so, you're saying we should had over a few $million to some kids to let them build experience running a company?
![Roll Eyes](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/rolleyes.gif)
What do you know about running a company? Why don't you start one and find out if you can do better.
Yes that is how finance and investment works. Most startups fail and if you don't know that then you invested more than you were prepared to lose. You have to weigh the upside against the downside to calculate the potential.
it takes no experience to post proof of hashing. that would silence 90% of the moaners around here, if LC actually posted some real proof.
it takes no experience to lock the shares. that takes a simple PM to burnside.
Labcoin is an international company, they probably speak all different languages from different time zones and can't communicate well amongst each other or with the Bitcoin community. But they probably had to be spread out like that for security reasons so that they don't get extorted or harassed like BTCGarden and Avalon.
If they don't have enough business experience to know the value of communication, then they have no business running a company of this size. They should gain experience on someone else's time, not ours.
There is no way to have business experience in Bitcoin mining companies. This is an industry which has never existed before with profit potential and crowd funding mechanisms which never existed before and which are not regulated yet. That means the issuer takes on a lot of risk along with the investor. It also means that these chips and the software associated with them is new, remember Labcoin isn't being asked to just buy some rigs and put it to work selling the hash at fixed rate. They are actually giving people equity in their virtual operation and virtual company.
It may take them weeks or months to get it right but if they manage to get their chips to work then they never have to worry about money again. They'll make millions or potentially billions of dollars depending on the price of Bitcoins, so honestly to scam for 10,000 Bitcoins is stupid when you can have a Bitcoin stream which never ends even while the price of Bitcoins could go up into the $10,000 a Bitcoin.
If it's a scam then they were short sighted and probably will never get to spend the money. If it's not a scam then they are incompetent but that competence can be earned over time and yeah, they are like children but thats how it always is in a new industry. BFL had people waiting for years and Bitinstant? What happened to them?
If they were a scam just after the money wouldn't they have let the IPO become a bidding war and profit as much as possible? They could have had way more than 7000BTC. They could have had over 10,000+!
How could they have foreseen that?
Anyway, all of you seem to think the "scam" has to be malicious and premeditated.
It doesn't have to. Actually, a lot of scams start that way: something went wrong, but you don't want to tell. You hope you can fix it. It's actually what happened in many financial scandals; just people trying to hide the truth for a while.
They could have seen the bidding war by looking at the bids prior to the IPO. Burnside saw the bidding war, they saw it and decided to "do the right thing". They could have got 10,000 Bitcoins for sure. The shares would have been 0.003+ at the IPO due to the bidding war which was driving the price to those levels before it even made it to the IPO time. They learned something about how to do certain things from that experience which is why you have Labcoin giving exact times and dates which drives everyone into a psychotic frenzy of speculation. Under the right circumstances if the chips were hashing and working perfectly that kind of stuff is what will drive share prices over 0.01.
Unfortunately "Buy cheap shares" has become the newest meme to replace "Amazing company". But I really do think the shares are cheap if they are a success. If they are a success 0.01 will be the price of the shares even if it takes 3-6 months from now to reach that and I don't think it will take that long but just sayin.