Looks like maybe account taken over.  Perhaps the owner gave his login details to one of the dodgy lenders offering loans in return for getting login credentials for collateral.

Exchange-rate : .0228
Adjusted NAV/U : 54.947
Bid at : 53.5

Off to a great start this week as well.  The single biggest source so far was something not far off a donation on Bitfinex.  Looks like someone used a market order instead of a limit order - and hit my bid set up specifically for that occurrence.

Exchange 577.58942443 LTC for BTC @ 0.00236 on wallet exchange    577.58942443       1336.77166065    04 Jun 03:56

We got to buy 577 LTC at around 10% of current exchange-rate basically.

In less good news the new security will be further delayed - possibly for quite a while.  This thread should explain why :

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=224745.0

For now I'm keeping funds on Bitfinex - though I've withdrawn our profit from the above trade already.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=225059.0

He's accusing John K of being a scammer - quoting a GPG message that's not even signed with John's key.

Either a very bad troll or a very bad scammer.

The first few numbers are correct.  Predicting difficulty after the next change is guess-work.  But yes - you don't want to be holding them (if bought at initial price) after the next 3 difficulty changes for sure, possibly after next 2.  I would NOT expect him to buy back that quickly - the longer he waits the more profit he makes.  But at some point that crosses over with the opportunity cost of not using the ASIC-MINER shares to secure some other revenue stream (or ASIC-MINER share price starts to fall and he wants to sell so has to recall these to free up the shares).

Why are you using the same security name as an already failed scam?

Look at Bitbond on Crypto::stocks to see the dead scam in question.

And how does giving your (or anyone else's) ID to Bitfunder guarantee that you have the cash to repay the bonds?  I wasn't aware that IDs came with attached free unlimited money.  Proof of realisable assets is what provides a guarantee - not proof that you have an ID.  Everyone has an ID.

107/gt AU would mean 107 grams of gold per ton of ore (AU is the chemical symbol for gold).

So every ton of ore/rock mined would hold 107 grams of gold.  It doesn't sound much but is well above the minimum needed for extraction to be profitable.

It is, however, only one of the TWO main figures needed to assess the profitability of a find.  The other being the quantity of gold there (the size of the deposit).

The startup costs wouldn't be worth it if there was only 1 ton of ore there.  If there was a million tons of it then christmas just arrived early.

There's other factors affecting the viability of a find (e.g. accessibility, ore-type) but the gold content and the quantity of gold (or ore) are the two key ones.

Buy-back for a bond would normally be at face value.  This (and just about ALL 'fixed-rate mining bonds') aren't actually bonds.  This is just a way for people who don't understand the math of mining to donate BTC to TAT - which isn't as bad as it sounds as you may donate less than on many other mining offerings based on actual hardware.

Mining securities, in general, make a profit for the issuers NOT for investors.  That's why they don't buy back at face value - as that would keep the risk with the issuer.

On options there is no buy-back : the transfer of value there occurs either at purchase or at execution of the option (depending on how you value it).  Here it'll primarily occur at buy-back as - until then - people will be exchanging them via the market at prices which ignore the reality of an impending buyback at below the traded price.

I read that as meaning you'll be taking some of the IPO funds in return for your BFL ASICs.  If I'm wrong then what is this "recovery fund" for?

Regardless of whether my reading of that is correct or not, what proportion of IPO funds is going to the "recovery fund"?  Is it actually a proportion - or is it the first X BTC?  i.e. if you only sold 100 BTC worth of shares how much of that would be used for expansion and how much would go to the "recovery fund"?

You won't have the option of holding onto it at 5% APY.

What you and lots of others have missed is the detail of the buyback clause.

"The issuer reserves the right to buy back bonds at a price equal to 110% of the highest price the asset was traded for over the prior 7 days or 200 times the value of the most recent dividend."

200 times last dividend means under 29 weeks dividend.  If APY falls to 5% of sales price then that means he can buy back for ~3% of sales price.  I'd expect forced buy back to be WELL before that point.

Right now the buy-back price is about 20% over trading price.  In about 3 difficulty changes' time it'll become profitable for him to buy back (even counting the dividends paid in the interim).  I'd expect him to wait longer than that - as there's more profit to be made letting difficulty rise a bit more first.

I've nothing at all against this sort of offering - I'm working on one myself.  But the buyback at under 30 weeks payout makes this a losing proposition for anyone other than TAT or people who flip shares fast - until their price falls a lot when some opportunities for profit WILL arise.

I've flipped all mine (for my fund) for a profit now - which is why I'm only explaining this now rather than earlier.  As an approximation, to stand a reasonable chance of making a profit on this you need to be buying at around half the current buy-back price (at 200 days' dividend).  I'm not going to explain all the math behind that - but try modelling with any reasonable prediction of network difficulty and you'll end up around that ball-park.

The devil is ALWAYS in the detail - in this case the detail of buy-back rights.

WEEKLY REPORT




This week's report is a bit late - the Litecoin forums have been down since yesterday evening and have been waiting for them to come back up.  Seems they're hosted without DDOS protection and their hosting company is being DDOSED.  I'll copy the report over there when the site finally comes back up.  The report content is the situation as of yesterday night when I would have posted the report had the LTC forums not been down.

This week was significantly better than the previous few - with growith of 8.48%, 6.66% of which was from trading and the remainder from LTC's continued slow decline vs BTC.  I already provided some information on where the bulk of that profit came from in a mid-week update.  It's typical that in very profitable weeks the majority of profit comes from a few trades - what was unusual this week was that those trades were on LTC-Global.  Lately we've been making little profit in LTC trading - it's nice to see our LTC reserves chip in for a change.

Bitfinex are no longer using MtGox at all - so I'll be looking to get our USD-denominated security up and running in the next few days.  LTC trading there is very sparse so they won't have much impact on currency conversion yet - but the contract (for the new security) will be amended to allow use of their exchange (and holding funds there) if/when volume and spread there make it useful.

Management fee is 2 units (rounded down from 2.23) and will be transferred after posting this.
Bid is up at 51.5

They aren't shipping anything.

They're just taking more pre-orders before delivering on the ones they accepted last year.  A cynic might suspect they have to sell some of these pre-orders to afford to build the machines they already owe.

I assumed that would be the case - just wanted it made explicit.

This is the bit that gets me confused.

I run a client on my local network - it can only connect to my own hatchers.  What stops them from hatching its transactions - noone else is going to see them to get the chance?  Or do nodes only ever approve transactions that they saw before they were processed (meaning immediate fork as soon you connect if any transactions were already being processed)?

Is there something that stops hatchers below a certain trust-level from processing transactions?  Do they have to back-date the time-stamp so it looks like they waited to give more trusted ones a chance to process them first?

And what's with the claim that honest nodes can detect ping-pongs (not quoted above)?  Is there some penalty for sending funds back and forth?  Do hatchers need to analyse all transactions to make sure they won't be penalised if they process them?  If I send money to someone then they send it back will it be taken away or something?  A general statement that something can be detected doesn't explain anything without detail of what happens when it IS detected.

If generating key pairs is fairly trivial then there'd be no need for anyone doing transaction padding to use same address twice anyway.  You just have X blocks of cash that you keep moving to new addresses.  Or one big block if its weighted by transaction size.

The ASICMINER shares backing this are unencumbered ones, correct?  i.e. this isn't being backed by the same shares that are backing your pass-throughs?

Why would the price need to hold out for him to make a profit?  I assume he's just immediately selling the XRP inside the client for a profit of about 15-20%.  Anyone selling their XRP to threads like this is losing a chunk of what they could have received if they spent 5 minutes making a Bitstamp account and sold via the exchange built into ripple.

Why would it be looked down upon?  I'm far more concerned if I see someone selling something that they won't put their own money into.  And, as I mentioned earlier, there's a potential conflict of interest if you manage your own investments seperately from an investment fund you run.  If you see some bargain shares who do you buy them for - yourself or your fund?  How are your investors meant to have confidence that you'll put their interest first?

The answer to solve the issue of investor confidence largely IS to put your own money in the fund.  Then investors KNOW you'll largely act in their interest - as it's also YOUR interest.

Where it would get out of line would be if you bought the majority of voting shares in a company you ran and then forced through motions against the interests of other investors.  But that shouldn't be allowed even if it wasn't your own company (in RL there are means in place to act against controlling interests who vote or otherwise act in a manner detrimental to the company/minority shareholders for their own personal benefit).

You misread what he said.  He said he WOULD pay the listing fee himself.

Weekly dividends would increase the apparent variance not reduce it.

In terms of reducing the variance in general there's a few ways to do it :

1.  Increase the house edge.  Can't see this being a flyer.  A fairly low house edge is one of the best means SD has to make it hard for significant competition to arise.
2.  Reduce max bet size (variance is much lower on 100 bets of 1 BTC than 1 bet of 100 BTC).  This isn't viable for very similar reasons.  People who want to make a 100 BTC bet won't settle for making 100 1 BTC bets.
3.  Remove the higher-odds wagers.  Not a good idea - if SD doesn't provide them, other sites will.

Which leaves the ONLY viable way to reduce variance without losing market share - increase volume.  That's what efforts need to be focussed on, not analysis to establish very basic facts already known (e.g. to minimise variance you'd ony allow bets of exactly the same size on a single bet type).  You have work within the range of what those betting actually want - and, unfortunately for SD, people don't want to bet a fixed amount on a single bet.  They want to be able to try to design variations of Martingale and other betting systems.  Whilst none of those systems can work some DO add a lot of variance.  Variance is the price the house has to pay to get people to wager on an unfair game (by which I mean no more than a game where one party has an edge).  You beat variance with volume - and over the long-term - not by driving away customers to try to avoid short-term losses.

It's what I did as well - paid listing fee myself and have never held less than 40% of the fund (currently hold a bit over half of the main fund and over a third of the 250 BTC-worth of bonds issued).

Because he needs to sell 5 BTC worth of shares first to pay the listing fee.

And that's what's wrong with this (same thing that's been obviously wrong with a bunch of similar attempts to start funds).  There's no sign of any of the profits the issuer claims to have made being invested in the fund.  Which leaves only two possibilities;

1.  The issuer doesn't have any funds.  That would suggest either he doesn't make profit OR he can't manage his own finances.  Neither of which is a good advertisement for running an investment fund.
2.  He's investing his own cash elsewhere.  Which means either a conflict of interest (if he's doing same thing with his own cash in parallel then which do you think will get priority on buys/sells?) or that he believes this isn't as good an invetsment as whatever he's doing with his own funds.

If someone starts a fund I expect to see some of their own cash/assets already in it - preferably verifiable - to show that they a) aren't broke and b) have some skin in the game.