In a year's time anyone holding 5 shares may be a whale. Buy and hold investor dynamics are often counter-intuitive. One would think that as it becomes accepted as a smart investment, investors would accumulate larger and larger positions. While this is true to a certain degree, history shows that the opposite trend occurs. As prices increase, "whales" tend to sell fractions of their holdings, taking profits off of the table. The average size of holdings decreases dramatically, and the number of shareholders increases in proportion. If one would assume that today that the average shareholder had 100 shares (just a number I picked out of a hat) and there were 500 total shareholders, one would expect in an environment of increasing valuations that at some point the average shareholder would have 10 shares, spread more or less across 5000 shareholders. Each day that goes by the effect of whales cashing out becomes smaller and smaller, until it becomes almost negligible, as each whale becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of total shares.

We are still at the point where whale sales can disrupt share prices substantially. I do not expect that will be a danger in the future if historic trends hold.

Looks like the future managed to arrive in less than 24 hours. A week in bitcoin time is a year in world time.

Soon people may be saying that they should have bought more at 4.0 today.

AM could go to 100btc or .0002 btc, but it only matters on the day you sell. Everything else is just entertainment.

My only real concern about the rising price is that it becomes a barrier to accumulating more shares. I am only really in it for the dividend income. Higher prices for shares translates into lower yields for additional share purchases.

I guess that is the different viewpoint of a long-term investor.

Are there really people in favor of clogging up the blockchain with microtransactions just so that they could get a daily dividend? I don't believe this would be in the best interest of bitcoin, and therefore not in the best interest of AM.

FC holding shareholder lists offline gives me an added sense of security from the all seeing gaze of big brother. Although the wallet addresses are easy to find in the blockchain, our email addresses are not.

I am not sure there is a "best" way, at least without defining what parameters comprise the term "best". There is one way that has not been previously discussed.

Simply buy those things with bitcoins which cannot be directly purchased with fiat, and then resell them for fiat. A perfect example would be ASICminer USB sticks. Purchase a large quantity, and then resell them on ebay. It has the added advantage of allowing you to avoid any governmental interference wherein they claim you are in the business of transmitting funds illegally, and helps to grow the bitcoin ecosystem.

Just a thought.

AM direct share auctions have become extinct. It is scary to contemplate how high bids will go if another should arise.

In 5 years time we may all be chained to plows cutting furrows in state-owned ethanol fields to provide fuel for the military campaigns of our respective governments in the resource wars.

Hard to say what a share of ASICminer will be worth in 1 week, to say nothing of the value in 5 years.

It is certainly doing just fine today though.

TAT shares pay dividends as promised. The dividends speak for themselves.

If investors are using you as a yardstick to compare similar products you have become the de facto standard.

The value of this position is almost incalculable.

After reading this very long and winding thread, I can see both sides of the argument. But I think in the end it all comes down to one thing: counter party risk.

If you use paypal, or Visa, or whatever system out there, those providers assume some counterparty risk. And they charge you for it. Sometimes they charge you a lot for it.

When you use Bitcoins, you assume all of the risk. There is no risk premium on transactions.

When you assume all of the risk, occasionally you may simply lose.

"We are working to configure the Little Single. Given the way our units have turned out we have had to make adjustments on each one. The LS was the last to be announced, so it is the last to be configured for production."

It is my understanding that the LS and the Single both use identical hardware, albeit less ASICs on the LS. If this is the case, the order of shipping could be maintained by building 25gh and 50gh as a single product line, and simply configuring each unit as a "customization" for the client. This would in essence create three order queues; one for jally's, one for LS and Singles combined, and one for Minirigs. Each queue would obviously be independent of each other, and ship queue order of that particular line would be shipping different order dates depending upon availability of boards.

That said, I wonder if some large disparity could develop due to these factors. Considering that a very large percentage of the total order pool are Jallys, I would think it possible that production of singles and LS could actually end up getting units into users mailboxes much faster than the Jallys. That is to say, a Jally ordered in Feb may take two to three months longer to arrive than a single ordered on the very same paydate. Were the LS and Singles separate lines, You could be looking at getting the LS models in almost no time due to the extremely low order rate.

I tend to think the Minirigs are a bit more custom and therefore are almost impossible to project dates. What think you?

There is already a well-funded group developing proprietary gateway software to integrate a BTC economy into several major game platforms. If you are still at the stage of raising capital you have probably already missed the boat. It should have been obvious for at least a year that BTC is ideally suited to replace in-game currencies, especially if you want to migrate assets between platforms. The only sticking point has been the resistance to abandoning control of the value of current proprietary game currencies for a self-regulating one. But that resistance is beginning to crumble as the benefits begin to make themselves apparent. They are doing quite a bit behind the scenes on this, and whether they are successful will be for the future to determine. Please take this with a grain of salt, I can offer no proof, so just consider it a random rumor, and just another datapoint.

I am under NDA to really say anything else, so don't ask.

I think it is unfair to classify people as stupid when they choose a course of action that conflicts with your own analysis. It is a very very thin line between smart and lucky. It is a problem in temporal perception.

If the future rewards your actions, you are a genius. If it punishes you, it was just bad luck.

The capacity for self-deception and rationalization by humans knows no bounds.

Personally, I am sticking around, and may add to holdings. But the results will in no way determine my intelligence, just my penchant for rolling the dice.

I know this is none of my business, but i thought I would drop in my 2 Satoshis on this thread.

From a historical standpoint, it was really not that long ago that calling someone a liar would get you horsewhipped at the least, or get you shot at the worst. Words, like any other action can have adverse consequences, and before we use them we should be prepared to accept those consequences. I know today that people generally feel that they should be able to say whatever they like without those consequences, but like everything else, that is only an opinion.

There is a good reason to be civil, even when you are frustrated. It makes the world a better place, and tends to bestow respect on you. Only in a schoolyard, a prison, or a trailer park can you get respect for that sort of behavior. Over the years I have learned to glean quite a bit about the past and the character of people by their choice of words, and many others I know are quite adept at this. These are critical things to know when entering into business dealings with others.

I guess what I am trying to say is, always put your best foot forward, and don't let your temper get the best of you. It will almost always cost you something if you don't, even if you don't see what it is costing you.

The bitcoin community is trying to grow, and outsiders will judge us by how we treat each other. What is written in these forum will exist for a very very very long time. It can cause real damage long after the arguments are forgotten.

I would posit that every member of the human race can be considered insane in one fashion or another by the majority. This comes with being human, all of our judgments are passed through a unique prism of our own specific experiences. No one (and I do mean no one) has the corner on the market for truth. Understand this and you will quickly understand that trying to impose your own unique rationality upon others is futile at best, and destructive at it's worst. At any time any of us is as likely to be wrong as right.

Those who fail to realize this generally resort to name-calling or labeling when they fail to convince others that their "reality" is the only logical correct one. This would appear to a contradiction;  the person attempting to persuade others believes he is doing so out of altruism, that is, he is helping his misguided fellow man by providing him with valid information, but then lashes out when the other person is non-receptive, showing contempt for those he had originally intended to assist. This is a difficult thing to realize, and a difficult behavior to learn to overcome.

I have done well on most of my mining and investment ventures. No amount of name-calling can change the past. Please, feel free to present your case in the most logical manner you are capable of. But do not degrade the choices others make, for they are every bit as valid as yours. That is the nature of freewill and choice.

But I could be wrong.