Hey Burnside, since you are reading this thread, would you please look into this issue for us?
Darin Carolus, one of the managing members of AMC/VMC was involved in scamming before, we have yet received any answer or confirmation from AMC or Ken. I think it is within your power to force an explanation or answer from them and protect all investors from potential scam.
I read through all of the references. It all seems to mesh. We'll definitely seek clarity with Ken, though I suspect he'll respond in the original thread when he sees it.
For IPOs where the issuer needs XXX amount you could apply two simple rules:
1. The funds raised from sales are escrowed by the site until XXX is raised - or reversed to all shares (and the IPO closed) if XXX isn't raised in Y days/weeks.
2. Issuer account is locked against transferring shares or selling at below a declared IPO price until 1. is met.
Number 2 is a problem (as happened in the past with Ken) where the issuer gets impatient and starts selling cheap.
Number 1 would only apply where there was a minimum needed to achieve their goals. If they fail to reach that in a reasonable time period (weeks not months) then the IPO has failed - so just return the cash, delist it and move on. You have to lock a lot of account functionality to do that - otherwise issuer an just transfer funds to an alt account and reuse it to buy more shares inflating the count of what was actually sold.
1) Definitely makes sense in the situations that fit.
2) In this case I suspect he'd just plug in a "minimum share value" of 0.0005 on the form, then sell at 0.0025 anyway. That's essentially what he's done contractually with BitFunder. So it would seem a maximum is required as well. And ultimately you realize as you're plugging all this code in that you're just trying to get around the issue that you don't trust the issuer to make good decisions. I'm starting to lean toward asking new issuers to seek guidance from consultants prior to IPO. Maybe even develop a list of trusted consultants, then require all issues to be represented by a consultant on the list.
I think you're still not clearly understanding the main problem with AMC btw. The problem is that its structure so that even if it DOES make profit from hardware sales under 5% of it ends up with investors. How much less than 5% depends on a definition of 'profit' imposed by VMC (which shareholders have no say in or oversight of) - which makes the 'no salary' clause of AMC worthless (as Ken can give whatever he wants as salary to himself/friends/family before profit comes anywhere near AMC) and on how much profit is made. To get 2.5% return on capital requires $2 million profit on sales to be made - that's sales of ASICs that won't even be out until end of this year/early next by KEN's estimate.
Definitely does not sound good for investors. Though my understanding was that most of their returns would come from the mining that AMC would be doing. Either way, a return seems a long, long way off.