If that's what they're intending to do, they're going to find an onslaught of bad publicity across every form of social media pointing out what a completely untrustworthy group of thieving scum they are.
Look, VirtEx is a sound company with a good product. They've done a lot of things right and deserve a big buy out.
Save your scorn for Lightbox and Havelock. Do you thing NYSE or NASDAQ would allow a company to leave their exchange with a promise to trade stock for "tokens yet to be defined"? They've lost a ton of credibility here.
What have Lightbox or Havelock got to do with anything?
My scorn is for a company who stated in their prospectus "Once the IPO is sold out, these shares can be traded on HAVELOCK at user determined prices."
But instead, are planning to permanently delist, preventing trading of the shares, locking investor's bitcoins away except for what will presumably be a monumental crash during the brief reopening of Havelock whilst everyone scrambles to save whatever they can before their money is swallowed by Virtex.
Or - have I misunderstood?
I don't think you've misunderstood anything and I completely understand your anger with VirtEx. In fact, I share it.
My point is that Havelock should have some protections in place:
"We strive to achieve a very high level of both transparency and confidence, and will be thorougly vetting any applications. We will only accept the highest quality funds into our exchange."
If a company is allowed to abscond with the proceeds of an IPO so easily, you'd have to be nuts to forfeit any btc to any enterprise listed on their exchange.
To play devil's advocate, you can thoroughly vet and check for high standards but you can't stop the fund doing what it wants as long as it's not breaking the law.
I guess Havelock needs some kind of contractual arrangement which would allow them to take funds to court who acted against the interests of shareholders.
I think Virtex takes most of the blame here though. It strikes me as extremely lame that a bitcoin exchange would remove the ability of its investors to continue trading shares in bitcoin.
What are they saying that there's something wrong with bitcoin and they don't want people trading their shares in it? Really smart.