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

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

---
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68


On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 4:26 PM, Julie Marchant <onpon4 at riseup.net> wrote:
> 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.

 nope, it won't.  it's already a gain - someone kindly signed up and
took me over the threshold into $200/day commissions.  time for
celebration, there :)

> 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?

 i'm not ready yet to tell you the story, publicly, about the pyramid
scam perpetrated by the U.S. Federal Reserve back in 2007.  the scope
and scale is... breathtaking in its brazen-ness.  Senator Ron Paul's
book "End The Fed" and that film on the AAA+ mortgage scam is just the
tip of the iceberg that can be traced DIRECTLY back to, correlating
DIRECTLY with, that blatantly unethical and BEYOND criminal decision.

 please... it makes me see red to hear people compare MLMs to pyramid
scams when, if you know where to look, you can see evidence of
governments basically doing exactly that and pretending it's not.  i'm
taking it down a few mental defcon levels now... getting over the
feeling of outrage... callm, caaalm...

 i've actually joined an MLM before (Moxxor - didn't make anything
because my partner ran it, we set up 3 accounts.... and she put
everything in "left leg"... sigh) and i know people who have (my
partner joined Usana 10 years ago and encouraged her family to join).
she earned a good salary at the time so it wasn't "risk", and actually
ended up buying then giving away quite a lot of pharmaceutical-grade
products to friends who really needed it.  the problem was not so much
that it was damn hard work but that it "fizzled out".  people gave up,
disillusioned, and, DESPITE the warnings, tried suing Usana.  idiots,
the lot of them.

 most MLMs have a peak period where the exponential effect, like any
evolutionarily constrained growth, out-strips "supply" and tails off.
i even did the implementation of "fox and chickens" population
algorithm growth, many years ago.

 bitclbub will be absolutely no different from that, and everybody
KNOWS that IN ADVANCE.  there's even warnings about it actually *on*
the informational pages and articles in the site.  everyone KNOWS that
unless something drastically changes, there's a window of opportunity
of 3 to 5 years where mining is profitable.  12.5 BTC reward this
year, 6.25 18 months after that, 3.125 18 months after that...

 ... and that's probably the point where they might actually consider
shutting the entire operation down.  or adapting to different
currencies.  they do also offer GPU mining of about 7 or 8 altcoins.

>
> 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:

 well... someone very kindly joined and put in enough so that i've
crossed the first threshold for commissions :)

> 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.

 i'd already been doing that.  the NAND is gone, and the next thing
that would have to go would be HDMI.  this would be a bitch as anyone
with stand-alone Cards wouldn't be able to use them.  i'd have to give
those people a Micro-Desktop PCB.

> For
> example, perhaps you might have to scrap the laptop design entirely

 i really *really* don't want to do that :)  and, luckily, it looks
like i now won't have to.  yay!

> and
> only deliver cards and micro-desktops, then fund the laptop design
> separately later.

 yehyeh that's what the current plan is.

> 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.

 yyyeahh

> 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.

 there are enough people already contacting me (1 every update,
usually) that further delays would be... bad.  if i am explaining
privately to people that i am *actively* getting on with things,
they're fine with that.  if i don't *have* an answer, it all goes to
hell in a handbasket very very quickly.

 also, the fact that i am a software libre developer with such
significant copyright material, and that i had to stop adding to my CV
about 4 years ago when it got to i think 15 pages in length actually
means that i'm not really "employable" by traditional companies.  the
insecure CTOs usually freak out and believe i'm after their job, and
the secure and sensible people state quite openly, "you will get bored
here, it would be IRRESPONSIBLE of us to employ you".

 as a result my "employment" - actual paid work vs time not being paid
- has been consistently somewhere around FIFTEEN percent for the past
20 years.  average income over a 20 year period: around USD $15,000.

 bottom line is: anyone else this idea would be fine.  for me - aged
47 and at the point where i should be a CTO of my own company.... not
going to work, is it?


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

 yes - you basically described my default fall-back plan, in a nutshell.

 some time about 5 weeks ago, i was pretty depressed and f****g fed
up, basically, and i went, "right, that's it, i've HAD it with this
consistent decade-long scraping around".  i recovered the BTC i got
from the (almost failed, f*****g dangerous) butterfly labs equipment
purchased 4-5 years ago, and on hearing about bitclub from a friend,
immediately recognised the benefits *thanks* to my former experience
with MLMs and with mining, and it was an easy decision.


> 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.

 yes it is - i run on some... interesting ethically-based heuristics.
i didn't mention this before but last year i GAVE AWAY 1.3 of the
bitcoins mined by that incredibly dangerous butterflylabs equipment to
my sponsor, chris, from thinkpenguin.  he'd sponsored me by that point
to the tune of USD $60,000, so it felt "right" to just... give it to
him.


> You said you have 0.65 BTC; that's currently worth almost $10,000.

 it wasn't: 0.4 BTC was about... $3500 at the time i bought the
equipment.  and it's already bought.  the decision's been made.

 0.25 i gave to someone in order to invest in their 3D printing
products, as a joint venture / investor in him, he's an extremely
reclusive and exceptionally competent engineer, and he'll be able to
pay for converting one of his products to injection-molded and we'll
be able to market it and make quite a lot of money.  i've never
actually invested in anyone else's business before, it's a first for
me.

 and i could *only* consider doing it because that BTC came from a
source that has absolutely nothing to do with the crowdfunding.
obviously though i chose to invest in something that will, indirectly,
benefit EOMA68 (in this case the 3D printing part).


 the nature of who i am and what i am is not changing: over the past
20 years i've been through absolute HELL and the worst kinds of
exploitation by corporations spongeing off of my expertise, i've
witnessed key strategic people in the free software community also end
up being targetted by people wishing to exploit them, and i'm not
putting up with it any longer.


> 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.

 nnope.  the bang-per-buck ratio of doing so vs the potential to
fulfil the plans that i've been working on, everything i've read over
the past 20 years tells me that's "failure" talk.  i've been looking
for something like this for some time, with the potential and also
sufficiently ethically justifiable to consider leveraging.

 ... one person i'm in touch with, they've been investigating altcoin
trading.  they have asperger's so have the attention span and the
intelligence to VERY quickly do the research and experimentation.
what they've uncovered...  holy f*** the insider trading and
"pump-and-dump" tactics being deployed world-wide right now are
OUTRIGHT BRAZEN.  i did try talking him out of it but he seems to be
doing ok: he's up $1800 in 10 days and has encountered and fallen foul
of both John Macaffee's twitter "pump-and-dump" "AltCoin Of The
Day!!!" scam *and* the fraudulent guy who


 my next target's USD $400 / day, which is where, every 9-10 days,
i'll be able to buy people from the free software and libre hardware
community a share of equipment that will earn them $30-$50 a day.

 all of that funded not through putting CASH in but using MINED
BITCOIN and *commission* to do it.

l.