--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 4:26 PM, Julie Marchant onpon4@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...
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 :)
- 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
- 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?
- 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.