You have your own threads to discuss your various failed securities in - though discuss isn't really the right term when you delete posts containing a view contrary to your own delusions.

I was going to ignore your deletion of my post - but if you're going to attempt to derail discussion of my securities with out of context responses to posts made in a different topic then fair enough : gloves off.  I'll make a new thread addressed to LTC-GLobal moderators and try to move this discussion there.

If that's not the outcome you wanted then tough.

You're not understanding it at all.

Imagine you go to a poker game.  You pay some cash in and get given your chips to play with.

Well in this game (according to myself) some of your opponents were given chips without having to pay for them.  That means you lose either way:

If you lose to them then your money is gone.
If you win at the poker then there's not enough money to buy your chips back off you.

Replace poker with 'gamble by margin-trading on the BTC/USD currency pair' and that's what is being alleged.  The extent to which it (in practice) harmed investors would depend on the price at which bids were placed to buy forced-executed closes : were they at or above market or well below (with a timely DC from Gox to force the execution onto internal orders).  Remember there's no advantage to the person having a forced-execution for it to be to someone associated with the site rather than to random stranger on MtGox.  And there's no real benefit to the site either - as selling BTC held in trust for a user to someone who hasn't deposited the cash to pay for the BTC isn't better in ANY respect than selling to someone for actual cash.

If true it would sound like the Tang situation was along the lines of Tang saying "Can I borrow $150K?  I think BTC is going to go back up shortly so I'd like to buy up some cheap BTC from all the panic sellers and people forced to sell due to margin calls".  And the site crediting him with it.  Obviously that's horrendous for all other users of the site - as if he gets his trading wrong and then doesn't pay then $150k of THEIR cash has now vanished.

Whether it's true or not is hard to tell.  There's two reasons why -

1. Myself is a self-confessed liar.  If what he's saying now is true then he lied previously when claiming everything was honest on the site - and generally acted in a deceptive manner for months, only blowing the whistle when he got cut out from the take.  So we have to decide whether he lied then, now or both times.  And we can't take his word for it - so we lack evidence to reach any conclusion.
2. Scrooge not responding is consistent with innocence (he doesn't want to waste time on entirely fabricated allegations) or with guilt (he just wants the topic to die so he can get away with it).  So we can't conclude anything from the lack of a detailed rebuttal.

The allegations do have the ring of truth about them to me.  But I'd never actually go so far as to reach a conclusion based just on that.  The problem is that although we now all know for certain that myself is a liar, we don't know how GOOD at lieing he is.  So he could just be a very accomplished liar able to make up a convincing-sounding allegation.

Either way myself should get the scammer tag - either for deceiving investors back then or for trying to besmirch the site now (or, conceivably, both).  His own posts convict on one or the other - no need to decide which to give the tag.

If mods want to move forward with the unclescrooge tag then a good starting point would be asking him to confirm or deny whether the email referring to Tang is legitimate.  It's likely it can be verified that it's genuine (if it IS genuine and if he denies it).  If he admits its genuine then an explanation of why they were loaning site members' cash to 'Mr Tang' would be welcome.

Doubt anyone gives a shit about the falling out over the detail of a contract which had no specified duration.

The recovery from investors IS theft however.

"Operation costs / Revenue / Profit The security listings proceedings will cover all operational expenses for the period of 3 years, hence all revenues will be net profit and paid out as dividends during that period."

Profit is defined as revenue in the contract. Charitably it could be considered that this month's revenue (or at least that part before the 'theft') was stolen and so cannot be paid out.  But there's absolutely no basis on which to withhold any dividends in future months (other than the 30% which investors for whatever stupid reason decided to give back in the recent vote).

The contract explicitly says "all revenues will be net profit" - there's nothing at all unclear about that.  But I wouldn't hold out much hope of him actually following his contract given he changed it mid IPO to avoid having to refund all share sales.

Don't think it was $175k of investors' (i.e. shareholders) funds that were stolen.  It was $175k of depositors'/users' (people who use the exchange) funds that were stolen.  That means he's now running with less cash than is in the accounts of the site's users.

Which risks a spiral of death - where some people withdraw (as they don't want to be the ones left with balances when cash run out) which then rapidly hits the point of withdrawals being blocked.  At which point revenue drops and confidence vanishes - meaning no chance to ever make the funds back.

Or he just stole the coins himself.  I'd assume that if he doesn't produce any evidence of it tbh.

EDIT: On reading the report more careful it appears the majority of stolen funds were (at least purportedly) covered by held assets - so they're only short by 100 BTC or so funds necessary to cover all deposits.

Are you factoring in his buy-back at 200% of face as WELL as the dividends when you compare?

Or the fact that you already changed the terms of your paper twice - the second time with a (barely veiled) threat to default if investors didn't agree to the change.

Both of you are asking investors to trust BFL as well as the issuer.  That's not all that tempting to many people.  BFL have managed to combine incompetence and dishonesty into one tidy package.  ASICs from them - received after difficulty has sky-rocketed - just aren't worth the risk of lending them BTC (repaid pegged to USD if you ever get bored of waiting) interest-free in the hope that they eventually accidentally make a promise that they stumble into delivering upon.

I'm not actually convinced it is - though it's a pretty trivial point.

With a DR investors actually own the underlying stocks.  With most pass-throughs investors don't own the underlying stocks - they have entitlements to (most of) the benefits associated with them.  That said, calling them DRs would be more accurate than stocks OR funds - but probably less clear to the majority of investors.  If they were to be recategorised as anything I'd prefer them simply to be listed as "Pass-Throughs".

It can hardly be an ADR when it isn't listed on a US exchange and isn't denominated OR traded in dollars.

If it's a bond you're offering, not a stock then what have the BFLs got to do with anything?

You're asking for cash now and promising to pay back a certain amount at a later date.

"Bonds will be redeemed by the issuer for 0.42 BTC each on 2014/06/01."

Looks like you're offering a straight 100% interest for a 1 year loan.  What happens if BFL ship late and/or difficulty rises sharply and you don't generate the mined income to pay that back?  Are you offering to pay that fixed amount OR are you offering to pay what you actually mine?  Those are two VERY different propositions and it's not clear which you're offering (and, if the former, how you can be sure of honouring it).

Plus you can't fairly compare your price to TAT's.  If you want to compare you need to be comparing the price of his shares at the date you actually receive your BFLs - until then you're charging an infinite amount per hash (or his price now LESS all the dividends he'd have paid by then).  And if you aren't paying out at all for a year then you have to also take into account possible compounding/opportunity cost on competitors compared to yours where no compounding is possible (as you have the funds not them for the next year).

Well on the pass-through issue, whilst pass-throughs technically aren't stocks in many ways it makes sense to actually list them as stocks.  That's because, if operated according to contract, their behaviour is going to be identical (less management fee) to if they WERE actually stocks in the underlying asset.  So listing them as whatever the underlying asset is does, sort of, make sense - in terms of informing potential investors what they can expect if they invest.  For this reason the three pass-throughs I run myself (on LTC-Global) are all listed as stocks despite technically being funds.

Listing funds as bonds is a far more serious error.  Stocks and funds have a lot in common which is NOT shared by bonds.  Fundamentally the different is that bonds are debt (if you hold a bond you are owed a predetermined amount of money) whilst stocks and funds are both equity (you own a portion of either the company or its assets).  With bonds the amount owed should never change - with stocks and funds there's no defined value and what your shares/units are worth is determined by the performance of the company.

The issue is further confused because a lot of IPOs are stock-like in nature but claim not to be stocks (they explicitly state that the share do not represent ownership of the company).  This is largely a (totally futile if regulatory authorities ever take an interest) effort to try to pretend they aren't securities at all but does make classifying them difficult (they give most of the worst features of all types whilst omitting those recourses which investors would otherwise have).  Those haven't managed to invade BTC.CO much yet (Bitfunder has plenty of them) but probably will.

My view on it is that the classification (stock/fund/bond) should be the best fit for the behaviour investors can expect from the security - whether or not it's technically correct.  Whilst there are definite grey areas between stocks/funds (the primary difference is whether you own a company or only some part of its assets) there's no such grey area with bonds.

It's not an issue burnside can just go and solve.  Moving categories would just cause confusion unless, at the same time, contracts were also amended (often requiring a vote by investors).  Then operators would also need to update their threads, websites etc.  All of which takes time which, for many companies, could be better spent on other things - such as producing the accounts/lists of assets that many are so deficient in.

A lot of the classification of securities is inaccurate or inexact.

In many cases securities don't meet the traditional definitions of ANY of fund, stock or bond.

Pass-throughs are funds.  A share in an ASIC-MINER pass-through is NOT a share in ASIC-MINER, it's a unit in a fund holding assets.  That those assets happen to be stocks doesn't make units in the pass-through stocks themselves.  If they were stocks then they'd be stocks representing ownership of ASICMINER-PT NOT stocks representing ownership of ASIC-MINER.  The distinction is largely technical but significant - specifically for any pass-through the question to consider (when determining whether it is a fund or a stock) is this:

Does the owner of the underlying asset recognise shares in the pass-through as representing ownership of the underlying asset?  It can only be a stock (represetning ownership of the underlying asset) if the answer to that is yes - and the answer to that as a general question is always going to be no.  All pass-throughs should be funds - unless run by the issuer of the underlying asset (when they MAY be stocks but not necessarily so).

With bonds the difference is a bit less technical and a bit more practical.  Bonds in general have a fixed face value.  So listing something as a bond immediately gives the impression (to anyone familiar with RL bonds) that an investment in them pretty much guarantees no loss of capital over the life of the bond (paying dividends cannot reduce face value).  Where that isn't the case then listing as a bond is inaccurate and misleading.  That, I assume, is why some are voting no to new listings that claim to be bonds when they aren't.  Whilst I personally strongly disagree with listing anything as a bond that doesn't have a fixed (and maintained) face value, I would NOT personally vote against listing such a security if everything else were fine with it.  It's possibly one of the few areas where my views are more lenient than those of some moderators.  The reason I'd personally pass them is because the term 'bond' has become so devalued in the BTC community as to be near meaningless - so the damage risked by allowing the term to further be used to misrepresent more securities is minimal (the damage having already been done).

It's one of those ideas that sounds decent in theory but is terrible in practice.

IF OP is actually going to offer decent-sized loans to high-reputation accounts then it's pretty much a guarantee that he'll end up getting ripped off by people who have managed to hack or otherwise obtain control of accounts that aren't their own.  They thus have nothing to lose and so will default on the loans.

What OP will then do with their accounts I hate to imagine - but it certainly won't make life any easier for the real owner.  And, of course, the other side also applies - that if someone DOES give away access to their account and then defaults they're immediately gong to claim their account was hacked and given away by the hacker.

Nothing good will come of this.

I haven't got a vote (don't hold 10 shares) but maybe the moderators are having the same problem I'm having.

Nowhere can I see a list of what assets BMF holds.

The linked closure post nowhere has mining hardware listed - which is specifically referred to in the quoted portion of your text.  And it also has things like:

"DMC (1300 shares, claimed on BitFunder, unknown value)
Jan 27 - Estimated value is 0.1 per share based on holdings of 1,000 ASICMINER and 1000 BTC-MINING. We have the shares on BitFunder. Have sold 300. Will post an update after auction closes."

The auction closed months back.  1k DMC is quite afew BTC - yet it's impossible to tell from your psot whether you own them or not.

You're asking moderators to approve for trading something where they can't see what assets it CURRENTLY has (unless they want to wade through a ton of threads and work it out for themselves).

You're also asking for approval of something with a contract that is vastly different to what it was when listed on GLBSE - without, as best I can tell, any shareholder motion ever passed to change the contract.

There's no way in the world the nyans should get approval (they don't even have proper contracts up).  BMF - maybe - but I don't see it happening all the time you refuse to provide simple details of what it currently holds.  If you intend people to have to read a bunch of different threads just to work out current assets then you shouldn't be allowed to run an asset.  If you intend to provide that information in a neat spreadsheet in the future (like you used to) then maybe, just maybe, doing it right now might tip one of the No votes or abstains into a yes.

Our of interest, what huge amount of BTC are they trying to steal from you?

It must be an absolutely massive amount for them to risk their reputation by stealing from you whilst letting everyone else continue to do business as usual.

There was a change in it to prevent people buying shares, voting on their own assets, then dumping the shares (change made after something along those lines actually happened).

Unless there's been a change since that and I've missed it (unlikely) current rule is that you get to vote once you've held 10 or more shares for at least 7 days.  I don't hold 10 or more shares so can't confirm for certain.

It's not as black and white as being a bet against network difficulty increase.

Investing is a bet that difficulty won't rise at a fast enough rate to make investing in this unprofitable.  It's not quite the same thing.

TAT's bet (in launching the security at all) is that there's enough people willing to buy at an unprofitable price (or a break-even/marginally proftable one that gives him cheap capital) to justify the listing cost and effort of maintaining it.  He's on a safe bet there.

There'll be a security allowing you to bet on the other side, hopefully within a few days.

Yeah - now is about the worst time possible to pre-order hardware.  Supply is low, prices high and the boat's already sailed on the mega-profits.

The valuations (assuming they're done by a reputable company - which I haven't verified) will be based on an estimate of what viable deposits are likely to be found in the areas they have the rights to.  Those estimates will be made based on known actual results of other areas with similar geology.  They're an educated guess basically.

As I don't invest myself (only trade) I have no interest in doing the background research necessary to validate this IPO - but a key part of that is ensuring that the valuations are done by a credible company not by a sock-puppet one which produces (unrealistic) valuations to order.  I have no reason to believe the latter is the case here - but ensuring it isn't the case is the very first thing I'd do if I was considering investing.

EDIT: The detail of the specific find mentioned isn't that critical.  Even if it's a tiny quantity the important thing is that it verifies the presence of useful ore and so supports the likelihood of further larger deposits being found when a full survey is conducted.

After the near miss early on in this security's existence I doubt very much creativex is going to even consider investing in anything until it's proven it actually has product.  And rightly so.

The difference is that this one has a buy-back allowed at a low multiple of daily dividend.

If the price stays high then not only can he buy back the shares for far less - but immediately before doing so he can fill the markt bids so as to make an immediate profit on purchases that never receive a single dividend.

It's already hard for people who haven't managed to flip yet - as when they sell they're competing against the issuer who's steadily selling more into Bids.

This.

Reinvestment is NOT some silver bullet that will turn a loss-making investment into a profitable one.  You can simulate reinvestment by reinvesting your dividends.

Mining bonds/shares typically work by the issuer taking a cut of all generated coins.  This cut is taken in one or both of two places:

1.  A premium you pay when you buy in.  So you pay $X*Y per share when it only costs them $Y - with X being >1.
2.  A percentage cut taken out of mined coins.

If (as is the case in nearly all PMBs) those factors combine to make it unprofitable then no amount of reinvestment will change it in a predictable manner (it may increase or decrease your loss).  All it will do is make the losses less visible in the short-term - and, in general, increase your overall loss as a percentage of the capital you invest (that's because reinvestment compounds interest - in this case a negative rate of interest).

Now there IS a price-point at which ANY PMB becomes a profitable investment.  But just about all of them are priced above that - and it may well be the case that in many operations even without a management cut that point lies below their cost (for a simple example imagine someone selling a mining bond/share based on CPU mining of BTC - even if they didn't make a penny from it themselves investors would lose nearly all thier investment).

The fundamental mistakes investors make are four:

1.  Starting with the idea that mining is somehow magically profitable regardless of the detail.
2.  Assuming that those selling investments even intend to make a profit for their investors.
3.  Assuming that issuers who DO believe they'll make a profit for investors are actually competent to make that judgment.
4.  Believing that the price at which something is sold on an exchange is somehow magically linked in some manner to the actual value of that something.

Ignorance and Laziness basically - not understanding the math behind it, compounded by being incapable/unwilling to put in the effort to do so.