A lot of the time big spikes and dips don't actuallly reflect a change in Hashrate at all - but rather a change in network luck.

All the figures we see for Hashrate are only a guess based on how long it's been taking to solve blocks.  A period of high luck looks like a surge in Hashpower and a period of bad luck like a drop in Hashpower.

Don't expect every change to have an associated actual change in deployed hardware.

Your stupidity never ceases to amaze me.  This time you seem to not know the difference between IPO price and current NAV/U.

Your initial sales were at ~0.2 BTC.

Those people have received back .0551178 in dividends and have remaining value of .0472.  i.e. they've LOST half what they invested.  As it happens, on this occasion, that isn't your fault - as a lot of that loss is the drop in price of silver.

But for it to be an automatic success in my terms they'd need to have received back (in dividends) more than the 0.2 they paid originally.   which ASICMINER has done and LTC-ATF has done (original IPO was 10 LTC, the 2 dividends we've paid amount to 25 LTC per share).

It doesn't become a success because you make enough loss to reduce current NAV/U below dividends you've paid to date.  Were that the case (which wierdly you appear to believe) then any share could be a success by dividending out 1% then losing the remaining 99%.

With LTC-ATF I only pay dividends if we can't use the cash ourselves.  In the 9 months we've been operating we've only twice paid dividends - once for 200% initial share price and more recently a dividend of 50% initial price.  The rest of profits have been retained (giving 440% growth in NAV/U as of right this instant).  Paying dividends at all only happened at MY request - as I felt we were sitting on cash we couldn't use.  Investors seemed perfectly happy with all profits retained.

Dividends are widely used as a crutch to give the impression of profit whilst loss is what's actually occuring.  PMBs are the classic example of this - explicitly designed to devalue whilst paying out dividends.  There are also a LOT of stocks/funds which pay dividends where the dividends aren't actually profit - just revenue.  Generally these are ones where the manager gets paid a percentage of dividends - so has a clear incentive to pay as many dividends as they can regardless of whether they reflect real profit or make sense from a business perspective.

The argument that getting something back is wise in an evironment of regular failure/scamming is a flawed one.  If that significantly concerns you about a specific investment/issuer then you shouldn't touch the investment at all - whether they pay dividends OR retain profit for growth.

To DeprivedMining.

If you sent to Deprived by mistake let me know and I can fix it (that's the account I used there for LTC-ATF).

You need to read the comments made in context to see just how off the mark MPOE-PR was.

Specifically it's already paid out more in dividends in the last 3 months than she claimed the shares were worth at most.

I agree with MPOE-PR on a lot of things - on that issue she was utterly wrong.  I also undervalued ASICMINER (I sold at about 0.75 BTC - clearly an error with hindsight).  What I got wrong was the extent to which BFL and AVALON would totally screw up and leave ASICMINER able to help themselves both to Mining and to sales - and, perhaps most importantly of all, to credibility.  What MPOE-PR got wrong was the assumption that EVERYTHING not on MPEx is crap and will fail.  Being listed on MPEx is neither a pre-requisite for success (see ASICMINER) or a guarantee of success (see BitVPS, S.BBET so far and the Giga pass-through).  FWIW I personally consider a security to be a definite success when (and only when) investors have received back at least the average IPO cost in dividends/final payment.  Until then it can only be a likely success that could still end up a failure if the operator ran with the cash - as recovery of funds in scammed/dead BTC securities is pretty much nonexistent.

Yeah - number of vote NOT number of YES votes should be the criterion for refunds.  If it's apathy from moderators then refund.  If it's a shitty security then tough luck.

In practice any losses from investment will also all go to SELLING.

The market prices of MINING and SELLING reflect the market's belief of how the two are entitled to capital.

Present prices of (using round figures) .021 Mining, .033 Selling indicate that the market believes that about 61% of all capital will end up going to SELLING.  If the market is correct then we'd have to lose over 61% of capital before the losses would pass on to MINING.  That's impossible with current and proposed investments so unless the market is significantly wrong there's no way any losses could be passed on to MINING (though capital cover in terms of number of days COULD drop - but the market suggests any such drop would be replaced when difficulty rose).

That's why only SELLING gets to vote - as they're the ones who will get the profit and stand to lose from any loss.

In simple terms all profit from investments gos to SELLING so long as SELLING is actually receiving dividends.

The only time it gos to MINING is if SELLING never receives another dividend - but SELLING should have voted to close the fund before that happens (once it becomes obvvious difficulty has stopped rising).

Further to the above post let me explain how you can easily tell it's over 10% ROI per year.

At present the site's been going under a week but volume of bets is larger than invested capital.  That means, without doing any math, that you know ROI for investment is over 1% per week and so over 52% per year (ignoring compounding).

That figure will likely drop (a lot) - but right now the ROI is plainly very large without any need to do any math at all beyond noticing that volume of bets exceeds invested capital.

Look at the volume of bets.  Multiply that by 1% (house edge).  That gives the EXPECTED profit (which is what we have to work with).  Now divide that by the time-period in which it occurred - to give a profit/day.  Then divide it by the total capital invested there to give an ROI.  I haven't bothered doing the exact calculation as I can tell at a glance that at present it's well over 10% per year (I'm pretty good at that sort of calculation).

If you do the above calculation on current stats that bear in mind not all capital was even in there most of the time - so the real ROI is far higher than what you get.  If the motion is approved then I'd be doing more rigorous calculations and keeping records so as to be able to watch trends and work out what expected ROI was for specific growth in capital there etc.  I would NOT be posting those - as it generally isn't in my interest to provide detailed analysis for free to everyone on the forum.

EDIT: you actually need to multiply expected profit by 0.99 (to account for dooglus' own 1%) but that obviously has a trivial impact.

Having considered my response above (and the post to which I replied) let me clarify the following:

No more than 20% of capital will be invested into Coinlenders without a new vote.
No more than 10% of capital will be invested into Just-Dice without a new vote.

All future proposals will have a stated maximum percentage which will require a new motion to be increased.

Where such maximums become exceeded due to unexpectedly large dividend payouts they will be promptly reduced back to within the approved maximums.

I wouldn't initially be investing 25% into it - or into anything (other than my own bonds which have no significant CP risk that doesn't already exist and it's not possible or likely to be possible in the future for me to get 25% into my bonds anyway).  The 25% is a maximum not a target.

If the motions are approved then at present I'd be looking initially to put :

200 BTC into Coinlenders (the lowest amount to get the highest rate for a 30-day CD) - with the plan to do a second similar one in 2 weeks time if capital has grown sufficiently to support it.
100 BTC into Just-Dice - with the intention to review that weekly and increase/decrease it based on the return it generates, available capital and any other information that comes to light.

Haven't seen this anywhere - but can you confirm how long withdrawals take?

Is there some amount above which there's a delay for manual processing?

I'd also recommend increasing your cut - somewhere between 5% and 25% seems the right sort of area to me.  As someone likely to use it I WANT you to be making significant profit.  An operator/issuer making significant profit is one of the single biggest factors reducing likelihood of scamming - if you can clearly make decent profit running it then there's a lot less reason for you to even consider stealing the bank.  Personally I stay well away from anything where I can't see how the operator is making a good return.

Just-Dice doesn't work like S.DICE.

Gamblers send cash once then use it from a balance - so there's only transactions when they deposit or withdraw, not for each bet.

Exchange-Rate : .028
Adjusted NAV/U : 53.514
Bid at : 52.4

LTC has risen slightly verus BTC so far this week, but we're still up about 5% on the week so far.

WEEKLY REPORT

Apologies for this being late.  The spreadsheet below DOES represent the status as of Sunday.  I'll make a seperate post updating for the current situation (as it's changed significantly since Sunday - for the better).  Some of the new in this relates to activity THIS week - seemed silly to make a new post for it.  There's quite a bit of news this time (none of it bad) - so hopefully it was worth the wait.




We ended this week with a slight loss of NAV/U (down 1.22%).  This was entirely due to a surge in the exchange-rate of LTC/BTC - if that were discounted then we'd have been looking at growth of just under 3.5%.  As I always say when this happens, it's the sort of bad news I'd like to have every week - a small reduction in number of LTC/unit in return for a massive increase in the purchasing power of those LTC.

CIPHERMINE

This news actually applies to this week - but seems pointless to wait until the next report to mention it.

One of the things I frequently do is buy on IPOs then flip the shares for a profit.  There are a few factors that absolutely MUST be in place for me to do this - and this one met all of the criteria comfortably (sorry for not listing them - but it obviously isn't something I want to give too much education on).

The first batch of 10,000 shares sold out very quickly at 0.67 each - with, as I'd expect, the bulk bought up by one person (7000+).  We were second largest purchaser with 2000 of them.  I flipped some of these at over 1.0 each before the second batch came out at 0.9 each - and replenished stock from that.

Generally when I buy on IPOs my intention is to flip fast for a reasonable markup - and I never mention it at all specifically in news.  On this one I intend to hold a significant chunk longer - as I believe the share price growth has a LONG way to go upwards.  Specifically I'll be looking to get rid of half of them at a reasonable markup (50%+) and hold the rest a bit longer for some more.  Were it not for my caution in terms of exposure per asset I'd have grabbed a LOT more of these.  Expect these to show up on long-term holdings in the next but one report (I won't be certain I'm holding them long-term until probably early next week).

When I post an updated current valuation after this post, about half the growth is from the trade we've already done in these this week - we've had some other decent trades as well.

S.DICE / S.BBET

I've taken the decision to keep our exposure to these low (we need some exposure for the pass-throughs).  There'll be no more end of week reports with 5000-10000 S.DICE held by the fund (above those needed to cover outstanding pass-through units).

WIth S.DICE there's a couple of reasons.  Evorhees, the asset issuer, has appeared increasongly disinterested in the asset and increasingly keen to pass costs on to investors even where it's dubious whether the contract allows it.  Just-Dice has emerged as, in my view, a very credible alternative to S.DICE for gamblers.  S.DICE looks like having a good dividend this month - so I don't expect any sudden massive fall in its value - and it will almost certainly continue to have a good market-share of gambling.  But I no longer have sufficient confidence it its price stability to maintain high exposure to it.  Were we an investment fund then I MAY still hold it - but we aren't and what few longer term investments we hold need to be significantly more stable (and significantly more profitable) than S.DICE.

With S.BBET there's no sign of it gaining any traction.  My view is that it targetted the wrong market from the start - gamblers who don't mind not getting defined odds.  That market's tiny compared to the fixed-odds market.  It may still end up doing well - but I'm not confident enough of that to carry significant exposure.

S.MPOE I have no problems maintaining larger exposure on.  It's price continues to slowly grow and its model is such that profits are inevitable (though a pretty piss-poor ROI).

Just-Dice

This has emerged as a credible competitor to S.DICE - with a model allowing fast investment and divestment.  I will be seeking clarification on withdrawal speed from it.  If withdrawals are near-instant (other than confirms) then I'll use this to hold mobile BTC reserves rather than BTC-E.  That's BTC that I hold ready to move where needed.  We'd still have some BTC on BTC-E - backing LTC buys to rebalance currencies automatically if the exchange-rate moves - but the reserve portion (typically 25-50 BTC) would sit in Just-Dice earning profit.  I would ONLY be depositing there what would otherwise sit inactive (and we HAVE to hold some totally idle BTC to allow fast movement when opportunities present themself). I would NOT be raising bond capital with the purpose of investing in Just-Dice - even if it made slightly more than we paid in interest (we won't know whether it does for a while) the CP risk would be unjustifiable for meagre returns.

This policy will incur no extra debt, generate some small additional profit and distribute our idle-capital risk between BTC-E and Just-Dice rather than having it all focussed on BTC-E.  BTC in Just-Dice would be listed explicitly in weekly reports along with our other cash holdings.

If withdrawals aren't near-instant then this will NOT happen at all : I need to be able to withdraw from there to exchanges in the same way that I can from BTC-E at present.

SHARE-SPLIT

A motion to conduct a 100:1 split on LTC-ATF will be raised shortly after this is posted.  This motion will be for two things to happen:

1.  All outstanding units of LTC-ATF to be multiplied by 100 (the split itself).
2.  The units authorised to be muliplied by 50 - increasing from 2500 to 125000.

Without number 2 we'd be in a situation where there were more units issued than were authorised - and where, without a contract modification, I couldn't correct that in any reasonable time-scale if we ever needed to sell more.

I'm confident I've easily proven that I have no propensity to sell units just for the sake of it - not only is it horrible practice but it harms me personally by diluting my own holdings.  I've only ever sold units when there was a sound case to do so - and will continue doing so (heavy losses, massive fall of LTC vs BTC and massive increase in LTC-denominated investment/trading options remain the scenarios in which it would occur).  By multiplying by 50 rather than 100 I still maintain the ability to sell more if needed - but actually halve the amount (in value) I can sell - so even if you don't trust my judgement I'd be reducing my ability.

No change to the contract is proposed - my ability to authorise (as opposed to issue) more units would be massively reduced but I don't believe that likely to be a problem.

The vote will run until midday Sunday and any split, if approved, would occur AFTER the next weekly report (and AFTER payment of any management fee).  All market orders would be cleared during the process - so no need to be concerned if you have Bids up.


WEBSITE

Work has commenced on a website that will cover all my investments (DMS and well as LTC-ATF) as well as being a general port for cypto-currency securities.  Initially, at least, the majority of content will be written by me.  A professional developer is doing all of the artistic/design/implementation work.  All costs of this are (and will continue to be) paid by me personally.

This is still some time away from launch - at present the focus is on branding/logos/style issues - but my hope is that this will give far greater exposure to LTC-ATF and LTC-ATF's securities (and also to DMS of course).  This, together with the share-split (if approved) willl hopefully add liquidity to LTC-ATF on the market as well as significantly raising the price at which it trades (with its strong historical results it could easily be trading a lot higher than it is - the high unit price and low visibility of LTC securities are, in my view, what has hampered this).  That can only be good news for current investors - as would any increased activity on LTC-ATF's secondary securities (which I fully intend there to be more of).


LTC-ATF.B2

In the next few days I intend to launch a second bond.  This will be on BTC-TC and paying a lower rate than LTC-ATF.B1.  As LTC-ATF can now get listing fees refunded, this becomes feasible.

No further capital would be raised via LTC-ATF.B1 (unless it proved impossible to do so on LTC-ATF.B2) but there would be no forced recall on LTC-ATF.B1 as that would be unfair on investors who bought it at well over face value.  Voluntary sell-backs of LTC-ATF.B1 would gradually reduce the capital raised by it.

The advantages of it are:

1.  Lower capital cost.
2.  Easier maintenance for me - I can leave Asks and Bids up without having to worry about exchange-rate moves causing them to generate a loss for us.

I'd initially only be selling 50 BTC worth (we could use that now) and would issue more, as previously, when we either needed more capital or managed to buy-back LTC-ATF.B1


ODDS AND ENDS

No management fee and HWM remains unchanged (as we made a loss).
Will post Bid in a new post with update for current valuation.

INVESTMENTS

Sorry I've been so slow getting this sorted.

First let me clarify the criteria I use when determining which potential investments even get as far as a vote.  To be voted on an investment has to, in my view, meet ALL of the following criteria:

1.  Be denominated in BTC.
2.  Have no significant exposure to any currency (fiat OR crypto) other than BTC.
3.  Have a defined face value and allow redemption at that value (a reasonable admin fee is fine)
4.  Have little chance of any significant loss of capital/reduction of face value.
5.  Have an issuer with no significant blemishes on their record in terms of returning investment and honouring contracts promptly.  The promptly part is critical - we can't have a scenario where someone suddenly take an extra 6 months to repay because of problems.
6.  Give an ROI of at least 10% per year.
7.  They must be backed by assets capable of redeeming the investments.  Where such assets are non-BTC-denominated then they must significantly exceed the BTC-denominated investments accepted.

At present I'm proposing TWO investments for vote.  Votes for both will be put up shortly after I post this.  I will hold my own vote back until near the end - and then vote for whichever side is winning (so as to make sure my own vote isn't effectively the casting one).

At present I'll be following a policy of no more than 25% of capital being invested with ANY issuer (including myself).  If and when other suitable investments are approved I'd look to reduce that percentage.  Obviously if there are significant dividends for SELLING then existing investment MAY pass that limit - if so then I'd act to reduce it as soon as practicable (in practice I can predict dividends in advance and act pre-emptively).


PROPOSAL 1 : COINLENDERS

Coinlenders is a BTC-lending site operated by TradeFortress.  We'd be looking at taking 30-day CDs paying an annualised rate of 26% or so.  30 days is short enough that I can predict difficulty well enough not to run into cash-flow issues.  I'd stagger CDs anyway to further reduce such problems.

My view is that this meets all of the above criteria.  The capital is used to issue BTC-denominated loans, the majority of which are secured against provided collateral.


PROPOSAL 2 : JUST-DICE

This is a new - and potentially more controversial - proposal.

Investments in this are acting as the house bank for a dice gambling website.  The very tight BR management (max payout of 1% of bank - dynamically recalculated) makes significant loss of capital highly unlikely.  Cash-flow is no issue - as withdrawals can be made at any time.  The capital invested is ONLY used as the bank - and so is always 100% backed by actual BTC.

At present it's definitely paying well over 10% per year - but that would need to be regularly reviewed if capital deposited there increases significantly and/or betting activity declines.

I view it as a safe investment - with only a slim chance of small capital losses with any such capital loss being such that it would entirely be absorbed by SELLING.  That is important - as only SELLING can vote, so it would be entirely in appropriate to vote on any investment where there was a real chance of losses that could impact cover for MINING.

EDIT: Just to be absolutely clear I would NOT EVER be rolling the dice myself.  I've never played S.DICE and would never play JUST-DICE (I only ever bet on -EV things where it's a social activity).

Both votes will be placed up for just over a day - if there's no quorum obtained in that period then I'll relist the votes for longer and try again.  My hope (and expectation) is that sufficient SELLING investors are active to obtain a quorum in a short time-scale.

Both of these securities support 2FA - which would be used (as is the case on ALL accounts holding any funds managed by me).

Can't disagree with the general theme - that the vast majority of "investments" are total crap that will almost certainly lose money.

For those who can't identify the few decent investments (i.e. the vast majority or people) then the best strategy would be:

1.  Invest your money with Just-Dice.
2.  When you get some profit from the investment gamble the winnings on a high-odds gamble - only do this as a single bet occasionally (not with dust as soon as you receive it).

Unless dooglus scams your capital is pretty safe (the BR management is sufficiently cautious that long-term losses on the investment side are unlikely unless there's very strange betting patterns) - which means it's already beating the overwhelming majority of BTC investments.
If you win the long-shot gamble then you end up ahead of the decent investments as well.

Main problem with Just-Dice is likely to be that investment outweighs gambling - driving investment return right down.  But even if it only returns your principal it's way ahead of what most people are currently achieving.

You should take your own advice.

I've no idea who redrobin is and have never dealt with him at all - nor, by the looks of it have you.  Yet you've already:

Accused him of being Ian Bakewell - which you've now backed off from.
Accused him of being AmazingRando (you've now deleted the post in which you did it - as noone quoted it).
What next?  Maybe you should accuse him of being Pirate?

Not everyone who disagrees with you is a sock-puppet or second account of a scammer.  Some just think you're a lieing piece of shit who doesn't pay his debts.  Which seems to me a perfectly valid conclusion to arrive at on the available evidence.


That's the reason why you won't compare your fund to LTC-ATF - as it's apparently totally different.  But then you go ahead and try to compare to LTC-ATF-.B1 (which has a fixed face value) and DMS.MINING (which is explicitly designed so as to return capital over time) - at present apparently only comparing market price and ignoring dividends.  No doubt that will change if yours pays out dividends and loses value - if cherry-picking and comparing apples to oranges doesn't work you can always just change how you compare as well.

And of course yours starts off with NAV/U as a base whilst what you compare to starts off with market price - so in any comparison you get the benefit of the (almost inevitable) markup to NAV/U most securities trade at.

Usual usagi crap.

Wants to compare his FUND to mainly PMBs and Bonds - not to other funds.  WHy not compare to actual FUNDs - as that's what you're running.

LTC-ATF (mine), BTCInvest (TF's) and MININGCO.ETF would be the obvious ones (the last one only invests in Mining stocks so is the most directly comparable).

Cherry-picking a list to compare to rather than picking the most similar competitors is hardly honest - but also hardly surprising.  Yes - LTC-ATF and BTCInvest don't just invest in mining - but then 3 of the ones in your list don't mine at all either (LTC-ATF.B1 which is a fixed-value bond, S.DICE and DMS.MINING - which is basically a pool bet designed to return capital to those betting).