Half of the IPO fund is in MSC, others in BTC. Maidsafe Sold out or still holding MSC? Cause the price of MSC is dropped to one-twentieth compared when Maidsafe is at IPO in April. I think finance condition influences at least part of prospective developing of company and the confidence of investors’ feeling. Maidsafe should consider announcing financial statements. Thanks.
best regards,
One of the investors in Safecoin
I am not sure this is any different from any project or company, so perhaps every company should do this ?
One good fact of using the open ledger blockchain for funds is that they are available. Would not be great for inspection of every time we paid an electricity bill etc. we are not well enough resources for that, but what is an idea is we can publish the blockchain addresses of the btc. We did however put most of the btc in a cold storage and insured mechanism. Perhaps @nicklambert can speak a bit about that. We can probably put some address here to let folk see what’s happening.
Just as an aside in the last 8 years I have killed myself ensuring everyone gets paid and it would not have been possible with a load of folk watching every move and me having to explain everything. For instance I have mechanisms where, as folk think they can come into the company and rip us off (as many people think they can), but I generally have several protections in place to prevent the selfish thieves (which there are a large % of, unfortunately).
BTW this is one area the patents helped protect us as they were lodged with a foundation and licensed back with some protection rules (such as killing maidsafe meant withdrawing patents and resetting the implementation company (MaidSafe) and much more. So the bottom line is the staff just trust that I am doing what I am doing and its in their interest. They know if there is a real issue and I say so then its serious. [edit: this is why I am not a shareholder in MaidSafe, it is very difficult to buy me off by screwing the actual shareholders, that drives the asset thieves mad as my drive is not based on short term cash and cash obsessed people cannot deal with this. It is easy for me to understand greed, it is near impossible for greedy folk to understand lack of greed (in short term cash gains).]
So yes as transparent as possible. We do not have meetings that any staff member cannot hear or just come into, our board table was in the middle of all the desks for a long time, we stopped it as it was distracting. That helped money driven or MBA type folk coming in and talking about Engineers or Admin staff as assets instead of people.
So I advise some caution here as well, but take your point.
I bought my mine with BTC, but I haven’t given MSC’s exchange rate much thought until now.
If MaidSAFE differentiated between those who bought with MSC vs. BTC, there would be 2 prices which (unfortunately for me) isn’t the case.
@dirvine You’re a clever man and a great role model David. Hat’s off to you. The inside story of MaidSafe will be an interesting tale for you to tell when the time comes, and a very valuable one for everyone I expect.
It’s a fair question to ask, how was the MSC accounted for, was it converted to BTC or held in MSC form?
Even more interesting is that MSC will be on the network! meta. If the original question was speculation about safecoin value, I’d look to ethereum and mastercoin both embracing the technology for their needs, in most recent news. This shows a lot of potential to me more important than the status of crowdfunds. I’d like to hear more from vitalik about how he plans to utilize the network, I’m fuzzy on the details.
Anyways I respect the privacy of the operation, and I’m glad to hear such a solid response from @dirvine
Cheers
I doubt very much converting MSC was an option. MaidSafe ended up with so much of the stuff that attempting to sell more than a fraction of this in such an illiquid market would simply floor the price, undermining the prospect of it ever being saleable. I think it has to be written off, held for the long term, and if Mastercoin ever finds a way of establishing liquidity in MSC, maybe it will have some value.
Well the central banks have been (so far) successfully hanging onto MBS and various other stuff they’ve acquired… 
MSCs would have to be marked to market (which @hjyuan1986 seems to be calling for) but “loss” has already been allocated to the both types (MSC, BTC) of crowdbuyers (assuming it’s reflected in the price of MaidSAFE tokens today).
Yes this is our plan. If it works great, otherwise it was an expense we had to bear. I would love to see it gain and then we use it and fund the pods like mad.
It was held intact.
A quick update with our financial position. The MSC raised during the crowd sale remains pretty much untouched, other than for some services where the supplier was happy to accept MSC as payment.
With regard to our BTC holdings, we took in just over 7300 (our crowd sale address states a higher amount but we had some refunds to make for amounts received after the sale ended) during the sale. Thus far, we have exchanged 1130 BTC (1MYCod1MCbiKvdSXe9X1Cx4hGodWsfBkSP and 1AhDPYipbJzYxdvy4xXG9ZEJme3qni9WUd) into £GBP to cover wages, rent, travel and all the usual things it takes to keep a business going and there is a decent amount of this money remaining in cash.
We sent 5410 btc (12K82GSo7DEM4nUJfrsuFNkJBYBn8MRiUo) into an insured cold storage vault with a US based company and this amount remains untouched. The remaining BTC is being held internally and is being us to buy services such as flights, conference tickets…etc…
Moving forward, people involved with MaidSafe (either equity investors or holders of safecoin, community members…etc) should be confident in what we are doing. We are a committed team with a clear vision who is now in a financial position to expand our engineering team to help deliver our defined roll out plan.
I hope this helps give you a bit more of an insight into what we are doing and hopefully reassures that the crowd sale participation is being used responsibly and only to further the development and roll out of the platform, as described in our white paper.
It’s no more risk than Bitcoin. Bitcoin has volatility too. People didn’t expect volatility with Mastercoin and there wasn’t for a while but sooner or later it had to happen.
I think Mastercoin will grow along with Bitcoin if developers can focus on writing code. A lot of features were planned a year ago and still haven’t been implemented.
When SAFE Network is implemented I hope Mastercoin has an integration plan.
Ironically, one of the biggest threats to Bitcoin is probably Safecoin! 
yeap, I agree no more.
Some of this would make a good FAQ along the lines of ‘What is the financial incentive for Maidsafe’ adding in the POD model and the fact maidsafe are happy to pay others to build something better.
I would argue that holding on to MSC vs BTC is waaaaaaay more risky and always was. Bitcoin while risky has passed a test of time and has far far greater liquidity.
While I understand there might be cool features of Mastercoin - distributed exchange - etc, what is the real advantage of actually holding on to MSC itself, that would justify the risk?
It seems to me that holders of MSC saw the MaidSafe sale as a nice way to get out!
You could not sell it if you wanted this is what lack of liquidity means. It would crash to zero with a fraction of what we hold. Even BTC with all its liquidity, if we cashed in £1M it would drop the global price by $30-$40 or so the estimates tell us.
In terms of the MSC way out, then I tend to agree, it looks that way, hopefully it will work out for us (well the pods who would benefit from this MSC if it gains value). “Who knows the secrets of the black magic box” though 