When you go on Havelock to the "Browse All Funds" section, there is a column labeled "IPO" and all the funds say "NO", shouldn't it say "YES" in the line with HIF?

Did you read what I wrote? My point is that Havelock is in a field with a very low barrier to entry, so even though there are few competitors right now there will be new competitors in the future. Therefore, the risk of losing money on this is high. The proposed reward, even in a best case scenario, does not balance the risk. Therefore, this is severely overpriced.

Why are you getting so mad, I was agreeing with you!


[edit] It looks like you can decrease the number of active funds by 1, xbond is closing, which should lower the projected income.

And this is why you should never buy this type of bonds above their buy-back value. You never know when one of these operators is going to "cleanly" shut down and you lose money.

This should be moved to "Meta"

No. This is not cryptotalk, this is bitcointalk. We talk about bitcoins here. If you want to make a cryptotalk.org forum you are free to do that.

Edit: Wait, there is already a cryptotalk.org forum. Why are you still here?

Rage much?

Even if the proposed solutions of colored coins or mastercoin do not directly compete with Havelock, they or some other decentralized system will be run over various marketplaces which will compete with Havelock. There is also the possibility of somebody buying the BTCT code and starting up another exchange, or somebody writing up new code or whatever. The barrier to entry in this space is very low, companies will list at the exchange that gives them the best combination of price, exposure, and security.

Dude, you need to turn your caps lock off!

But remember also that the network will reach an equilibrium scaled to the size of the demand as demonstrated by the transaction fees. If transaction fees do not rise to replace the block subsidy, then the inefficient miners will turn off their machines. Mining will be left to the people with the most efficient energy uses and for people willing to mine at a loss for ideological reasons or by companies who profit more from the bitcoin network than they lose by mining to maintain that network.

Wait, so you are trying to sell a service which is not even running yet? How can you be selling bitcoins without any wallet functionality?

I don't think that is possible. If some people refuse to mine transactions under 10%, there will be others who include those transactions to get the fees. Having a low fee might make your transaction slower, but as long as you include some fee the transaction will eventually get picked up by somebody. Bitcoins is still open source, you will never have 100% of the miners agree completely.

Already you run into people who say "we miners are getting abused, let's all refuse to include no-fee transactions", and they can modify their software to only include fee-carrying transactions, but there will be other people who just laugh at them and keep putting the free transactions in.

Wasn't 11/12/13 last Tuesday?

mmm, I think we already discussed the market cap is more like $60 million, not $440 million. But your argument still stands: how is this company possibly worth this many bitcoins?

I think it was Mircea Popescu who said there are two ways to value a company: how much money would it take to build the assets, and how much money would you get for selling all the assets. I don't think either of those valuations comes anywhere the millions they are asking here.

Instead of calling it mining, call it "transaction processing", that is a more descriptive term for what the work actually goes toward.

Describing it that way lacks some of the scale to the amount of processing power needed. It is also confusing how mining is reported in units like GHs, which is completely different but looks similar to the usual unit for processor speed, GHz.

Aha, now there is some data we can use. (Havelock, can you confirm this number for the current trade volume?) So with a trade fee of .4%, that is 1.0 btc per day. That gives an income of 365 btc, (ignoring expenses at the moment) which would be a PE of 274.

Here is a suggestion: in the prospectus, put in three estimates of future performance, make the current estimate the "extremely good" projection, add two more projections with increasingly conservative estimates.


pascal257: remember that there is velocity to bitcoins, so the total trade volume can exceed the monetary base without any troubles. For example, if there is 1 coin in existence, I use it to buy your car and then you use it to buy my house, we have transacted 2 coins using a monetary base of just 1 coin.

What I was trying to say is that it is a problem which makes the computer work hard, how do you describe that quickly without calling it a "difficult problem"?

Well, they did take some time off offering new securities while they addressed the legal issues, and there have been a couple IPO recently, maybe Havelock could give us a statement on the actual number of securities in the pipeline to get listed? The prospectus should also include some actual current data about usage rates, current sales, and the recent performance of the site.

I see this explanation of mining in most articles introducing bitcoins. What they should say, instead of "solving difficult problems" is "solving computationally intense algorithms" or something like that, the important part is not that the problems are difficult but that the algorithim for generating the random number requires the computer to do a specific amount of work. It is not just guessing a random number, it is running that random number through the complicated formula to see if it is the right number. It would be nice if the articles somehow mentioned that doing this work also verifies the transactional data for the network.

They should describe mining as "Verifying transactions and running random numbers through a complicated formula which requires intense computational power" Or something like that.

With regard to the constant rate of coin generation: The algorithm is meant to produce a rather constant coin generation rate over the short term. From November 2012 to about November 2016 bitcoins will be generated at roughly a constant speed of 25 bitcoins per ten minutes. Then for the next four years they will be generated at a constant speed of 12.5 bitcoins per ten minutes. So the short term rate is held constant, but the long term rate is decreasing. So he got it half right.

Why is your proposal a bad thing? It will just help the market balance supply and demand issues. If fewer people are sending transaction fees, then that is a signal to the miners to slow down. If people want their transactions processed faster they will add more fees. It is a give and take that was built into the structure of bitcoin from the beginning. It is a feature, not a bug.

You still have to face the reality that bitcoin is a deflationary currency. It does not matter how you measure it: USD, EUR, gold, silver, man hours, acres of land in Manhattan; the value of a bitcoin is designed to go up over time. It may seem reasonable to charge 1 bitcoin for a listing now, but if the value of a bitcoin rises drastically then that amount will seem absurd to anybody considering listing on the exchange. So you will be forced to either lower the prices for your services or you will have less people utilize those services, either way we can expect the revenues measured in bitcoin to decrease over time.

This IPO seems overpriced to me. You can say you value the company at 100000 btc instead of 60000000 USD, but it means the same thing and is equally overvalued.

Is this a SatoshiDice style IPO where all the money generated from stock sales goes into the pockets of the current owners, or is this raising new capital for the company? What will the money be spent on?

Edit Wait, somebody said there are 100`000`000 units, but now I see there are 20`000`000 units listed, that is a big difference, could you clarify? Even with a market cap of only 20`000 btc, I think that is still overpriced.

And there seems to be some confusion over the price being listed as 0.005 vs 0.0005, there are still bid orders at 0.005, those people will be very sad to find out they bought at 10x the going price, maybe you should send out an email to all the people who received the announcement email stating that there was a mixup and they should change their bids?

Edit Edit: Ah, now I see, you are selling 25% of 20% of the company. Why not just say you are selling 5% of the company? Why make a distinction between the 80% you are not selling and the 15% which is not for sale?

What is the current sales volume per day for the site?

You expect to spend 300`000 USD each on law and accounting firms? You should really look into hiring your own lawyer and accountant and cut that cost way down!

If I am calculating right, using your numbers, you want a P/E of (100000/5870) = 17, like I said this seems a bit on the expensive side to me, for such a risky investment.

I just threw in 12.3 mB to feed about 8 people. (it is a bit hard to say a specific amount since the exchange rate is jumping around so much)

transaction e85381c95002ea5cc84012a775a6dd68f2185abc808f9bc63ef545d48113ae4b