At the time of launch, this was a lucrative fund.
No it wasn't. It was never lucrative. It was lucrative on paper and on assumptions the hash rate growth would be slow during the fall of 2013. Every bad investment looks good at some point especially if you believe unfounded promises and calculations. The way hash rate increased during those months only the best case scenario would make it barely profitable. So if they started hashing in November as promised, it would barely make profit.
Personally, I liked the aggressive reinvestment plan and the promise to repay public before private shares didn't hurt either. At the time the IPO opened, I don't believe anyone anticipated HF would be as late with shoddy equipment nor the shutdown of bitfunder (and the poor choice to go to cryptomex for accounting & trading)
Even though I don't completely agree with some of the decisions & actions, or appreciate the lack of communication, it's easy to throw Will and DeadTerra under the bus in this situation in which they really have little recourse but to react to problems caused by other parties. Tying IceDrill so tightly and exclusively to HF was a problem since our success then depended entirely on HF's success.
All of the losses in this case are because DeadTerra gave the money we paid to him to people he didn't know. It was out his hands and out his control. When you get millions of other people's money you have to be very careful with them. If it's out of your control and you trust someone else to do something for you, you have to know and trust those people. You have to go through their plan, all the details and goals. If something is not done right or delayed, you make sure with correct legal work you get reimbursed very quickly.
If for whatever reason he couldn't make a good legal deal or didn't know those people very well, he must have put a stop to the whole operation and return everything. That's what an honorable man should do. When you take other people's money be very careful what you do with them.
He didn't. He trusted those people whom he barely knew with 24,000BTC. At that time it was over 2.5 million dollars and that was enough to produce own ASIC, including design, wafers and chips. 2.5 million dollar was enough to produce own ASIC on 65nm.
I thought DeadTerra learned from previous mistakes and knew what he was doing so I invested 5BTC. Turned out he is still an idiot. I started worrying when he defended his unrealistic calculations in September and October but still hanged hoping they would deliver. Now I know it was a mistake to trust him with my bitcoins.