[closed] Zeta Bitcoin Mining

[zefir]

Update: GLBSE recovery plans


Dear Investors,

while Nefario started to pay back some account holders, I am still waiting for my coins and the list of ZETA-MINING shareholders to resolve the mess. I'd like to shortly outline the next steps on that bumpy road.

Short Term
I continue to transfer the weekly dividends I am not able to pay via GLBSE to address 1zetan. Those payments are marked as 'pending' in the spreadsheet, I will continue to pay and account them until I am able to distribute the accumulated amount to the investors.

Mid Term
As soon as I receive the investors list from Nefario, I am going to consider different approaches and let investors to chose from, presumably between:

• winding down by buying back all outstanding shares
  The main problem for this approach is the lack of a free market for a fair price finding. Right before GLBSE closed, 1MHps was traded between 0.07 and 0.14 BTC, while my guaranteed buy-back offer was somewhere at 0.1 BTC. Some operators more clever than me (like Meni) might find a formula for a fair estimate on what 1MHps might give within its remaining lifetime, so let's wait and see how this option develops.
• continue operation with private accounting
  I would have to account dividend payments by myself and do the payments manually. Since I do not have an idea of the investors structure, this might turn out to be a PITA or even not feasible at all. It obviously does not make much sense to handle 2 shares from investor A and 5 from investor B. I might offer this option for larger investors (say in multiples of 500MHps quantities) and / or do payouts with some minimum thresholds (say after reaching 1BTC).
• move to a different exchange
  Frankly speaking, I will need some time to establish enough trust with some new exchange before I sent coins and expose them to risk again. Not sure how risk aware you investors are, but if there is a consensus to go that road, I will not refuse to provide it.

That's for now, I'll keep you informed as soon as I hear from GLBSE.


Have a nice week,
Zefir

[1715103657]

1715103657

[zefir]

Update: Claim process opened


Dear Investors,

more than tow weeks passed since GLBSE shut down, and I am still waiting for a shareholder list to start manual accounting.

Knowing that also my own claims for the assets I hold have not yet been forwarded to the issuers, I begin to suspect that something went really wrong at GLBSE. There are scripts linked in this forum for automatic evaluation of account data, and with another day of programming Nefario should have been able to combine those results with the claim requests data and resolve the mess already.

Did not happen so far. I'm personally prepared for the worst case, i.e. the asset information will not be released at all. Though I hoped GLBSE would at least support us with the data to get things straight, it seems it is inevitable to follow other issuers that already started a private claim process.


Claim Process
Please send me an e-mail to the address given in my forum profile <zefir(at)web(dot)de> specifying

• your GLBSE account name
• number of ZETA-MINING bonds you hold
• address where dividends should be paid to (paper wallet address or at least one you have the private key of)
• optional: e-mail address to be used to contact you for confirmation / updates (if not reply-to address)
• optional: anything you have available to prove your claims (screnshots, trade information, etc.)

I hope the claims will more or less match the number of outstanding shares, so I can soon start paying you the dividends manually.


Thanks for the support,
Zefir


Edit: Added my email address; was not aware that it is not visible until you log in, sorry.

[Graet]

Email:   hidden
Could you unhide it please
Cheers
Graet

[zefir]

Email:   hidden
Could you unhide it please
Cheers
Graet

Hi,

sorry, it seems you need to be logged into the forum to see the address.

Edited my previous post to add it: zefir(at)web(dot)de

[Graet]

Email:   hidden
Could you unhide it please
Cheers
Graet

Hi,

sorry, it seems you need to be logged into the forum to see the address.

Edited my previous post to add it: zefir(at)web(dot)de

thanks man, yeah weird, I can see a email symbol under my profile but not yours.

Will send email shortly

[zefir]

thanks man, yeah weird, I can see a email symbol under my profile but not yours.

Will send email shortly

Then 'Hide email address from public?' in the account settings maybe also means to hide it from registered forum members? That would be stupid, since what would be the purpose to make the email symbol appear only for me?

Anyhow, hope to get the claims soon. And please do something with the luck at your pool, it has been sub-optimal lately

[dishwara]

[Graet]

thanks man, yeah weird, I can see a email symbol under my profile but not yours.

Will send email shortly

Then 'Hide email address from public?' in the account settings maybe also means to hide it from registered forum members? That would be stupid, since what would be the purpose to make the email symbol appear only for me?

Anyhow, hope to get the claims soon. And please do something with the luck at your pool, it has been sub-optimal lately

email sent
working on luck
cheers
Graet

[Graet]

https://ozcoin.net/content/luck-bitcoin - seems to be working atm 

[dishwara]

https://ozcoin.net/content/luck-bitcoin - seems to be working atm 

I am seeing lot of texts like this "< class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-full">" in the above site.

[zefir]

Update: No news from GLBSE; slow claim process


Dear Investors,

paid the 4th dividend to the temporary address (1zetan) without hearing anything from GLBSE for a month.

At the same time the direct claim process is not progressing very well: so far, I have claims for less than 40% of outstanding shares. For obvious reasons we need to pass the claim phase before I can start with manual payments. This would require a defined threshold to be reached (say somewhere between 80 and 95%), therefore I'd like to remind you to file your claim if not done yet.

I know for sure that quite some Bicoiners were sick of drama after GLBSE closing and just left the scene, but I don't expect that 60% of ZETA-MINING investors went 'poof'. Also don't expect that 60% were sold back to me during the last days of GLBSE (when I was not active there but had a bid wall for all outstanding bonds somewhere at 0.09).

In some claims investors lost track on how many shares they exactly had - even then, please give me some rough estimate, I am not going to dispute for +/-1 share. Still hoping for Nefario to provide me with the required information.


Keep the faith and have a nice week,
Zefir

[zefir]

Update: No major news; being off week 44.2012 for LinuxCon


Dear Investors,

you are following the GLBSE status and already know that there were no relevant news since last week

As for the private claims, I think we passed 50% with some left uncertainty (since some investors don't know their exact number). That's not yet enough to start manual payment of the accumulated dividends, so I'll wait a little bit more.


I am heading to the airport today to attend LinuxCon Europe in Barcelona next week, and will not be able to deal with Bitcoin related stuff. I'll confirm new claims when I'm back, thanks for your patience.


Have a nice week,
Zefir

[Graet]

Thanks for keeping us updated - even if there is no news 
Enjoy  LinuxCon
Best wishes
Graet

[zefir]

Thanks for keeping us updated - even if there is no news 
Enjoy  LinuxCon
Best wishes
Graet

Back from LinuxCon Europe, with some mixed feelings. While it is always fun to see and meet such a huge bunch of nerds, the sentiment in the Linux movement is subtly changing when compared to last year's LinuxCon North America held in Vancouver. At that times all big players in the IT business jumped on the open source bandwagon and praised their belief in the free community and binding commitments to support the movement - we pretty much were in the euphoric phase. Almost all of that positive spirit vanished during the past 14 months - mainly driven by the fact that at the end of the day companies need to make money and some still don't see how collaboration will win over competition in the long run.


Back to topic:

Updates: claim process closing; accounting change; buyback offer

Needless to say: no news from GLBSE.

As for the claim process, the ratio reached 70-90% (variance due to uncertain number of bonds held). Although I feel uncomfortable with such a considerable amount of unverifiable claims, I want to end the drama soon and start dividend payments by 2012-12-15 if we do not hear from Nefario. At the same time the claim process will be closed, so if you have not yet claimed your shares so far - please do it now. Claims will not be accepted after this deadline.

At GLBSE times I did weekly dividend calculations, which I changed to difficulty period based now for easier processing. This started effectively from the difficulty period 102 (starting with block 205632), the calculations are done on a separate sheet in the Google Docs spreadsheet.

From the number of investors and their claimed shares it is evident that processing manual payments will be a PITA. Some positions are so small that even with monthly payments the fees will be higher than the amount transferred. To save investors from scattered payments and myself from some work, I hereby provide you a limited buyback offer of 0.1BTC per share. This offer is valid until the above mentioned deadline 2012-12-15, but no later than the confirmed shipment date for any ASIC based Bitcoin mining device. This offer includes the accumulated dividends since GLBSE shutdown at this address (which for 4000 accounted shares is worth 1.4 Bitcents), i.e. you either take the buyback offer or you take the dividends. For a better estimate: at current difficulty, you need to hold one 1MHps bond for 50+ weeks to earn 0.1BTC - given that ASICs are around the corner I'd say this is a more than fair offer. If you want to take it, just email me and I'll send you the coins to the address you gave me with your claim.


Cheers,
Zefir

[Graet]

thanks for the update

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=127306.msg1356246#msg1356246 is a suggestion to use sendmany to avoid paying extra txn fees when sending bulk payments

Best wishes
Graet

[zefir]

thanks for the update

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=127306.msg1356246#msg1356246 is a suggestion to use sendmany to avoid paying extra txn fees when sending bulk payments

Best wishes
Graet

Yep, luckily I hold some PUREMINING bonds and was already pointed by Meni to the process he is using. Thanks for the heads-up!


Update: (Partial) investors' list received from GLBSE; payouts to restart after block reward halving

So, finally (and just when most of us started loosing hope) I received the ZETA-MINING investors' list from GLBSE. It is incomplete due to some folks did not file their claims or received double payments that need to be send back to show up in the list. From the 4000 outstanding bonds ~1300 are missing in the list, at the same time I bought back ~1150 bonds from people not on the list. Assuming that privately collected data was more or less accurate, I expect no big surprises popping up with the final list.

Although the total number of the privately collected claims and those from the GLBSE list are more or less matching, some individual claims have significant deltas. I therefore prepared a GoogleDoc spreadsheet and emailed all investors to ask for a final confirmation of their claims. At the same time I pointed to the buy-back option I offered two posts above. Obviously many investors do not read this thread, since the majority of the confirmations so far accepted that (new to them) offer.

So, what's next
The day after the block reward halving (which should be this Wednesday, 2012-11-28), I will
  a) pay those investors accepting the buy-back 0.1BTC per bond
  b) update the pending dividends since GLBSE downfall up to the block reward halving
  c) pay those that want to remain investors their portion of the accumulated dividends
  d) pay unclaimed dividends to a temporary address for later payout



Have a nice week,
Zefir

[Graet]

Responded to email.
Thank you for choosing a sane way to handle this - I realise it has been a strassful time for you, well done:)
Best wishes
Graeme

[PinkBatman]

Thank you for choosing a sane way to handle this

QFT

Responded to the email aswell.

[camolist]

got the email and numbers match up. reply sent

[zefir]

Thanks folks for your support and the kind words.

Claim confirmation is progressing quite well: all but ~300 bonds from the GLBSE provided list are claimed. Additionally, I double checked that those investors that already cashed out without being on the list are missing for good reasons (i.e. pending return of double-payments or pending GLBSE claim). With this confirmation there is almost no risk left to be hit by new claims when Nefario updates the lists. Along with the fact that the deltas of the private claims were mostly in the investors' disadvantage (i.e. claimed less than they hold), I am very pleased to state that all ZETA-MINING investors are honest Bitcoiners

As for the claims, I did not confirm via email but instead added a status column to the online spreadsheet, along with a column for an updated address. If you need to distinguish between your claims / GLBSE paybacks, you can request a new payout address. Signing that request with the original address would be ideal, but I will also accept your request if it comes from your email address on file.

As you can see from that spreadsheet, all but one investor chose to cash-out. I hoped the buyback offer was clear, but since I had several investors asking, I want to clarify once again:

What's with the 2012-12-15 deadline?
That deadline was explicitly tagged as 'if we do not hear from Nefario'. We did and that's why it is void now and I will start payment this week.

Why can't I get the pending dividends and then cash-out?
Because that's the deal: I want to save myself from manually calculating who earns what (or writing scripts to do, or risking wrong payments caused by bugs / errors, or whatever) and am therefore willing to come clean with you by paying 0.1BTC per bond before I start calculating dividends. Therefore the choice for dividend payments or cash-out is an XOR decision. Your alternative dividend payment way would be: collect the accumulated dividends since GLBSE shutdown of 0.018BTC per bond, followed by mining income paid out every 2 weeks. If difficulty remains where it is now, it will take you ~2 years to make it to 0.1BTC per bond, but we know it will skyrocket soon and 1MHps most probably will take you forever to make that amount of coins. Do your math and realize that you need very good reasons not to cash out.

What's with your contractual forced buy-back option?
It was exactly meant for the situation we have now: so little outstanding bonds causing so much effort to be correctly handled. But we have no 120% of the 7d GLBSE averaged price, so this is no option anymore. Generally, I am not going to force anyone, but prefer to make offers you can't refuse

What happens to the unclaimed coins?
As for those on the GLBSE list, there I am a bit in a dilemma. From the original idea I should take the list for granted and just pay the dividends to the given addresses. After contacting investors directly to confirm the claims, I can only think of very little reasons not to reply a short ACK/NACK: a) after all the past drama people might have left the Bitcoin community, b) have been involved in dubious business and prefer to remain silent, c) are just AFK. While it is not on me to judge, I am not going to potentially destroy BTC by sending to some forgotten address. Therefore, I'll just wait and remind the silent investors to confirm. The buy-back option will be valid for them for some time, but not forever.

As for those still missing on the GLBSE list: including those I paid out before the list was sent, there are 145 bonds left unclaimed. So we are talking about 14.5BTC at the most, but more realistically about 10BTC over the next year. I think I will follow others and donate the coins when all pending claims are closed, or a wait period of at least six months has passed.



That's all for now. According to latest predictions for block reward halving, payments will start in two days.
Zefir