Investing in SatoshiDICE actually peaked my interest. These returns are ridiculous though...
AAPL pays ~2.5 dollars
a year in dividends. The share trades for ~650 dollars. You may think the reason you don't own AAPL is because "they're insane". The truth however is that you don't own AAPL because you don't have money.
0.0033278 BTC for 1/100M of 10%? Are you insane?
I don't think you read the offer very carefully. 0.0032 BTC (lowest tier) buys someone 1/100M of the revenue of SatoshiDICE! The dividend yield works out (if worked out by people who actually can do division and multiplication) at an estimated 0.00036 BTC a year per share, or a little over 10%.
This revenue has some very marked advantages over any available alternatives. To wit:
a. It is better than Ponzi. This should be self explanatory. If it is not self explanatory you are not an investor and do not belong discussing securities.
b. It is better than mining bonds. Mining bonds
depreciate. You pay 1.5 BTC to buy one today, it's worth 1.0 BTC in four months and in the interim it's paid 0.1 or 0.2 dividends. You've not made 10 or 20% a month. You've made a 30% loss over the quarter. A 30% loss compares
disfavourably to a 1% gain a year.
c. It is insulated from fiat-world risk. The government of Japan decides to arrest a person from MtGox staff? Your MtGox investment is now worth zero. Game over. Dwolla decides to lock the accounts of TradeHill? Your TradeHill investment is now worth zero. Game over. The only thing that can kill pure-BTC plays like SD is the collapse of BTC itself, which is no extra risk to the BTC investor: you already have those BTC.
Here's another way to look at this: 320,000 BTC is a little more than 1.5% of all bitcoins that will ever exist.
And for now, and possibly for a little while longer, SatoshiDice is a lot more than 1.5% of all that's worth owning in bitcoins. There are some good companies out there. Maybe ten, maybe twenty, certainly not one hundred. This is one of them.
Subtracting expenses out before the reported revenue numbers skews the profitability.
Net profit is calculated as the difference between revenue and expense. Why would this be problematic? What would it skew?
I still have a hard time grasping how these voluntary associations are being referred to as companies and corporations.
Because that is
exactly what a company or corporation is: a voluntary association. Furthermore, milk is the white liquid seeping out a cow's udders, not the item found in a government approved package announcing to the world that within lies milk. This is an important point and I think too easily forgotten.
When someone is talking about raising something like $7K for a project that you'd never get a loan for from a bank or never would see finding through an Angel, for instance, then I think these cyber equities are a fantastic innovation. But raising over a quarter of a million dollars, with a valuation of several million dollars -- I wonder if this cyber-equities approach should be reconsidered.
This is a very limiting, unfortunate and in the end destined-to-fail way to regard bitcoins. They are not this exotic pet, to play around the "serious" fiats and fill the cracks they leave.
Bitcoin is the harbinger of doom for all fiat currencies. That is its role. That's what it is supposed to do. The notion that it should be relegated to denominating scams and ridiculous penny-ante endeavors of bizarre internet denizens with visible mental handicaps (yes, not being able to do basic math is a mental handicap for an adult human) is loathsome.
Bitcoin will support million dollar ventures, and it will support billion dollar ventures. And then it will support trillion dollar ventures, and quadrillion dollar ventures, and as the dollar slowly I mean quickly devalues into irrelevancy bitcoin will support everything. That's the paradigm.
And as shocking as this may sound, nobody needs nobody's permission for this.
Now, here's the question, and it lies in front of everybody: do you have some money for which you want to make some money, or do you have some time to kill for which you want to waste people's time?
That's the whole story.