Quote from: smooth on December 22, 2013, 07:07:38 PM

Quote from: Yogafan00000 on December 22, 2013, 05:42:51 PM

Quote from: silverfuture on December 20, 2013, 08:07:38 PM

Yes, and keep in mind that this is only until our debt is paid. Once the debt is gone, we can go back to 25% retained. The recent break in the price has been good for us both on the mining front and concerning our debt. We should be in good position for the next epic bubble if we have our debts paid and a some coin to save before it comes. It's likely to happen again sooner than anyone thinks.

+1

I couldn't have said it better myself.

I still oppose. 75% is too much and will reduce donation payouts drastically and hurt seat values. The debt is not in and of itself harmful, and especially the idea of paying off "all" debt is misguided. The market cap of the group (see post 1) is over 1200 BTC which is more than 3x the total debt. This is not an unhealthy debt ratio for a business like mining. As we have seen in the past several weeks bitcoin is not always deflationary (in fact at present and for the forseeable future it is massively inflationary, with 3600 BTC being "printed" out of thin air every day), which was part of the argument against using debt. If we had paid off the debt at $1200/BTC, we would be much worse off today.

It is unfortunate that the debt holders have been holding the bag longer than perhaps expected, but they were told up front what the debt was being used for and how it was to be paid off. They took a risk that mining using pre-ordered gear would pay off (in BTC) less and more slowly than expected, which is exactly what happened.

Low seat value doesn't mean much unless you are trying to liquidate seats. A low seat price also makes nastyfans more accessible to new or less rich potential participants, not to mention a better entry point for newly minted seats. 3600 BTC per day inflation is a constant, yet year to year BTC has only grown massively in value. It is almost impossible to predict short and mid term movements but I think in that type of environment, debt has the potential to ruin us if we aren't careful. A very high BTC value coupled with a massive difficulty increase does have the potential to be an insurmountable challenge. Having btc savings (and the access to capital if neccessary) is a far better position to be in than in debt. Fiat debt would be the way to go forward unless we were absolutely sure the BTC price was going down over a protracted period. We want any creditors to be happy and potentially willing to loan again because of our excellent reputation.