Last month we covered the story of the Long Island Iced Tea Company rebranding itself as Long Blockchain as part of a broader shift in corporate strategy. The company's stock price tripled over night.
On Friday, we got the first concrete details of the company's new blockchain strategy. Long Blockchain planned to raise up to $8.4 million with a stock offering and then use some of the money to buy 1,000 Antminer S9 bitcoin mining machines. The machines would be "installed in a world-class third-party data center experienced in cryptocurrency mining and located in a Nordic country."
But today Long Blockchain announced it was scrapping the stock offering. The company says that it's still planning to buy bitcoin-mining hardware. However, Long Blockchain says that it "can make no assurances that it will be able to finance the purchase of the mining equipment."
Related Stories
The Long Island Iced Tea Corporation is exactly what it sounds like: a company that sells people bottled iced tea and lemonade. But today the company announced a significant change of strategy that would start with changing its name to "Long Blockchain Corporation."
The company was "shifting its primary corporate focus towards the exploration of and investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology," the company said in a Thursday morning press release. "Emerging blockchain technologies are creating a fundamental paradigm shift across the global marketplace," the company said.
[...] The company isn't getting out of the iced tea business. "The Company will continue to operate Long Island Brand Beverages, LLC as a wholly-owned subsidiary," the company writes in its press release.
[...] The former Long Island Iced Tea Company is following the lead of other companies that have seen their value skyrocket after announcing blockchain-related moves. One small financial technology company saw its value skyrocket after it announced a blockchain-related acquisition. In October, a biotech company saw its value skyrocket after it renamed itself "Riot Blockchain."
Iced tea company rebrands as "Long Blockchain" and stock price triples
$24 million iced tea company says it's pivoting to the blockchain, and its stock jumps 200%
Update: Bitcoin Tumbles Below $14,000 as Investors Face ‘Reality Check'
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11 2018, @05:46PM (2 children)
People say they want great tea (to share it with others!). Hidden, even to themselves, is the motive to obtain money (and thus power) over others.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Thursday January 11 2018, @06:23PM (1 child)
With great tea comes great responsibility.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday January 12 2018, @12:10AM
Usually I drink coffee because I hate Freedom.
But my tummy became upset as a result of this morning's coffee.
Maybe that's God's way of telling me that my immortal soul is damned to while away eternity in Hell.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday January 11 2018, @06:24PM (4 children)
1) notice $bubble
2) announce $bubble-related pivot
3) sell stock that just tripled
4) cancel $bubble-related pivot
5) (optional) buy back stock at old price
6) profit !
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11 2018, @06:30PM (2 children)
7) get sent to federal pound me in the ass prison for insider trading.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday January 11 2018, @06:59PM
Nah, those people don't go to the pound-me-in-the-ass prisons, they go to the country-club prisons.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 11 2018, @07:50PM
7) only applies to individuals who are not "too big to fail"
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday January 11 2018, @11:23PM
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11 2018, @06:24PM (1 child)
"The company's stock price tripled overnight" and it "can make no assurances that it will be able to finance the purchase of the mining equipment."
Yeah, that wasn't a totally massive scam or anything...
Step 1: Announce blockchain launch!
Step 2: Profit
I guess on the plus side we're eliminating the pesky "..." what do we do for increased profits part. Efficiency is king! Just hand your money over for no good reason, best capitalistic enterprises yet!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11 2018, @10:48PM
They should have done it with more pizazz like Kodak, who announced at CES [cnbc.com] and had their stock triple.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday January 11 2018, @07:12PM (6 children)
I ordered it in December for march delivery. It sold out a few days after I ordered
The antminer bitcoin miners require 220V. All I have is my stove socket
I might order two more. Three miners and I won't need to work anymore. But I would - on my own projects
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 11 2018, @07:59PM (5 children)
Every time I have run-to-ground what my ROI would be for bitcoin mining, it came to something like $500 worth of mining gear, sucking down $0.04 per day of electricity should net about $0.04 per day worth of BTC, until the market gets more competitive at which point the investment stays the same but the return goes down.
Even without the increasing competitiveness of the mining market, ROI time was infinite, or worse. The only way this was a good deal was that the coins mined back in 2010 (say, 3.5 net coins per year, per $500 rig fully occupied), inflated 2500-5000x by today. Back then, mining all year on a NUC could cost you ~$18 in electricity to get ~$18 "worth" of BTC. If you managed to keep track of those coins safely for the following 8 years and not sell them on the way up, now you've got ~$50K.
Then there were GPU mining rigs, then FPGA, I looked at the latest mining rigs and return is still down under a nickle a day for several hundred dollars worth of gear - I expect that Long Island Iced Tea hadn't done that math, or maybe not done it correctly, before making their announcement.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday January 12 2018, @12:04AM (3 children)
Honestly I don't know.
Some Litecoin mining profit calculator I used predicted the Antminer L3+ [bitmain.com] would yield a profit of $10k per year. Electricity is relatively cheap here in the Pacific Northwest. IIRC it's 8.16 cents per kilowatt-hour.
It cost me $2,050 plus a $105 power supply and $140 for DHL from china.
My hesitation on buying two more is that I might not be able to tolerate the fan noise. Bitmain says it's 75 decibels but I really don't know how I will experience that. Would my music drown it out? Would I go deaf?
Bitmain mines with its own products, so there surely must be a case for them.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 12 2018, @12:15AM (1 child)
Check the actual coin (fractions) expected per mega-hash, and compare that to mega-hashes per hour.
For the noise, build it a soundproof box and pipe cooling air in through a muffler.
Keep us posted on how the mining goes - if you're really yielding $10K per year, that's a full coin per year - you should be seeing a clear indicator of your actual yield within a week of operation. Whatever specs I was reading were estimating closer to 0.002 BTC per year on a ~$300 mining rig, as of late 2017.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday January 13 2018, @07:24AM
thanks for the encouragement.
I will post my experiences to my journal.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @12:51AM
No, and somewhat slowly. I suspect you'd go somewhat crazy from annoyance first, though.
http://www.noisehelp.com/noise-level-chart.html
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @07:36PM
Well you could be that asshole who ruins things for everyone else:
https://www.chargepoint.com/support/driver-faq/ [chargepoint.com]
;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11 2018, @09:10PM (1 child)
With all of these fancy mining rigs crunching so many numbers, why are payments so slow? Do more rigs speed up payments, or just bog things down?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday January 12 2018, @12:08AM
or rather the calculations become more difficult as calculation speed increases so as to always take about ten minutes per block.
The block header has a "difficulty" factor. That really should be called easiness because the lower it is the harder it gets. The header also has a "nonce" which is an integer which results in the entire header's hash being smaller than the difficulty.
The root of the block's merkle tree - a tree of transaction hashes - is also in the header, as well as a hash of the previous block.
Or at least that's my current understanding. I'm not convinced I have it all strait yet.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]