What is CoinLab Offering?


UPDATE: We have stopped giving out new Loyalty Points as of midnight UTC Sunday 11/25/12.  You may continue to mine on Protected as long as you'd like and continue earning 95/97%.  Redeem pool is being set up now.

The text below will be preserved as-is for archival purposes.

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CoinLab Protected Pool - 95-97% PPS Pool with Protected Earnings
Earn 95% PPS plus Loyalty Points.  When ASICs make GPU mining unprofitable, you can redeem your Loyalty Points to get $2.5 per GH/s per day on submitted shares. Protect the future of your GPU!

97% PPS for users who mine at least 1,125,000 shares in a week (the equivalent of 1 week at 10GH/s with perfect uptime, or 3.5 days with perfect uptime at 20GH/s...).

98% PPS Pool
This is just a simple 98% PPS pool.  No earnings protection is offered.

PPS Pool's rate is now 95%

Worried about GPU Bitcoin Mining becoming Unprofitable?


Many Bitcoin miners are worried about the day when their graphics cards will no longer be able to earn as much as they do now.  When GPUs replaced CPUs for mining, the value of mining on a CPU dropped dramatically, and eventually became completely uneconomical.



We are on the cusp of a new generation of technological improvement as custom chips are being designed for Bitcoin mining (FPGAs and ASICs).  While these new chips are not general purpose computing devices, they are designed to mine Bitcoins at rates 10 to 100 times more efficiently than even GPUs can today.

If Bitcoin prices drop to the marginal cost of mining using specialized hardware, current GPUs could become useless for Bitcoin mining (since you’ll earn less than your electricity costs).

Protect Yourself from a Price Drop

To help protect against a possible price drop, CoinLab is now offering a Bitcoin mining pool, that comes with a minimum price guarantee!  For every share that you mine at today’s prices, we’ll guarantee to pay you the equivalent of $2.50 per GH/s-day ($0.00012427 PPS) in case the current market rate for mining drops below that level.



This is a “loyalty program”; we want to you start mining with us today, and in return we’ll guarantee your income in the future if you stay with us.  We pay a competitive market-rate of 95% pay-per-share (PPS), delivered to you in Bitcoins.  But for each share you earn, you’ll also be able to bank a “Loyalty Point”.  

Example
If you mine with us for 6 months before the price drops below $2.50, you’ll have enough shares to earn the minimum price of $2.50 for the next 6 months (assuming equivalent hash rates during both periods).  Or, you could sell half of your rig, and those loyalty points will last 1/2 the hashing power twice as long: 12 months. Or, double your hashing power and use all of your Loyalty Points up in 3 months.


The current expected earnings from a 1GH/s for 24 hours is $5.37 (using price of $11.7 and difficulty 2190865.9701).  On our 95%PPS pool, you'll be earning $5.10 per 1GH/s per day.

This program gives you protection against three risk factors:

1. Difficulty goes up dramatically - so that earned shares get much fewer Bitcoins per block.
2. The Bitcoin cliff cuts the number of Bitcoins earned per solved block in half (now 50 BTC, new blocks will only pay out 25 BTC) - expected in December 2012.
3. The price of Bitcoins themselves drop to match the marginal cost of mining with custom hardware.

How can CoinLab make this Offer?

We are in the business of building a a world-wide distributed computing service.  While today, you can earn money from mining Bitcoins, we want to be able to bring you other scientific computing jobs that will pay as much or higher than the rate of Bitcoin mining.

So, if you’ll help us build out our network, we’ll commit to providing you with profitable work for your idle GPU cycles.  We’re willing to take the risk that we won’t be able to find higher-value replacement work, in return for your agreeing to join our network.

We’ve identified a number of opportunities to monetize our growing GPU cluster at a higher rate than Bitcoin mining, particularly for NVIDIA cards:  Protein Folding, Computational Finance, and Big Data Analysis, just to name a few. We believe we will be able to monetize computation at a higher rate than Bitcoins before mining profitability takes a serious drop.  However, you probably don’t want to take on our sales risk. If mining earnings drop before our other computation jobs come online then we are willing to eat the difference until then.

We are looking for GPU miners who can give us lots of hashing power with high uptime who are willing to run our custom mining client.  We have structured this program to reward these miners most: the more shares you submit before earnings drop under the price floor, the more Loyalty Point shares you will be able to mine when it would otherwise not be profitable.

The Fine Print

• For every difficulty 1 share (from here, called a credit) you submit above break even (equal to our price floor factoring in our cut - $2.50 / 1GH/s day / 0.95 = ~$2.63 / GH day), you earn 95% PPS for that credit and one Loyalty Point which lets you sell one credit at the price floor ($2.5 / 1GH/s day = $0.00012427 PPS).
• For the next couple months, you can earn credits with the miner of your choice.  Once we release it, we will only accept credits submitted by our custom mining client (co-developed with Con Kolivas, the creator of cgminer), as it will allow us to perform other, more valuable compute jobs when available.  
• Loyalty Point credits can only be redeemed through our custom mining client.
• We may perform other types of computation with your GPU besides Bitcoin mining.  We will calculate your earnings based on the equivalent number of credits your card would have produced for the same amount of work.
• Payments for computation will be in Bitcoin, and occur once per week.  This system will be manually administered at first, so please be patient.  We’ll have a self-service system in the next few months which will automate payouts and sign-ups.
• Payouts will only occur when your balance is at least 1 BTC.  If you wish to withdraw a smaller increment, contact us.
• If you earn more than $600 worth of BTC in one calendar year and are in the US, we may need to send you a form 1099 to report our payments to you to the IRS (we will need your name, address, and US tax id). Miners in this group also get the option of  receiving US dollar payouts, or a mixture of USD and BTC (you can take your electricity costs in USD and keep your profits in BTC). We’re evaluating a means of waiving this requirement, so we’ll keep you posted.
• You can redeem your Loyalty Points by mining on the redeem pool.  See the instructions here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99643.msg1350491#msg1350491
  Loyalty Points are redeemed automatically whenever you mine and the market rate for Bitcoin mining is below $2.50 per GH/s-day.
• Loyalty Points are not transferable.  
• Loyalty Points expire 2 years after the earnings from Bitcoin mining crosses below the price floor of $2.50 / 1GH/s-day.  If the price swings above the price floor and back down, the expiration date is reset.
• Loyalty Points expire after 90 days of account inactivity.  Account inactivity is defined as not submitting any shares and not communicating with us.
• Loyalty Points have no cash value.
• Bitcoin payouts will only be sent to you.  If you want to send them on to someone else, you need to take possession of them from us first.
• Users who submit at least 1,125,000 shares in one week will be paid at the increased rate of 97% PPS.  1,125,000 shares is equivalent to 100% uptime with 10GH/s for one week.  Double the hash rate will earn this many shares in half the time.  (Ex. If you have 15 GH/s, you will reach 1,125,000 shares 66% of the way through the week.) The new week begins each Monday.  Early on-request payouts will be credited at 95% PPS unless you have already earned 1,125,000 shares that week.  
• CoinLab’s services and offerings including this program and the Loyalty Points are subject to Terms and Conditions posted by CoinLab from time-to-time.  Terms related to this offer will made publicly available in the next week.

How do I join?

To sign up for our 95% Protected Pool, go here:
http://pool.coinlab.com/partners/protected/sign-up

To sign up for our 98% 95% PPS pool (no Loyalty Points), go here:
http://pool.coinlab.com/partners/ppspool/sign-up

We'll email you instructions to get started.

So is the current Payout $2.50 Per Day Per 1.0 Ghz?

This smells like a scam. Difficulty doesn't influence price; it's correlated because price influences difficulty. There is not very much reason to expect a major price drop when ASICs are released.

Disclaimer: I run a competing pool, but I consider my argument above to be neutral to that fact.

So I'd have to mine with you and give up my bonus-pool bonuses constantly for a full six months before getting any kind of fixed price?
Hmmmm.
There are downsides, but I'm still remotely interested - My break-even is at about $1/GH/day looking at electricity costs alone.

Will you be offering some way to mine at some set $ rate for miners who join after ASICs hit production? I could easily sign a contract of several months if the price was right.

Also, the $/GH rate will likely be irrelevant for many calculations (I'm presuming that much of what you do will have nothing to do with SHA256), so how will payouts be calculated in that case?

Also Luke - yes they're right on that point, but if they can find a market for the sort of distributed computing we've been doing for the past year or three then it's an interesting business. I still need some convincing that this'll be successful though, I have to say.

I think looking at the second graph 95% PPS is around $5 per day, is what i'm seeing. If i understand this correctly.

They are saying if the price drops below $2.50 they will still pay you @ $2.50

Ohhh so you're mining for crap now and more or less paying for an insurance with your mining earnings?


I will take my losses when they come thank you very much

or maybe buy a gpu per week until that comes around and I won't even notice the difference

How's life under a rock? 

CoinLab gets $500,000 in VC for bitcoin-related gaming startup

I agree, I should definitely not be giving added value to miners that isnt available to them from the other pools. Shame on me.

I would love to understand how you got to the byzantine part without thread crapping here so if you wish to elaborate on that feel free to pm or post in the bonuspool thread.

Hey as long as the music is good I'm happy!   

Fixed prices will begin whenever the expected output of 24 hrs of 1GH/s drops below $2.5.   Each share you earn before then allows you to redeem one share at the price of $2.5 per 24hrs at 1GH/s.


Once we have High Power Compute jobs online, we plan to offer a self-serve pool with BTC or USD payouts for contributing GPU compute to our cluster. Until we are at capacity, we plan to give miners who have been with us longest priority for getting into this program. The first miners to start in this program will be the first to have a chance to do more lucrative HPC work.

We don't plan to offer any programs that ensure a price floor for miners starting after expected earnings have dropped below our guaranteed price floor.

Each compute job will return its own kind of work unit.  HPC work units will be calibrated to earn an equal or greater number of shares as would have been earned from bitcoin mining.