Hey guys,

First off, thanks so much for all those who showed their support throughout this process. Unfortunately after some legal counsel, we believe that we are unable to continue to operate publicly with shareholders, due to financial regulations in our jurisdiction. We believe refunding our backers and ceasing public ownership and dividends is the the only fair course of action available to us at this point. We have refunded our backers the full Bitcoin amount of their initial investment. Each investor's funds have been returned to the Coinprism address from which the funds were originally sent, so please find returned funds in your Coinprism account. Thanks again for everyone's support and patience, if you have any questions or concerns please send us a PM.

Some people can get away with it.  We got away with it for about a year.  It's probably a matter of time before Paypal finds out refuses their services.


I sent them a few hours ago.  You should have received them by now.  

Haha.  We're a legit business already up and running since November 2012.

All the big payment processors do not allow electronic cigarettes and drug paraphenelia.  Skrill has this under their terms and conditions. See here: https://www.skrill.com/en-us/siteinformation/terms-conditions/

They even strictly forbid sending and receiving payments for bitcoin in section 6.7 and 7.4

Yeah the main address supports colored coins.  You should be fine.  I sent the shares btw.

No shares will be given away, as that wouldn't be fair to those who purchased theirs. However, shares purchased in this first week receive a 30% bonus

Today's shares have been delivered to all recipients.  Pending transactions will receive shares once they have been confirmed.

Today's shares have been delivered to all recipients.

Thanks for the questions, will try to shed some light.

The "dust" in this case would be Bitcoin. The Bitcoin blockchain is used as the mechanism for sending/receiving coins, and the coloring exists as a protocol on top of the blockchain. Coinprism uses the Open Assets protocol for coloring, https://github.com/OpenAssets/open-assets-protocol/blob/master/specification.mediawiki.

Colored coins must be sent to a wallet that is set up to accept them. From Coinprism, "If you are sending colored coins, please make sure the recipient is expecting them in that address. A colorblind client or wallet could uncolor coins if they perform a transaction on an address that contains colored coins." CP has a forum if you're interested in learning more technical details and/or connecting with other users - http://forum.coinprism.com/

Dividends will be paid to the address from which the Bitcoins were sent. For now, we recommend only sending Bitcoins from a Coinprism wallet. We are manually managing these addresses through spreadsheets with multiple backups, having the blockchain - https://blockchain.info/address/1LzUY9zPp1iSabwr4aUwUezSGe5aC4Wmhh as an ultimate authority on share amount and receiving address.

This is our top priority right now and we have talked with about dozen merchant providers who specialize in e-cigs.  This is the best solution for online Canadian retailers to be able to accept online credit card payments, and is a common business practise.

We don't need the money, however we would like to grow at a faster pace as we cannot spend more money in marketing without it eating away at our profits.  The money will be used on the following:

Setting up a U.S. corporation as this is the best way to accept credit cards online.  (We've talked with about a dozen merchant providers that specialize in e-cigarettes)
upgrading servers
marketing and more professional on-site stuff like educational videos and general development
If we raise enough money we will spend a small portion of it into developing a prototype for our portable vaporizer.

If all that goes well, we may have another round of fundraising to support the new portable vaporizer and its production.

We are currently coming up with designs and doing research into making the best portable vaporizer on the market.  I am working with a close  engineering friend of mine to develop this and we are quite confident we can pull this off.  That being said, we are hoping to delve more seriously into this project in a few months after all our milestones with vapetropolis are complete.

Vapetropolis Colored Coin IPO - Original Thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=609682.0
:


IPO Details

The sale will last 30 days or until all units have sold out. Backers will receive additional shares based on the following incentive structure:
1st week:  30% bonus units
2nd week:  20% bonus units
3rd week:  10% bonus units
4th week:  no bonus

300,000 public shares represents 30% ownership of Vapetropolis.  
1,000,000 Total Shares
1 share = 0.0002 BTC
Dividends – All profits from bitcoin sales will be distributed as dividends to shareholders on a monthly basis. Please note our dividend strategy may change in the future. (currently all sales are in bitcoin, however we are adding credit card payment solution asap.)
As a shareholder, you will be entitled to a portion of all profits generated from Vapetropolis and any future entrepreneurial activities.

Minimum investment to receive dividends is 100 shares = 0.02 BTC

edit: Shares will be distributed at the end of each day.  So Please make sure you have sent bitcoins from a coinprism wallet. http://www.coinprism.com

About

Vapetropolis is an online retailer of vaporization products. Vaporization is a technique for avoiding irritating respiratory toxins in marijuana smoke by heating cannabis to a temperature where the psychoactive ingredients evaporate without causing combustion. The company is based in Canada but provides shipping of its products to the United States, United Kingdom as well Europe and Australia.  It began doing business in November of 2012.  Sales have grown significantly since then and in February of 2013 we began accepting bitcoin. We have generated over 70 bitcoins since then.  However, in late October, paypal refused to do business with us, saying they do not allow the sale of e-cigarettes and vaporizers.  Vapetropolis then turned Stripe to process our credit card payments, but they also refused to do business with us after a few sales.  Our website has been surviving on bitcoin sales, but the volume is not near the volume we were doing prior to the paypal event.  

Growth Strategy

Our strategy to grow the business is to set up an online credit card payment solution immediately and focus more on gaining international sales.  In Canada, e-cigarettes and vaporizers are sort of in a regulatory grey area at the moment.   Currently we have been struggling to open a merchant account that will process vaporizer sales as Canadian banks have been denying e-cig and vaporizer retailers.  From all the merchant providers we have talked to, they have suggested we open a U.S corporation and virtual office.  This will allow us to open a U.S merchant account in which we can process online credit card payments as they are less strict in the U.S.

Our marketing strategy will be to focus on search engine optimization and new forms of paid advertising.  Starting an affiliate program is also high on our agenda. We may also hire a professional marketing consultant to help come up with a viable marketing strategy that produces optimal ROI.  

We are also interested in marketing towards the bitcoin community as conversion rates are fairly high.   Buysellads.com has a growing number of bitcoin sites that we can advertise on, and we are specifically interested in coinmarketcap.com


Vaporizer Market

The market size for vaporization products is difficult to estimate because of how quickly it is growing and a lack of consolidated statistics. The e-cigarette market for example is on target to have doubled in size this year; to $2 billion.  TAM (total addressable market size) for portable vaporizers, not counting e-cigarettes, is likely to be around $500 million.

Top Brands are Volcano by Stors & Bickel, Arizer, Davinci, Magic Flight Launch Box.  Many new vaporizers seem to be entering the market almost every month indicating a lot of hype around the industry particularly because of new favorable regulations in the U.S. decriminalizing the use of marijuana.  

Operational Costs

Currently our only operational cost is web hosting.  We use xpcwebhosting.com at 19.95 per month.  However, we are considering upgrading to cloud hosting to provide better service to our international customers.

Use of Funds

The funds will be used accordingly:
1.   Set up U.S corporation, virtual office, merchant account, U.S bank account to be able to accept credit card payments again.
2.   Revamp marketing of website to increase website traffic and conversions.
3.   Upgrading infrastructure to support worldwide shipping and optimize website.
4.   Possible development of new portable vaporizer.  
5.     Implement future strategies to grow the company.

Bitcoin Sales since April 2013:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cLjBa3DwxeepkahVtRzLgzPXtugPqvH67xFIzcrr24Q/pubhtml
*we've used mtgox to process bitcoin payments prior to using bitpay, but we do not have that data available.
Website Revenue to date: http://imgur.com/Hybu6ZC

If you have any further questions please ask them below or contact us at vtropolis@gmail.com.  Thanks!

Thanks for announcing that.  We will do our best to make a return on your investment.

More shares will be delivered tomorrow, or possibly later tonight.

We are using colored coins to create an IPO of our e-commerce business, since it gives a lot of control to us and no fees as oppose to using mastercoin or havelockinvestments.com and cryptostocks.com.  Look here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=609682.0

I don't think people would make the switch to from bitcoins to ethereum, nxt, mastercoin and other crypto 2.0 protocols just because although they may be innovative, there is not much incentive to make the switch.  I could be wrong, only time will tell.

Hi guys,

We made a blog post on our website, since there was no mention of it on our website.  More details will be added later tonight.  And a proper banner will be made on our site to assure people that this post is legit and indeed from us.  Any more questions, please feel free to ask.

Thanks.

Hi guys I made an IPO on the colored coins protocol.  See here.  Thanks.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=609682.0

Vapetropolis Colored Coin IPO



IPO Details

The sale will last 30 days or until all units have sold out. Backers will receive additional shares based on the following incentive structure:
1st week:  30% bonus units
2nd week:  20% bonus units
3rd week:  10% bonus units
4th week:  no bonus

300,000 public shares represents 30% ownership of Vapetropolis.  
1,000,000 Total Shares
1 share = 0.0002 BTC
Dividends – All profits from bitcoin sales will be distributed as dividends to shareholders on a monthly basis. Please note our dividend strategy may change in the future. (currently all sales are in bitcoin, however we are adding credit card payment solution asap.)
As a shareholder, you will be entitled to a portion of all profits generated from Vapetropolis and any future entrepreneurial activities.

Minimum investment to receive dividends is 100 shares = 0.02 BTC

edit: Shares will be distributed at the end of each day.  So Please make sure you have sent bitcoins from a coinprism wallet. http://www.coinprism.com

About

Vapetropolis is an online retailer of vaporization products. Vaporization is a technique for avoiding irritating respiratory toxins in marijuana smoke by heating cannabis to a temperature where the psychoactive ingredients evaporate without causing combustion. The company is based in Canada but provides shipping of its products to the United States, United Kingdom as well Europe and Australia.  It began doing business in November of 2012.  Sales have grown significantly since then and in February of 2013 we began accepting bitcoin. We have generated over 70 bitcoins since then.  However, in late October, paypal refused to do business with us, saying they do not allow the sale of e-cigarettes and vaporizers.  Vapetropolis then turned to the payment processing company Stripe, to process credit card payments, but they also refused to do business with us after a few sales.  Our website has been surviving on bitcoin sales, but the volume is not near the volume we were doing prior to the paypal event.  

Growth Strategy

Our strategy to grow the business is to set up an online credit card payment solution immediately and focus more on gaining international sales.  In Canada, e-cigarettes and vaporizers are sort of in a regulatory grey area at the moment.   Currently we have been struggling to open a merchant account that will process vaporizer sales as Canadian banks have been denying e-cig and vaporizer retailers.  From all the merchant providers we have talked to, they have suggested we open a U.S corporation and virtual office.  This will allow us to open a U.S merchant account in which we can process online credit card payments as they are less strict in the U.S.

Our marketing strategy will be to focus on search engine optimization and new forms of paid advertising.  Starting an affiliate program is also high on our agenda. We may also hire a professional marketing consultant to help come up with a viable marketing strategy that produces optimal ROI.  

We are also interested in marketing towards the bitcoin community as conversion rates are fairly high.   Buysellads.com has a growing number of bitcoin sites that we can advertise on, and we are specifically interested in coinmarketcap.com


Vaporizer Market

The market size for vaporization products is difficult to estimate because of how quickly it is growing and a lack of consolidated statistics. The e-cigarette market for example is on target to have doubled in size this year; to $2 billion.  TAM (total addressable market size) for portable vaporizers, not counting e-cigarettes, is likely to be around $500 million.

Top Brands are Volcano by Stors & Bickel, Arizer, Davinci, Magic Flight Launch Box.  Many new vaporizers seem to be entering the market almost every month indicating a lot of hype around the industry particularly because of new favorable regulations in the U.S. decriminalizing the use of marijuana.  

Operational Costs

Currently our only operational cost is web hosting.  We use xpcwebhosting.com at 19.95 per month.  However, we are considering upgrading to cloud hosting to provide better service to our international customers.

Use of Funds

The funds will be used accordingly:
1.   Set up U.S corporation, virtual office, merchant account, U.S bank account to be able to accept credit card payments again.
2.   Revamp marketing of website to increase website traffic and conversions.
3.   Upgrading infrastructure to support worldwide shipping and optimize website.
4.   Possible development of new portable vaporizer.  
5.     Implement future strategies to grow the company.

Bitcoin Sales since April 2013:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cLjBa3DwxeepkahVtRzLgzPXtugPqvH67xFIzcrr24Q/pubhtml
*we've used mtgox to process bitcoin payments prior to using bitpay, but we do not have that data available.
Website Revenue to date: http://imgur.com/Hybu6ZC

If you have any further questions please ask them below or contact us at vtropolis@gmail.com.  Thanks!

Long story short, we need to clear out our inventory,
so we're having a big sale on vaporizers...every vape is discounted, some
up to 50%! We're also giving away an MFLB and V-Tower to two lucky individuals who order this week.

We're accepting BTC as well as a few other altcoins:

• Litecoin
• Nxt
• Bitshares PTS (protoshares)
• counterparty
• mastercoin
• dogecoin


If you'd like to pay with anything other than Bitcoin, send us a message
at vtropolis@gmail.com , or through the site.


Cheers.

http://www.vapetropolis.ca

Auction closed as no bid reached the reserve price. We're going to continue running the business ourselves for the time being. If anyone is interested going forward, please contact us at : vtropolis@gmail.com

10 btc placed by private message. Thanks for the opening bid!