Why you can't invest with Cryptostocks

Cryptostocks is yet another of the play-pretend Bitcoin financial exchanges, carrying the glorious torch of nonsense and idiocy dropped by the Global Scam Exchange, and then by the BTCT & BitFunder, and so on and on. Because boys will be boys, and they will feel all important and smart and powerful and if there's nothing to keep them from jumping into a fighter jet, formula one car or nuclear reactor control room then they certainly will. And if there is something to keep them, well then no problem! They'll just make their very own fighter jets, formula one cars and nuclear reactors, out of a little straw they found fallen on their desk, some bootstrap and their own drool. When swallows do this it's apparently a delicacy, but when neckbeards do this it's quite the catastrophe, especially if you're one of the naive fellows that don't know it's a dog over the Internet and so end up caught in the blast.ⁱ

The particular anonymous fuckwitⁱⁱ is a subject of mockery and ridicule among the people in the know for his incredibly badly executed self-IPO earlier this yearⁱⁱⁱ. I've hinted at it before, but here's a blow-by-blow and suck-by-suck :

I. Fuckwit announces the IPO, under the terms that if at least 10k shares don't sell at 0.25 each (so 2`500 BTC) the IPO fails.

II. Among the terms, it comes to light that the 10k shares or however many sell represent 30% of his thing. So this isn't an IPO, nor is it a share placement. It's a GLBSE-style head of a sheep, torso of a goat construction.^iv

III. The raised BTC was to be used to incorporate the thing (which obviously never happened), to integrate with other payment processors (which obviously never happened), to advertise (wonh) and to "improve the infrastructure", which is obviously as opaque as shit and so wonh by default.^v

IV. It further came to light that


Current monthly revenue from trading activities as well as advertisements is ~11 BTC.

This, to make it perfectly clear, means that a) you are expected to pay in excess of 2`500 BTC for (a chance at) 30% of 11 BTC, for a magical P/E of about 1`000^vi and b) you are expected to finance a management team inept enough to be actually selling advertising on what's supposed to be a professional service.^vii

V.^viii It further came to light that 1,500 BTC will be used as a "onetime payment to license the platform and transfer the ownership of the complete infrastructure from its current owner". Which current owner is, of course, the fuckwit himself. Best price for a website ever : 70% of shares + 1'500 BTC in cash. You'd think it's a pinata, this deal.

VI. Three months later ?

The systems Vircurex.com and Cryptostocks.com have been taken offline over the weekend
Please do not deposit any further coins to your Vircurex accounts. We must assume that the wallet has been compromised.

So now, using only your knowledge of business law and one slice of three month old Brie cheese, consider the following questions : how much should the provider of the software for 1500 BTC be charged for this breach ? But wait! There's more!

VII. A month goes by with no word from the fuckwit. Because that's what children do immediately after having run the formula one jet fighter into the nuclear reactor, for superb firework results : they disappear under some cardboard box or something while the adults struggle with putting the fire out, wait there a little until they figure "all is forgotten" and then come back out strutting.

Although there is a report Kumala just published to their site indicating that investors will be taking the hit for the losses in the form of no dividends for months to come.

Imagine that! The crooked management which sold equity in something it didn't own (which is fraud) and then made a sweetheart deal to buy shitty services from their own self with company BTC (which is fraud, collusion, conspiracy and everything else) will be pushing the costs of all this upon the... taxpayer, it seems. Honestly, this guy is only qualified for a position in government, business isn't for him. We strive for fairness and fair dealing, here.

So you'd think this is all. It isn't all.

It isn't all, because someone came up with the brilliant idea of IPOing DragonTale a few days back :

Dragon's Tale is home to games unlike any other casino. You wont find a craps table, roulette wheel, or black jack dealer like in other online gaming sites. Instead you will discover a persistent 3D world filled with original games designed to attract casino gamblers and MMORPG players alike. While about half of the games in Dragon's Tale are simple as a slot machine, others require deep thought and skill. In addition to solo games we've also included unique player versus player games so patrons can stack their wits against others.

https://cryptostocks.com/securities/67

We are listing 4,000,000 Dragon's Tale shares (40% of the profits), while eGenesis Corporation owner(s) shall hold 6,000,000 shares (60% of the profits), for a total of 10,000,000 shares.

Current monthly profits is around 150 - 180 BTC whilst rapidly growing.

Dividends will be paid weekly every Friday

Website: http://www.dragons.tl/

We have listed ourselves here as we would like to raise the funds to upgrade our servers and increase our max payout BTC. We've had at least two bets of 200 BTC each, and each one came up a winner (950 BTC paid out each.)

Is there a time limit on the IPO shares?

I will likely retract any unsold shares after 30 days.

When is the first payout?

The first dividend payout will be November 22.

Any questions please ask.

This was approved by Cryptostocks, it sold shares on Cryptostocks, it was a huge success (a la Cryptostocks) and all that. The entire thing has only one (very minor) design flaw : it's not owned by Teppy, the guy that runs Dragon's Tale.^ix

Which in the end shouldn't stop anything - it is after all not sensibly different from the way cryptostocks listed itself in the first place. As the fuckwit in chief aptly puts it, "The issuer has been contacted and we are awaiting his/her reply to set things straight". I have no doubt things will be "set straight", in any representation of straight that does not even begin to include "we are closing down the entire menagerie because we've finally figured out we're too fucking stupid to be doing anything like this in the first place, and also we'll stop using we to talk about one single kid living alone in a run down basement somewhere with low land values". Because to be this stupid in the first place you definitely need to be too stupid to even begin to realise just how stupid you actually are.

All this aside : you can't invest with Cryptostocks for the same reason you can't swim in the desert, you can't invest with Cryptostocks for the same reason you can't sunbathe at night. You can't invest with Cryptostocks because it can't be done, nobody can do it. It's a gamble, and as my PR aptly pointed out for the benefit of the forum muppetry long long ago, if gambling is your idea of "investing" then you're much better served "investing" in one of the dice games. You can roll for "dividends" as often or as rarely as you can stomach it, you can set your "dividend" ratio in advance, and most of all you are actually playing a provably fair game. Which is a much better deal than the sort of crap computer-illiterate dorks with a ready software package and zero business experience can ever offer.

1. And since we're on the subject, do you know how many "I wish I had read that article before I got into this mess. Shocking prescient." I get every given week ? Guess.

   Or, rather than guess : don't let that be you, okay ? It's really not that hard to do. [↩]

2. He goes by the nom du web "kumala" and I really don't give a shit enough to make his physical identification a ticket in my intel system. [↩]
3. Back before three digits. [↩]
4. The catch here being that you can either have an IPO, in which case the funds raised go to the company and the manager gets zilch, or else you can have a stock placement, in which case the manager is really the owner, and he sells his own, pre-existing shares reflecting his own, pre-existing equity in the corporation. In which case obviously the company gets zilch. To drive it home : an IPO raises BTC for the company, a stock placement is simply a sale, raises BTC for the owner.

   This would be very clear and obvious thing, under normal circumstances. The problem of Bitcoin is that a bunch of smarmy kids (like Amir Taaki, like Nefario, like the endless list of the rest of them) figure they would really be the emperors of the world with very little skills and absolutely no capital. So then what they need is this sort of opaque structure where people give them Bitcoin in exchange for theoretically very much but practically very little. If you're curious, the prototype for this crap was the SkepsiDyne GLBSE "asset" of some anonymous "tawsix". [↩]

5. What's so hard about saying "and we shall buy X Y Z" ? [↩]
6. Yes, I know this apparently happens on S.MPOE. I humbly submit that I have no idea why, and further (perhaps more importantly) not every piece of Internet roadkill is now S.MPOE suddenly. [↩]
7. This would be roughly the equivalent of a multi-million, multi-ton Print on Demand unit coming with a large LED display on which the provider runs advertising. Because this makes sense, in some sort of parallel universe in which Bitcoin financial services are being offered by people whose entire understanding of economy comes from having one time bought something at the supermarket with their EBT card. Yes, I'm aware this sounds like a humorous dig. It's not humorous, it's factual : the "financiers" in their own head really live on welfare. [↩]
8. I am aware you're probably going "ok, ok, this is an [un]intentional scam run by idiots, I'm satisfied" but really, we're just warming up here. It gets much, much better. Read on. [↩]
9. 
   

   Just to confirm that, yeah, it's some scammer. eGenesis is the developer of Dragon's Tale and is owned primarily by me, Andrew Tepper.

   eGenesis/Dragon's Tale is not for sale; if you check the creation date on this account, you'll see that I've been involved with Bitcoins since they were half a cent each; we certainly don't need to sell stock to raise 2000 BTC

   [↩]