[CLOSED] S.DICE - SatoshiDICE 100% Dividend-Paying Asset on MPEx

[ribuck]

20 BTC for opening a account? This is a robbery.

For what it's worth, you can reduce the account-opening fee to 15 BTC by mentioning the key ID of an existing member:
http://polimedia.us/bitcoin/faq.html#13

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[evoorhees]

These "shares" bear more similarities to a an annuity than they do to actual equity.  On top of this, I see nothing resembling an audited financial statement.  Proceed at your own, in my opinion extreme, risk.

a) They are not an annuity. Their value will fluctuate with market demand based on dividends paid out, which are 100% of SatoshiDICE net profits.

b) Actually, the financial statements are better than "audited."  All the information is mathematically verifiable using the blockchain, which is public. You don't have to trust any auditor, you can audit yourself any time of day to see exactly what SatoshiDICE is making (and some have done that in other threads on this forum).

c) Not sure if it's fair to call it "extreme risk" when comparing to other Bitcoin investments out there... you know what I'm talking about. It's verifiably profitable, and everyone knows where the profits come from. It's priced at 10x P/E and anyone who knows investing will understand this is a very reasonable valuation for a company with large growth potential and which already pays dividends.

SatoshiDICE is not a get-rich-in-three-weeks-from-your-investment, investment. It's a transparent, income producing asset, and happens to be the majority of all Bitcoin transactions on the planet

[evoorhees]

did i read the fine print right, 100,000,000 shares at .0032 or 3,200,00 btc or more than 30 million usd?

that is insane...

Math fail. It's 320,000 btc, or about 3.2m USD. This puts it at 10x p/e based on current earnings and assuming zero growth.  

I agree sorry for the quick mistake, but still. The numbers are way out of line to anything in the industry other than that odd exchange itself. No you guys are not apple.

Do not get my wrong, I hope you guys sell out, it would be nice to know people are willing to wait 15 years to break even. I just sadly do not think that is realistic right now. We will see.

Wait 15 years to break even... what are you talking about? 

If SatoshiDICE didn't grow at all (which it will) and you were never able to sell the share (which you can), then it would take about 10 years to break even.

Since the site will grow, and since you can sell your share whenever, the equation changes substantially. A conservative estimate with a doubling of site revenue within 2-3 years means you'd have made 100% within 1-2 years because the stock price would double to maintain the same 10x p/e valuation. The attractiveness of such an investment to professional investors should be apparent.

[evoorhees]

did i read the fine print right, 100,000,000 shares at .0032 or 3,200,00 btc or more than 30 million usd?

that is insane...

Math fail. It's 320,000 btc, or about 3.2m USD. This puts it at 10x p/e based on current earnings and assuming zero growth.  

I agree sorry for the quick mistake, but still. The numbers are way out of line to anything in the industry other than that odd exchange itself. No you guys are not apple.

Do not get my wrong, I hope you guys sell out, it would be nice to know people are willing to wait 15 years to break even. I just sadly do not think that is realistic right now. We will see.

Wait 15 years to break even... what are you talking about? 

If SatoshiDICE didn't grow at all (which it will) and you were never able to sell the share (which you can), then it would take about 10 years to break even.

Since the site will grow, and since you can sell your share whenever, the equation changes substantially. A conservative estimate with a doubling of site revenue within 2-3 years means you'd have made 100% within 1-2 years because the stock price would double to maintain the same 10x p/e valuation. The attractiveness of such an investment to professional investors should be apparent.

That is a very optimistic view. I hope you are correct but I highly doubt it.

Would you be willing to let me short your stock?  Thanks.

It is a very optimistic view that the site will double usage over 2-3 years? The site doubled usage just in the last month

Even if SatoshiDICE doesn't grow relative to the bitcoin economy (possible, since it's already so large), the bitcoin economy will FAR more than double over the next 2-3 years. I'm curious what your basis for analysis is?

[zebedee]

And if you have to pay 20btc just to register on MPEX just to get a few shares you will NEVER make a profit buying S.DICE.

This is not playing around in some finance-themed MMORPG. This is investing. We're not playing here, you understand this? It's not the monthly subscription for Diablo IV we're discussing, too expensive at 20 btc, would be ok at 5.

If you need to talk to a lawyer you need to pay, depending on where you live, 500 or 5,000 dollars just for him to hear out your story. Nothing more. If you need to talk to a doctor you need to pay... eh, I don't even want to get into that.

IPOs are not for people wanting to buy 5 dollars worth of shares, nobody participated in the Facebook IPO based on the strength of his 19.95 balance sheet with freestocks.com.

20 bitcoins is nothing for an investor. He who stumbles and falls on a twenty bitcoin trap is not an investor. There's really no other way around it.

You sound way too emotionally involved in this.  Take a chill pill.

[Rassah]

I didn't see this asked or discussed, so here's my question: Why?
Why does SD need to go public, why does Erik want to dilute his own ownership and give up some control over his business, and what will he use the money raised for?

He sells 10% of SD for $350K (if all the shares sell)

I think that answers most of your questions

That's assuming he takes that money for himself. Typically when a company issues shares, the cash raised becomes part of the company equity, i.e. the cash is owned by the company to use to expand or pay down expenses. I guess Erik can just pay himself a huge one-time salary though. My question was mainly inspired by the thing I typically ask Ponzi schemers of: Why do you want other people's money instead of use your own and keep all the profits to yourself? SD is obviously not a scam, but the question of why does this company need so much money still intrigues me. If it's something like "I want a huge paycheck for all my hard work so I can keep doing what I'm doing," that's still a perfectly fine, legitimate, and understandable answer.

[Factory]

did i read the fine print right, 100,000,000 shares at .0032 or 3,200,00 btc or more than 30 million usd?

that is insane...

Math fail. It's 320,000 btc, or about 3.2m USD. This puts it at 10x p/e based on current earnings and assuming zero growth.  

I agree sorry for the quick mistake, but still. The numbers are way out of line to anything in the industry other than that odd exchange itself. No you guys are not apple.

Do not get my wrong, I hope you guys sell out, it would be nice to know people are willing to wait 15 years to break even. I just sadly do not think that is realistic right now. We will see.

Wait 15 years to break even... what are you talking about?  

If SatoshiDICE didn't grow at all (which it will) and you were never able to sell the share (which you can), then it would take about 10 years to break even.

Since the site will grow, and since you can sell your share whenever, the equation changes substantially. A conservative estimate with a doubling of site revenue within 2-3 years means you'd have made 100% within 1-2 years because the stock price would double to maintain the same 10x p/e valuation. The attractiveness of such an investment to professional investors should be apparent.

While a P/E of 10 for a growth company is attractive as a normal investment, a 10 P/E ratio just isn't attractive at all in the world of bitcoin finance. The risks greatly bring down any reasonable P/E ratio, just look at any super high risk company on any major market. Those with growth are still prices in single digit P/Es most of the time. Bitcoin, as of right now, is much riskier than that, therefor companies based in bitcoin should have P/Es to match.

If the IPO had a reasonable valuation, I would give it more thought. Right now a 10 P/E is inappropriate for nearly any BTC based venture.

[zebedee]

These "shares" bear more similarities to a an annuity than they do to actual equity.  On top of this, I see nothing resembling an audited financial statement.  Proceed at your own, in my opinion extreme, risk.

a) They are not an annuity. Their value will fluctuate with market demand based on dividends paid out, which are 100% of SatoshiDICE net profits.

b) Actually, the financial statements are better than "audited."  All the information is mathematically verifiable using the blockchain, which is public. You don't have to trust any auditor, you can audit yourself any time of day to see exactly what SatoshiDICE is making (and some have done that in other threads on this forum).

c) Not sure if it's fair to call it "extreme risk" when comparing to other Bitcoin investments out there... you know what I'm talking about. It's verifiably profitable, and everyone knows where the profits come from. It's priced at 10x P/E and anyone who knows investing will understand this is a very reasonable valuation for a company with large growth potential and which already pays dividends.

SatoshiDICE is not a get-rich-in-three-weeks-from-your-investment, investment. It's a transparent, income producing asset, and happens to be the majority of all Bitcoin transactions on the planet

Sorry, but for a new unproven (yes 3 months is unproven) business with an easily reproducible model, where the margins will come under pressure from competitors, and which will inevitably succumb to the "It was fun but I've gotten bored of that" novelty value fatigue, I think you should be factoring in considerable reduction, not growth.

A P/E of anything over 2.5 sounds very speculative to me Erik.

[zebedee]

Sorry, but for a new unproven (yes 3 months is unproven) business with an easily reproducible model, where the margins will come under pressure from competitors, and which will inevitably succumb to the "It was fun but I've gotten bored of that" novelty value fatigue, I think you should be factoring in considerable reduction, not growth.

And I'm sure you are, which is why you want to get out 50% right 

[2112]

This is worth preserving against future edits. I had to glue two posts with an edit.

did i read the fine print right, 100,000,000 shares at .0032 or 3,200,00 btc or more than 30 million usd?

that is insane...

Your math is a little broken there, but as they say practice makes perfect.

yeah, i was like lulz....

Me too. Cause of the math. In general money people are good with numbers.

what is stopping someone from coding up a clone of satoshi dice over a weekend and taking a piece of
the pie... thus reducing your profits.

it seems that is a major threat i would love to hear countered.

I'm not a tech, but I would guess the same thing is stopping someone today that stopped someone up until today. And also the same thing that stopped all the groupon clones from becoming groupon and all the facebook/twitter clones from becoming facebook/twitter. In the words of the once-famous Jerry Seinfeld,

No Resources, No Skills, No Talent, No Ability...

Go with the flow, hate less, live longer.

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.

[dust]

Here is the problem:

• S.DICE is pricing themselves like a "real-world" IPO, and being potentially optimistic about their growth potential
• Bitcoin investors expect 1-7%/week return and don't care about the underlying business.

[Rassah]

Here is the problem:

• Bitcoin investors Clueless idiots who haven't learned from the BS&L experience expect 1-7%/week return and don't care about the underlying business.

FTFY

[boonies4u]

Investing in SatoshiDICE actually peaked my interest. These returns are ridiculous though...

0.0033278 BTC for 1/100M of 10%? Are you insane?

Man some people need to check numbers more carefully. It is .0033278 for 1 of the 100m shares (though only 10m shares are being offered). It is not 1/100m of 10% of the shares. 

Sorry about that, I misread.

Yes, this makes the P/E of 10 a lot more believable now. The High Risk/High Reward nature of this IPO seems highly dependent on the growth of SatoshiDICE. Because of that I will have to refrain from purchasing shares until I believe they are no longer overvalued. I will also be waiting for (an) IPO(s) to pop up.

[Shadow383]

And once again, MPEX PR put people off taking them seriously as an alternative to GLBSE. I was actually interested in the idea of owning shares in SD, but the price is way off.

I'm not a tech, but I would guess the same thing is stopping someone today that stopped someone up until today. And also the same thing that stopped all the groupon clones from becoming groupon and all the facebook/twitter clones from becoming facebook/twitter. In the words of the once-famous Jerry Seinfeld,

1-I know right, just like that blatant myspace clone facebook went nowhere... and that photobucket ripoff instagram... (In businesses like these, new sites are a serious business risk. Deal with it.)
2-When you're selling a stock based on a perceived similarity to Facebook/Groupon... Well... Let's just say I have absolute faith that this asset will perform just as well as those two have  

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.

No, actually I don't own any AAPL because I don't think a company that makes trendy phones and computers is worth more than the entire US retail sector. $620,000,000,000 is just too much for that business.
I actually made a pretty tidy amount shorting Apple stock earlier this year, and I'll probably be going that way again pretty soon.

did i read the fine print right, 100,000,000 shares at .0032 or 3,200,00 btc or more than 30 million usd?

that is insane...

Math fail. It's 320,000 btc, or about 3.2m USD. This puts it at 10x p/e based on current earnings and assuming zero growth.  

Which is seriously expensive for a business that relies entirely on a fairly unstable online currency that may well not exist or be heavily used in 10 years...
Like it or not, this is a far riskier asset than proper companies on proper exchanges...

[Factory]

Here is the problem:

• S.DICE is pricing themselves like a "real-world" IPO, and being potentially optimistic about their growth potential
• Bitcoin investors expect 1-7%/week return and don't care about the underlying business.

I believe there are many of us who actually care regarding underlying businesses.

However, they still must be appropriately priced. A 10 P/E ratio in the BTC world is flat out crazy.

There are real concerns here:
-A fully audited financial statement.
-An easily replicated business model.
-Massive risk regarding BTC on a whole (as much as I am a proponent of BTC, we have to acknowledge it is very risky.)
-Many other seen and unforeseen risks.

In my mind, as of right now, this IPO appears to be very unattractive.

[misterbigg]

If SatoshiDICE future growth has so little risk and such high potential then why on earth is the owner selling equity instead of selling bonds?

[evoorhees]

I didn't see this asked or discussed, so here's my question: Why?
Why does SD need to go public, why does Erik want to dilute his own ownership and give up some control over his business, and what will he use the money raised for?

He sells 10% of SD for $350K (if all the shares sell)

I think that answers most of your questions

That's assuming he takes that money for himself. Typically when a company issues shares, the cash raised becomes part of the company equity, i.e. the cash is owned by the company to use to expand or pay down expenses. I guess Erik can just pay himself a huge one-time salary though. My question was mainly inspired by the thing I typically ask Ponzi schemers of: Why do you want other people's money instead of use your own and keep all the profits to yourself? SD is obviously not a scam, but the question of why does this company need so much money still intrigues me. If it's something like "I want a huge paycheck for all my hard work so I can keep doing what I'm doing," that's still a perfectly fine, legitimate, and understandable answer.

This is a legitimate question and I'm happy to respond.

As per the prospectus, 10% of the raised funds will be going to a high-profile print media campaign in European gambling/casino publications.  

The amount shown in the prospectus of the "nominal value" (10k btc) will be held and not spent, so that if there is some breech or insolvency it can pay back investors at that promised amount.

The rest goes to me. The vast majority of it I'll be holding as BTC because as you know I love Bitcoin more than anything.  Other than that, I'll be using some of the funds on two other startups I have in mind, but these are secret  Some money was spent on the new website, but those costs were already paid so this capital won't be going to that specifically.

Basically, I'm trying to bring a fraction of my future earnings of SD into the present as a lump sum.

[Factory]

I didn't see this asked or discussed, so here's my question: Why?
Why does SD need to go public, why does Erik want to dilute his own ownership and give up some control over his business, and what will he use the money raised for?

He sells 10% of SD for $350K (if all the shares sell)

I think that answers most of your questions

That's assuming he takes that money for himself. Typically when a company issues shares, the cash raised becomes part of the company equity, i.e. the cash is owned by the company to use to expand or pay down expenses. I guess Erik can just pay himself a huge one-time salary though. My question was mainly inspired by the thing I typically ask Ponzi schemers of: Why do you want other people's money instead of use your own and keep all the profits to yourself? SD is obviously not a scam, but the question of why does this company need so much money still intrigues me. If it's something like "I want a huge paycheck for all my hard work so I can keep doing what I'm doing," that's still a perfectly fine, legitimate, and understandable answer.

This is a legitimate question and I'm happy to respond.

As per the prospectus, 10% of the raised funds will be going to a high-profile print media campaign in European gambling/casino publications.  

The amount shown in the prospectus of the "nominal value" (10k btc) will be held and not spent, so that if there is some breech or insolvency it can pay back investors at that promised amount.

The rest goes to me. The vast majority of it I'll be holding as BTC because as you know I love Bitcoin more than anything.  Other than that, I'll be using some of the funds on two other startups I have in mind, but these are secret  Some money was spent on the new website, but those costs were already paid so this capital won't be going to that specifically.

Basically, I'm trying to bring a fraction of my future earnings of SD into the present as a lump sum.

So basically, you are looking to keep 90% ownership, get a lump sum of up to ~300k, invest only a fraction of the total capital raised by the IPO?

I just want to make sure I understand.....

[Factory]

Here is the problem:

• S.DICE is pricing themselves like a "real-world" IPO, and being potentially optimistic about their growth potential
• Bitcoin investors expect 1-7%/week return and don't care about the underlying business.

Well there is middle ground.  Our company (Tangible Cryptography) recently funded notes (debt not equity offering) at 29.6% APR and had more capital offered than we were willing to take on.  While 29.6% APR puts us solidly in junk bond status it is a little more realistic than 3400% "investments".  Since that offering we have seen multiple lenders contact us for expansion of our capital so there are investors with more realistic (albeit still high risk high reward) views.

I am glad to see another "real" company get financing using Bitcoin.  That being said I think I will pass on the IPO.  Generally equity carries more risk than debt.  At P/E of 10 the company is priced like a low risk growth stock, yet equity "owners" have no control or no legal protection.  At a P/E of 20 or 25 it would be a more attractive offering.

In major markets I think a low risk growth stock with a P/E of 10 is what most would consider a 'bargain.'

Also, I think you mean a P/E of 3-7 would be more attractive, not 20/25.

[chmod755]

This reminds me of the FeedZeBirds asset, which was also a profitable website and after the IPO they seemed to have stopped working on it without paying a single dividend, because other projects became more important  

TL;DR S.DICE is overvalued - company should improve its management