First of all, I like what Eric is doing, and I love MPOE.
Wow, there's someone left?! How do you do it!
Aside from that, what I can see is that there is not much happening to the site. No new games, no new marketing - at least as far as I can tell from Eric's communication on the website and in this thread. As far as I remember, there are things happening on the backend - improvements etc, but marketing-wise, there is nothing.
Not to detract from what I think is perfectly valid criticism, there have been a few fires to put out. Not just the recent fork which affected everyone, not just the
DDoS extravaganza which affected pretty much all the top dogs (MtGox being
the most recent inductee in that exclusive club) but also two (or three?) different methods to attempt double-spends that were averted but required some code changing (at least iirc from what was publicly discussed). So I would guess even if not much went into visible marketing a lot of hard work went into strengthening the actual platform, which I'd count as value-adding.
It would be quite spectacular to see the same amounts of BTC profits, but with BTC above $90...
20k or two million a month. A scary figure.
All in all, on average, I sold at ~0.0040, and earned 120BTC in dividends since IPO. I'm quite happy with the whole deal, although I obviously wish I've sold it all when it was 0.009 (but who would've known that the wales were just temporary - perhaps Eric?). I still have some of my BTCs on MPOE, waiting for one of the following:
- the S.DICE P/E to fall to 2-3x - either by an increase in profits, or by a decrease in share price
- Eric doing something which would increase the valuation to 10x in my eyes. That would probably mean consistently showing us that there is more done towards the marketing and development of the site
- seeing a premiere of a new game, and turning S.DICE into casino. I'm curious to see whether a new game would be classified as a new venture, or the same one. There is nothing in the IPO documents I can see that would forbid Eric from doing it as a separate venture. And if he did, my target P/E would fall down even further - to 1x-2x
Now I'm curious how this will play out.
Therefore all the people with less than $100k to invest in one of three ventures on MPOE, need to use a passthrough. On the other hand - perhaps that's what he wants - to deal just with "sophisticated" investors.
Guy's name is Mircea (and MPEx is the exchange, MPOE is either me or the options bot) and his game is building Bitcoin finance, or
to quote,
People don't understand many things, chief among which that the world is at war, and finance is the means of that war. MPEx is here to arm bitcoin with all the high impact high efficiency weapons fiat currencies have.
He wants to create a market for PTs, and he wants to help people specialize and professionalize in actual roles - such as broker, or IPO consultant, or analyst (the sort of thing people like Deprived are tirelessly doing - evaluating the books and reports of assets). And to be perfectly fair - if you compare the state of the MPEx led Bitcoin finance in March 2013 to the state of the GLBSE led Bitcoin finance in March 2012 I would say the differences are both marked and flattering.
An illiquid market brings down the valuations as well.
Small investors buying on PTs still reflects in the MPEx liquidity, and in the liquidity of the asset.
IRL the concept of "accredited investor" exists, which basically boils down to "someone who knows enough of this world to be able to protect his own money". Like it or not the truth is that most people don't know enough of this world to be able to survive on their own. Governments have to - it's not a matter of wanting to, they
have to - step in and protect the retail/consumer "investor" because otherwise he'll get fleeced, and that fleecing will finance the
unsavory elements and their activities, which results in
pain across the board.
IRL you are an "accredited investor" by means of owning a lot of USD. It's not practical to verify how much BTC someone owns, and it's also not BTC-ish to do. MP opted to use a simpler and more flexible approach: if you can afford 30 BTC you're big enough to play. People obviously trash and cuss and complain, but this barrier is there for their protection, and it indeed works well to protect them. It also works well to protect everyone else, because as a company if your stock is held by a large number of clueless/impressionable/non committed people you're in for a world of hurt. This point is amply discussed by Buffett, I won't extend this endless post with more quotes but if you wish to look up what WB had to say about investors and pricing for Berkshire you'll see what I mean.
I was wondering whether to publish this all.
I'd say you made the right choice and thank you for doing it. The more openly things are discussed, the better off everyone will be.
