[Arm-netbook] EOMA68 / Libre RISC-V team financing

[Julie Marchant]

Sent this from the wrong email address. Please excuse the duplicate
email. Luke: if the other email is in the moderation queue, feel free to
just reject it, since it doesn't add anything beyond this version.

On 2017年12月27日 06:23, Luca Saiu wrote:
> You may want to have a look at this:
> http://behindmlm.com/companies/bitclub-network-review-zeek-ponzi-veterans-at-it-again/
> 
> I have no doubts about your good faith but to put it bluntly the
> investment is morally very questionable, almost certainly illegal, and
> likely to result in financial loss for yourself and the project.  It
> would be a shame to see the initiative crash because the funds got stuck
> in a Ponzi.
> 
> Look at how many similar schemes, offering no proof of actual mining,
> exist right now.  This is not going to end well.

I have to second this opinion. Luke, doing *nothing* and losing the
funds honorably would easily be preferable over trying to do *any* kind
of "multi-level marketing", which is almost certainly going to be a
financial loss to you.

The idea of "multi-level marketing" can be explained in a chart. The
"0"s represent people buying into it, with the one at the top being the
one who started it. Tell me, what does this look like?

                    0
                   000
                  00000
                 0000000
                000000000
               00000000000
              0000000000000
             000000000000000
            00000000000000000
           0000000000000000000
          000000000000000000000
         00000000000000000000000
        0000000000000000000000000
       000000000000000000000000000
      00000000000000000000000000000
     0000000000000000000000000000000
    000000000000000000000000000000000
   00000000000000000000000000000000000
  0000000000000000000000000000000000000
 000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000

If you need money to survive, and you can't find any contracts for
well-paying work that you could do alongside EOMA68, then the best
thing to do is either:

1. Do whatever you can with the remaining funds to do the closest you
can to fulfilling your promises. This may force you to make cuts. For
example, perhaps you might have to scrap the laptop design entirely and
only deliver cards and micro-desktops, then fund the laptop design
separately later. Or, perhaps you will have to just abandon delivering
on the printed-for-you laptops, and everyone would have to print the
laptops on their own. This is the solution I would prefer; it would be a
bummer to not have everything you sought out for, but at least we would
have *something*. A starting point. It's better than nothing.

2. Put the project on hold to get a well-paying, actual job and build up
enough savings to continue as originally planned at a later date.

3. First do (1), then do (2) when you run out of funds.

Note: You said in a later email that it's just Bitcoin you already had
you're "investing" into this, but that's rather splitting hairs. You
said you have 0.65 BTC; that's currently worth almost $10,000. That's a
*massive* financial loss you're looking at there. If you have no use for
the BTC and haven't been touching it, convert it to real currency and
put it in your bank. Don't go throwing it at one of these schemes.

-- 
Julie Marchant
https://onpon4.github.io

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