Well, looks like this thread was completely ridiculous again. Too bad I missed the sell-off/rebound but I would have had to transfer more coins and would probably have missed it.
I think there are a couple reasons why people are spreading so much B.S/Fud.
1) Butthurt ActiveMining investors - either steveioio/sutartUK actually said that there would be a 'troll army' descending on this thread as "payback" for mabsark and others somehow destroying ActM's share price. So some of the trolls are likely those people. (Kind of hard to tell those two apart and honestly they seem like the same person)
2) People just trolling to drive the price down, or just for fun.
3) Genuine nutcases like MPOE-PR (who Mircea Popescu
still claims isn't him, but rather an
actual woman who works for him.)
PS for the lulz : today at 06:51:45 PM my PR chick posted in the three day old, 36 page long RetardsTalk thread shaking her had at the idiocy. She got post #4 on the page. Post #20 happened 07:01:54 PM, precisely ten minutes later. The posters are... ShroomsKit ... limbaugh ... dexX7 ... dvdrewritable ... bitcoiner49er ... limbaugh ... Ytterbium ... Bitcycle
(he claimed all of us were sockpuppets even though several are now anti-labcoin)
4) There are probably some "reasonable" people who actually are worried people might lose there money. However, my view is they are being overly paranoid.
I don't have a problem with people expressing their doubts and concerns. It gets a little tedious to hear the same thing over and over again, but people
do need to be aware of the risks. However, at the same time the whole purpose of investing is to take
risks in exchange for a large enough reward to justify the risk. You can do low risk, low reward or you can do high risk high reward. (And if you're lucky, you might even find low-risk high reward investments, if you have better information then other people).
A big part of the reason I'm not particularly worried is that the trolls/fudsters just don't seem like they know very much about how ICs and circuitboards and the rest are made. I don't mean to be insulting but there is a huge drop in intelligence between posters on the Custom Hardware board and this one.
Buying custom hardware is just as risky as investing in these stocks, but I believe that at the moment the reward from buying custom hardware is much lower then the reward from investing in these stocks, particularly labcoin, and maybe ActM as they get closer to having their own chips. (But there are still some problems with ActM)
So, basically as far as I'm concerned I think the probability that Labcoin is a total scam is low, and I think the probability that they'll be successful, and the share price/dividends will be epic is pretty high.
But, if that's not what you think then by all means sell your shares. I've picked up way more of these shares cheaply then I expected to get because of all the ridiculous bullshit and panic selling. I'm not planning on liquidating my position now so I mean, for me it doesn't matter at all.
As far as why I don't think this is a scam, well, looking at their website and presentation material before the IPO it seemed like they were competent and wouldn't have a lot of trouble actually getting their chips produced. As I said earlier, making chips (or at least, doing chip layout and then ordering the chips from foundries, through third party suppliers who check your work)
isn't some kind of black magic. A well funded operation shouldn't have any trouble getting 130nm chips made.
We also know the real names, etc of the people involved in the company. So if it was a total scam those real people would be risking prosecution, like Pirateat40. There's not a 100% probability of that happening if it was a scam, and obviously it's not a 100% deterrent either. We don't know how much the authorities in HK, Italy, and Sweeden are going to care about bitcoin theft - but it's still something most people are going to think about before they would try to pull a huge scam like this.
There's also the fact that in the long run, it would be far more profitable for
them to do what they say then pull a scam. I think the people running Labcoin expect the company to be worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars some day, why would they pass on that in order to rip off $700k and risk prosecution for fraud (even if the risk of authorities caring was low)
And furthermore, even if they wanted to pull a scam, why wouldn't they actually take the step of making their own chips? BFL was a scam and they made their own chips. And they're idiots.
the stuff some people claim is "shady" doesn't seem shady to me at all. The pictures people say are photoshopped don't look photoshopped to me. And furthermore, it doesn't make much sense to say that they are both a scam because there are no pictures, and they are a scam because the pictures they released are photoshopped. Pictures are easy to fake. And of course there's no reason why, as I said, scammers couldn't just buy bitforce chips and put them on their own circuit boards and then take photos/videos as well as doing actual mining.
So anyway, if you want to sell you're shares go head. If they seem shady to you that's fine. As I said, I could be wrong and that will totally suck for me. But I feel like I understand the situation well enough to make an evaluation of the various outcome probabilities.
Oh, and btw - the biggest risk "scam" risk isn't that the chip is fake, but rather that they won't distribute all the profits to shareholders. That's one reason why they shouldn't IMO be solo mining, at least not at this point. ASICMiner wasn't even solo mining when it started. When you're mining with high variance one thing that happens is you find some blocks really quickly.
Check out the stats on Slush's pool, which is mining at 56Th/s right now. Most of the blocks were found in 1, 2 or 3 hours, but one was found in 17 minutes.
So one thing you could do to "steal" blocks is to code your miner to steal "high luck" blocks. A block comes in, say 5 minutes after another one when you don't expect it for another two hours, and instead of stamping it and sending it to your main address you stamp it with something else, and have it relayed through some proxy so it looks like it came from somewhere else.
Also, solo mining at 2Th/s right now is just a bad idea in general. Slush's pool is at 25x the speed that Labcoin claims to have right now (50TH/s vs 2) That means a block that takes 1h on Slush's pool will take
25 hours for labcoin to find.
Oh, and the slowest block they found recently took
5:44:06. That's the equivalent of
nearly six days for labcoin to find a block if they have similar luck. (right now Slush's 24h luck is just 57%!).
As I said, it's not like a thing where you have more variance over the short run but over the long run it's the same. Because of the rising difficulty, if you have bad luck during one difficulty period,
the chance to earn those coins at that rate is gone forever. It does
not even out in the long run at all!
On the other hand, if you did pooled mining we'd be able to see in real time what you're making. BTCGuild's PPLNS fee is just 3% and right now their pool luck this difficulty is 97%. (Plus you could start a labcoin team we could all join
)
Later on once you've established yourselves more you can switch to pooled mining, but I still think it's a bad idea unless you have a pretty big chunk of the network. You can also split your mining up among multiple pools to prevent one from going over 50% of the network.
As 'usual' when the share price moves I get a lot of PM's. Nothing has changed, and as usual I will not give out any information via PM or trade based shares based on any 'non public' information. Of course I have no clue why the share prices moves up or down, but that's just the market.
I guess I could also mention that the speculation that Labcoin somehow has been mining since mid-August "without telling anyone" is a 'little' funny as you can probably understand that Labcoin has all the motivation in the world to publish has rate etc. with 30% of the company being held by the founders.
However, if the Labcoin team somehow has developed a method that allows them to mine with ASIC before miners are actually constructed I would assume that to be very positive news (<- Joking)
The website will according to Sam be updated 'soon' and I am hoping to have a time for the launch of the redesign/functionality shortly.
Well, given that you are hashing at 2Th/s you
should have found at least a block or two by now.Since you're not marking your blocks yet, you should tell us the txids you generated when you found them.
If you haven't found any blocks yet, well that's an object lesson in why you
shouldn't be solo mining
