It'd be a bond if it were debt. They sold shares.
I'd look that up with an accountant if I were you :-)
A share is a declaration of debt in the form of ownership. In other words, a shareholder gives the face value of a share to the company and the company acknowledgeds that debt in the form of a share of ownership. It is generally an irredeemable and interest free debt unless the company is liquidated at a balance, but it is still a debt.
The premium a shareholder gets from that share is the share price, the debt owed by the company to the share holder is the face value.
Yeah, technically, the term debt refers to something that will be paid off and earns an interest, whereas stock equity is not paid off and any 'interest' paid is called dividends, but in practice it is the same thing. You sell shares and increase your debt (or stock equity).
Otherwise, issuing shares would be an income for the company, which it certainly isn't.
Look, the technicalities of book keeping is irrelevant to the discussion. Even if a share holder is comfortable with the return they have gotten, that return is still tied to a promise made at the IPO by the company and the expectation of the share holder that those promises will be kept. The risk the share holder puts on the possibility of a default on those promises, plus whatever earning they expect from their investment, is the price they expect to get from an eventual sale.
At this point, it seems nobody has any clear answers to how we can evaluate that risk. That uncertainty should make an investor uncomfortable at some level, regardless of whether they believe in a bright future for Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in general.
.b
You do realize that the PROMISE that was made by the ASICMINER project was that all shares would be paid back in full from what they cost when they were sold. Each share cost .1 BTC and this is all the money that ASICMINER ever collected from the initially sale. That was paid off already. Initially investors are free rolling at this point. That promise was fulfilled.
You keep talking about the debt owed by the company to the shareholders.. There is no more debt. That was completely paid off in the first 4 dividend payments. Your entire write up above makes it obvious that you have no idea the history of ASICMINER and of the shares that were sold.
Think of these shares more as venture capital that ASICMINER sought after and gave those who put in money a slice of the equity in the company. That amount was repaid in full. Now we are trading around those slices of equity based on what we feel they are worth.
Friedcat owes you nothing. The promise he made to repay shareholders was upheld. Now it is our job to decide what we want to pay for these slices of equity.
Stop thinking of these shares in the fashion you consider publicly traded companies.