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[a2offrb]

"I am retired and have bought 500 LRM bonds as a way to get a no-hassle, steady stream of BTC income while I go on with my life in other endeavors. I like to travel the world now, enjoying my life, and am sometimes away from home for months at a time. Sometimes years. I don't waste my time reading the forums or websites too often; honestly I have higher and more fulfilling priorities in my life.

"Imagine my surprise when I return home for Christmas to find that, due to no fault of my own, Lab_Rat has seen fit to "absorb" my 500 bonds and leave me with nothing. My bonds have been stolen by the issuer, and I have not been compensated. I'm quite sure my lawyer and judiciaries would have a field day with that.

"There is nothing in the contract I entered into with LRM stating that I must be 'verified' or do anything other than pay for my bonds and provide a BTC address. LRM has the entire shareholder list from Bitfunder, in the form of payout addresses and bonds held. Mine among them. He has been paying dividends to that address since the beginning, and there is nothing preventing him from continuing to do so. As long as I hold bonds, he is bound by contract to continue to pay. He cannot arbitrarily decide to change the terms demanding further information from anyone as a condition of continued payments or, worse, forfeiture of bonds.

LRM has a list that says "address 1xyz holds 500 bonds". There is nothing more he needs to know than that, and it is all that I (and LRM) agreed to when entering into our contract at point of sale.

Now, the above story is just that: a story. It isn't true. But the points it makes are relevant to all bondholders here.

If anyone finds their bonds "absorbed", it isn't difficult to see that is tantamount to thievery. If LRM wants to arbitrarily change the contract terms as he seems to be doing, he first needs to make 'reasonable' attempts at contacting people ('reasonable' being the very clear legal definition of the term, not his own arbitrary definition) and provide a 'reasonable' way of people to opt-out if they do not find these new terms acceptable.

The correct action from LRM, for people who cannot be contacted or 'verified', is to opt them out ... and that doesn't mean 'absorb' their bonds; it means buy back their bonds at 'reasonable' market value and send a final payout to their last address on record. Nothing complicated about it. Situations like this are not uncommon, and there is ample precedent. "Absorption" of bonds would not go over well in the courts. Not for LRM, anyway.

LRM is taking a 25% 'management fee' from everyone's dividends. He has a lawyer. It is long past time to use him, because what I've been reading in this thread as 'official news' is ridiculous.

Perhaps a minor point, but I'll add it: I am irritated that LRM has charged a fee for his recent dividend payment outside Bitfunder. Due to negligence, or incompetence, or ignorance he used multiple transactions to send out dividends when he could have simply used a single multi-transaction. He screwed up and has taken money from all bondholders instead of eating the fees himself. Without their consent or prior knowledge, for goodness sake. This was especially hurtful to the small bondholders, of which there are many.

He's pulling in BTC hand over fist with his 25% rake and still has to nickel-and-dime the small investor to cover his own mistake? And he doesn't want to own up and say "sorry, I screwed up" and return the funds? I'm not sure what to say to that ... but it is nothing less than shameful.

+1. I really doesnt like LR politics in this kind of questions.
I have made "long time invest" and now, when not even half of mining power is online i want out. Only reason that stops me - low bond price.

Some strange "fee" that must be included in 25%. Owner of 1 share must wait about 20 weeks with current dividend amount per share for what? For pay a "fee"?
I dont care will it be once or thousands of times. This is not how its works.
THIS MUST NOT WORK LIKE THIS.

Absorbing bond? By what right?
There is 2 ways:
1) Send those dividends to public address or:
2)Make a different wallet for unverified bond holders. And send every week dividends to there. Book keeping will be pretty easy.

Someone will loose his investment because of what?

I am from Europe. My luck i check forum currently almost every day. BUT:
I could just invest all my BTC:s. Set "reinvestment" to 100% and go to Thailand for year. And i would be sure that my dividends are reinvested or just in BitFunder account. If i would invest 200 Bitcoins and you would absorb them then........

You make decisions too fast. You are managing ATLEAST 50000 shares * 0,05 BTC (last market price i bought)*205$ (MTGox price) = 512500 dollars,
and you cant even think a second what will be best way to do something.

[||bit]

Absorbed bondholders should be able to claim their bonds anytime after the deadline if they can prove ownership of the address.  However, they will have lost the interim dividends since the dividends are not held and rolled over.

Guess that would be a fair solution for those that didnt verify.
So others get their dividends untill they verify any time and get dividends as well.

Um, no, it would not be fair.

The dividends would need to accumulate and ALL of them paid out when the claim is made. Dividends earned by unclaimed bonds do not belong to LRM nor anyone else; they belong to the bond holder on record. And that bondholder is entitled to all of the accumulated earnings. It isn't rocket science. GigaVPS, upon consultation with his legal representative on GigaMining/TeraMining, came to the same conclusion about unclaimed GigaMining shares which he explains in his own thread.

Agreed. It was audacious to say unverified bonds would be "absorbed" - a political way of saying "taken without consent of the owner". It's a very bad mark on LRM in my view. Instead, the dividends should be set aside for those people.

[Mindsync Miner]

I want to throw my vote in that unclaimed shares should remain in an account so that they could be claimed later.

Other decisions such as rolling the first 14 days of mining from the new Bitfury gear into new hardware were made by general consensus on the forums.  Maybe if we're vocal it'll get done that way.

I would certainly want for others to fight for my rights if I were in absentia.

[bobfranklin]

I agree with unverified shares stay with the account, but not indefinitely and I also believe that dividends from unverified should get divided up to the verified users until the account is verified.

Yes I believe in you snooze you lose.

EDIT: I know that's probably not the popular view, also I see my address is still showing as Failed for verification so awaiting that to be rechecked.

[Bargraphics]

An Idea: If the shares are not claimed then LRM should buy back the shares at market price and put the money aside to be claimed.

But how do you claim the shares if you can't sign with the address on bitfunder? These shares are lost forever anyways. Unverifiable.

[bobfranklin]

An Idea: If the shares are not claimed then LRM should buy back the shares at market price and put the money aside to be claimed.

But how do you claim the shares if you can't sign with the address on bitfunder? These shares are lost forever anyways. Unverifiable.

Good idea and good point.

[zulover]

ive signed a message i think but if i try to verify it in the bitcoin qt it says verification failed

what am i doing wrong ang can labrat confirm anything from the email i sent???

[pascal257]

An Idea: If the shares are not claimed then LRM should buy back the shares at market price and put the money aside to be claimed.

But how do you claim the shares if you can't sign with the address on bitfunder? These shares are lost forever anyways. Unverifiable.

If the share holder accepts it, LabRat could sent the coins to the address.

[bittymitty]

It's the 3rd week into October and still no hardware or order placed. Compared to whatever prices were agreed to for an early October order placement, an eventual order will need to be reduced big time. Or find a new supplier.

I'm not sure where you're getting your news from, but what exactly do you think went down at the meeting between Dave and I?

I understand I haven't been the most vocal about everything, but please don't make assumptions.  Order was placed in person with Dave and hardware should be rolling in this week or first thing next week in large quantities.

now orders have been placed can you give us some numbers like how many gh/s we should expect? 

does anyone know what was orderded?   why is this information not provided?

[grnbrg]

ive signed a message i think but if i try to verify it in the bitcoin qt it says verification failed

what am i doing wrong ang can labrat confirm anything from the email i sent???

PM it to me, and I'll have a try.  I can't do anything officially with it, but I can at least poke at it.  

Be very careful of extra spaces in the message before you sign it...  I think my problems occurred when I cut and pasted Lab_Rat's message and filled in the blanks.  I left too many blanks, which were included in the signed message, but were disappeared when I pasted it into the mail client...  



grnbrg.

[tar_meneldur]

I have a few nooby questions.
Remember all the shares that were discovered recently where the owners had malformed addresses?
Seems like the transactions would have failed when attempts were made to send dividends (maybe several rounds) to them through BitFunder.

Were attempts made to get the addresses corrected?  And where did those dividend funds go?

[mufa23]

I completely agree with Epoch.

[bigasic]

It's the 3rd week into October and still no hardware or order placed. Compared to whatever prices were agreed to for an early October order placement, an eventual order will need to be reduced big time. Or find a new supplier.

I'm not sure where you're getting your news from, but what exactly do you think went down at the meeting between Dave and I?

I understand I haven't been the most vocal about everything, but please don't make assumptions.  Order was placed in person with Dave and hardware should be rolling in this week or first thing next week in large quantities.

now orders have been placed can you give us some numbers like how many gh/s we should expect? 

does anyone know what was orderded?   why is this information not provided?

YES!! This would be nice to know.. What was ordered? when will it get here? when/how much starts to go live, etc.. This is important information...

[mufa23]

I would like to know what hardware has been ordered, and when it is excepted to arrive.

[grnbrg]

I have a few nooby questions.
Remember all the shares that were discovered recently where the owners had malformed addresses?
Seems like the transactions would have failed when attempts were made to send dividends (maybe several rounds) to them through BitFunder.

The issue is that I think all the LRM bondholder addresses were legal Bitcoin addresses.

The issue is that people added addresses they don't control....  Deposit addresses for exchanges, or wallet addresses for wallets they don't have any more....



grnbrg.

[pixl8tr]

I have a few nooby questions.
Remember all the shares that were discovered recently where the owners had malformed addresses?
Seems like the transactions would have failed when attempts were made to send dividends (maybe several rounds) to them through BitFunder.

Were attempts made to get the addresses corrected?  And where did those dividend funds go?

Those dividends went into the local account of the bondholder at Bitfunder.  They were never distributed via the bitcoin address set up on the bitfunder account.  So they were never an  issue .. until bitfunder punted us out.

[tar_meneldur]

Thanks, to both comments.
Actually, I was thinking of those that had extra characters, street addresses, etc in the BTC address, making them invalid.  I guess the same would apply; the funds got left at BitFunder, unless LR can somehow claim them.  

This was back on p. 58 of this thread:
"Among the BitFunder public keys:
""  - A null key.  This user (Single?, Multiple?) holds several assets.
"14oQSdpw56jv3Xn49EM58nNY5RSDbiPGwr  " - probably valid, but has trailing spaces.
" \tBalance \t 1Dxg9ZazutpaNkS3Yu5NwMsBHuHTRPdkn" - Uhhhhh....
" 155TY9EpfpML46QA5bhYxRkxXpcJJFZfxU" - leading spaces.
"150 Vernon Ave. #400 Vernon, CT. 06066" - Dude.  That's not a bitcoin address.
"https:\/\/blockchain.info\/wallet\/3d0719da-52a1-" - Neither is that.
"e4c966be-7fe4-45fe-a5e1-7781f3081e04" - lolwut?
"13yEHkfHB9Hc7c1JZ15qqSP2Zw8hQugA9k13yEHkfHB9H" - Not a valid address, and a holder of 15 LRM bonds!
"635a91d71c72e64f2be449065407ac59b213eb127b279" - Another LRM holder (2 bonds) who doesn't have a clue.
" \t \t1birdyVUS7v4gHsruyBFbmGM6YDLJTkNa"
There are probably more creative entries.  Just found this on a once-through the assetlist...  "
-----------------
On another matter, just for fun, I just counted the different assets (companies) at BF and found that 18 of the 40 have frozen their trades- no trades in the last (at least) 48 hours.  Guess the rest are non-US.

[Lab_Rat]

Hmm, mine Failed, probably because of signing using Armory

Armory DL is acting up for me, gotta use a different OS.  If you could just import to QT or blockchain.info that'd be much easier.  Going to grab a different comp tomorrow to set up armory on.

[Ashitank]

Lab_Rat could you please give us a update on projected hashrate & plans for future growth , how do you plan to have trading of LRM shares set-up in future which doesnt rely on PM to you or grnbrg and provides clear visibility of number of sold shares & cost per share.

[Lab_Rat]

...

LRM has a list that says "address 1xyz holds 500 bonds". There is nothing more he needs to know than that, and it is all that I (and LRM) agreed to when entering into our contract at point of sale.

...

The correct action from LRM, for people who cannot be contacted or 'verified', is to opt them out ... and that doesn't mean 'absorb' their bonds; it means buy back their bonds at 'reasonable' market value and send a final payout to their last address on record. Nothing complicated about it. Situations like this are not uncommon, and there is ample precedent. "Absorption" of bonds would not go over well in the courts. Not for LRM, anyway.

...

The reason for verification isn't that I'm trying to make sure I know who owns the bonds.  It's that BitFunder (Ukyo) put his own BTC addresses in as default if you didn't put your own in and I don't feel like paying him for something he sure as hell didn't earn.

The same goes for a "final payout" theory as I will not pay BTC to Ukyo for your bonds for the fact that if you come complaining to me, then I have to pay twice.  If for some reason down the road you come back to me and say you've been out of town for 6 months, I'll handle that case by case with a reasonable manner.