The motion's been up for nearly 2 weeks and so far 11.2% of shares have voted Yes on it.

Hardly overwhelming support - main thing it shows is that most just aren't interested in participating in usagi's stupidity, even when they're losing money.

Shareholder support isn't a tiny minority of share voting yes.  It's a clear majority.  Obviously usagi can get that by allocating shares to his other companies and voting himself.  That may well be legitimate in this case - but isn't a basis on which to claim that other shareholders support (or have any interest in) him continuing with the farce.


YES: 169 - NO: 0 - ABSTAIN: 0 - OUTSTANDING: 1513 (169/1513 = 11.2% Approval)

That's usagi's motion status after nearly 2 weeks.  That is NOT shareholder support - it's shareholder apathy.


YES: 281 - NO: 0 - ABSTAIN: 0 - OUTSTANDING: 282 (281/282 = 99.6% Approval)

That's what I got in less than 2 days in last motion I ran.  THAT is shareholder support (just over half the votes were my own shares - they weren't cast until after a majority of others had voted Yes.  Vote would have failed if there'd been any significant number of No votes).

Response to this:


Attention LTC-GLOBAL moderators!

There are just 7 days left to put up with usagii's whining then he'll be out of your hair for good.

Rather than pick holes in every line of his post let's look at what he's actually done.

He posted a public spreadsheet calculating the NAV/U (or Book Value) for BMF.  It was massively wrong - due to a simple error that basically doubled it.  When he became aware he'd made that cock-up (probably from my post in this thread) and found it he then REMOVED the spreadsheet from public view rather than simply correcting it.

In his own thread you'll see his reported NAV/U fall from ~.06 to ~.03 - or you WOULD see it were it not that he deleted various of his own posts as well as those of people pointing it out.  But some evidence still remains of how he couldn't even work out his own NAV/U:



It was previously quoted even higher but that got deleted.  No doubt my accusation that his NAV/U was wrong is one of the many things I supposedly got wrong or were proven untrue.

Perhaps the best and fairest way to look at how good his reporting is would be to look at his active, running asset - TU.SILVER.  So let's have a look at its NAV/U,

Hmm, I can't.  To look at the accounts I'd have to spend $90 buying a share then give it to him.  Luckily he has weekly reports, so I don't need to see the accounts - and can just look at the NAV/U there.

Hmm, that's strange.  There's no mention in of it in the last few.  In fact the last mention of any NAV/U or similar is in the monthly report at the end of May where it says :

"Internal Calculation of 0.04348010"

Guess it hasn't changed much and that's still around what the NAV/U is.  And there's another clue as to where the price lies in a later post of his:


His advice to investors, BTW, is just to guess what the price is - put up an order and if he likes it he'll fill it.  

So over we trot to the Bitfunder order book to pick up some of the shares - we know there should be some for sale as he just got some new silver in.

Hmm - fuck all volume on the Bid side (he long since gave up the pretence that he was going to provide visible liquidity) and on the Ask side:

21    ฿0.09090    
45    ฿0.0910    
700    ฿0.10      

Nothing under .09.  And we know the 700 order is his (check asset lists and noone other that him holds anything near that number) - at a price he himself said was unreasonable not that long ago (and with no news in between to suggest it had suddenly become reasonable).

What's happening here is actually classic usagi.  He tries to sell his shares at well above their value - making sure to either give no information or wrong information to investors.  If some sucker actually buys at that price, that then increases NAV/U and he can either pay it out as dividends or brag about how his trading is making profit.  When all he's really doing is running a near ponzi - where the profit for existing shares come from new sales.

And if the price gets high enough he can then justify using that to buy back personal shares or shares held by his other companies - screwing all other investors.  Which is exactly what happened with nyan/bmf not long before GLBSE died.  He had a spell of price pumping in which he was allegedly buying back shares.  But in practice what happened was the prices were inflated with small trades then the big volume of buybacks were off-exchange ones involving his own companies' holdings in one another (that's when nyan's holdings - supposed to be there to protect nyan.a/b - vanished).  Actual investors who wanted to sell back found there was no way THEY could get to sell at the fake prices.

Don't fall for his whining, lieing and deceit.  NOTHING he does is done in a sraightforward manner - it's ALL about tricking and misleading investors : with one of his favourites being failing to provide information then claiming it isn't his fault if investors paid too much.  When of COURSE it's his fault when he doesn't publish NAV/U or a public list of holdings.  With TU.SILVER the contract says :

"How it works
We calculate the price of silver in bitcoins and add a small markup for shipping and vault storage."

So when you see Asks up and know he's got new silver in stock, then check the BTC address and see it's his, you'd assume the price he was selling at WAS the value of the share + a small markup.  Is it?  Well - I don't know, as he doesn't publish NAV/U.

But if it is NOT a small a markup then he's lieing.
And if it IS a small markup then he really should have, at some stage, told investors the NAV/U had more than doubled since the last report.  I mean - isn't that something they'd like to (and should) know?

Now for the final laugh:


The important word here is "or".  So long as the second part is true the first part doesn't have to be (and if you use the exclusive meaning of 'or' the first part has to be untrue).

Is he a character from Sailor Moon?  If not then his name isn't Tsukino Usagi and all doubt should be on the veracity of the first part of the sentence (that TU.SILVER is the most trustworthy fund).

Not sure if this was a conscious attempt to deceive whilst being able to argue that technically what he said was true (i.e. one part of the 'or' was true which makes the whole sentence true).

If you look back a few pages to when SELLING got its last dividend there's a lot of explanation around there.

Put simply, after a rise in difficulty capital is examined and how many days of dividends (for MINING) it covers is calculated at the new higher difficulty.  If that number is more than 410 (days) then SELLING gets a dividend such that it reduces capital to 400 days of cover (of MINING's dividend at the new higher difficulty).  The check to see if a dividend should be paid (and payment where appropriate) occurs after payment of a dividend to MINING.

TAT holds over 5k ASICMINER shares, so not sure why you think he doesn't hold 233.

Heh, don't forget your own ones when you're discussing securities that vanished without giving back funds or producing accounts.

The LTC-ATF.B1 bonds were NOT newly issued ones.  They were ones I already personally owned - either bought by me via the market or bought by me personally from people who wanted to sell theirs.  Thats why if you look at dividends you'll see that the same 250k shares were paid dividends before AND after I transferred these to the fund.  

If you read through the LTC-ATF thread you'll find one example in there of me personally buying the bonds.  TAT wanted to cashout 5500 of his bonds (to get out of BTC before the drop in its price).  The fund bought back 2k (20 BTC) of them at its rate of 99% and I took the other 3.5k (35 BTC) myself at full face value (as I'd personally already liquidated all the BTC I wanted to before the expected drop).  Private purchases like that (which don't effect the fund at all) aren't usually disclosed - that one was as usagi had claimed the 2K drop in outstanding bonds was me selling to myself then selling back after a dividend (which would be a remarkable dumb way for me to steal money given I could just transfer it).  TAT confirmed he'd done the deal with me - to close that stupid idea down (though it was provably wrong anyway).

So there was no increase in debt as a result of this fund getting the LTC-ATF.B1.

You also need to understand a bit more about how LTC-ATF works.  It's valued and priced in LTC - but trades a lot in BTC.  CUrrency exposure is reduced by the existence of the LTC-ATF.B1 bonds.  The majority of BTC trading is done with funds raised by the bonds - as that is offset by a BTC-denominated liabilty (the face value of the bonds) it greatly reduces LTC-ATF's exposure to BTC (and also retains most profit for LTC-ATF).  The excess capital LTC-ATF has is LTC-denominated.  We can't use that for BTC trading - as we'd then expose ourself to exchange-rate risk.  So we're often in the position of needing more BTC and less LTC (as we make profit - and that profit ends up being held as ~85% LTC denominated whilst LTC-denominated activity is probably only 20-25% of what we do).

If this fund needs to liquidate the LTC-ATF.B1 then at present there's two ways of doing it:

1.  Sell back to LTC-ATF at 99% of face value.
2.  Sell back to me at full face value.

LTC-ATF.B1 are backed by ALL the assets of LTC-ATF, which has no other debts.

At present there are 250 BTC worth of LTC-ATF.B1 (at full face value).
LTC-ATF's gross assets are approximately 325 BTC worth of BTC-denominated assets and 350 BTC worth of LTC-denominated assets.  So well over double the value of the bonds.  And of that ~675 BTC worth of assets over 91% is in actual cash (BTC or LTC).  It's rare cash falls below 85% - as we trade not invest so our whole game-plan is about not having cash stuck in actual assets for too long.

At present (and nearly always) LTC-ATF could pay off all the bonds AND buy out every unit of LTC-ATF not owned by me personally without having to liquidate ANYTHING.  That's nearly always the case - and is why LTC-ATF can constantly maintain a bid-wall for over 1/3 of its outstanding units at about 98% or so of NAV.

In practice if difficulty fell a lot and we had to liquidate the LTC-ATF.B1 I'd just buy them back myself at face value - same as the fund got them for.  Saves a lot of hassle and moving funds around.  That may change shortly - to where it would be better for the fund (AND for LTC-ATF) to sell back to LTC-ATF but that's an announcement that I'll make if/when it proves to be the case.  In any event LTC-ATF has about 275 BTC cash so could comfortably buy them back without even having to exchange any LTC and then resell at face+1% easily - so redemption is no problem whatsoever.

As I alluded to above, there'll likely be a change shortly in the way LTC-ATF handles bonds/debt.  That change will have zero negative impact on this fund - and possibly a positive one.

Yes - I lost all interest in AMC once it became apparent it only existed to finance VML, with a few crumbs of mining income thrown investors' way.   That plus the one-sided contract where there's no penalty for late delivery and if AMC cancel, VML can repay the cash paid with whatever spare parts it has lieing around.  In something time-critical (which mining is) a contract without a penalty clause for late delivery is useless - as the purchaser takes on all the risk and costs of full/partial failure by the supplier.

In theory that's why mining shares CAN be compared to PMBs (for value).  It breaks down in practice because until recently the price of PMBs wasn't falling in line with their value - making reinvestment in them far worse value than internal reinvestment.

Internal reinvestment works better for companies than relying on new share sales because they can predict cash-flow better and so plan further ahead.

In practice it works WORSE for investors as they have no way to stop it when they realise that it's losses being compounded not profits - which is the case for the vast majority of crypto 'businesses'.  The issuer gets to keep reinvesting and taking a cut out of it even when it's obvious investors are losing - with no way for investors to pull the plug or stop the waste (they can only try to find a bigger idiot to pass them on to).

And only if it reinvests so that the profit from that reinvestment gos to the company investing - rather than to a different one not owned by investors.

You can't include future projected profits into a book value (much as some idiots here would like to).  Book value isn't the only way to value things (and I'd say it isn't a good way at all for PMBs) but if you're going to use it at all then you can only look at the current value of things.  Which is either what you paid for them (less depreciation) or what they could be sold for.

I was talking about the outcome - the analogy isn't correct in terms of where the spade physically resides and who does the digging.  Lease would probably have been a better term than rent - the buyers don't own the spades but DO get all that it produces.

EDIT: And yes - it HAS to be more than the cost of buying a spade or there'd be no point anyone selling a PMB.  The issue isn't the "more" it's the "LOTS".

The money's always in selling spades not in digging.  That's why ASICMINER is so much better than most - as they do both.

PMBs rent you a spade - usually at a price that's a LOT more than actually buying a spade yourself.

Mining shares use YOUR (investors) money to buy spades, dig with them and keep some of whatever's produced by digging themselves.  Even when the spade never digs enough to cover its cost.

AMC uses YOUR money so another company owned by Ken can make profit from building and selling spades.  You get some spades yourself in return, but have to pay for your them in advance to him even though by the time the spades arrive you could probably buy them elsewhere cheaper.  There's no guarantee the spades will ever be delivered - and no penalty in the contract if they're late.

I think Entropy's P/B valuation is unfair on AMC - as it should also include whatever cash AMC has.  But Ken pretending his personal shares don't count as they aren't shown as issued on Bitfunder is hilarious.

Sold   202
Swapped   0
Total   202
Price   0.05419
Total   10.94638
Less Fee   10.92448724
Man Fee   0.327734617
   
Units   16235
Excess Div   0.00003111
Refund   0.50507085

BTC Balance (BTC-TC)    976.32168484
12500 LTC-ATF.B1    125.00000000
TOTAL ASSETS    1,101.32168484
   
Outstanding MINING   21056
Outstanding SELLING   21056
Outstanding PURCHASE   280
Effective Units   21336
   
Block reward   25
Difficulty   19,339,258
Hashes per MINING   5000000
   
Daily Dividend    0.00013002
50 days (Min Liquid)    0.00650111
100 days (Forced Close)    0.01300222
365 days (Buyback)    0.04745810
405 days (IPO)    0.05265898
400 days (Post SELLING div)    0.05200887
410 days (Pre SELLING div)    0.05330910
   
NAV Post MINING Div    1,098.54753150
NAV/U Post MINING Div    0.05148798
Days Dividend Post Div   395.99
SELLING Dividend    -         
NAV Post SELLING Div    1,098.54753150
NAV/U Post Selling Div    0.05148798
PURCHASE selling price    0.05406238
PURCHASE buy-back price    0.05045822

Sorry - I'll try to get back to that today.

It's a fair point on DMS.MINING price volatility.  Because there's no issuer or shortage on the supply side, the price WILL drop to the market's valuation of hash-power far more rapidly than PMBs can.  So whilst the behaviour of DMS.MINING does match PMBs, the behaviour of the market in valuing it may well differ.  That makes MINING a bad investment for those whose plan is to buy something over-priced then sell it even more over-priced to others (a strategy I frequently employ myself - through necessity as the vast majority of securities aren''t actually worth what they trade at).

But the argument that because the price won't fall quickly you can make more profit/less loss by selling higher isn't quite that simple.  If the price is maintained at above value then the loss represented by the difference doesn't disappear - it just gets passed on to the next owner.  At some stage someone ends up actually bearing that loss (even if it's only a loss in the sense of less profit).  And, as we're seeing, the existence of DMS.MINING is having a knock-on effect in forcing revaluation of PMBs a bit quicker than would otherwise occur - so it becomes risky to rely on a "bigger fool" showing up.

Shouldn't "my asset is better priced" have read "my asset was better priced" - as you explain how it USED TO BE better priced then somehow change tense to the present as though it still was?  You were asked why people should buy it NOW - not why they should (maybe) have bought it a week back when it was more competitively priced (had the opportunity been available).

What's your source for ASICMINER, BFL and Avalon not shipping anything else before then?

And why, if your own figures suggest a jump to 250TH by August 1st are you then predicting that the rise will immediately drop to 10% per month?  Seems rather strange that you think there'll be a massive jump in July then everyone will stop shipping so your investors can do OK.

I was just going by what your CONTRACT says :

"The bond is backed by miners that have yet to be released. The scheduled release is September 2013."

It's now June.  September is 3 months away.  That's months.  If your contract states something then I'm perfectly entitled to quote it when discussing your contract.  Expecting an ASIC manufacturer to ship ahead of schedule flies in the face of all past experience.  The closest was Avalon who sent a couple of prototype machines on time and pretended that was shipping.

The problem with that is this:

1.  Rises in difficuly early on have a much larger impact than ones later.
2.  Your bond doesn't start mining for months - i.e. AFTER the most important rises.
3.  10% rise per month (NOT per change) seems rather unlikely - given the rise when your miner and others from same manufacturer wil ship will far exceed that just on its own.

Your bond pays 20% extra for first 6 months after starting, supposedly to make up for not mining already.  But a 20% bonus for 6 months in the future is at best 1.25 months at current difficulty IF difficulty didn't rise at all.  As you can't mine without difficulty rising (as your miner can't even exist without increasing difficluty) that means it's actually far worse than 1.25 bonus at current difficulty.  So if comparing yours to ones already mining investors need to be aware that even with the bonus it represents significantly less payout than 1 MH/S mining already.

None of which says it'll never make a profit - it just looks exceedingly unlikely to do so in the sort of time-frames you quoted.

Mining is marginally profitable - any markup of more than 10-25% on cost of hardware is rarely going to make a profit (often selling at cost will make a loss).

Your math is fine - your assumptions aren't.  With avalons arriving, their chips due soon, BFL starting to ship, ASICMINER aorund and (if yours is ever to do anything) KNC (or whatever they're called) also shipping expecting rises of only 10% per month (i.e. under 5% per change) in the short-term is pure fantasy.  And that's without the scammier other manufacturers where one or more might turn out to be real.

BTC Balance (BTC-TC)    968.47114028
12500 LTC-ATF.B1    125.00000000
TOTAL ASSETS    1,093.47114028
   
Outstanding MINING   20756
Outstanding SELLING   20756
Outstanding PURCHASE   378
Effective Units   21134
   
Block reward   25
Difficulty   19,339,258
Hashes per MINING   5000000
   
Daily Dividend    0.00013002
50 days (Min Liquid)    0.00650111
100 days (Forced Close)    0.01300222
365 days (Buyback)    0.04745810
405 days (IPO)    0.05265898
400 days (Post SELLING div)    0.05200887
410 days (Pre SELLING div)    0.05330910
   
NAV Post MINING Div    1,090.72325142
NAV/U Post MINING Div    0.05160988
Days Dividend Post Div   396.93
SELLING Dividend    -         
NAV Post SELLING Div    1,090.72325142
NAV/U Post Selling Div    0.05160988
PURCHASE selling price    0.05419038
PURCHASE buy-back price    0.05057768


NAV/U is actually exactly accurate - it turned out easiest to just recalculate what balance would have been had all shares been paid dividend at the same time.

Any PURCHASE sent to me for trade will have received a manual payment for the missed dividend (as has Floates for his 48 MINING).  Swaps are all done (other than Floates where I need to know if he wants his MINING/SELLING returned or cashed out - but those HAVE been included in totals correctly).

Sold   175
Swapped   0
Total   175
Price   0.054282
Total   9.49935
Less Fee   9.4803513
Man Fee   0.284410539

Management fee paid.  Am going to do calculation for rest as though dividend were paid on all shares - the tiny difference because of 50 shares sold after dividend time won't make any noticable difference to NAV/U (and will be back to exactly accurate again tomorrow).  It means NAV/U will be under-reported by about 0.01% today then corrected again tomorrow.