[ActiveMining] Official Shareholder Discussion Thread [Moderated]

[gogxmagog]

It didn't work out, but I don't think it was a scam.

True I believe Ken to be largly incompetant, not a scammer

The truly successful scams end this way.

Successful scams are indistinguishable from failed businesses.  They're structured that way.
This has been pointed out more than once.

  ~Happy Investing!

Failed businesses become scams the moment they do not liquidate when they know they have failed. *As Flashman noted the abundant failures of this company with Bitcoin Price rising giving it the ability to fail as much as it did.

When you sit on your failed business drawing salaries for you and your loved ones for as long as you can, knowing that you will never become profitable to be able to pay back shareholders is when it becomes a scam.

If the above isn't the case (and it will likely come out in court) then we can label him as solely incompetent and not a scammer which might make everyone feel a tad warm inside but doesn't save Ken from blatant securities violations  

Thank you. This is what my post meant to be getting at before the sentence above was taken out of context.
I believe Kenny had the intention to do what he promised but failed so bad and so often, right away, that he decided to try and hide the facts (deceptive practices) make more promises he couldn't make good on and start to even play with shares and gamble with our money. He lived well and paid his family as everything went to shit and he maintained it was all under control.
He didn't start out trying to scam he just turned into a scammer when his options all died.
That's my suspicion but hey, maybe he was scamming all along.
I hope December 1st brings some kinda news. Does the Missouri resident here plan to go to the hearing?

[zumzero]

It didn't work out, but I don't think it was a scam.

True I believe Ken to be largly incompetant, not a scammer

The truly successful scams end this way.

Successful scams are indistinguishable from failed businesses.  They're structured that way.
This has been pointed out more than once.

  ~Happy Investing!

Failed businesses become scams the moment they do not liquidate when they know they have failed. *As Flashman noted the abundant failures of this company with Bitcoin Price rising giving it the ability to fail as much as it did.

When you sit on your failed business drawing salaries for you and your loved ones for as long as you can, knowing that you will never become profitable to be able to pay back shareholders is when it becomes a scam.

If the above isn't the case (and it will likely come out in court) then we can label him as solely incompetent and not a scammer which might make everyone feel a tad warm inside but doesn't save Ken from blatant securities violations  

What gibberish!  A scam is premeditated.  But if it makes you feel better, call it what you want.

[zumzero]

It didn't work out, but I don't think it was a scam.

True I believe Ken to be largly incompetant, not a scammer

The truly successful scams end this way.

Successful scams are indistinguishable from failed businesses.  They're structured that way.
This has been pointed out more than once.

  ~Happy Investing!

What utter gobshite!  A scam is a fraudulent scheme and a failed business is not a scam.  Whatever you or anyone else wants to distinguish to suit your own reality does not effect the actual truth. 

[MrTeal]

It didn't work out, but I don't think it was a scam.

True I believe Ken to be largly incompetant, not a scammer

The truly successful scams end this way.

Successful scams are indistinguishable from failed businesses.  They're structured that way.
This has been pointed out more than once.

  ~Happy Investing!

What utter gobshite!  A scam is a fraudulent scheme and a failed business is not a scam.  Whatever you or anyone else wants to distinguish to suit your own reality does not effect the actual truth. 

His point stands, and your reading comprehension could use some work.

[Phildo]

Is is really make you feel better that you gave your money to an incompetent idiot rather than an asshole scammer? You still lost your money.

Not that it matters either way, but the hashfast debacle moves it towards asshole scammer. Either he lied about having as many cards as he did, or he didn't ship them out because of "reasons." Both are actions of an asshole scammer.

[SebastianJu]

Um... it really could happen that Ken is the "hero that brought us so far" now?

I dont see him as a scammer too but at least he made a lot bad business decisions. As far as i remember there was a board of advisors once who were big shareholders. They gave up on ken because he made wrong decisions again and again. It sounded like we would have gotten our chip long ago if ken wouldnt have been an adder of perfection who led him try to squeeze a bit more out of it. Leading to ultimate fail because of the time spent on this.

Then not giving out the shareholders shares led to huge losses for those that wanted to sell long ago.

No... i cant ever see him as the hero in this game. Im eager to hear his "truth" of it all. And where he pushed our coins into.

The worst thing on bitcoin businesses that go wrong are the bad communications. Why is it so hard to be honest about whats going on? At the end everyone has to guess whats going on and fear spreads. Unfortunately this fear is mostly correct... right NotLambchop? There still are missing examples where this fear turned out to be baseless or all went good at the end at least.

[RoadStress]

It didn't work out, but I don't think it was a scam.

True I believe Ken to be largly incompetant, not a scammer

I have always maintained that this was not a scam, merely a failed business.

What gibberish!  A scam is premeditated.  But if it makes you feel better, call it what you want.

I dont see him as a scammer too but at least he made a lot bad business decisions.

I have to disagree with all of you. This was a scam from day 1. I will tell you my reasons:
1) This was the only company in the mining ecosystem that had a trademark on their chip. Intellihash was the biggest lie from the start. I think that any chip designer can confirm that. Everyone is talking about how easy is to do SHA260 on a chip, that a student can do it, yet Ken had something different than everyone;

2) I would like to see some solid hard proofs that he actually intended to had a chip ready. All we saw was a retard NDA signed with eASIC, nothing else. That NDA could be just an informal talk nothing else. We still don't know or saw any proof that he actually sent money to eASIC to start the job. Even if he did wtf happened? I would like to see the failed project, but there isn't one and never was one;

3) After the so called failed eASIC project what are the proofs that he tried anything else? All I saw is that he bought some third party chips and he tried to sell some hashing boards on a '90 design webshop;

4) Also never saw any proof about the so called mtgox failure. Ken never published all his wallets right?

At least in HashFail we know that they were so dumb to spend all the money on chips, PCBs and components. What Ken did with all those money except buy some third party hardware?

Prove me that I am wrong.

[wasubii]

Totally agree with RoadStress.

Massive scam from the get go

[PurpleTentacle]

...
2) I would like to see some solid hard proofs that he actually intended to had a chip ready. All we saw was a retard NDA signed with eASIC, nothing else. That NDA could be just an informal talk nothing else. We still don't know or saw any proof that he actually sent money to eASIC to start the job. Even if he did wtf happened? I would like to see the failed project, but there isn't one and never was one;
...

I too believe that Ken intended this to be a scam from the beginning, but it is not true that all we saw was a retarded NDA. We also had a press release on eAsic's official website, I think that's what deceived most of us.

[stereotype]

....... but it is not true that all we saw was a retarded NDA. We also had a press release on eAsic's official website, I think that's what deceived most of us.

Remember when the eASIC news was officially released?.....The 'board members' commenced dumping, and within hours the share price was halved, if my memory serves me well.
The ex 'board members' knew something then. One of them said "Ken" and "unethical practices" in the same sentence, i seem to remember. 

[Flashman]

1) This was the only company in the mining ecosystem that had a trademark on their chip. Intellihash was the biggest lie from the start. I think that any chip designer can confirm that. Everyone is talking about how easy is to do SHA260 on a chip, that a student can do it, yet Ken had something different than everyone;

BS BS BS, do you not think golden nonce, bitforce etc are trademarked?
Everyone TALKS about how easy SHA256 is, however they seriously underestimate scaling issues, many fall on their face, many pass off fails as triumphs. (Bitfury for example, the chip was supposed to do 5GH at less than a watt a gh, at 5 GH it sucks ~4 watts/gh and damn near burns up, very close to BFLs 65nm, only thing saving them there is how cheaply they can bang it out, allowing it to be respecced at 1.5GHish for lower w/gh, newer iterations may be improved.) Other projects haven't actually come out of the woodwork until their chips almost done so the drama from those is occluded, and of course they won't admit that they're running at half the gh they intended. Avalon and AM gen 1 came in real close to expected, because the process was so old it had no surprises left and the speed and engines per chip were a lot less.

Now because you don't understand this and possibly never will, (Seriously if you've been following bitcoin ASICs for more than 3 months and can still spout crap like "SHA256 is soooo easy", then there's no hope for you)  I doubt there's anything I can say that will convince you that yes, there are genuine improvements that can be done over a "student's first ASIC" design.

But knowing that, I know why you're mad, you needed a "Fisher Price musical melody baby's first bitcoin" product, not bleeding edge tech.

[NotLambchop]

1) This was the only company in the mining ecosystem that had a trademark on their chip. Intellihash was the biggest lie from the start. I think that any chip designer can confirm that. Everyone is talking about how easy is to do SHA260 on a chip, that a student can do it, yet Ken had something different than everyone;

BS BS BS, do you not think golden nonce, bitforce etc are trademarked?
...

So...  Ken did create IntelliHash^TM, software that makes miners mine faster as the difficulty increases?

[tempestb]

I've always been under the impression that Ken doesn't understand how Bitcoin works at all from a technical viewpoint.  He understood how to trade it, but he required the help of other people to do anything technical.  It's why he was unable to fix his website, or handle transferring the shares (Until he got himself the "project manager") which was probably one of those kids that were putting the Hash Fast boards together on the web cam.  His intention there, was to raise the share prices so he could sell more shares for more money.  I don't believe it was ever about distributing anything to shareholders.  Plus his ability to ship and support those boards was almost non-existent.

He purchased People's Asic, which gave him an ASIC design that he later scrapped.  He may have retained some of their people, or one of their people, for help in the eASIC stuff, but he scrapped that as well because he couldn't afford to do it at that point.  He seemed to have some expectation that Bitcoin was going to continue its drive up to a $10,000 valuation.  And therefor have enough to pay his entire family of workers, People's Asic employees, and who knows how many others.

He then, apparently, built a facility that apparently didn't have enough AC in it to handle more than one rack of Hashfast boards. 

The guy is just massively incompetent.  After eASIC fell through, he should have scrapped the company and refunded everyone he could.  But he found himself in a pickle of having a lot of preorders on VMC and being unable to refund them, because he blew the money on who-knows-what.  So he tried to scrape together a mining farm that really was a total disaster like everything else.  And now he's pocketed the coins it earned, likely sold off the boards to whoever, and vanished under the guise of legal restrictions.  Although he's not banned from providing refunds to VMC customers, he just can't deal with shareholders.  Though there was an announcement that he would be providing refunds, we've heard no proof that he ever did and many people still waiting for theirs posting about how to get it.

So, really...  That first part is incompetence, but the last part is fraud.  Taking people's money for a product you don't have and never intend to give them, when you have the money to refund them is fraud.  Especially because he never filed bankruptcy and never liquidated the company.  He just ignored his responsibilities and continues to do so.

[RoadStress]

...
2) I would like to see some solid hard proofs that he actually intended to had a chip ready. All we saw was a retard NDA signed with eASIC, nothing else. That NDA could be just an informal talk nothing else. We still don't know or saw any proof that he actually sent money to eASIC to start the job. Even if he did wtf happened? I would like to see the failed project, but there isn't one and never was one;
...

I too believe that Ken intended this to be a scam from the beginning, but it is not true that all we saw was a retarded NDA. We also had a press release on eAsic's official website, I think that's what deceived most of us.

Well that press release changes nothing. Think about it for a second. There is no downside for eASIC to publish that they started working with a company on their new 28nm mask. It shows that eASIC is very active in the chip fab game. It is also for a new technology and that might impress people who heard something about bitcoin, but haven't made their research on it. There is a very big market of people that haven't researched anything about bitcoin and they see that eASIC is "working on it" so they think that this company is a damn good one. And no company is releasing a press release when they fail or cease a big project because it makes the company look bad. It's damn easy.

Also since nobody knows how much scammer Ken paid to eASIC and how much did he recovered what's stopping Ken for sending a $100k or $500k pre-payment so that eASIC can see that they mean serious business and they start the development process which is also triggering the press release. This is just a move to lure more money in my eyes. I want to see payment proofs and design stages and what exactly happened between Ken and eASIC! Until then this was all just a big smoke for everyone.

BFL had pretty nice press releases too...
http://pressreleaseheadlines.com/bitcoin-mining-technology-provider-butterfly-labs-ships-45000-orders-completes-preorder-backlog-65nm-product-line-188029
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/8/prweb11035951.htm

[magzy]

Whoa, what happened?

p.s. Am I still banned in this thread?

[gogxmagog]

I think everyone who saw through this gong show has been vindicated. Kenny has to go before the Missouri securities division on December 1st.
I don't expect anything to be resolved then, but hopefully it will inch things forward a little.
Kenny's broke, the money is gone. Maybe ken will be forced to sell his house? We shall find out soon enough. He's been deceptive the whole way through so it's pretty much a given that he will face some sort of punishment.

He's probably scheming right now, trying to place all the blame on ferguson or some such other nonsense.

[hazryder]

Oh well, I'll see you all on December 1st for the next exciting installment in this sad saga.

[Bargraphics]

Anyone have more information on today's hearing?

All I found were the following which are kind of old but maybe interesting

[Surf Capital Management]

Another continuation. How long can they legally keep pushing this back?

[Bargraphics]

Another continuation. How long can they legally keep pushing this back?

Thanks for this.

Could you reply and find out a case #, judge, circuit?

This way we can keep track of files and potentially get transcripts if they become available.