Biz27B-6 on Bitfunder - 100% scam

[DrGregMulhauser]

The latest story seems to be that this was never intended as a fund-raising exercise at all and was merely intended to provide bookkeeping functions for existing shareholders. But there's a broader and ongoing problem here which comes down to woolly thinking: assuming without argument that what applies to individual consumers should apply to any entities at all, including businesses.

I appreciate the mathematical beauty of trustless systems in general and the quasi-anonymity of Bitcoin in particular, but none of the respect for privacy for individual consumers that is baked into the DNA of Bitcoin has anything whatsoever to do with institutions such as businesses and this fundamental fact about them: without identity, there is ultimately no accountability.

While identity might not be sufficient to provide accountability, it is a necessary condition for accountability.

And maybe I've been asleep at the wheel, but I've never heard one -- not even one -- decent argument as to why an exchange or an investor should tolerate someone aiming to raise money from other people to run a business without coming clean about their own identity. We're not talking about charities aiding political dissidents suffering under oppressive regimes, after all, we're talking about people in business to make a profit. Sure, there are plenty of assertions which boil down to "well, if you don't know, then I'm not going to tell you", but that's just mixing a spoonful of laziness with a dollop of condescension and hoping people will swallow it down without engaging their brains.

The bottom line is that if you are an asset issuer asking other people to fund your business without coming clean about who you are, you are asking to remain unaccountable. And if you're an exchange willing to list such assets, you're signalling that you're OK with that.

[supermono]

In my case, I bought 1 share during the brief time when it was visible to the public and have since held on to it mainly out of curiosity. But now I'm trying to do something with each of the assets I own on Bitfunder (either sell or migrate), so I'm hoping that the issuer will make some sort of announcement soon as to the future of the asset. Otherwise I will probably end up selling soon just so I can take 'deal with this asset' off my things-to-do-list.

[SamPryce]

What are the plans?
We will be going to direct shares managed by ourselves, at least until we can find another marketplace to list at that won't be as vulnerable to government threats.

What do shareholders need to do?
For now, please make sure your BitFunder public address is a valid bitcoin address that you control. We know there are a few shareholders who have non-bitcoin addresses there. The one with a postal address has already been contacted through other means. We understand that this means we will need to handle exchanges ourselves, and we need to develop a means to securely and privately issue buy and sell orders. We're working on that.

Dividends, when we have them, will be distributed to the public bitcoin addresses we get from the BitFunder site. Emails may be encrypted and sent to sampryce2@hotmail.com : the GPG key to use is
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The latest story seems to be that this was never intended as a fund-raising exercise at all and was merely intended to provide bookkeeping functions for existing shareholders.

We did actively raise funds, but in person. Most shares have been sold directly and the transfer functionality used. I'd bet Ukyo can verify that.

Most of the investors are personally known to me and they know what the business is and does. I'd bet Ukyo can tell you how many of these investors were brought to the website by me, and how many only own shares of Biz27B-6. Doing a quick check of the asset listing page, of the 45 investors in Biz27B-6 only 14 hold shares in other assets; which means about 70% of the investors only hold our asset. That 70% can be assumed to know what the business is, else they wouldn't hold just that.

The reason we keep our identity unexposed on these very public sites should be obvious. Our biggest threat is the government and those who would impose arbitrary regulation. The majority of our shareholders are quite aware of who we are and how to contact us. A few shareholders have already contacted us and we have already discussed our plans with them.

We've added this info as a news item on BitFunder so those who don't frequent this forum will also have it.