Anyway, the real news comes when the first chips leave the fab either they work, or they don't. If they work, the share price should go up a great deal. If they don't, then everyone is fucked.
And if they know they can't make it, they could then dump all their shares before releasing the info and more people would get fucked with valueless shares on their hands.
Freaking out about the founders being able to sell - there isn't enough liquidity in the market for them to make much money at this point at all. It's a non-issue.
Well I think it is an issue. Let's say something goes wrong, in current market they could sell 427.110 shares for 460BTC and get back around 1/2 of their $100K investment (assuming that they have not already made some profit by selling a chunk of their shares).
Taking into account that 120K shares just sold off, give it another week and liquidity will be back. They could then just sell off enough to take back their full investment, still hold some 1.5-2M shares and no risk of financial loss on their part (hence no incentive to achieve).
I m not saying that this is happening - I actually don't think it is. I m merely trying to say that you might not have taken all these parameters into account in your analysis. My question is, why not lock the 75% of their shares, as they stated, and be over with it? Open a new BTCT account (1mn), send 2.225.000 shares (30 sec), email Burnside to lock account (1mn). That's all.