First planned dividend is start of April for March profits.

If the trend of BTC rising continues AND profits of S.DICE decline month on month as they have this month then I'd agree.  But I'm by no means convinced the drop in profits this month are related to the price rise - more like just because the whale ran out of funds.

For those who say 'but it's more profit in USD this month' - who cares.   It's the ratio of dividend : share price that matters not the absolute amount of the dividend.  If you value the dividend in USD then you need to take share price in USD too - which, shockingly, gives exactly the same ratio as if you measured both in BTC.  The yield dropped this month - which is what counts.  If you're valuing based on P/E then if that becomes a trend then price has to fall.

We aren't at that point yet - whether we'll get there is very open for debate.

I agree with that - but point is that making them require 1 confirm for all bets would very likely reduce profits: as a lot of people won't gamble if they have to wait an average of 10 minutes to find out whether they won.

I'm not sure HOW you think the client/bitcoind COULD block S.DICE.  Prevent masses of transactions to a single address (no point using specific addresses as new addresses can be generated easily)?  Any such cure would be worse than the 'problem' it's supposed to fix.

If Bitcoin isn't meant to handle the sort of transaction volume S.DICE produces then how is it ever supposed to achieve widespread adoption?

Trying to block S.DICE at the bitcoind level is treating the symptom rather than the illness.

Yeah LTC-Global is down too.  Seems like the problem is accessing his backend server to check balances - you can view and navigate the site fine if you aren't logged in (try it in a different browser and you'll see) but soon as you login it fails.

Well, from the error message it seems error is when it's tryign to read your current balance.  If you aren't logged in it doesn't need to do that so doesn't encounter the problem.

Not just you.

Error:
Xcoind backend failure in getbalance at 774

There's no such entity as a "Bitcoin" that can choose whether or not to block or not S.DICE transactions.

Any blocking would be done by individual pools.  It would only take one large pool to actively be hostile to S.DICE to make them unable to allow zero-confirmation bets at all.  If a pool discards S.DICE transactions but intentionally allows competing transactions from same source to process then the pool only needs a few % of network power for anyone to profitably attack S.DICE by trying to double-spend any losing bets - the few % of times the pool includes the double-spend (and cancels the losing bet) then outweigh the house edge on the rest of bets.  You underestimate the extent to which some are opposed to S.DICE (not me - obviously).

The loan is NOT denominated in Bitcoin.  It's denominated in USD but transacted in BTC.

You should be able to work this out for yourself by considering the question "how much will the repayment be?".  When you realise that you can ONLY give an answer to that in USD yoi've just worked out what the loan is denominated in.

Additionally, all such loans should have the amount of the loan AND the size of payments displayed in USD:

1.  So lenders have it made very clear to them that what they get back will be valued in USD.
2.  Because if the borrower wants to borrow USD then the amount they want to borrow is likely set in USD not BTC (i.e. they want to borrow BTC sufficient to buy something work X USD).

At present people are going to lend to these sort of loans without noticing that if they mouse over the USD/GOX symbol it tells them that what they get back depends on an exchange-rate.  There should be no possibility for such misunderstandings.

His rationale is that he wants to raise funds to invest in some RL venture and wants to sell them so he can.  The shares he already borrowed to sell include ones that are eseentially unshortable (they have a fixed buy-back price).

Basically it's (at least perceived as) easier to raise funds for a business/trading than to just ask to borrow cash unsecured.  Some unknown would stand zero chance of getting a 100 BTC loan filled but a much more signficant chance of raising 100 BTC by listing some sketchy business on an exchange.  Similarly I guess Ian's perception is he has more chnace of raising funds by asking to borrow to short than by asking to just borrow cash in the first place.

Yeah - I totally missed that the repayment is based on USD.  That removes the exchange-rate risk from you (and dumps it on the lenders).

Do wonder how many lenders miss it as well - it's rather deceptive of BTCJam to list it as a BTC loan when it's actually a USD loan that's being transacted in BTC.  The amount requested and monthly payments should be listed in USD really (criticism is of the site, not you) as that's what's being lent and repaid.

So yeah - my criticism was unfounded.  Though I DO think it's just very slightly dodgy not to mention anywhere in your loan description that lenders are taking on significant exchange-rate risk.

LTC-ATF WILL BE SELLING NEW UNITS TOMORROW

Exchange-rate : .00228
Adjusted NAV/U : 56.4537
Bid at : 55.2

At present we're up around 12% this week, with the vast majority of that trading profits (exchange-rate isn't much different to at start of week).

Main purpose of this post is to announce that new units in LTC-ATF will be sold tomorrow (later today for some time-zones I guess).


WHY SELL MORE UNITS?

This will (or should) be the immediate question that springs into the minds of existing investors - after all, I've repeatedly said that I saw no need to sell new units.

Let's look back at a previous post of mine where I qualified that - and explained the circumstances under which new units WOULD be sold.


So IS the ratio of Bond capital to Fund Net Assets near the 150% limit?

The simple answer is NO - it's at just under 100% (97.35% to be precise).
The more complicated answer is NO - but it SHOULD be (and WOULD be, were I not keeping it low).

Let me clarify by looking at the first 2 numbered points in my quote above (point 3 does not apply - we've NOT made any trading loss).

1.  Need for BTC-denominated capital significantly grows.  This HAS occurred.  The most obvious area where we could use more capital is on BitFunder for two reasons:
a)  There's new very tradable securities (if less clearly worthwhile as investments) there.
b)  BitFunder HAD been implementing a similar system to BTC.CO - where the same capital could back orders on the bookds for multiple securities.  Our account there was one of a handful of accounts given this ability during their tests of it.  A few weeks back this was removed - and now every order has to be backed by its own cash.  That's obviously a total pain - given only a small percentage of our bids get filled on any given day - and of itself pretty much immediately doubled the capital requirement to maintain the same orders.

We've also on occasion run low on funds on BTC.CO (to the extent, once, of having orders auto-cancelled).  And on a few occasions now I've had to pull funds back from CoinBR (cancelling orders I'd rather leave up) for more pressing bids - which costs us 0.1 BTC per withdrawal.  Finally, I'd like us to be trading ASICMINER - but we don't really have the spare cash to do so.

In short there's now opportuniteis for fairly significant more BTC capital to be used.

2.  LTC falling further vs BTC.  From the time of the quoted post to now LTC has fallen about 50% in value vs BTC.  The immediate impact of that is to increase the ratio of bond-debt to NAV - restricting our ability to safely issue new BTC-denominated bonds (we've been able to do so to an extent purely because we've been making a profit so can sell new bonds backed by the profit).

In short, the actual circumstances have precisely matched two of the three criteria I listed - so this isn't actually a reversable of policy.  The only reason the ratio of bond-debt to NAV is NOT near 150% is because I've held back from issuing bonds (that we could do with selling) to STOP us getting near 150%.  I feel obliged to exercise this caution as if BTC continues to rise there has to be a significant chance of LTC falling lower - and the absolute last thing I want is to sell bonds then be forced to buy them back at a premium or issue new units in a rush.


PROTECTING EXISTING INVESTORS

In the past I've toyed with the idea of, when any new units are issued, giving first option on them to current investors in proportion to their current investment.  There are, however, a few big problems with this:

1.  It's a cumbersome and impractical way to do things - as there's no functionality allowing any automation of it.  At a vasic level I don't even know the account names of the various investors (with a few exceptions) to do a transfer to IF they chose to take up such an option.  And I can't offer at a fixed price - as the value of a unit can change very rapidly (either through trades, major price-changes in an investment or simply through a change in the LTC/BTC exchange-rate).

2.  If the extra units are offered at any sort of discount to what the market would pay then investors who take up the option are advantaged compared to those who don't (as fund value doesn't grow to the degree it would if units were sold on the open market).

My belief is that issuing extra units (but not an excessive quantity) will have a minimal (but non-zero) impact on growth per unit.  Some small reduction IS likely (predominantly because around 70-80% of the extra LTC raised from selling units won't be used - it's the BTC raised by selling more bonds backed by the units that will actually be put into play).  This is offset to some degree by a reduction in our fixed fees (per-transaction transfer fees, monthly fee on CoinBR) which won't rise but will represent a smaller cost as a percentage of NAV.  I DO, also, have a proposal to put the LTC to use - which I'll hopefully get time to type up for discussion before too long.

My intention is to sell the new units at a more significant markup to NAV than units were initially sold at.  If they won't sell at a reasonable markup to NAV then they won't be sold.  That markup will generate an immediate small growth in NAV/U for existing investors which I believe should compensate for any tiny short-term drop in weekly profits.  In practice profits could rise OR fall significantly after sale of new units - we could currently easily have a +25% week or a +1% week (or a -5% week if an asset openly defaulted whilst I was offline and we had bids on it) and that won't change.


MECHANICS OF SALE

100 units will be sold (or placed for sale) at 22:00 GMT 2nd March 2013.  That's around 22 hours after the time of this post.

Of these 100 units, 25 will be purchase via transfer by myself at NAV/U +1%.
The other 75 will be placed on the market at a price of NAV/U +10%.  If there are existing orders then the highest of those will be filled.  If no (or insufficient) Bids then I will adjust the price thereafter as/when NAV/U changes.

I will endeavour to provide some updates to current NAV/U during the period before placing the sale.  Based on current NAV/U the ask price is likely to be in the range of 60-65 LTC (dependent largely on how exchange-rate moves) but obviously that could change significantly if there's a major exchange-rate move or substantial tarding profit/loss.

In case anyone wonders why I get 25 at NAV/U+1% here's a quote from the contract:

"When new units are authorised for issue the manager additionally has the right
to buy up to 25% of those units at NAV/U + 1% before releasing the remainder to
the market. "

That clause was always in the contract to allow me to maintain ownrship of a significant portion of the fund personally when expanding.  That I get them at a discount to what (hopefully) the market pay is explicitly part of my reward for running the fund in a manner such that units DO (hopefully) sell at a premium to NAV.

I will NOT sell any of my personal holdings (including the new 25) into bids placed tomorrow.  I will also NOT bid on more units myself prior to placing the sell order but if they don't all sell at NAV/U+10% I WILL then buy more up myself.

At the time of making this post I personally hold 248 of the 533 outstanding units of the fund.

On the pricing of shares at 10% over NAV/U, all the contract says on pricing is this:

"Other than as detailed below under "MANAGEMENT FEES" the manager is only
entitled to sell issued units on the LTC-GLOBAL exchange. Such sales may only
be made at or above the current NAV/U (to avoid dilution of existing investors'
holdings). "

So any price at or over NAV/U is acceptable under the contract.  The referral to "other than as detailed below" refers to my own right to buy 25% at NAV/U without them being listed on the market (necessary as there's no way to transfer to myself via the market at that price if there's higher Bids up).


SALE OF FURTHER BATCHES

Whether more such batches are sold depends a lot on what happens with the exchange-rate and with trading conditions (and with what demand there is for this batch).  My expectation right now is that another few batches of 100 units could usefully be sold - but when they're sold depends as much as anything on how quickly we can sell extra bonds backed by them (as the goal is to back BTC-denominated capital - right now the actual LTC themselves aren't too much use).

There's a risk that it will be difficult to sell bonds if units are available (although the bonds have less risk, the much higher historic profit of the units will outweigh this to many investors).  Should this prove to be the case then I'll revisit the idea of listing bonds on BTC.CO.

Don't think anyone faults the Post Office for "pre-mining" stamps.  But if the Post Office were to claim stamps were decentralised then I think you'd find a few people disagreeing.

What OpenCoin are doing/have done (with some degree of success) is move the discussion to HOW to fairly distribute XRP.  In fact, given they're happy to run a centralised system, there's no need for a block-chain or XRP at all - they could just manage the ledger on a private server.  PayPal (and other centralised services) have managed to do that without problems with spam.  Of course then they'd not be able to sell the Ripple concept so easily here - as it would be OPENLY centralised.

But they could promise to decentralise it later without any detail of the plan for that.  They seem to think a vague promise to decentralise XRP supply is fine - so if the communty will accept a vague commitment on one promise to decentralise why wouldn't they accept a different vague promise (rhetorical question of course)?

Isn't taking a BTC-denominated loan to buy something (silver) valued in USD rather risky when BTC is rising fast?

You have to pay the loan back in BTC not USD - so if (this is an extreme example just to show the point) BTC were to double between you taking the loan and selling the silver then either:

a)  The funds raised from selling the silver would only pay half the loan back

or

b) You'd have to sell the silver at a 100% markup.

I'd be wary of gambling heavily on BTC not rising - given that you've twice so far made assertions BTC will fall and been totally wrong (the first time you were so convinced you made a new thread about how BTC was going to fall and silver rise - and of course both went in the opposite direction).  Why are you so confident you're right this time that BTC won't rise further?

Obviously if BTC falls then the loan works out very nicely.  But this makes the loan much more a bet on BTC falling than anything to do with silver - the fund could either make a nice profit or lose more than it has available in spare cash depending entirely on how BTC moves vs USD.

(I've ignored here changes in the price of silver - if it falls then it makes the situation worse, if it rises then it improves the situation).

I thought the fund was meant to gamble on selling silver options (was never clear WHERE you could sell covered calls that were covered by silver you personally held) not on the exchange-rate.

LTC has fallen a lot vs BTC in last weeks.

Anyone trading who kept a significant portion of their capital in BTC (which you HAVE to do to trade currencies) would have made a profit (denominated in LTC) even if they did zero trades at all.

Have you made more profit than if you'd just converted your LTC into BTC and then looked at how the value of that changed during the fall?  The test of whether you're a profitable trader comes when LTC rises vs BTC - where you have to make significant profit from trading just to keep up with drop of value caused by your BTC becoming worth less.

It's very easy to fool yourself into believing you're a profitable trader.  It's not quite so easy to fool everyone else.

Yeah that's a pretty abhorrent practice that serves no useful purpose.  It just adds unnecessary complexity and confusion - es[ecially when shares have voting rights (NOT the case on Zig/Pride).  Some BTC companies will go to any lengths to avoid having to do any sort of proper accounts.

There's not even any meaningful definition of what profit IS in the two listings you mentioned.  Both will hold significant amounts of both USD and BTC - so there should really be a definition of what profit actually is.  If the exchange rate changes in either direction does any resultant change in the value of assets (in whichever currency they account in) mean that a profit/loss was made?  If not, then how are accounts being done to exclude such impact?  Value change arising from exchange-rate movement has to either be included or excluded when calculating profit : we don't even know WHETHER it's included let alone the detail of how accounting will be done.

The contracts are silent on a bunch of things that should be in there: but that's BTC world for you.  Contracts written by the financially illiterate.  On the bright side at least they're actually genuine companies with actual product and a non-zero chance of success - a massive step up from the blatant scams/deceptions listed on Bitfunder recently:

Biz27B - where the scammer hasn't even bothered saying what his business is and instead pretends it's listed to track invetsment of private shareholders when it's obviously an attempt to sell unspecified crap to the public.  There MAY be some business behind it but it's inherently a fraud when he claims a purpose for listing which is obviously a lie (he claims he can't stop shareholders selling to the public - but is actually the one trying to do it himself).  If his plan is so shit he can't even reveal WHAT it is then he should have the decency not to list - OR the exchange should have the self-respect to tell him to fuck off.  As he hasn't revealed what the business (supposedly) is, it's hard to be SURE it's a scam.  But if it isn't, it's almost certainly some worthless junk - as not revealing the nature of a succeessful business would just be giving away too much value to be done by anyone rational.  It does give him the chance to drop hints etc and try to fool people into believing he's a business that he isn't (without actually ever making a claim) - which is the best chance he has of making this particular scam pay off (and on at least one level it absolutely IS a scam as there's demonstrable lies in the limited information he's provided - meaning he's trying to obtain money under false pretences).

Exchange.ESIF - think of anything which makes it obvious something is just an outright scam and this one has it.  In trumps.

So although there's lack of detail/disclosure in the new two they ARE a big step in the right direction and, also in their favour, they aren't mining companies, investment funds or gambling sites.

Surely to send them it in Ripple they need to have trusted you first.  You're actually sending an IOU not BTC/GBP.  Which would be why you could send to a friend but noone else - as the friend has presumably extended trust to you.

Selling a bunch of shares at price X then selling another bunch at price 2*X a few days later is NOT how things work irl.

Discounting for early/bulk orders/placements is entirely normal - it's the extent/time-scale over which it's happening that is a fairly recent development.  Plus the fact the heavily discounted (if they are actually discounted - without any financials it could be a smaller markup rather than a discount at all) ones are being sold to Joe Public is rather different to irl.

It happens for two reasons:

1.  People are desperate to raise cash - the prospect of buying shares then selling them on at an immediate profit is siffocent grred-based motivation for them to get sales they otherwise wouldn't get.  And if sales go slowly they can always buy up a big chunk themselves to make demand look higher than it actually is.

2.  The people doing it have no clear idea of what their companies are actually worth - so don't really care about selling at a 'fair' price as they lack the information and ability to actually work out a 'fair' price in the first place.

Doing it that way will tend to raise more cash quickly than would otherwise be the case - but will inevitably end up raising less cash in total than a properly planned IPO would if (and only if) the company is actually worth the sort of ball-park valulation that the share shales add up to.  If the company is actually worth very little then the early-bird approach will raise more than they'd ever raise through a more traditional approach to their IPO. 

Which leads to the conclusion that companies doing it either need the cash very fast OR believe the company isn't worth as much as they ask OR are just totally clueless on how to value their company.  I think a mix of all three is the case in the recent couple pf such IPOs - with the balance between the three actually quite significantly different between them.

Note that S.BBET on MPEx also did a very similar thing (heavily tiered pricing of shares) and seems to have stagnated with no new sales after the first load (probably due to their being no sign at all of it heading towards decent profits).  It's a way to lock in profit (or cover debts) for the founders even if the business never really takes off.

You can't discuss whether or not to build your own version of something without looking at the pros and cons of the alternatives already available.  The two discussions heavily overlap.

Until you're appointed a moderator you lack the ability to determine that a discussion has ended just because you want the last word in it.