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I want to personally write you this message, in front of the whole community. I hope that you can read this in full, and will await your reply and/or feedback, and welcome any action you take.
What's prompting this is that I saw that you gave us a Negative Trust Rating on this BTCC_Official company account, you claiming that:
A) Changes auction rules mid-auction to benefit themselves.
B) I would not trust this company/person
First of all, yes, I did make the executive decision to change the bidding increment rules of the auction, after 3 hours of auction extension overtime, past the originally scheduled end-time of 4:00 pm UTC. For many people, this auction was going on for way too long.
It appears that you were not following the auction for the 3+ hours past end-time, and thus did not see this post like the rest of us, while the bids were coming in.
Let me show it to you here, the post of the actual change I made, at 3 hours and ~6 minutes after the scheduled end-time of the auction:
This auction has gone into over-time for over 3 hours now.
In order to encourage a proper (and early?) end to this auction, I will make an executive decision, that starting at post #401, all new bids would need to follow a NEW minimum bid increment of 0.01 BTC.
This will apply for BOTH the One Bitcoin (V##) and the One Tenth Bitcoin (W##).
Please pay attention to this rule.
If your bid does not EXCEED the previous bid by more than 0.01 BTC, then your bid is not valid.
thanks,
Bobby
In order to encourage a proper (and early?) end to this auction, I will make an executive decision, that starting at post #401, all new bids would need to follow a NEW minimum bid increment of 0.01 BTC.
This will apply for BOTH the One Bitcoin (V##) and the One Tenth Bitcoin (W##).
Please pay attention to this rule.
If your bid does not EXCEED the previous bid by more than 0.01 BTC, then your bid is not valid.
thanks,
Bobby
I did take executive action to change the rules. I decided to do it in a way that would encourage LESS back and forth bidding, and to ensure that the people who did place valid bids, would not EASILY get their bids wiped out by snipers who had the stamina to stay until the end.
The "extend-by-15-minute" rules was original to prevent sniping, but due to the (bad?) rules we set initially, it actually allowed practically anyone, to extend and extend the auction in perpetuity, just by innocently placing a bid that's 0.001 BTC higher than an existing bid on one of the Wxx coins, One Tenth Bitcoin.
A initial auction rules had a "deadly" and "toxic" combination of certain features, thus allowing this unintended behavior just described:
1) relatively *low* bid increment for the Wxx coins, at 0.001 BTC
2) any last minute bid on any coin would re-extend the *whole* auction, for *all* coins
3) re-extention time was *long*, at 15 minutes
4) having so *many* (~200) coins available for auction
With dedicated serious bidders, as well as casual bidders coming in from all sides and against all coins, our rules had a deadly effect of this auction going on almost forever. It essentially gave aggressive (and persistent) bidders a cheap weapon, to wreck damage to an existing, stable set of bids, all while doing it late in "overtime", when many of the players may have already left. In the analogy of sports: these rules created conditions for a game where the Offensive weapons were too powerful, in relation to the Defensive weapons, especially in overtime, when everyone is exhausted, tired, and may have even left.
If the auction did go on much longer, the victims are the ones who put in solid bids, but couldn't hang around for 4+ hours after the scheduled end-time, to constantly be on the lookout, to defend their bid. A sniping bid could come out of the blue, at any time, in the indefinite extension of the auction. And not to mention, I myself, and 2 of my staff members at BTCC had to stay up very late that evening, to follow all bids, to ensure correctness, point out mistakes, and to keep providing everyone with an updated "Latest Bids" tally. (Now yes, we should not complain about staying up late; I'm not complaining, as I was very willing to stay up late to follow this to the end, as it was my responsibility.)
The very real motivation for changing the rules during Auction Overtime, was truly just two-fold:
Objective #1: Bring closure to the auction, and not let it go on "forever"
Objective #2: Bring protection to the past bidders, so that they don't have to hang on "forever" to protect that bids
I thought about changing the auction using a different rule, such as to only have the 15-minute extension apply to coins that had a bid. But this method is unfair to the bidder, as he/she might want to re-bid on other coins, given the latest bidding scenarios.
I also thought about changing the rules by decreasing the extension time, to use maybe a 10-minute or 5-minute extension, instead of the 15-minute extension. An extreme version would be to use a 1-minue or 2-minute extension. After some quick thinking, I didn't believe this would accomplish my two objectives above.
Edit (added this paragraph roughly ~20 minutes after posting):
I finally also thought about changing to rules to only allow the auction extension for a set of 3-5 people, who were constantly making bids against each other's highest bid coins. However, I quickly realized that this would be tremendously unfair for everyone, as no one else could defend their bids. It's essentially giving these 3-5 people the ultimate shining weapon.
Finally, I came to the conclusion (right or wrong; good or bad) to increase the minimum bid increment for the Wxx coins, from the 0.001 as in the original rule, to 0.01 BTC. The purpose was to discourage frivolous bidding, and only allow bidding from people who really had an intention to win that coin. Later, at the ~4.5 extension hour mark, I yet again instituted another rule change, to again raise the bid increment, this time, to 0.02 BTC, applying both to the Vxx and Wxx coins.
Most importantly: my late changes to the auction rules, at 3+ hours past scheduled end-time, was NOT to be greedy financially, such as to make MORE profits for BTCC. It was purely to accomplish the two objectives listed above. Auction experts could very well agree with me that making the bid increment higher actually chills down the auction, yielding potentially lower final sale prices, and LESS profit for BTCC.
To me, have the auction go on for much longer did not make sense anymore, especially with the deadly combination of the 4 toxic rules mentioned above.
In any case, you came back late, and placed a bid not knowing about the rule change. I can't blame you, but I did alert you to the change, and gave you a choice; see my post #469.
And with this rule change, you could not just "cheaply" take a shot at two of the Wxx coins, some 4 hours into the auction extension,
hoping that they're no longer around to defend their bid. You are essentially trying to snipe at the items, precisely what we set out to prevent.
Now, I do admit that it was our rules that were messed up in the first place, creating this "toxic" combination that actually ended up allowing high-stamina people to snipe at coins. So, I responded my changing to rules, to prevent this sort of sniping. You still could, but you'd have to pay a higher price, of at least 0.01 BTC (or even 0.02 BTC, later on.)
In your case, you chose NOT to snipe at the coins W78 and W79, now that the "cost of sniping" was 0.01 BTC instead of the cheap and measly 0.001 BTC.
And now you're complaining to me about me changing the auction rules, in mid-auction. Yes, I did do that.
Further, you're accusing me of changing to rules to PROFIT more. No, that is NOT why.
You're complaining because you could no longer snipe for cheap. Yes, that was my objective, to PREVENT late sniping.
And finally, you left a NEGATIVE trust rating on our Official Company account, falsely accusing us of the REASON why we changed the auction rules mid-auction. Your accusation of our reason: "for profit", is patently FALSE.
And most damning: you further state that you WOULD NOT TRUST us: Would NOT trust this BTCC_Official account; Would NOT trust this company, BTCC.
Really? Do you really NOT trust us, and you are willing to tell that publicly to all forum members here?
Please confirm with me if that is indeed the case. If you no longer trust us, then we will end our relationship here. I will refund your payments for this auction (including your tx fees), and even offer to refund *all* of your past purchases from BTCC Mint, both from our online store, and from our auctions. If you truly CANNOT trust me and CANNOT trust BTCC, then please do NOT participate in any of our future sales or auctions on this forum, and don't even bother buying anything from BTCC again.
Talk is cheap. Action is what matters.
It was *cheap* and *easy* for you to just snipe, whine, complain, and leave a NEGATIVE TRUST rating on our account.
Your casual "pressing" the NEGATIVE TRUST button/rating for us; that's probably an easy and quick reaction.
Or was that a serious and intentful decision, done after a lot of thought and contemplation?
What's difficult and time consuming, is to be responsible and follow the auction to the end, ensure relative fairness, make hard on-the-field decisions, make controversial last-minute and mid-auction rule changes, accepting responsibility, and committing to learn from mistakes and make improvements in the future, AND, to write this long post, to explain our thoughts on this matter, to give transparency to this whole community, which I respect and embrace.
Leaving a short NEGATIVE TRUST rating is just the easy way out.
The harder thing to do, is to take time to reflect, and see if it makes sense to re-adjust your perception of me and BTCC, to possibly reverse your NEGATIVE TRUST rating on our account.
You are an outstanding member of this community, a senior member who has garnered a lot of trust and respect from everyone else here. Your words matter, your actions matter, and what even matters more, is your public rating of others here.
I understand, agree, and admit that changing rules mid-auction is bad tact on our part. In my opinion at that time, the impact was limited, and the benefits were clear. I made the decision and accept responsibility. Yes, I will learn from this episode, and commit to setting better rules in future auctions.
Thank you for reading this. I look forward to your sincere response.
And if you do decide to retract your NEGATIVE TRUST rating for our BTCC_Official account, I would most certainly welcome it. If you did that, I would also know that you spent the time and energy to read this rambling post, and that you have gained some valuable insights into my past actions. I would thank you for that as well. And most important of all, no harm, no foul.
(and for others who might also be reading this, I welcome your criticisms, endorsements, or any comments in general.)
Edit (added this paragraph roughly ~20 minutes after posting):
A general statement about BTCC Mint and our role here on Bitcoin Talk Forum: We, as BTCC Mint, are in the business of making physical bitcoin collectibles. We make them in the highest quality we possibly can, and we hope our customers love them as much as we do. "In Crypto We Trust." We hope that you appreciate the products we make; we hope that you find it as a good investment; and we hope that you find it a good value for your money. Making a profit is only possible if what we sell is appreciated by our users. In the end, we are NOT professional auctioneers. We are merely doing these auctions, to allow you, our most important customers, a chance to get our products early, with the serial numbers you want. Since auctioning is not our livelihood, we probably will make some mistakes in doing this, as we have in the past. Please forgive us, and give us some slack. Give us a chance. Running auctions here is just a means for us to get our products out to you first. It's not the other way around, where we created BTCC Mint merely to have a role of running the best and most perfect auction on this forum. Give us a break, and support us! Don't hate us for having made a few small mistake. And don't spread bad things about us, unless you TRULY think we're BAD, UNTRUSTWORTHY or EVIL. Your words and endorsement matters; to us, and to everyone else. Give us a thumbs up if you support what we're doing: Making Great Physical Bitcoins, to Make Crypto More Accessible Worldwide.
thanks,
Bobby
3:57 am local time. Yes, I'm staying up late, to follow up on details of this auction, and to write this long and important post to Minerjones.
