So I can't help but notice that there is no "news" or announcement at BitFunder about this.  Does anyone with knowledge of pass-throughs know what we as shareholders through such services have to do in this case?  Do we have to sell our shares (for less than the buyout value based on their spread), or can we just sit tight, and wait until our assets magically just disappear and our account balance goes up?

This may be a market/exchange fragmentation issue, but I was not looking at Havelock.  It appears that they are issuing shares of a proprietary fund that is made up of shares of SD, but they are not a place trading in actual shares on a 1-1 basis, so the prices they reflect are for shares of their SD-based fund (presumably with a premium on top).

I was using https://bitfunder.com/asset/G.SDICE for my data, which has fairly different values (looking at the 3- and 6-month charts)

I think that a lot of Erik's points are good ones, and I certainly think that the tone, if not the substance, of a lot of the questions/criticisms on this board are out of line.  People can demand that SD take a more "mainstream" or "professional" approach to shareholder relations if they are unwilling to act in a courteous and "professional" manner as investors (who do not traditionally get to flame corporate CEOs directly in message boards).

That said, while obviously the exchange rate change made a huge difference, it is disingenuous to keep highlighting the 10x number with regards to valuation and dividends.  If this were the primary factor at play, then when the price dropped back down to 5x of what it was in February, then theoretically share price should have doubled from what it was at the peak of the exchange rate, which isn't what happened.

While I totally agree that both gamblers and investors still considering their decisions based on USD values rather than the BTC denominations of the bets/shares played a part in driving the price down, it's definitely only half of the story, as evidenced by the fact that there is not an inverse relationship between share value in BTC and BTC value in USD.  While share values dropped as BTC value rose, when BTC value fell, so did share price.  They are closer to non-correlated than negatively correlated.

Still holding my shares, and still interested to see what the future holds for SD, but let's make sure we are all thinking rationally about this.  Frankly, I think that Erik (thanks, Erik) has done a pretty good job of resisting the urge to get down in the muck with the trolls, for a guy whose job is not really PR.  Everyone, disgruntled investors especially, needs to realize that this isn't the NYSE.  We weren't buying into an established company, we were investing in what was essentially a start-up, and that can often mean taking losses for months or even a year or two before seeing profits.  If you are that risk-averse, or only interested in short-term gains, you shouldn't be in any Bitcoin company stocks most likely.

I am somewhere between depression and acceptance.  It makes me sad, but I am resigned to just watching my share value drop to zero.  I have thought about selling them a lot over the last few months, but something keeps me holding onto them, in that I want to believe it will turn around, especially after seeing EV at Bitcoin 2013 last weekend.

Sort of like Bitcoin after the 2011 spike & crash, I am hoping that a year or two from now, everyone who sold out at this point will realize how undervalued these shares were.

Erik, I am going to go ahead and say that this was overdue, but thanks a lot for taking the time to post this.

Have you considered a mailing list for shareholders, or some method of pushing out communications?  When the homepage for the site goes down, a week or two is a long time to wait for any information.

Part of this is the nature of the market infancy that we are in.  Despite the fact that "shares" have been sold, this is nothing like the major stock markets.  There is no accountability, nor recourse here, and we are basically all just private investors, this isn't really a publicly traded company in the traditional sense.

We signed up to pay EV directly, and in return we get some dividends from his business.  There is no board, we don't get votes, we don't even get an annual shareholders' meeting or detailed quarterly financial reports.  The SEC isn't checking to see where the revenue from these shares goes, and we don't know either.  EV could just be buying a ton of fur coats, I don't know.

Is he doing a bad job of dealing with "shareholders?" Unquestionably.  Is he doing a bad job of running his own company?  Probably.  Is there anything we can do about it?  Not really.

I think the biggest thing in this entire thread is that we (as a community, I mean) need to find a way to repay people taking the time and putting in the effort to do useful things such as what dooglus does (but more generally too) without it being sponsored by the company itself (which has the problem of creating an affiliation). Any ideas?
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Frankly, I don't think that there is a huge problem with affiliation, as long as we know it.  For instance, Dooglus revealing that he was in some way compensated for providing a service makes me think of him as an independent contractor.  He doesn't actually work directly for SatoshiDice, and his compensation/livelihood isn't tied directly to them, so given that he has been transparent, I have no reason to think that he is posting false information to make them look better than they are.

I mean, if we were really worried about his being influenced by the financial side of things, his approximately 10,000 shares would be far more of an issue. 

We can certainly tip him, and others who provide services (preferably through something like the Reddit tipbot), but there is also nothing wrong with people being compensated by the companies that they benefit.

And this inexcusable oversight just caused the share values to tank even further.  Maybe he sold all though shares at below then-market value a month or two ago because he had no intention of continuing the site and wanted to cash out.  

He is either a villain or incompetent, but either way, the shareholders suffer.  First the the flood of low priced shares, then the tiny dividend, now this.  My 48 bitcoins have turned into 11, 13 including the dividend payments.

No divvy for March. SD had a loss.
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Will have to go back and read the fine print, but with normal stocks the performance of the company does not stop them from issuing dividends.

Not this.  While it is decadent to eat money or gold, you aren't really harming the economy by doing so because there is an essentially limitless supply of both (gold is debatable, but most estimates suggest that as technology improves we will be able to access more and more of the gold in the earth, not to mention space).

The only way that this is an analogue would be by destroying private keys that don't exist anywhere else, thereby removing those coins from circulation permanently (otherwise, you might as well just eat a piece of paper with "bitc0inz" written on it).  By willfully destroying bitcoins, which are already in a very limited supply and are poised to become only more scarce as early adopters die off (presumably not everyone has an iron-clad system for making sure their wallets survive them), you will damage an already small monetary supply.

We recently had a new "social manifesto" created and distributed.  I got the first copy!

Hi Everyone,

My Company, cbtnuggets.com, provides IT training (as well as Project Management and Office) streaming online from some of the best trainers available, with thousands of hours of video and exam prep materials on a wide variety of technologies.

We recently put out a Bitcoin training video series, and our CEO has been featured in some articles about Bitcoin adoption lately (http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/interview/bitcoin-the-currency-of-the-future-109318), but we just finally got BitPay to work with our system!

We've been very excited about getting this up and running, as everyone here is really excited about growing the Bitcoin ecosystem.  Feel free to PM me if you have any questions.

Thanks,

CBT Nuggets

Must have pissed off Anonymous somehow.  Everyone knows that they are responsible for all hacks.

HACK THE PLANET

I don't think anything that complicated fundamentally is taking place here.  When the exchange rate was roughly flat or a slow increase, SDICE was a nice way to increase your BTC holdings, especially as it corresponded with the news reports about SDICE's earnings in 2012.

However, as the value of a bitcoin increases rapidly against the dollar, it is a bad idea to hold it in SDICE.  I have lost 28 BTC (market value of over $1300 at today's price), in a couple of months, while getting dividends of 1.7 BTC.  Had I simply held onto my bitcoins, those would be worth $2300, while instead my shares + dividends are worth $1000.  Holding a stock denominated in BTC greatly increases your risk (stock price can go up or down, as well as the value of the BTC it's valued in), so it primarily makes sense in a stable exchange environment.

I wish that I were!  But alas, I am just a CBT employee who happened to already have accounts on the Bitcoin forums.  I do e-mail him though, so I can get information to him.

This isn't a "so I have a friend named Keith..." situation.

We appreciate the feedback, Dooglus.  I will be making a list from all of the comments in these forums to make sure that we can address the issues, though for the published ones it might have to come at the end once the upcoming videos in the series are done. 

There have been a number of comments to the effect of "too long to get to it" on the first video, but I think that one in particular was intended for people who were completely unfamiliar with Bitcoin and needed to first understand why we would need an alternative currency type to begin with.

Sgt Spike:  I thought that as I was posting using the pronoun "we" in all of the answers to the first reply regarding the browser problems, it would be understood that I work at CBT Nuggets.

I have taken, and continue to take, full responsibility and admit my error, and I have already apologized to other members who posted in the thread personally.  As soon as I saw that there was an problem I issued a literal "mea culpa," and I extend the apology to you as well.

To be clear, I am fully recognizing that I made a mistake, and I thought that I had done so earlier, but lest I once again cause confusion:  I screwed up, and I am sorry.

TL/DR on my previous post:  These posts were from me as an individual "going rogue" and not official company posts.  The social team will hang me by my tendons when they see all this, but don't blame them or the company. 

Hi everyone,

This was not an attempt to deceive, this is just a segmentation issue.  We have a social team who is responsible for handling all of our social media efforts, while I am just the web analytics guy who is also a Bitcoin enthusiast.  I'm not in sales, and the series is free, which I tried to emphasize, so I didn't mean any harm.

I knew that this link was going to go out on the official channels on Twitter, FB, and reddit, but I was afraid that it wouldn't hit the places I personally thought that it would be most valuable, in these threads where I tend to be.

I thought that from my posts it was clear that I was involved, but I could have done a better job of making that clear at the beginning, which also would have made it obvious that my posts here were in only a semi-official capacity as a guy who loves Bitcoin and is excited that his company does too.

This is why we have people who do this professionally, and I shouldn't have stepped on their toes, but I assure you that I just wanted to make sure more people saw that we had a free Bitcoin video series.

Mea culpa, but I would still love to see feedback on the actual video content.

Hi gweedo (and everyone else).  Sorry for the usability issues you have been hitting, it was because we were in the process of moving all of the files from the lander initially mentioned to a new subdomain on our site:

http://bitcoin.cbtnuggets.com/

All the videos will be hosted here now, giving us the flexibility we need to ensure that the videos play in all browsers and on all devices.

So I apologize again for the issues you ran into today, we were just trying to get this launched quickly, but there should be no more problems moving forward.

We also appreciate the feedback, and we want to get these right.  We will be collecting all the information that we hear from you guys and will make sure that it gets addressed, even if we have to make extra videos to do it.

We're learning this stuff too, as is Keith, so bear with us.