative Glasswalker, you don't have to explain us the details. I don't think the shareholders really care.

Just tell everyone what's your plan for compensating the external shareholders, if you cannot find the money back with the help of police. those shares  You executive team get by providing several months of hashrate but no firm hardware is really cheap in the accounting standard, which imply you should do good job to the company and create value, not let the money stolen.

Even if you can get a proof from the police that the money is not stolen by yourself or other executive team, this "if" cannot make an excuse for you not to take responsibility after this disaster.

Seek a loan from your relatives and friends or local bank or credit card, or simply withdraw some money from your bank account. Anyway, just make sure that the "company" don't have to pay the theft money.

Give back the company dollars.

There is not much to report here at this point. I have discussed further with MTGox, who *may* be offering a loan of some sorts, but they were very unclear and MagicalTux is hard to get in contact with sometimes (I can get him to answer vaguely, but when I ask for more details, he never responds).

As for reimbursing the shareholders. Here is the hard truth, some people may not like it, but that's how it is:

I'm doing my best to rebuild the syndicate. I want to continue operation, meaning shares owned will be shares in the syndicate still. If/Once we can rebuild into something equalling what it was, then your shares will be worth what they were before this incident. And who knows, likely more. But this has been a major setback. This loss is very large for us, and it means that we won't be likely hitting our initial forecasted growth rate.

Regardless of what happens, I'm trying my best to continue operation. I'm not simply folding up shop and walking away.

THAT is how I plan on "compensating" the shareholders. Not by doing something extra to give money back or taking out loans in my own name, or anything along those lines. I am doing what I can within reason to rebuild.

Am I responsible for reimbursing the company for the money lost? no I'm not. And I won't be. I don't have that much cash on hand (hell I'm tight for cash myself at the moment). And I highly doubt anyone will be giving me a loan (even if I was willing to incur that extra liability on my own to rebuild, which I'm not).

There is a reason that in the real world people adopt the incorporation model. It's called protection from liability for the executives/directors. The CEO of a real corporation is not responsible for personally paying back his shareholders in the event there are major losses. The shareholders can vote to dismiss the CEO and put a new one in his place, and if for example the CEO is found guilty of actual fraud (embezzlement, stealing from the company and so on) then there can be criminal charges in place, and perhaps some small form of restitution required to be paid. But under no circumstances in the real world is the CEO responsible for personally injecting funds into the business...

In this case, a terrible thing has happened. We had a large amount of money stolen from us. The person who is responsible is the one who stole it. And to a small degree Enterpoint/MtGox due to the delays. But as I said before already, I stand by my decisions. I didn't do anything WRONG here. There were choices that I could have done differently had I had different information at my disposal at the time (and it's easy to look back and say oh you should have done this instead of that, with the info we have now in hindsight) but in the end. I stand by my decisions, stand by the fact I did nothing wrong, and so I am not responsible for putting $12K back into the syndicate.

I am doing my job to try and rebuild, come up with a plan to continue operation, and hopefully recover the funds if possible.

So far not much progress on support from MtGox, I still have a week or two to wait for an answer from Enterpoint. And I am exploring some other options.

In the meantime I have not heard from law enforcement yet. I was told it could be a number of weeks before they contact me. I will follow up with them in another week or two to check in on status.

I have received the evidence packet from mtgox, and I am reviewing it. If I find anything of use (that wouldn't be damaging to the case to publish) I will post it up.

Until something changes, we will continue mining with the founders rigs, and working towards a plan of action. At that time I will hold a series of motions to decide on a final course of action based on the available options. Once the course of action is chosen by motion. Trading will be un-frozen at glbse.

Again, I'm sorry if this goes against what some people feel they are entitled to. But this is just how it is.

I will post up more information once I have more to post. As I said before, it will be a bit of a long haul here, Police are slow to move on anything, everything else will take weeks at least, and so expect some silence, before I have the information available to me to come up with some meaningful ideas to put forth to a vote.

Thanks for your patience, understanding, and support (for those of you giving any/all of the above)

I hold a few shares of BTCSYN, was looking at the old motions and then wondering at the recent buy/sell activity. Funnily, I wasn't too happy with the liquidate current FPGAs motion when I read it. Turns out that is the source of the stolen funds. May I ask what the reasoning was behind that move? The Cairnsmore1 devices don't even have a full working bitstream yet. Yes I know you can't rewind, but the whole maneuver there is a bit puzzling without some explanation of the reasoning involved.

Glasswalker continuing to work to make BTCSYN whole (by this I mean continuing to operate with the reduced resources) and also posting a copy of the police report in a timely fashion (blacking out anything sensitive) would help reduce the fallout from this.









-Crosspost from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=92142.msg1036967#msg1036967

Hey, to clarify the decision process there in point form (I believe most of this was clarified in either the discussion about, or the actual motion thread itself, but I may be wrong):
- I was working closely with Enterpoint from before their release
- I was working on a bitstream for their boards which should perform very well
- I was the FIRST person not from Enterpoint to have my hands on a cairnsmore board for development (board serial #0001, first one off the lines). I was well aware of the hardware state, and it's capabilities.
- I was also well aware of their capabilities to release a very high power bitstream
- The hardware was designed to be 100% compatible with an out of the box icarus bitstream, but with twice the FPGA chips it would be twice as powerful as an icarus with no bitstream needed
- Unfortunately what we didn't know when making the decision was a small error was made (swapping the tx/rx pins between first and second fpga for each icarus chain) which made it incompatible.
- I'm also the one who developed the current bitstream for the cairnsmore which is a port of the icarus bitstream (which is FAR more difficult than you would think).
- I'm also currently working on a "fixed" version of the icarus port, in addition to a new completely unique bitstream for the cairnsmore (in parallel to the same effort going on at Enterpoint).
- Regardless, we were having major stability issues with our Icarus boards. Mostly due to the flaky usb chip used by ngzhang (which he admitted he would be replacing in the next gen).
- The cairnsmore boards not only had a nicer "industry standard" FTDI chip, but it was a high end, and capable chip. In addition to their Controller FPGA, and some infrastructure they added, their boards were far superior for stability.
- The cairnsmore boards carry a warranty far superior to Icarus.
- Once the cairnsmore attains it's "potential". It will be at LEAST equal to 2x an icarus, but with the strong suspicion that it will be more like 3x an icarus board in the end
- With this all said, the cairnsmore board is overall far superior to the icarus boards. Even at full retail of $950 USD (compared to over $500 USD per icarus)
- We were only getting about 75% yield out of the icarus due to stability and other issues
- Add in the short term discount to $640 on the cairnsmore boards
- Also consider that for a very short window due to unavailability of icarus, and no news on lancelot, there was a spike in the value of an icarus board due to supply/demand
- Because of all the above factors, we were able to offload our icarus boards for what we paid for them, redirect that money into almost 50% discounted cairnsmore.
- With those things considered, if we had NOT had the money stolen, we would have at LEAST seen a match in hashing power during the development phase while working with a sub-par bitstream
- Once a "Real" bitstream was released, we would see at LEAST double the hashing performance we had before, if not triple the hashing power on the best case.
- I think with that information available, the limited risk at the time (I could not have forseen someone hacking the account and stealing the money). It was a no-brainer move.
- We see 1 month of downtime, to double/triple our returns.

That's the reasoning that went into it. So again, at the time, with the information available, it was an extremely smart move. (unfortunately with the money being stolen any potential benefit has been shot to hell)


As for this, I am currently working to make BTCSYN whole. As you say by continuing to operate with the reduced resources, and seeking other means to improve our position to at the very least something resembling where we started out before the liquidation. Best case, we recover the funds, and can get back on track with just the loss of time, but that's a fairly optimistic view at this time.

As for releasing a copy of the police report. I believe I clarified this in one of my posts on one of the threads here but:
- I went to the police station and filed a police report via their "standard" procedure.
- The proof I got from this is a reciept for the police report, bearing the officers name and badge number which took the report, and a case number for the case we now have open.
- I did NOT get a full paper copy of the report.
- I asked if I could get one, they told me they cannot provide that at this time, First it needs to go to an investigator, and later a full report will be produced. At that time I can request a copy for a fee.
- I have not been contacted by them yet to follow up. The officer who took the report told me that it would be going to either Fraud or CyberCrime (or a joint effort between them). And it may be "several weeks" before I hear anything more.
- Unfortunately since there are only 2 data points on the reciept, both of which are potentially sensitive, Blacking those out would kind of defeat the purpose.
- I don't want to release that reciept to the general public, because I don't know if that would negatively impact the investigation (ie hordes of people inundate the officer with questions, harassment, or any other issues, who knows how it could affect it).
- So until I'm contacted by the investigator, and I am told it is safe to release it (and what I can release) I can't do that.
- What I HAVE done, is release a full scan of this reciept to MagicalTux at MTGox, as well as to Nefario at GLBSE. They are both aware of the situation, and the full details, and they have both offered their support in trying to resolve it.
- If you wish to verify that the report is legit, I suggest you contact one of those 2 individuals (and hopefully they are willing to verify for you).

I hope all this info helps clarify the situation for you, and hopefully re-instates some form of trust in me during this difficult process.

Thanks for your understanding.

I completely understand that it will take some time to get an actual police report, in no way did I mean release proof immediately. IMO, when you can get a copy post it on the BTCSYN forum and a link to the post here.

Hearing how closely you were working with Enterpoint I can see why you felt confident swapping hardware out. Shame they were not able to accept your payment in bitcoins in a reasonable timeframe.

Just a quick update. Still nothing from the police, and I did get the MTGOX Evidence packet, it didn't really tell me anything new other than verify that in the logs the attack came in the stated number of attempts over a couple days. It will be more useful to provide to the police to simplify their job (and hopefully get more traction from them). Also the previous login attempts did come from random IP addresses all over the place.

Interesting enough, I got an email from mtgox yesterday offering me a free yubikey (due to the "rash of security and hacking issues lately") whatever that means. Seemed to be a general form letter they sent out to several customers, and not directly related to the syndicate. Too bad they didn't offer that a month ago...

Anyway, that aside, I'm working on a couple other angles that may result in returning some of the mining power we lost. I don't want to get people's hopes up, so I won't go into detail, but if it pans out it won't quite be back to full strength, but it will be a good boost in the right direction.

Thanks again for your patience.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=95738.0;topicseen
another reused password leads to pwned gox account.

https://mtgox.com/press_release_20120605.html
gox supported google authenticator as early as june 05
hindsight 20/20

Any status updates? Dividends from remaining hashing power? Properly redacted police report regarding MTGox theft?

the statistics and financial pages are both up & running. at the time of writing there were about 155 + 7.5 btc in the books
7.5 for dividends where the growth fund 80 % of income were already accounted
and 155 btc growth + dividends.
not really sure how to account for the funds gone with the gox.

Thanks for updating Mila. :)

To kick in what info I have at this point (which isn't really anything new from previous updates):

No real updates as of yet, as per the previous posts:
- Still waiting on law enforcement. I'll try following up with them this week to check on status. (they told me it could be "several weeks" when I filed the report)
- As for dividends I have been holding off until we have a couple courses of action decided on, and a vote carried out.
- Currently none of the possible "plans" I had come up with have finished unfolding yet to a point that I can present them.

The plans/ideas I've come up with so far are/were:
- MTGox helping us out, turns out that is a loan in my name, requiring personal guarantee... Can't do that one
- Enterpoint helping us with some hash-sharing lease on hardware of some kind. Yohan at enterpoint has been very busy so no traction yet
- Additional investment as proposed by Mila. I have a few investors that might be interested, still pursuing this one
- Adding to my shareholder loan in the form of a few FPGA mining boards of my own, to boost production for a while as we recover
- Using the remaining funds we have (minus dividends, to be voted of course) to buy more mining gear

So through any combination of the above, we'll get our operation back up and running, but it's taking time to explore all the options. And form a specific set of "options" which can be voted on in a motion.

Right now I've been busting my ass in most of my spare time developing the bitstreams for the Enterpoint Cairnsmore1 boards, trying to get it working fast and stable. Which may result in me getting a bit of compensation in the form of donations in BTC, and possibly some free boards. Which is where the "increase shareholder loan" option above comes from. I'm in no position right now to buy gear to add in, but if I can aquire some via this work, I'll loan some additional hashing power in.

As always, I'll post more when I have something concrete. But hopefully this update helps clear things up so far.

Thanks for your patience.

objection. funds lost in the gox event did not burn but exist and are technically spendable
or did I miss any small print?

Unless the transaction is to an address nobody has the private key for, that's basically the same as burning a pile of money.

Is the police report available to you yet, Glasswalker? It's getting close to the two month point. No idea about your area but it's usually possible to get a self copy of a reported incident fairly quickly. Police know these are important for insurance purposes and such.

Not yet, I'm hoping to have this, and some other info available next week sometime. If all goes well I'll have a large update in the next 1-2 weeks, allowing us to vote on a course of action and unlock the GLBSE fund for trading. (and resume operation).

Unfortunately my day job exploded (as any of you following my FPGA dev exploits in the mining hardware forum will know) and I've had to put all bitcoin related stuff to the side for the past week or so, and the next upcoming week (possibly). I've been working from 8am to 1-2pm each day, with some extremely tight deadlines, so I haven't had the time or energy to wrap this stuff up.

But if all goes well, and a few other outside pieces fall into place, I should have everything I need to propose a plan, and give a general update so that we can get back to "business as usual". It won't be what we had before, nothing (short of catching the thief) will fix that, but we can at least begin rebuilding in a reasonable way, with the hope of getting back to our former glory in a reasonable timeframe.

Thanks for your patience.

transfers work fine. no fees atm for otc trades (over the counter)
syndic has 189 global balance accounted as 7.49 in dividend fund
leaving 181.5 to be split 145.2 growth fund 36.3 dividend fund
dividend fund june-august total 43.79 btc 0.003649 per share
updated balance 'growth fund' 145.2
updated 'global balance' 145.2
updated balance 'dividend fund' 0
reset mining clock (for coins mined after current block) / current block 195816
what about voting for that? a

Glasswalker have posted in the ASICMINER thread. He said something about how to know whether an investor hold enough shares to be a board member.

Glasswalker, could you disclose how many shares have you invested? if it is large amount of money, can you explain where did you get the money? I remember that you said didn't have any savings to compensate the BTCSYN investors( of course I know, you think that you should not be blamed  for the loss while you don't use 2fa on mtgox, and you still have not show us the police report by now.)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.msg1143278#msg1143278

The post is :

I could say "It's none of your bloody business" or "Do you mind disclosing exactly how many shares you have in BTCSYN that justify you causing such a stink over this?" But no, I'm not that much of an ass... So...

To answer your question: I own exactly 163 shares in ASICMINER right now. I spent all of about 10BTC in total on those shares, (I was able to do a bit of back and forth trading during the volatility in their share price). I've been monitoring all the ASIC mining threads because I'm fairly heavily invested in FPGA mining (via the syndicate, and via my work with Enterpoint). I thought that ASICMINER was an option that may pan out, so throwing a couple BTC at it might help me with a bit of extra income in the long run. I probably should have cashed those BTC out to pay my bills with, or you know... Buy groceries... But it was already available to me in BTC, and I thought this might help me in the next couple months if it pans out.

I'm sorry if what I spend my personal money on isn't satisfactory to you.

As to where I got the money? I have a dev board (now a couple) from Enterpoint because I'm writing their bitstreams for them (as I've shared on here several times). That dev board has been mining on and off at various times (up until very recently at a significantly reduced rate). And so I earned up a bit of cash. I had earned like 4BTC via that method over the past several months. I also had a 1-2 BTC left in my GLBSE account that it made no sense to withdraw from previous dividends. Then I recently won (split between 3 people) a bitcoin bounty for releasing the bitstream for the Enterpoint FPGA solutions, which I threw in a couple more BTC from. (the rest of which was split between the 55BTC I paid back into the syndicate, and the remainder I am holding onto for personal use because I put HUNDREDS of hours into that project, I think I earned it).

If you're done getting on my case about this, I'm going to get back to being busy as hell at work, and in what little spare time I have working on trying to get the syndicate back off the ground and operating again.

Also, as I mentioned, the police report wasn't available to me until VERY recently, I'm now simply strapped for time to go get a hard copy to upload for everyone's review. I'll be doing that shortly.

This accusational suspicion bullshit is getting really old, normally I don't let crap like this get to me, but this situation, and the reaction of some people to the situation have really worn me thin. I realize so far it's been a select few individuals who have pulled this crap, and so I'm pushing on to rebuild the syndicate into something worthwhile because I believe in it. (and to help the majority of the shareholders who have been supportive through this situation).  But let me say, for those of you who can't just let this drop and move on with life... That you're all lucky I didn't just liquidate the syndicate immediately after this happened, and call it quits, saving myself much time/energy and pain. Because it was well within my power to do so. But no, I wanted to push on, and rebuild. And I'm doing my best. I'm sorry if that's not good enough for you.

Thanks for putting me in a bad mood for the remainder of this already hectic day with this post. I appreciate it.

zero.

I questioned your honesty in my mind after some of your post. Of course, at that time I had no solid evidence. I just feel your personality is really like someones I saw in the financial history. And then sold all the shares quietly. Later, when I nearly forget about BTCSYN, a friend informed me that shit happened.

It's a public company. People who have no investment in pirate40 talk about pirate40. I talk about BTCSYN. If you don't like it, next time you just raise money from your friends and make it a private company. I manage a bitcoin investment fund for friends, and I don't make it public. So that I can scam the money without any question been raised publicly ;D ;D ;D



You're really kindhearted, but I bet that lots of people's mood was worse recently.  why not have a try on this?
http://motivatethyself.com/10-tips-to-help-you-keep-a-smile-on-your-face/

Lol, fair enough. in fairness you didn't ruin my entire day, I was only grumpy for an hour or so.

It's perfectly fair for you to comment as a third party, and hearing you have zero shares helps put that into context. Though I have been a bit on edge based on the amount of crap flying around (when I'm already coping with personal crap on the side and so on, example, my wife and I were hoping to take a trip for our 10th wedding anniversary, but we had to cancel it due to money being too tight, we scaled back to a roadtrip in the USA, which ALSO ended up being too expensive with money being tight. So we stayed home and went out for a cheap dinner...)

It's tough when you're trying to do something positive, it blows up, and then you not only have to deal with the repricussions, but also have everyone accusing you of being a criminal, it's not fun :)

Anyway, I digress... I'll stop snapping at you now. (and yes you have a valid point, I shouldn't be trading publicly if I don't want to have to deal with the downsides of public opinion).

An on another note.

Incoming announcement post in 3... 2... 1...

Ok, so it's been a long haul. But I've finally got the pieces in place (minus one, which I'll mention below) to get our plans of action to carry forward.

First a brief summary after the theft:

The police responded, I worked with the investigator, to explore all the leads I had dug up, and any other potential options he could think of. He was surprisingly knowledgeable about bitcoin, and aware of the situation quite well. Unfortunately because the money is still sitting in one wallet, it's un-traceable at this time. IF further useful evidence presents itself, and he'll consider acting at that time. The case is now essentially in their cold-case files, and will be re-opened if we call them with further evidence.

I'll be getting a hard copy of the full police report and posting it up for everyone to see shortly. (right now I'm very strapped for time, and so I don't have time to go down to the police station and wait around for paperwork to get done, as I have to go down in person, fill out a formal information request form, and pay a fee for it). But that will happen soon.

In addition, I've re-deposited the bitcoins that I had (rather the Canadian Dollars I had, converted back to bitcoins minus exchange fees and such). So that explains the random transaction for like 55BTC you saw. (I withheld enough CAD$ to pay the fee to the police for the hard copy of the police report).

So basically nothing at MTGox has turned up any real leads, the police are no longer investigating, and the money is basically non-recoverable (unless we get lucky in the future and they move it in a traceable way).

Also to touch on current hashrates, we're doing our best. Several of the founders rigs are experiencing hardware problems now, and I have not had time to tackle it. I expect we will be able to resolve this soon. Until then we've been doing our best to maintain as much hashing power as possible.

Now, onto the plan(s) of action:

I propose the following options going forward, I've put a lot of thought into these, and hope that collectively this presents good options with the interests of the shareholders in mind, and a wide spectrum of available actions to choose from.

Option 1 (Rebuild FPGA):
I've been doing much work with Enterpoint (I'm essentially the lead developer on their bitstreams for their boards right now). As such they are willing to do 2 things for us:
- Still give us a discounted price from the now full retail price (current retail on their boards is 600GBP, we get them for 400GBP)
- Give us 4 boards on a "Mining Lease". Which means that 80% of those boards hash power goes in to paying off their purchase price (at 400GBP). (after electricity/overhead costs)
- Once the boards have been paid off, we own them in full.
Currently the Enterpoint Cairnsmore1 board is pulling about 800-820Mhash on average. I expect the bitstream to advance in the next little bit to boost that as high as 1Ghash - 1.2Ghash.
If we redirect 100% of our current funds (which is what I'm proposing here) into the boards, that gives us approximately 1650GBP (at current exchange) which should be enough to cover 4 boards purchased, plus shipping, and any supporting parts needed. This combined with the 4 leased boards means an instant jump of 6.4Ghash in mining power (note the icarus boards we sold off were rated for a max of 6.6Ghash). Of which for the first little bit we're paying off 4 of the boards. But consider there is a high chance that hashrate will increase "for free" to be 8Ghash - 9.6Ghash in the near future.
Overall this gets us back to where we were in hashing power. But we lost about 3 months of FPGA hashing during that time. So the net effect of the theft was basically 3 months of FPGA hashing. Which isn't bad all things considered. On the other hand the Opportunity Loss was still high, considering where bitcoin value went, and how many enterpoint boards we could have had, but we have no control over that now, so this I think is one of the best options. Also to consider is Enterpoint are highly experienced and have shown good business practices. They already have a Gen2 FPGA product on the horizon, and a likely ASIC product. Aligning ourselves with them now, gives us the ability to take advantage of this relationship going forward. With this option we would resume normal dividend payments at an 80/20 split as before, after the initial "rebuild" purchase of hardware has completed.

Option 2 (Rebuild ASIC):
It has been suggested (by mila) that we buy into ASIC boards from BFL at this time. This idea can't be discounted fully. BFL has a REALLY bad track record, they don't deliver on time, and rarely meet their projected performance goals. Their business practices are questionable and best, and so on. We dealt with them once, and they nearly screwed us out of our money. But that said, they did EVENTUALLY deliver on the singles, and the mini-rigs. And the mini-rigs are much closer to their advertised specs than the singles were. They might have been very late, but they did in fact deliver. So now we're posed with the dilemma, they announced their ASIC products. Which are FAR faster hashrate per dollar than the current FPGA offering. And better power efficiency. IF they deliver as promised, and on-time, these are going to be a game changer for mining. I don't think they will destroy the profitability of FPGA mining for quite some time, but GPU mining will become un-profitable overnight. So that said, we have the option of taking all our current money and investing it into ASIC boards from BFL.
The risk here, is that we invest, and they take months to deliver like last time, and we're still left "out in the cold" for some time. Or that their hardware doesn't live up to the offered specs. Also another big risk, is that with the major surge in hash power, there is a risk that the bitcoin mining protocol could change (even slightly) to protect from possible attacks (with easily available cheap hash power). If that happens, the ASICs on the market get invalidated. If this change is going to happen, it would need to happen before ASICs take over the network, as very few running ASIC miners would invalidate their own hardware, so the whole ASIC movement COULD fail within months of it's takeoff... That's another risk we need to consider here. But the potential hashrate gains are high if it all works out well.
- We take out 250BTC we have now and put it towards ASICs from BFL.
- The "Jalapeno" works out to be 23.5Mhash/$
- The "SC Single" works out to be 30.8Mhash/$
- Our current funds at approximate exchange rate of $10/BTC is $2,500 USD
- for this money, including shipping, we can get one "SC Single" and approximately 7 of the "Jalapeno" models.
- This equates to a total (advertised) hash rate of 64.5GHash/s
This option works for me too, it has a much higher potential gain, but with a higher risk profile. The question is, do we want to support BFL? And do we want to accept the potential wait until sometime in the newyear to get the product? And the risk it may not pan out as expected for one reason or another?
With this option we would resume normal dividend payments at an 80/20 split as before, after the initial "rebuild" purchase of hardware has completed.

Option 3 (Rebuild Hedge Our Bets)
A Combo of option 1/2 I won't go into full detail, but basically we buy 2 enterpoint boards, do the hardware lease, and throw whatever funds we have left at "Jalapeno" boards from BFL. With this option we would resume normal dividend payments at an 80/20 split as before, after the initial "rebuild" purchase of hardware has completed.

Option 4 (Wait it out, with Lease & 50/50 split)
Due to the upcoming "ASIC Revolution" for bitcoin mining, combined with the reward drop in December. There is a lot of uncertainty ahead. And we are still recovering from a major blow. It may be wise in our position to simply wait, gather assets, and see how things unfold. Then we can decide what to do once the dust settles. There is risk in this option too, if bitcoin value crashes hard, we loose most of our value. But in general I think bitcoin itself will be fine, and not having invested in any particular solution means once the dust settles we can make an informed decision (which may be to simple close up shop at that time if the business is no longer viable in the new "state" of things). If we hold onto our liquid assets until the new-year, we can see the outcome of the ASIC revolution and the reward drop, and decide what to do then. But since the hardware lease from Enterpoint is essentially "Free" we can still take advantage of that at this point, and get that 20% boost in mining power from those 4 boards, with the boards paying themselves off. Once paid off this gives us another 3.6Ghash - 4.8Ghash of mining power until we decide what to do with our gathered assets. If this option is chosen we would continue with a 50/50 split, 50% of income paid to dividends, 50% to savings until the newyear. At our current hashrate I expect we would gain another 200BTC by the end of the year approximately (depending on how the difficulty goes, and how fast we pay off the leased boards). So at the "decision point" (accounting for dividends) we would have around 200BTC to decide what to do with (estimated).

Option 5 (Wait it out 50/50 split)
This one is just pure wait. Don't do the lease, minimize all risk, and just sit on what we have until Jan 1 2013. Then decide what to do at that time. Same 50/50 split as proposed in Option3

Option 6 (Close up shop)
This last option isn't the one I want to take personally, but I have to present it for the shareholders to consider.
Basically we just cut our losses, pay out 100% of the current liquid assets to dividends, and cease operations.
With the current assets this would mean 0.02BTC roughly per share in dividends. Nowhere near the amount invested, but considering the previous dividends, that does put us in a position to be better than the current share price at least, and not a 100% loss. I don't personally like this option, but if that's what the shareholders decide I'll support it.

Ok, so those are the options I'd like to present. My plan is this:
Put up 6 different motions all at once. All with 7 day timeframes.
I will be withholding my votes. I will not vote on these motions. I will hold my vote back as a swing vote.
Anyone can vote for/against one or more option you wish to pass/fail.
If more than one pass, then provided one of them has a lead over all other of at least 10% measured using the pass margin, that one is the winning option
If no such option presents itself, I will use my remaining share's voting power to make a final decision between all the passed motions.
When I say the 10% is measured by pass margin, I mean if 20% vote no on option1 and 30% vote yes (of total volume of shares) that gives a pass margin of 10% of total share volume. If option 2 gets 30% no, and 60% yes of total share volume, then it has 30% pass margin of total share volume, meaning it has a lead over option 1 of 20%.

Once this vote is concluded, I will ask Nefario to unlock all trading on GLBSE so that trades can commence, and we can then see what happens to our share price. (based on people making informed trades knowing our actual business plan going forward). And from that point forward, we would resume operation and paying dividends as per the chosen option.

The motions for these are going live in the next couple hours. I'll post back with confirmation and motion IDs in the Motions thread once they are up.

There are a few other options/actions we can take as well, but they will be more applicable once we have resumed operation in one form or another (ie extending further investment opportunities and so on). We can explore those options once one of the above choices is chosen, and we have gotten things rolling again. (or not if option 6 is chosen).

Thanks for all your patience and support during this trying time, Based on the outcome of this next decision, we will move forward, and past this difficult incident in our history.

Please see the original post on our internal forums: http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=106

Motion Announcement:

Multiple Choice Motion. As per Announcement Post at http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=106
These motions are up for 7 days. This is an important vote, deciding the future of BTCSYN, PLEASE if you own shares VOTE on these.
They should expire at approximately 10PM Sept 11th 2012 EST.

Option 1 (Rebuild FPGA):
Motion ID: 116

Option 2 (Rebuild ASIC):
Motion ID: 117

Option 3 (Rebuild Hedge Our Bets)
Motion ID: 118

Option 4 (Wait it out, with Lease & 50/50 split)
Motion ID: 119

Option 5 (Wait it out 50/50 split)
Motion ID: 120

Option 6 (Close up shop)
Motion ID: 121

As per instructions in the announcement thread:
- I will be withholding my votes. I will not vote on these motions. I will hold my vote back as a swing vote.
- Anyone can vote for/against one or more option you wish to pass/fail.
- If more than one pass, then provided one of them has a lead over all other of at least 10% measured using the pass margin, that one is the winning option
- If no such option presents itself, I will use my remaining share's voting power to make a final decision between all the passed motions.

When I say the 10% is measured by pass margin, I mean if 20% vote no on option1 and 30% vote yes (of total volume of shares) that gives a pass margin of 10% of total share volume. If option 2 gets 30% no, and 60% yes of total share volume, then it has 30% pass margin of total share volume, meaning it has a lead over option 1 of 20%.

Original post: http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=107

seems like a major announcement. bump.

Crosspost from our internal forums (thread here: http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=107&p=1372#p1372)

The motions have finally closed!

Here are the results:

116 (Option 1 Rebuild FPGA)
PASS
Total Votes: 2994
Yea Votes: 2749
Nay Votes: 245
Pass Margin Absolute: 2504
Pass Margin % Volume: 20.8%
Pass Margin % Voted: 83.6%

117 (Option 2 Rebuild ASIC)
PASS
Total Votes: 2702
Yea Votes: 1573
Nay Votes: 1129
Pass Margin Absolute: 444
Pass Margin % Volume: 3.7%
Pass Margin % Voted: 16%

118 (Option 3 Rebuild Hedge)
FAIL
Total Votes: 2262
Yea Votes: 321
Nay Votes: 1941
Pass Margin Absolute: NA
Pass Margin % Volume: NA
Pass Margin % Voted: NA

119 (Option 4 Wait it out with lease & 50/50)
PASS
Total Votes: 2251
Yea Votes: 1617
Nay Votes: 634
Pass Margin Absolute: 983
Pass Margin % Volume: 8.1%
Pass Margin % Voted: 43.6%

120 (Option 5 Wait it out, with 50/50)
FAIL
Total Votes: 2160
Yea Votes: 58
Nay Votes: 2102
Pass Margin Absolute: NA
Pass Margin % Volume: NA
Pass Margin % Voted: NA

121 (Option 6 Close up shop)
FAIL
Total Votes: 4558
Yea Votes: 190
Nay Votes: 4368
Pass Margin Absolute: NA
Pass Margin % Volume: NA
Pass Margin % Voted: NA

FINAL CONCLUSION:
What I can conclude from these results are several things:
- I'm very happy to see that of every vote, the one our shareholders felt the STRONGEST about was option 6. And they all CLEARLY did not want to close up the syndicate.
- There was interest in the ASIC option and FPGA option (but not hedging, which was interesting).
- There was some interest in waiting as well.
- There was a clear winner. Meaning I did NOT need to exercise my voting power at all.
- Most (all?) the founders did not exercise their votes either. Meaning this was a 100% community shareholder decision.
- The clear winner was Option #1. (Rebuilding Via FPGAs). It has more than 12% lead over the other options in terms of pass margin by total volume.

Thank you all for your patience, and support through this process. I'm extremely happy to see this coming to it's "conclusion" and allowing us to move on.

I'll be making an official "announcement" post shortly outlining exactly what's coming next.

Once that post is live, I'll ask Nefario to unlock trading on our asset.

Rebuilding Announcement Post (cross post from our forum at http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=129)

Ok, the motion is complete, and here is the plan of action based on the results of the motion (for the details of the motion results, see the motions forum, and my post of the results):

#1a - I'll contact Enterpoint and finalize negotiation for the hardware purchase.

#1b - (at the same time) - I'll withdraw our full balance to $CAD (the amount is smaller this time than last time, so I don't have the same tax concerns). And this way there is less exchange risk like last time.

#2 - Once the negotiation is finished, and the money is in my account. I'll wire it directly to Enterpoint.
(I will provide a record of how many $CAD I got out, and what exchange rate, and wire fee was and so on).

#3 - Any remaining funds will either be used for supporting bits needed to get the boards hashing, OR re-deposited (if it's excessive) to the syndicate.

#4 - We will await shipping of the hardware

#5 - I'll get it all operational and hashing

#6 - On the next "dividend payment time" that comes up (beginning of the month) following hashing beginning. We'll resume our 80/20% dividend split

#7 - IMPORTANT Until the lease from enterpoint is paid off, our full 80% growth fund will be going towards paying this off. This is to mitigate risk from the liability of the lease.

#8 - Back to business as usual after that

Any questions?

I have already emailed Enterpoint to finalize negotiations. I expect the whole forex/wire process to take about a week. Once Enterpoint have received funds I expect boards to be here within another 1 week. That means by the 1st of Oct, we should have boards here, ready to hash.

It's not easy, but Glasswalker finally start to get up again from the disaster.

Cross post from our forums at: http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=129&p=2546#p2546

Quick update. Wire is sent, boards are bought and paid for. And the money wasn't stolen this time! Woohoo! (yeah I know, I went there...)   ::)

Anyway, the boards are paid for, once they arrive we will begin the lease period. We will owe Enterpoint 1480GBP for the leased boards. This will eat up 100% of our "Growth" fund until the debt is paid. Which shouldn't take too long.

So that means there are 8 shiny new Cairnsmore1 Boards being shipped from Enterpoint ASAP to begin mining for the syndicate.

I'll post another update once they arrive.

After converting at the canadian exchange (virtex canada) and paying their fees (and digging fairly deep into the market depth), and then paying the fees to withdraw it, exchanging it at my bank and sending the wires (paying the bank their fees/commission on the exchange of course) and so on. We have paid for the boards, and there is $264.42 CAD remaining. Which I will use to pay for any duties/fees to recieve the package when it arrives, and any bits and such I need to get them mining (cables, psu, fans, whatever).

If there is leftover after that's all done, I'll re-deposit it as BTC.

Also one more update. I just heard from Nefario. Trading has been re-opened on GLBSE!

This means the BTCSYN asset is now open for all trading again on the market!

can't trade syndicate on glbse

can't trade syndicate on glbse

Ugh, ok I'll alert Nefario that it's not working still...

Thanks for the heads up!

Still no trading.

Nefario not really responsive these days..weeks...

Yeah I've emailed him again, I have him on IM as well I'll try and pin him down that way. Unfortunately there isn't much I can do directly until he takes a look.

I'll post an update once I have an actual response.

please post an update, so far the first entry under op shows status as not tradeable

Ok, so GLBSE is now gone... This has a fairly major impact on BTCSYN.

- GLBSE is now gone. Permanently.
- We have no way currently to track our shareholders, pay dividends, or anything else for that matter.
- Nefario is proposing to provide a list of shareholders. But only if those shareholders "claim" their info
- In order to make a "claim" you need to provide nefario with full AML Documents. Full real identity, real name, address, government photo identification, passports and so on.
- The suspicion from GLBSE shareholders (Who disagree with Nefario) is that this info is being gathered as part of a large SEC investigation in order to prosecute the individuals they gather info on.
- Right now a lot of rumor/speculation, but the reality is we are in complete limbo right now, until people decide to go through the "claim" process or not.
- If nobody claims, then BTCSYN is essentially forcefully dissolved. We have no way to verify shareholders. We are 100% at the mercy of nefario.
- Even IF everyone claims. Managing it will be a nightmare. And I don't have the time to deal with it. I barely have the time to keep our miners maintained right now.
- We would need the ability to very quickly move to another trading platform (That isn't absurd). And all this hinges on people making claims (and exposing themselves to possible prosecution/legal action)

Please see this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=115669.0 for more details.

Not sure what we're going to do at this point. Just posting this to make sure everyone is aware of what's going on.

I don't believe that anything of what has happened would finish your obligations to your shareholders just like that. We invested in the syndicate because you had so many projects, and was so prepared to support bitcoin economy, with so many crazy projects... Hell, you was even prepared for Zombie apocalypses!

Sadly, against my will, I still have some shares on the syndicate, and I believe that if it's going to be closed down, it has to be done on the right way, making all effort possible to recover the list of shareholders, and paying whatever remains after a liquidation to them.

Unless you have info that I haven't seen, there has only been speculation that AML documents will be required.

And I intend to do what I can. My point is currently continuing normal operation with a manual list of shareholders MAY be impossible with the other constraints in place. In which case I would be forced to move the shares to another exchange of some kind (that doesn't require rediculous fees or requirements to operate) OR I would need to close down operation under the terms of the bylaws.

But the main problem here which I don't think you're grasping is that I CANNOT do anything to recover the list of shareholders. It's all at the mercy of Nefario. It's up to the individual shareholders to contact him, and fulfill his requirements to get their info released. And the requirements (admittedly only second hand info right now from Theymos) are quite high (full personal information disclosure) which I doubt many will want to do. I DID (and still do) have many projects on-hand. And I intend to continue being a part of bitcoin as a whole, and contributing the bitcoin economy. But right now this particular situation is outside my control. If you have a problem with it, I suggest you take it up with Nefario.


Zapeta, you are correct to some degree. But it's not "speculation" it's a confirmed statement, which is third party info. Basically 2 confirmed shareholders of GLBSE have stated that it was said clearly during the shareholder meeting that the info required to make a claim would be full AML documents. This is admittedly here say, but from a relatively reliable source. It is yet to be seen what the actual requirements are. For now that's all we have to base on. Until the "claims" process actually begins.

Another consideration. How long do I wait? Lets say it takes 2 weeks for the shareholders of GLBSE and the treasurer to sort out with Nefario to release funds, and he starts his claims process then. Unless he sets a hard deadline on the claims process of say 30days... How long do I wait around for "everyone" to make a claim? Until EVERYONE has claimed, I can't easily take action which would be unfair to those who may claim later... How do I fairly decide how long to wait? Without vote from shareholders (Who I can't identify).

It's all a big catch-22... We are literally at the mercy of Nefario on this one.

wow.
that escalated quickly.

nefario's talk at the bitcoin conference 2012 last month http://youtu.be/vmPD_YSQ--k

Announcement: Enterpoint FPGAs are live now. http://forum.btcsyn.com/posting.php?mode=edit&f=6&p=2560

Well the news comes during an uncertain time, so it's not as "good" as I had hoped...

But the FPGAs ordered from Enterpoint are now live. They are mining in a temporary enclosure while I wait on sourcing a proper rackmount enclosure for them.

They are working quite well so far, and have significantly boosted our hashrate.

I'm working on solving the problems with the RD rig before I depart for some major travel later this week. That will add another 1.6Ghash back to the mix as well. We do have a few other rigs offline as some of you have noticed. I'll do my best to reach out to the founders controlling those rigs and see what we can do to get them up and running.

Now if we could just get some news about what's happening with GLBSE that would be great...

Ok just an update, I was travelling for my day job for the past couple weeks. I'm back now, and have fulfilled all the claims requirement with GLBSE (as an issuer). I recommend everyone else do the same. Once the claims are made, we'll be able to see where things stand. Once I've received confirmation of everyones shares we'll decide how we're going to proceed going forward (without the exchange to facilitate).

I'm not sure how long the claims process will remain open. I'll try and get an answer out of Nefario about that.

I'll post more once I have more info.

Asset list received from nefario. Travelling now will post more details later. See: forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1263 (http://forum.btcsyn.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1263) for more details.7

Ok sorry for the delay due to my travel.

Here is a hash table of the share list as sent to me from Nefario so far:
It's in the format SHA256HASH,shares,SHA256HASH
The first hash is the email address as sent by nefario, the second hash is the bitcoin payout address as sent by nefario.

a64cc0cde6f1d6ffbdf2758d70b6cf50e7d04eb77743557c542ed45f578df7d4,67,798085e4b52d6947d2553cb82b816d02176e52df9b5d051ae194a37838b5e7b6
06867736c53f2afb4245b4e6ed8e6ed82a195d3235b3768e7ca588001af2f7b4,1853,60f7c541914bf2ee02dd26a3749565ecef8c1d4d36d2458219718967a8bc2a4f
0628a1bcdda5ce6ccc9ed5da8cc3ddd0e134bbc3c6389221800f67163c4272c9,1,fbd86eab267d12b5eae5fb35eaff3b5b41e97a92d743655e296df8544a7936cb
0443b84c79102b840544803d3b5a45f4fd916fc7158df77e897735c84fb51f77,3,5ada9b67d50b7d9b957f95c138a800b47e5507c9e8f7061cb73c8fe8f68076d4
679bdde95fa896abb0a3159b5ad360c0ac874bef2059ed1bee685ce5173fde00,292,595a79d4910849c39706c3e2cdafb2baff4d11768f77b78f81135e5e1dfa5125
e20520316c63853a2f756bf41bbbd3b354290c2604f3857dc1dcb5f46181a049,4,77398d3528aef9e53bec19e90dde3de2c40e0ef3bb61251d40c2285dca71974d
813d11d37a55c4f34284a539149dc4700fcc9fe9369a14dc3d7ad3e5f56f9d02,31,aa5d79b519290c456a1e5c652c5c4ac9df61d991caf610eaf2f1b0436487936f
6189ad3b74f4d5dd49623fecdfc51e009e525830fcbf866b8cdf3e048b82ae48,110,d380d5ece65d4138941e4b539a44ee60d4b5808df1a9e12f41837f46ffb4fea4
db2140be1e2b6e7b18f47d706d1778cb4130f119d66b750852bd673e8a45338c,55,9648c7210bd78876088422ddd9d31c6e192c13e7517c332fb1649bc424c9d6ce
fae11bbd4fc3366833073f81921b3d956894473a45687aff83cd8981459ad024,11,953048c5d6926dfb49a186a88755a13eee457a0052c9c19bef7853aa940520b7
0b085b3e3236a60bce88f8911426894fff556645aa7d8fb08136f9a0bfc5a975,4,de65dea672bfdf43de65287a5710a6988f0e1a7843d36bcd4de1fc24529f9cee
ca4069b7393fc59285f56db9666dbd0ccead715cc3b0cdc92b0c22d7372a2cfb,3,0dbda4797b7e0773afb4ce64e7097bc9e676059e911b96ad7ec3a2b169f6773d
42de56fca676e573208bf47872b3e95d5d8bfb5d33bde49c2879cebcb9adcb28,190,e4f9f3446bcf927b29f66599385b8083d314eadba45628c4219bf106514270fc
088ebfa4caa8ff73a679b2ccc2fca4364c902e300a40ebe2136ce35703579dad,4,dccd038e27d121ae75b26edada050bc2586f3c9e8c6143c906a230755f955944
cb71f10509ff02d3399146fc87812ea42e9b618560042aaa635d5d5afb315339,2264,b222ae369bda7a207ba591a4d15705dce4b98d3d1a63f7e0f4a5dbc8435caf2d
2b62aba45261039b9a77e0c9bab695518ea7e9ff44ef393113812ce580ad2f8c,113,6e1414cae47d96ba63d601ed92e85afda305d432910c37581f058f0c18f42f86
327980b68da79e8648fd848e4bef6860ea588280016ed1f7234e58be1149e77c,84,424c247da4614dd52b592c51114c730e8e43a4c4b87ce5dca003b4f1211578ad
db171101d2154f4a3723380c6fc6f33b49135233135499bbdbb1e5e30051ee06,6,52487bb12b3202dd3b3ea3f0b137380d737743b0cff78bd263b103741d65d895
3717a47855b168e66b4a19de045a2c748346a1ec49167d35806185e407e10691,443,b128443391bc09ab7479ff83ef74c217d013e4e4ad2d11daf4a6baa194badd6c
b61c458b1171bf07b6a0bc5161fb8148965c862f0ba6aa8d4a918f4c8252eed0,102,4ddbee35f560822b2bac690c2341280fd71e291ca2de48cffbb8068cd2188f71
d96e81fe39165b17dd3f2eac3b892695fd22e94ae1324f0cddcb16b06e5ffa1e,2,789e9a53cd3cee083a553d58cd06c9515d4627234223d74c9b03d2798840c461
51019b2821d40a83df622cc6c9cdd2cbd2fc797774cd802354b9d1de41c26ee3,46,5bb74fb083ed70dded37868d2c822a4552c2e4d30b79b994f87282696b19657e
6037c71c4b815a03f93111a8ee4d8392498d100d996c23ed08ad7a71659bcce9,2,40fccb2dcac93bd4ba285e08ffb475d1accdd3155bc5a4dafc630e12218b6327
15a639e11378433c65299c69e0e57f25b4103f33cd404c02bc77def54a0831d3,9,f41b74e0fac28524290af7b84005aaf87707058ac1eb4d50b095e174b328a46f
a1329816b65ddeeb07a2488450f178fada8bbff73538c9a8a046c0865475eb55,1,58d88ada5e2c0335ebcf9f85fe96a4cebbe9b430fc5e8b03a05bd59cec6bc4f6
00e0ad3731082e67c044bf6babba6deda90f753888b5698cd23ba22bfd9303e2,125,6dcc58ed23c1e26b2b1bd8ee7447e999ccd59eb6b3f5c71242b7ceb69fc19e9b
f9e7dcf1744845b162f6f3b3e551d90c38aed3c2e2ff8c7579e44017bbfbd07c,20,8447399991c7f3d994bcfcea1de691b7abb24d9f6f5ac8dc2d4fab056d57b05b
81e65f3bc0a92d2032a9ee7a41f21efaf026dca845ebad834bfdc9daae2f4886,10,e88ddcb2304a1d31e3d4531bdd315e5792145233157aea65b63e25c33bb8f1ed
d1b8ae48b36faff4c9151e687ab6fa67b79252349575b49cea53201978e3f1bd,3,795144f04be13696d3ede6802cfa69c5ae43e44fcb0c189af54ed6b427f4354b
c4b3aef50e901267abe64d3373403d0c71b1d9160619e5c9088003c805e833a3,171,aee4c3541a168f45519de1c6c107aa12b214c8d265a6462b9217a2f3fbcb5e51
bcfc9b120b0cbec0b1bbfa7c3d1a28797ec284ca0a10b49247ed448a47751915,3,3c04c67550420857ee435575b09327a5ad68dc477cd1891a06b7300c074d929d
6929b908ea90432e15949d3d2f7b33600f2e1e6f6bcc88c45eeeafedaf81e2a8,50,35849eb9c888128df945f6357c77ca147ecd9f4b5c418cada6b359a86f769285
4cb12c3dac5e2d500ea64cc78f2882f92fd7f047a37600469d9e259d042ffd69,921,d9d5d0e935064b739233d7bf1a6fe1287d9ccf0396051cd95e5ea8f2e8e86847
d17abea134c3848b8138de30473fcf74fa601f12453c0c55532cc237d228c734,360,45b37479e6c397dc56893bfb52f97a30c49013f65b0e7c5af3ffee917c0b0b98
89884ecb33ec913287a412567c0ab3a17441d84979868674ed9c903467bb61c8,432,2b244ca0ea1371a01951db42752fbfe8310ad7298d8b5a2c2a93491ade9d0154
c01f45cb6f559785e59b83cd67aebad86c9565077d63429387ade0dc19006d07,432,ae3996c8d52f8a0df9dc63e5ca57cfdbe12f0e9069342cdf76a96b8b23270831
4f8a5061411223ec8fd7429b419e39814f13df156dcd2e1810083bf1814d3b48,864,782cfbf55c05e54e25a7e1db8cfe63f4f654d639bbf25ea9ac279205f863e79d
649bceb2dd80ed0cc56301ffc45c5581ebb475326d35154e7e9c63ee17170011,1224,7eaa8c180210bdebb402370c8fb6427bf8641c26888f04470302ba36483caebc

TOTAL: 10315 / 12000

So far there is still 1685 shares unaccounted for.

I also have an "emergency" announcement. The server which I have been hosting most of BTCSYN on is being shut down soon. (in a matter of days). I can go into more detail later, but ultimately my employer subsidized a large portion of it with the terms I could use it for whatever I wanted (to facilitate some of my R&D activities. Some major restructuring has happened in the past month or so, and I just found out a couple days ago that they won't be renewing that contract. So I'm left to fend for myself, and it's an expensive server. So the server is being shut down.

I'm in the process now of backing up all the data, and securing the wallets and so on. In the coming days the btcsyn site will go down (hopefully not for long) and be transferred to a new temporary host. So the forums can stay up. And I'll have more details once that process is done. So if the site goes down, don't go into panic mode, the site will come back up, and I'm still accessible via this forum as well. It will just take me some time to sort it out.

That all said, with this change, combined with my job changing (and requiring MUCH more time commitment from me) I will not be able to continue running BTCSYN as it is.

I had hoped to have more time to plan something useful to come in here, but I haven't...

This doesn't mean that it's doom and gloom. (though we've had plenty of that already). What it means is that I won't have time to maintain the miners, keep things running, or run the sites/infrastructure.

So this means either:
A) BTCSYN will be shut down, and we'll figure out a sane way to do that (liquidate and pay out to shareholders using this list)
B) Someone else will need to pick up the torch and continue operation (At the vote of shareholders).
C) Some other alternative I haven't thought of yet.

So again, don't panic. The server is dying one way or another, so for now I'm focusing on securing/backing up the data. The wallets contents will be transferred to an offline wallet for safekeeping (created solely for this purpose, and backed up) until we have this sorted out.

I had hoped to announce this in a more elegant way, but as with most things these days it seems, it just wasn't in the cards.

Anyway, I'll post a similar announcement on the BTCSYN forums to redirect to this thread for now, while the site is still up, and again in a little while the site/forums should come back so we can facilitate the final closure/shutdown/transfer/whatever in a sane way in the newyear.

For a general list of assets/liabilities:

We own 4 Cairnsmore1 FPGA boards outright.
We have 4 more Cairnsmore1 FPGA boards on lease from Enterpoint, which we owe them for still
We have about 138.5 BTC.
A few other odds and ends of hardware (a PSU, some USB hubs, and some cabling and such)

IF we decide to liquidate (ie no other alternative is presented) be aware that the debt to enterpoint is larger than our current liquid assets, and the liquidatable value of those other 4 boards isn't very high with ASICs around the corner. Ideally another alternative will be possible. We'll see in the newyear.

Thanks for your patience!

So, any update on this?

Not really... A lot has been going on lately, things are kind of crazy, and I don't even have the time or energy to deal with this.

The site is backed up, but the old server is gone. Funds are still safe. And boards collecting dust... I don't really know what to do about it. I was kind of hoping after my last post that someone would step up and offer to take over the torch, but I basically heard nothing from anyone, other than one or two people confirming their claim from GLBSE...

Basically unless someone wants to pick up and figure out what to do next, and operate it themselves, we're insolvent... For example we have enough funds to buy an ASIC to mine with, but we also owe a bunch of money out in debt. So if we pay off our debts right now, we're left with only 8x FPGA boards, which are practically worthless in liquid value right now (because of ASICs). So unless someone can fire up the miners and mine up enough money to buy an ASIC to keep things afloat, we're basically bankrupt...

There is a lot to deal with to shut it down cleanly, and I don't even have time to deal with that. Which is why no news...

If anyone has any suggestions I'm open to hearing them...

So, I'm understanding it right? Do you have the miners turned off?

Yes miners are off, the mining server is down, wallet host is gone, moved to an offline wallet, and so on.

As another update too just for the record, I've emailed all shareholders proposing a few shutdown solutions. With a vote taking place via email over the next 24h so we can finalize all this.

not cool.

edit: about the torch and stuff, I can take care of the site hosting (a) & running the boards (b).
as for the mining, only problem with it is the customs when importing into EU

e2: not sure about not being liquid. since the latest btc rate changes there would be not debts at least

I really don't think we have enough information to make a decision about the options given.  Both options A and B require that we get some concessions from Enterpoint, and option A has a series of steps that make it impossible to calculate what the final dividend would be.  Option B results in a dividend of approx. 0.0115 BTC/share, but I don't like Option B as it leaves Glasswalker solely responsible for the debt.

I'd really like to see what sort of deal we can get from Enterpoint before we decide.  That will have a huge impact on whether or not it is feasible to continue operations and how a liquidation should go.

the real wtf imo is that the boards are idling. mining with fpga will remain 'profitable' for a while for sure
and I believe folks Enterpoint are mining themselves (just bought some btc from them) so this is a waste of opportunity to close the shop

I'm not in the mood for arguing right now, but I just want to state clearly that I won't recognize anything as settled if Paul proceeds as stated.

oh, a lot of things happened since i last checked.
server gone, miners off, short notice vote without any prior discussion.
7 dec note that list from nefario arrived
two weeks later long post
month later vote from nowhere.

not cool
and no word from other 6 founding members

I read this before somewhere.


Aww, I think this shitty community scammed you.


That sucks man. I know, why don't you just keep the shitty 8 FPGA boards? Worthless POS (because of ASICs) and you know...you've been busting your ass with blood sweat and tears our friend so therefore....

...


This alone is enough to declare the whole thing void. So I'm proposing to start a discussion to decide ourselves what to do. I'm proposing myself to take things in charge. I can run the miners from Argentina, where energy rates are really low. But I would support Mila too, if he wants to take the torch.


Long post saying basically nothing, by the way. Until this last post I didn't knew miners weren't working. So many breaches of fiduciary duty... Looks like some people are just playing games here...

and as of today 2013 feb 11 (monday) it seems to be the end of the syndicate (it ended earlier i just finally managed to skim the walls of text buried in my mail).
it did not last a single year - see Paul's OP

founding members failed to meet their end of the loan of 6 GH/s.
what they did not fail is to claim the rights stemming from the shares (dividends and votes)

i do not want to judge if that's incompetence or bad intention.

basically what happens is that the final dividend will go to shareholders who were free riding the cooperative.

Care to post a summary of those emails? Inquiring minds wish to know.

why to summarize if they can be posted in full length?
I'm strong/weak enough to face this issue once a week or bi-weekly so be patient.
there's no need to rush a dead horse.

hope you noticed the 'funny fact' that none of the founding members had the technical capacity to grab the miners and operate them.
so neither did they stood to their commitment nor did they felt committed to take care of common production goods.
search for excuses for yourself. that was the proverbial last straw that bended things beyond repair.
if you were not member of the internal forum you probably missed the discussion why only founding members could trade in hashing power for shares when syndic was established.

i'll post also my collection of screenshots from the stats page (avg mining output) and known addresses used for payout from p2pool. together they illustrate the avg mining output better than memories. just gimme time. or pm me your email and I'll drop you the zip file.

I keep seeing references to founding members but ARE there founding members?  Or is it just one guy, badly out of his depth, who keeps referring to himself in the plural?

Yeah, it would be great if you can make everything public, as it always should have been. The secrecy with which everything has been always handled only builds over the overall scammy feeling of the whole matter...

If this hasn't been a plain scam from day one (sadly, I have not proof whatsoever of it), at least it has been a huge scammy negligence. Whatever it is, this guys shouldn't be doing public businesses nevermore. Well, anyway, calling theirs thing business is a huge overstatement...

And Paul deciding on a rush, almost alone, what to do, and deciding to keep the remaining hardware for himself is a scam on itself...

there was a list of 7 people in the bylaws who all committed themselves to the loan of mining capacity
which they still owe btw (the year long contract is still open)

not sure if I made copies of all pages from the site, maybe archive.org knows something.

and for the "best effort, no guarantee" argument, well, this is no effort.

Caveat emptor, in this case, I'm afraid. While I agree with you, you can't enforce an interpreted concrete meaning from a purposefully vague statement.

Idealist goes in with ardor, meets the reaping scythe of reality, runs out screaming and retreats back to their little hole of isolation, all morals, cares, and idealism gone. That seems to be the story of the Bitcoin economy right now.

 :(

some badass scam-motherfucker donate me some bitcoin. cause you are now millionaires^^

would be kindoff fairplay^^

So what happened to BTCSYN?

I happen to be one of the early 'small' shareholders. The website is down, GLBSE is too. Was this whole thing a scam?

Well, a majority of the coins were stolen from Gox.  Glasswalker got too busy to keep things running and the operation was closed and liquidated.  People who went through the share claim process after GLBSE closed received a dividend of about 0.0115 BTC/share when the operation was liquidated, approximately in mid Feb, 2013.

Would that be still possible to do now, how do you think?

Maybe, if you contact Glasswalker.  In the email I kept from mid-Feb, he said that any funds not claimed 30 days from mid-Feb would be forfeit, but it doesn't cost anything to ask if he's still holding the funds.

Thank you, trying to contact him.

just noticed the mining stopped already in october 2012