Branny, you are the king of informative updates.  Please continue doing it.  It's a breath of fresh air compared to other investments I'm in.

I was thinking about MTGox's 200,000 Bitcoins they found in that old wallet or whatever it is.  At some point the bankruptcy is going to sell those coins and dump them on the market in one big go turning them into FIAT.  There is no way I see them distributing out those coins as Bitcoins.  What will that do to the market?  If they released all 200,000+ coins at one time?  Seems to me that's exactly what they are going to do.

I always like these tech savy people who go out of town but somehow don't have a laptop or tablet to go with them.  Let alone a smart phone.

Because they promise people free money later if they invest new money now.

It's a good question.  For some reason it defaulted to this after the last update.  I got tired of changing it to whatever wild forecast was in here because it just seems to consistently lose me money...

Short EMA 20
Long EMA 42
Trade 30 Minutes
Buy 1 - 0   Buy 2 - 0.15
Sell 1 - 0   Sell 2 - 0.1
Stop Loss is 0

So what should this be?  I back test and the profit is not so good.  Empirical evidence suggests that is true.  Yet, other things I've tried have not met with much better success.  Other than when the currency makes huge gains, which currently it is not.

The purpose of financial reports is to make sure the man in charge has been spending the money correctly.  Our shares go towards profits, if the money was spent on things outside the scope of the business then Ken would be in violation of those agreements and we could discuss replacing him for someone who could take the business in an appropriate direction.  On the other hand, if the money was spent on things that just failed to materialize through no fault of his own, just bad luck or bad choices, then we can rest easier knowing that the money invested is being sunk into what we paid for.

It's why any company shows its books to share holders.

Don't underestimate that someone else could have bought a data center and hosted miners months and months earlier than Ken did.  And the rewards would have been greater.  We're also under the thumb of an investigation that we've seen no proof of which is limiting our ability to get out from being investors in the first place.  Other than total forfeiture which I'm not willing to do. 

We should not have to rely on the assurances of one person.  Evidence should be provided.  The data center and miners are an ok investment.  Though the falling value of Bitcoin coupled with the rising hashrate does not make for a good investment right now.  Hopefully things turn the page on that soon.

Butter-Bot just bought BTC on BTC-E.  That means the price of Bitcoin is about to go down.  It never fails.  It's like clockwork.  Whenever it buys, the value goes down. 

Except it's not averaging at $750, so this is dumb.  It will currently earn back 4.1 bitcoin based on average difficulty increases before it is unprofitable to mine at .15cents a kwh.  Since it costs about 3 coins to buy one, you'll make 1.1 coins. 

You ordered from Minersource and not BA directly?  Because they aren't importing orders from BA's site.

They eventually shipped.  They got chips in over the weekend and they are testing.  If they pass tests shipping may begin as early as Monday of next week.  It may not be fast shipping, but between now and August is an explosive amount of Hash being added. 

In terms of hash rate, right now it's around 60 million ghash.  If BFL ships 20,000 Royal Monarchs plus regular Monarchs, the Hashrate will be an additional 32 million.  Around a 50% increase in hash rate.  If you through all the rest of the companies like KNC, Asicminer, etc.  You're going to double the difficulty.  But then it gets really difficult to try and double it again because there just aren't that many orders out there.  And a lot of miners have switched to Scrypt mining.  Plus, a doubling of the hash rate is going to cause older 65nm and below equipment to go offline for those ordinary people who pay their electric bill. 

So I would not expect the Hashrate to triple by August.  It IS going to spike, and ROI is going to be further out, but I believe it'll ROI. 

The reason Bitcoin will rise has little to do with modern countries with regulated banking sectors that are mostly working properly.  The reason someone in a third world country would invest in Bitcoin is because it's going to be safer than the bank that is controlled by a shaky Government.  If your money was in Ukraine's currency, would you feel safe that it would be there in the morning?  Unlikely.  And it is not easy for these people to go and purchase another currency and then keep it somewhere safe.  Bitcoin provides safety.  It's just not that easy to move money in and out of Bitcoin for the non-text savy.  More Bitcoin ATM's, more adoption at stores, more wallets and education.  Its value will grow and grow.

Bitcoin needs a lot more education in the third world and access has to be made available.  The longer Bitcoin survives the more people will realize it's not a fly-by-night investment scam, and an actual good place to store your money safely.  Safer than corrupt banks and hanging onto cash in the home.

August is a long ways off, are we likely to see any sort of performance increases or optimizations beyond the expected 5.4th on the SP30?  Is that just a low ball estimate of power and it'll end up being faster, or is that a best case scenario?  With the orbital death-ray of KNC and BFL shipping before August arrives we're likely to see the difficulty rate jump up significantly before you ship.  We know BFL has more than 20,000 Monarchs to ship out and however much that purchased hosting contracts.  Also Black Arrow ships in two weeks, and Asicminer has boards in hands testing right now.  So the difficulty is about to explode.  Trying to view this from that angle and think about what 5.4th will really return by August.  Are you able to ship sooner than August if everything goes well?  Any sort of other perk to this process that makes investing the money to buy something so late worthwhile at this point?

Nobody knows if they are going to hit their deadline, even they don't know.  They are relying on a lot of third parties here.  They can hope for the best and that everyone comes through on time, but you can't be sure.  So far I've heard nothing that indicates they can't do it, but it's also possible they'll hit a snag at any moment.

Also, there is that whole 5 days of free hosting or whatever, my guess is this is burn-in time before shipping?  So if that starts on May 1st the actual shipping wouldn't be until May 5th or 6th.  Right? 

I don't believe he's being investigated.  He's shown no proof of it.  He likely doesn't want to put the shares out there because he'd have to explain why there are no dividends.  A great many of the fanboys think he is storing their "profits" in their dividends and as soon as they are released they will get them.  They also believe that sales of the current miners are being split up and going into those shares they don't have but believe they will one day get.

I think some of them are motivated by fear.  If they just let Ken do his thing, one day he'll be able to give them their money that they are hoping he has been good about.  Any talk of lawsuits or SEC means they'd get nothing, so they just accept the good and ignore the bad and hope they see their cash again one day.

From Ken's point of view, it makes no sense to make the shares available.  He would have to do a bunch of work and he gets nothing for it.  He already has everyone's money.  The hardware that everyone paid for is just going to his pockets.  Great deal for Ken!  Not so good for shareholders, which I'm one of.  Thankfully I didn't invest very much. 

Why nobody tries to sue him to get a piece of what he currently still has is anyone's guess.  They are all just going to wait until the money is exhausted and the miners are gone and then post up about how mad they are and how someone else should sue Ken.  Bitter disappointment awaits...

Some folks still think Ken is actually working on the 28nm chip.  Crazy. 

He said 4 weeks from today +/- a week.

It sounds like the X3 Hashboard Sample IS the prototype you guys are asking about.  Otherwise, how would they be testing for performance?  Performance of what with no chips?  It's the prototype.

I think they will be late, but we're not looking at five weeks.  Probably an extra week or two.  Which, time is money and they should come clean and tell us what the real prediction is on shipping, but I'm not canceling an order over it.  Waiting to hear what the compensation changes are going to be when they ship.

I can't see how this would be profitable.  By August the difficulty is going to be around five times what it is now maybe greater with all the hardware coming out.  This thing won't come close to making a return. Plus it's 2500 watts.  Ouch...

Same thing that happened when KNC launched, the software takes time to tweak to get everything right.  It's not just about the hardware.  Read the AM thread on this for people's thoughts, it's not really the place here for it. 

Again, that's not optimized.  And that from-the-wall test is based on one chip with other stuff powering the board.  So the jury is till out.  Price is also a factor.  I suspect we're going to see a massive hardware price war soon.  There are too many players selling chips at the same time.