Quote from: Stephen Gornick on August 20, 2012, 09:23:23 AM

From the prospectus (Full):

Quote

These amounts are subtracted from revenues before calculating net profits. SatoshiDICE does not
pay salaries or compensation to any person and thus salaries will not be taken out of net profits.

Legal expenses have thus far been paid out of pocket by the operator, Erik Voorhees. If legal
expenses exceed $1,000 per month, the amount will be deducted from SatoshiDICEs net profits and
this will be described in the monthly Profit and Loss statements. There are currently no ongoing legal
expenses.

Web development expenses for the new website have been fully paid (there will not be upcoming
costs for this site). In the future, if other upgrade plans are implemented, these expenses will be
subtracted from net profits.

Subtracting expenses out before the reported revenue numbers skews the profitability. I get that they are relatively a small amount, but I don't get why you would do that? I would think P&L should list all revenues and expenses. Even if there is no outlay for an expense, it still should be booked, I would think. Without doing that paints a rosier picture (margins) than actually exists. (Again, probably inconsequential, but why not include them?)

From the Asset page on MPEx:

Quote

virtual trading of virtual shares of unregistered corporations

- http://polimedia.us/bitcoin/mpex.php?mpsic=S.DICE

I still have a hard time grasping how these voluntary associations are being referred to as companies and corporations.

I can see how the operator might be protected from being sued personally by a customer, for instance, if I am understanding the concept of corporation by estoppel. But I hate to see the word corporation used for these "assets". These are voluntary associations of otherwise unrelated parties. I've written on this elsewhere:

- http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=80139.msg897131#msg897131

When someone is talking about raising something like $7K for a project that you'ld never get a loan for from a bank or never would see finding through an Angel, for instance, then I think these cyber equities are a fantastic innovation. But raisng over a quarter of a million dollars, with a valuation of several million dollars -- I wonder if this cyber-equities approach should be reconsidered.

What's the downside to finding a nice jurisdiction with great privacy laws an incorporating there? There probably are several jurisdictions where you could incorporate yet still raise the funds through MPEx.

Subtracting out one-time costs is a fairly common practice for companies that report non-GAAP statements (though in the real world they must also report GAAP earnings and cannot simply hide one-time costs because they feel like it).

Overall, this seems like a terrible investment idea to me on pretty much all fronts. You're dealing with a non-entity ("unregistered corporation" wtf?) to purchase extremely small amounts of a business that is extremely easy to copy (see Groupon). SatoshiDice appears to currently be a sole proprietorship and will remain so in reality because these "shares" have no voting rights.

These "shares" bear more similarities to a an annuity than they do to actual equity. On top of this, I see nothing resembling an audited financial statement. Proceed at your own, in my opinion extreme, risk.