It is my understanding that a lien is typically agreed upon by both parties within their agreement. In the cases where it isn't there can be a legal lien applied but it is upheld by a court and the items held by the lean cannot be sold, but are held until payment is rendered. My understanding, in this scenario, is that Ken seized Ukyo's shares without any legal backing, called it a lien, and now is acting as if he owns the shares. As I'm fairly certain no lien was written into the Bitfunder listing agreement, and I know it isn't written into the contract between ActM and its shareholders, I would assume that Ken is exercising it as a matter of law, and that, in my opinion,  is where everything false apart. What state's law is imposed? Is it a federal law that grants the ability to implement a lien against a shareholder? I highly doubt it. "

As stated before, we have to individuals highly involved in illegal securities. Imposing legal action just doesn't quite work here, in my opinion. All that said, I won't continue to drudge up the Ukyo v Slaughter case here as I'm sure people are growing weary of it.

Happy New Year, guys!

I doubt that there was an attempt to scams

But I can confirm BIG problems with support and admin reaction to problems/errors - all last weeks almost all tickets/e-mails/PMs from clients just are completely ignored.
For example i have some problems with access to my own account (due to some unknown technical problems confirmation codes do not come to my e-mail and  because of what i can not pass the 2th authorization stage and log in to my account). It is a critical issue - i am de facto bloked and lost control of all assets(USD, BTC, LTC, PPC and few shares) placed on this exchange with total value of few BTC for more than a month.
During this month I sent a few tickets, direct e-mail and a post on this forum(in the official theme of the exchange) about this issue - and not got ANY reactions from support/admin.

At the end(after several weeks of waiting and polite requests) i began to "bomb" all known contacts by e-mails with headlines like "Stop ignoring critical issues!" or "Begin to respond or be labeled as scammers!" and finally was able to attract the attention of someone from support.  But it was only 2 lines - a short  apologies and please remind "what is the problem"? (although in my letter it has already been described). And after my answer with a more detailed description of situation - no any reactions again (one more week pass).

Fortunately, while I was waiting for reaction one of the verification codes could slip to old e-mail after my numerous attempts to login, I managed to login one time and use it to immediately change e-mail address and disable e-mail verification codes. I now have normal access to the account cuz i solved the problem myself.

I know its rhetorical question, but allow me to answer this one nonetheless


The awesome thing they did was being the first (and for quite some time, only) industrial bitcoin mining operation producing their own asics, at a time when almost no such chips existed. That is something no one will ever be able to do again.

Also, I would put this:

Firmly in the "pro" list, rather than with the "cons". AM has a huge stockpile of money, thats a serious advantage in any industry. They dont have to worry about finding funding or taking in enough preorders to pay for some NRE. THey can just do what they think makes sense and if need be, think big. They even have enough money to develop several alternatives (be it chip designs or whatever) in parallel, if they think that makes sense. I dont see how that is a negative.