Quote from: Deprived on September 09, 2013, 11:39:23 AM

Quote from: Mythoranium on September 09, 2013, 07:10:24 AM

I fail to see how this would count as a scam. First of all, the fact that there were private investors was known and not hidden at the start of this offer. Secondly, the private shares are not the same as the public ones - the private shareholders don't receive any profit until the public shareholders will have received 0.0016 BTC per share. In other words, the public investors will get much more hash power than they have paid for, until they will have received full ROI. After that period, they will still get the hashing power they paid for. The situation couldn't be much better for public investors.

Disclaimer - I own (public) shares

I don't think it's a scam either.

But your explanation is incorrect. We aren't talking about private shares (the ones that don't receive dividends unless .0016 is ever reached) but about public shares that were sold off-market at below the official price. It's debatable whether that was allowed by the contract (contract allowed changing price of batches but nowhere allows undocumented sales at below the stated price) but it's not something worth making a huge fuss over.

Thank you for the clarification. I hadn't noticed these were also public shares and was under the impression that they were private.
Although I do agree that this is not worth making a fuss about, as an investor, I would be much more comfortable if the amounts and discounts needed to qualify for the "block sales" had been made public at the very start. After all, I might have qualified for a slight discount if I had asked.
Still, this is not meant as a serious criticism to Ice Drill managers. Being involved with enterprise level devices, I know it is quite a common practice for an entity to offer volume discounts only when asked for them or when said entity expects the customer might choose a competitors product, because of a better price offer. There exists such thing as a "list price" for a reason.

Quote from: moribana on September 09, 2013, 12:39:22 PM

In your reasoning you assume that mining will remain profitable for a long enough time that 0.0016 btc will actually be paid as dividends. It is absolutely not clear whether any of the companies starting now will ever be profitable. And in that case the only way to make a profit is to sell your shares cheaper than you bought them.

Yes, I do assume that. But this is irrelevant to my reasoning. In the case of the mine not generating enough returns to pay the 0.0016/share, the public investors would get at least some of their money back. The private investors would get exactly 0.0 satoshis per share. That still seems to be quite in favour of the public investors.