I'm Sam Lee, CEO of Bitcoin Group, Ask Me Anything :)

[SamLee]

Hey All,

I'm Sam, CEO of Bitcoin Group Ltd. A pureplay Bitcoin Mining outfit that is accepted to list on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) in December, as a profitable company, we're scheduled to be the first IPO in the Bitcoin space to list on a major global exchange, raising up to 20m in the process.

From an IT Project Management background, I fell in love with Bitcoin in 2012 (best thing since my two daughters) and started with Asher Tan (tomorrow's AMA) the Melbourne Bitcoin Meetup (http://www.meetup.com/BitcoinMelbourne/) as well as played with arbitraging between exchanges throughout 2013 through Bitcoins Reserve (http://bitcoinsreserve.com). with long time friends Allan Guo and Jin Chen.

In 2014, having teamed up with Ryan "Martian" Xu (Think of him as the chinese version of Roger Ver) and Jacob Cheng (SMSC Lead Engineer), we launched our plans to IPO a Bitcoin Mining company in September 2014 and raised through an earlier pre-IPO round of 3.6m from sophisticated investors to prove the business model. (more at: http://www.bitcoingroup.com.au/our-story/ & http://www.bitcoingroup.com.au/our-people/)

With listing just around the corner, we brought into the fold the bitcoin community through the Melbourne Bitcoin Technology Center (MBTC: http://bitcoincenter.co/) to help spread awareness and educate people on the opportunities through a range of initiatives such as:
http://www.bitcoinbuskers.com/preview/
http://thinkbitcoin.com.au/
http://coinstation.com.au/

You can find out more here:
Bitcoin Group Corporate Video - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V0SjdGsyfYc
BRR CEO interview (2 min) - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_rkILs5meA
My Max Kaiser Interview from last week (starting 12.5 minutes in) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzFuejFxPQg
BNK To The Future (Offer closed) - https://bnktothefuture.com/pitches/2421 ... g-ipo.html
Our IPO Prospectus (Offer closes on the 20th) - http://www.bitcoingroup.com.au/investors/

But without further ado, lets kick this AMA off by asking me anything!

[meerkat1337]

How did you get in to bitcoin? And where do you see bitcoin in 5 years?

[rogerver]

Hi Sam,

Thanks so much for participating here and for getting involved int he bitcoin space.

Were you originally attracted to Bitcoin for the technological aspect, for philosophical reasons, or for something else?

Does your company have any plans to release consumer products in the future?

What is the long term vision for the company? (5+ years into the future)



I embedded all your videos to make it easier for everyone to watch them:

Bitcoin Group Corporate Video - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V0SjdGsyfYc
BRR CEO interview (2 min) - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_rkILs5meA
My Max Kaiser Interview from last week (I start a little after the half way mark) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzFuejFxPQg

[Marshall]

Hey Sam,

Thanks for doing the AMA.

As a fellow Miner here, wondering what kind of Miners, you guys like to run. Size of your operation in MW. And expansion plans?

[peeer]

Hi Sam,

Thanks for being here.

What's bitcoin group's position in all miners globally? Are you going to take majority proportion of the hash power?

What makes you determined to get your company listed in ASX?

Thanks
Jim

[SamLee]

How did you get in to bitcoin? And where do you see bitcoin in 5 years?

How I got into Bitcoin -
I first got into Bitcoin through the developers in my team whilst I was working as a Project Manager at Aegis Group (Now Dentsu Aegis: http://www.dentsuaegisnetwork.com/), he gave me my first Bitcoins by transferring some to me after I bought lunch. With the help of my daughters, I have since lost the private keys to this lunch money wallet, but this kicked off the process of self indoctrinating myself into the community after realising the global implications of a decentralised trust platform that just "works".

Where do I see Bitcoin in 5 years -
There has been a lot of talk along the lines of "Bitcoin Bad, Blockchain Good" I just want to echo the words of many in our community that you can't have a secured decentralised and OPEN blockchain that is without the incentive model inherent in the value of bitcoin. Bitcoin Mining is one that generates very predictable Bitcoin revenue, and because the Bitcoin Blockchain is the most secure Blockchain in the industry, it's utilisation will continue, as demonstrated by the growing number of Bitcoin transactions and drive the long term value of Bitcoin as a token of value.

[SamLee]

Hi Sam,

Thanks so much for participating here and for getting involved int he bitcoin space.

Where you originally attracted to Bitcoin for the technological aspect, for philosophical reasons, or for something else?

Does your company have any plans to release consumer products in the future?

What is the long term vision for the company? (5+ years into the future)

Where you originally attracted to Bitcoin for the technological aspect, for philosophical reasons, or for something else?

Bitcoin attracted me for philosophical reasons, my IT background only merely help me "get there faster" to understand the technology is bullet proof when combined with the flawless the economics behind Bitcoin as an incentive model.
I also like to work with smarter people that have an eccentricity that spices up the daily grind, and it seems the Bitcoin community is full of colourful characters that gets me excited and keeps me on the edge of my seat (literally).

Does your company have any plans to release consumer products in the future?

We do, but unfortunately can't disclose anything until post-listing, as we're in capital raising mode since the 4th of September, we cannot announce anything that is of "material" regardless of whether it is positive or negative as the Replacement Prospectus is the only source which investors have to consider their investment decision. So stay tuned as we're only a month away from these restrictions being lifted and am excited to giving investors a clear outline to our post float roadmap.

What is the long term vision for the company? (5+ years into the future)

In order to ensure my comments are not misleading, I'm just going to do a copy/paste from section 4.3 of our prospectus (http://www.bitcoingroup.com.au/wp-conte ... pectus.pdf). Thanks for understanding.

Short term

• investing and focusing on current BCM Operations by maintaining and expanding on current Hash Power levels which include the acquisition of additional Mining Equipment to be serviced under fully hosted solutions as well as seeking additional Hash Power providers (See Sections 4.6, 4.7 and 4.8)

• deployment of Mining Equipment with current and future providers of Fully Hosted Solution Agreements (See Section 4.9)

• investing in facilities to increase the efficiency of the Mining Equipment, and

• investing in Mining management software to better monitor Mining Equipment output.

Long term

• meeting demand for increases in Hash Power

• consistently monitoring electricity markets and where favourable conditions permit, expand into new territories

• expansion into middleware and application layer opportunities leveraging the Block Chain technology by developing mobile apps such as Digital Currency wallets

• acquisition of smaller Miners

• investing in research and development into Mining related software via Bit Tech and/or entering into joint ventures with third parties for the conduct of research and development, and

• potentially investing and acquiring Digital Currency industry startups that focus on building fintech applications, to be achieved through establishing a startup incubator.

[Evander Smart]

Hi, Sam, Evander Smart of Coin Telegraph. Congrats on your IPO progress! Good luck!

For those who want to "go public" or get funding, can you please go over what you did, and what you would suggest for those looking to do the same. A checklist, if you will, in order of importance.

Evander

[SamLee]

Hey Sam,

Thanks for doing the AMA.

As a fellow Miner here, wondering what kind of Miners, you guys like to run. Size of your operation in MW. And expansion plans?

Hi Marshall,

Thanks for your query and great to have the Prince (挖矿王子) in the house!

This information is available in our prospectus because as a soon to be listed company, we need to maintain absolute transparency with the public and our shareholders. All these numbers are reviewed by our Lawyers (Foster Nicholson Jones Lawyers: http://www.fnjlawyers.com.au/) and our Auditors (Shine Wing Australia: http://shinewing.com.au/). This level of transparency will mean easier access to money by raising capital through capital markets moving forward, in addition to leveraging the deep ties with you and the rest of the Chinese Bitcoin community through Ryan "Martian" Xu this gives us a key competitive advantage to carry out our expansion plans and achieve the 13.4% Global hash power output market share as outlined in the Replacement Prospectus.

In a nutshell, we operate an assortment of over 6000 mining machines across 7 sites in 3 countries. The breakdown can be found at the bottom of our websites Bitcoin Mining page (http://www.bitcoingroup.com.au/bitcoin-mining/)

Sections to look out for is (http://www.bitcoingroup.com.au/wp-conte ... pectus.pdf)

• page 35: 4.9.1 Pre-listing Mining Equipment acquisitions

• page 101: 10.4.2 Mining Equipment Agreements

[SomaTodd]

Hello Sam,

What are your thoughts on block size debate. Favorite BIP on block size increase?

[SamLee]

Hi Sam,

Thanks for being here.

What's bitcoin group's position in all miners globally? Are you going to take majority proportion of the hash power?

What makes you determined to get your company listed in ASX?

Thanks
Jim

Thanks Jim,

What's bitcoin group's position in all miners globally? Are you going to take majority proportion of the hash power?

Our company since the beginning of this year been the largest Bitcoin Mining company in Australia and is among ranks among only a handful of profitable bitcoin companies.

We are executing our vision in an investment vehicle that is truly publicly owned with the three cofounders (Ryan "Martian" Xu, Allan Guo and myself) only holding onto 8.6% of the post-float equity. Meaning that much like Bitcoin, the public shareholders which make up over 90% of our company have the final say on how Bitcoin Group can help Bitcoin and it's community continue to grow.

To grow the company eightfold post listing, we need to under take an aggressive growth strategy, but as Bitcoiners ourselves, you can rest assure that like always, we'll be working harmoniously the rest of the Bitcoin community and the broader fintech movement to cut the lunches of the Banks to bring about a fairer financial future for future generation.

What makes you determined to get your company listed in ASX?

Transparency, Legitimacy, Accountability. These are the three pillars that underpin a company that is listed on a major global exchange such as the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). I understand that Bitcoin doesn't "need" regulators to give it legitimacy, but I believe what we are doing will benefit our movement greatly.

So why an IPO? Well, through our journeys, we have all too often we see listed companies having shareholders that don't truly believe in the dream. Instead, shareholders are there to make a quick buck off "hype". an IPO being a "clean skin" means we are building this tribe from the ground up, and since all management shares are escrowed, it means that people who buy shares at 20 cents in the IPO are believers, and may see the share price being worth many times more. This makes for a stronger debut and long term growth of the company, as I believe no one invests in us hope to losing money and trying to sell it for any price below 20 cents when the company begins its first day of trading.

So in conclusion, the recipe that makes us a great company is us being a transparent, legitimate and accountable investment vehicle that is truly public and owned by hundreds of shareholders that fanatically believe in Bitcoin Group's long term potential to harmoniously collaborate with the community and aggressively grow our footprint to disrupt the existing incumbents in the financial ecosystem and bring about global trust *breaths

[SamLee]

Hi, Sam, Evander Smart of Coin Telegraph. Congrats on your IPO progress! Good luck!

For those who want to "go public" or get funding, can you please go over what you did, and what you would suggest for those looking to do the same. A checklist, if you will, in order of importance.

Evander

Thanks Evander,

Thinking back on the dependencies (courtesy to hustling as an IT Project Management in a past life) my checklist in the order of most to least important, will look somewhat like this:

1) Become a subject matter expert (eg. Bitcoin), a pre-requisite to sound convincing

2) Sound convincing, and convince people smarter than me who can cover off my weaknesses to sign-up as co-founders, for bonus points, make sure they are "all in" with their own reputation and capital. In my case I'm lucky to be joined by...
- Ryan "Martian" Xu, who came with +10 creativity and industry networks
- Allan Guo, who came with +8 charisma and sophisticated investors

3) With nothing but an idea, investors can only look at the team, since the team looks good and are committed by their "all in" attitude, they invest, our cornerstone investors are...
- Harry Wang - Banking and remittance services company founder and director
- Richard Gu - Property and resource billionaire
- Victor Huang - Education and Entertainment industry magnate
- Gao Xiang Dong - Recycling and logistics millionaire

4) Bring on reliable experts to prove the business model (that Bitcoin Mining is profitable), the Director level experts that were brought on board were...
- Jacob Cheng, Operations Director, came with +12 knowledge and Silicon chip fabrication expertise
- Jin Chen, Technical Director, came with +13 logic and systems and programming expertise

5) Deliver on your promises to these investors and re-raise from the public, in our case we've done it through an IPO on the ASX.

So in summary, an idea in a great industry executed by a great team will attract the necessary capital a startup requires to succeed.

[notig]

If you are to calculate the profit a future mining center will generate... How do you calculate your competition? Isn't that an unknown variable to a degree? Isn't the price of bitcoin which is also unknown another factor? I don't see how you can calculate if a mining center will be profitable when you don't know how many other hundred million dollar bitcoin mining facilities are being built that will eat a piece of your pie and what the actual price will be.

How do you feel the reward halving will effect price?

[Evander Smart]

Thanks for the thorough, thoughtful response, Sam.

Sounds like good information for the community to be shared.
Take care.

Evander

[LISAM]

Which digital currency (litecoin,dogecoin, peercoin etc) do you think will be the biggest competitor to bitcoin in 5 years?

[LiteCoinGuy]

Hi Sam,

you are writing:

"From an IT Project Management background, I fell in love with Bitcoin in 2012 (best thing since my two daughters)..."

Where is your wife in that equation?



LCG

[TeslaGen3]

Sam -

Thanks much for taking the time to answer our questions.

Q1. After all bitcoins are mined - how do you see Bitcoin Group making money to sustain operations?

Q2. Scammers. I recently came across a scam organization called Miners Center - they offer 10% - 13% over the current market value of bitcoin. Do you pay attention to these type of things or do you believe it's every person for themselves? Should the B(b)itcoin community do anything to prevent scammers from operating?

Q3. What are your interest outside of B(b)itcoin?

Thanks again!

[SamLee]

Hello Sam,

What are your thoughts on block size debate. Favorite BIP on block size increase?

Hi Soma,

Thanks so much for your patience, I haven't had a chance to formulate a viewpoint on my favorite BIP yet, but seeing this is a raging issue, I did give a call Jacob Cheng (Operations Director) to get his view-point.

Jacob believes that there are merits and drawbacks to all BIP proposed, but believes BIP 100 to be from a technical perspective the path to least resistance whilst meeting the short term usage needs. This he believes buys enough time to implements a longer term strategy that is needed to help Bitcoin scale to become something that is truly disruptive.

I think it is safe to say, that as a company, we strongly agree on is that block size MUST increase in order for transactions to not be discriminated to a point where "free" transactions in the queue just never make it as part of a block due to the way miners prioritise things, as that will in the long run diminish the utility of the Blockchain to a platform that can only benefit those who can afford the fees.

So until I find enough time outside of dealing with lawyers and auditors to finish off this IPO, I will reserve my judgement and trust the smart people in the community to be able to influence and help guide the rest of us to reach a consensus on the best way for block sizes to increase.

I truly am humbled that our views matter, and will do our best to be better prepared for next time, when we are expected to play our small part in shaping the future of Bitcoin through this transparent decentralised decision making process

[SamLee]

Which digital currency (litecoin,dogecoin, peercoin etc) do you think will be the biggest competitor to bitcoin in 5 years?

I believe a truer representation of Bitcoin and it's underlying Blockchain technology is as a digitally decentralised trust platform, this goes beyond Bitcoin as a digital currency. So we need to define "competition" first.

TCP/IP is the protocol that powers the internet, and although there are alternatives such as IPX/SPX or SCTP that have specific niche benefits such as multiple parellel transmission streams on a single connection, the network effect means that these have very narrow use cases as on a global scale TCP/IP has no real competition, as over the years, any major advancement that other protocol's have made have similarly been proposed and accepted into the TCP/IP protocol.

Similarly, any major advancement in an alternate digital currency can be incorporated into Bitcoin which will erode in part any competitive advantage an alt-coin initially has.

Not to say alt-coins are bad, they indeed are often where the smartest of our community push the limits on the potential of the blockchain technology, but all too often, these geniuses are undermined by others who launch poorly designed alt-coins that has for the sole purpose of enriching it's creators through pump and dumps, these side-shows are distracting, and hopefully in time, will be less rewarding for bad actors as the community becomes better at calling out these schemes.

I also believe digital currencies such as Ethereum and Ripple to be indirect competitors to Bitcoin, as they are more closed than open, such that they are more "intranet" than "internet" for the lack of a better analogy.

Even though I've been around for a while, I think a 5 year prediction is one that I'm unable to comfortably give. If we're talking about a digital currency competitor only, then I'll have to say Litecoin, as it has an active community similar to Bitcoins, hell, I even accepted Litecoins via my e-store back in the day (https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/amazing ... onths-ago/).

But if you want to support something very special, I recommend checking out Safe Coin (http://maidsafe.net/safecoin). They are reimagining how the internet should work which is an absolute game changer, I mean this is a level of cool that rivals Elon Musk, and really hope the guys pull it off!

[SamLee]

Hi Sam,

you are writing:

"From an IT Project Management background, I fell in love with Bitcoin in 2012 (best thing since my two daughters)..."

Where is your wife in that equation?



LCG

My wife was the best thing that happened to me during university.

After that was my kids.

and after that was Bitcoin and it's (for the most part) welcoming community gave me the balls to venture out of my comfort zone to rebuild a better financial world using Bitcoin and it's Blockchain technology as an alternative to the existing ponzi scheme we were forced into by the incumbents.

So where does my wife fit into this equation? Well, I do make it super clear at the 35 second mark in the below video. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4lTgRe83q8

Also I note that I still haven't yet responded to TeslaGen3's Q's, I'll have to do it in the morning (later in the morning), as brain function is decreasing at 3am now in Melbourne, Australia. Also the kids will be up soon, and it's my turn to do the school run in Monday traffic!

[CoinPoint]

Hi Sam,

Wanted to ask about VC and Bitcoin
Which sector of the bitcoin market, you believe is the most interested for investors? Mining, Trading, Technology, etc ?

Thanks

[main.bit]

Hi , Sam
I am international sales from bitmaintech
So have many miner have u got running now ? And how many antminer u are currently using ?
My contact as follows
whatsapp/tel:+8613838248258
skype:jianghu441
lu.chen@bitmaintech.com

[Sajid.roy]

How are you predict bitcoin in next few months?

[Ajaniayodeji]

Hi, my name is Ayodeji, I want to know this, how do I get my bitcoin address?

[nji]

Hello, I have been sent some money through bitcoin from the uk. it shows that the transaction has been sent sucesfuly from my sender's end buy but I am yet to receive it in my wallet.

what could be the problem please?

[celsusgloria]

Hello. I am new and hope I m right. I want to start with bitcoins. I have a company and want that customers can pay with bitcoins. What i have to do? Greetings

[odi.lagi]

Hello Sam,

Please dp you know anything about Remitano? Are they legitimate. See website https://remitano.com/ng

[PAYGO]

Hi Sam,

I have a great currency related brand PAYGO.com , which short for Pay-As-You-Go.

Do you think I could partner or sell this brand successfully to a digital currency company.

Thanks for your response

Steve

[JayC888]

ayyrree bi bitcoin

[AbhishekRanjan]

dear sir
i recently came to know about Bitcoins . I think i got to knew somewhat about Bitcoins from all the preferred sites that i can go to review it . Every sites seems to have positive reviews . i wish i had known about it earlier . as i invested in some part of Btc of what i can (the price seems to be fairly moving with a great speed ).
i am a student of IT 3rd year from India . here there are very few peoples who know about it . and personally now i think Btc coins are better buying than investing money on bank . it can be turned into profit even if it turns a drop. Awesome idea the whole concept of Bitcoins its truly amazing .
my main motive of writing here is because of my interest in business . as my higher study plans Invovles completing m.b.a after my b-tech . and i am thinking of a start-up here related to Bitcoins in India . there are lots of things to ask then is there any way you could put a light on me regarding this matter or help of any kind i would truly appreciate that .
Yours faithfully
smiker