Bitcoin Forum

interesting

Q: What are the operating costs and management fees? guesstimate?

Interested, but MORE interested in hearing about your dev team.

"If it was easy, everyone would do it."

Operating costs are to be determined once the setup is complete. Management fee will be 15%. I have updated the OP accordingly.

This looks interesting? Any management fee discount for larger investors, let say >50 BTC

Agree that it ain't easy. Members of our team are experienced in software development and electronics. We also have a senior member with Project Management experience.

We expect challenges along the way and are confident that we will be able to tackle them as they come along.

We ran through various numbers before arriving at the 15% management fee which is quite reasonable. We could consider a discount structure at a later stage. This will need some deliberation on our side.

Maybe an IPO (or two) would be a better way to do this.  Liquidity in trading your shares (class A and class B?) can only be a positive for the endeavour, I would have thought.

4000+ BTC (net 15% management costs) for <3000 GH/s with a four month waiting period.

Vs.

80 BTC for >70 GH/s for batch 4.

Ummm...

have you ordered the chips or are you waiting for people to fund this project?
Regards

We are waiting for investors to fund this project and as soon as we hit 780 BTC we will order 10k of Avalon ASIC chips.

It would have made much more sense if you first bought the chips, then asked for funding. You are already a week behind of the first chip buyers, and you know time is everything in this game...

Majority of the people who were interested already bought in - you are somewhat late in the game. Good luck.

3500 + 15% is roughly 4000 BTC

Assuming Avalon Batch 4 is 40BTC, why not just buy 100 Batch 4 units which should hash at 5000GH/s.  No need to cut your fingers or do any work other than setting them up.

Whoops I gave away my plan  ;D

Good luck with that.
It's so massively overpriced, it's not even funny.
Let's assume someone wanted to buy boards with a total of 10000 ASICs on them. 3500 BTC is, whatever, $425000 for 2800 GH/s?
Seriously, man?

The management fee will be taken from the mining income and not from the setup costs. So funds needed is ~3500 BTC

I would REALLY hope Avalon batch #4 to be 25BTCish for 45GH/s and shipped at the beginning of June. If Yifu does that... Well, he'd be my hero. I wouldn't find it so strange given the fact that BFL started to ship indeed.

Yeah, assembly 3,500BTC? I think they mistakenly added a zero, no way you spend 3,500BTC ($425k) to manufacture units with 10k chips.

2800GH/s is the minimum speed our operation will run with.

We will overclock those chips to archive a much better hashrate once we have done the initial setup.

Just thinking out loud, Burnin is proposing a service where he builds a USB-based PCB for 80 Eur which can hold 10 ASICs on it, so the cost of manufacturing a complete board is roughly 50% ASICs and 50% everything else. Your proposal has the "everything else" at 80%, i.e., four times as much as the cost of the ASICs.

Why are your other hardware costs so high?

Yes the upfront cost is only 3500BTC.  Assume it was just one buyer.  Would he get back the full mining return on 2800GH/s?  No, he gets back 85%.  So essentially he would need a 115% ROI more or less to break even since there's a maintenance fee.

Even if you overclock you're only looking at 3TH.

I'm not mocking your plan, just saying the numbers don't really compete with what's out there like burnin's offering as noted above.

Ok. My bad. 15 percent less income works even worse in your favour. As follows:

3500 BTC for 2400 GH/s. Batch 3 gives you 3500 BTC for 3400 GH/s. And since they price according to ROI, batch 4 will be even cheaper.

The price for batch 4 is still unknown. Please remember that at this stage, anyone can only estimate the total cost.

Let's see with the batch 3 costs which are a known item.

An Avalon ASIC unit with 4 modules and PSU costs 101 BTC for 85 Gh/s

That gives 85/101 = 0.84 Gh/s per BTC

Our estimate for 2800 Gh/s is roughly 3000-3500 BTC. That will give roughly the same hashrate of 0.8-0.9 Gh/s per BTC. The assembling and parts costs will be clear once Avalon releases the board design. We have used a conservative figure in our calculations. Any cost savings will be passed along to the investors.

Can you please give numbers before considering it overpriced?

To get 2800 GH/s with the Batch 3 units, you need 33 units at 101 BTC each. That works out to roughly 3350 BTC. Our ballpark estimate is not very far off. Any savings we achieve in assembly and parts will be passed on to the investors.

We expect 2820 GH/s as a base. With overclocking, we could achieve more.

Batch 3 will get you roughly 33 units for 3500 BTC. That is 33x85 = 2890 GH/s, not 3400 GH/s.

As for pricing of batch 4, nothing is known yet.

Practical query, other concerns aside:

I don't follow how investment and returns are related. You say you require 780BTC to order chips. Fine. THen you will require an additional 3500BTC to make the chips go. Ok.

So I invest 100 BTC in this project, my return is...???
I'm not even talking about calculating profits, simply calculating what 1 BTC of investment is supposedly purchasing. The cost of manufacture being relatively unknown on your end makes for a problem.

What happens if you raise 780BTC, to order chips, but you don't raise ??? BTC to create the remaining portion of the project? TS for the investors? Re-sell chips at some point for whatever they are now worth, and return whatever percentage of the initial investment to the people who funded the buy? Would you take a management fee of that as well?

We require an additional ~2300-2800 BTC, not 3500. 3500 BTC is inclusive of the 780 BTC required for the chips.


Given current difficulty, you could get back your investment in less than a month. As difficulty increases, the time for ROI does increase but not by a lot.


The cost of manufacturing is included in the ~3000-3500 BTC rough estimate.


If we get 780 BTC and don't get the remaining portion, then we will see the best viable option. One such option is to re-sell the chips and return the proceeds to the investors. There won't be a management fee in such a scenario. We do hope to get enough funding for the whole plan. We initially had a private investor who was interested in such a venture. That is why decided to see if we could garner interest for the whole thing.

Interesting.

any chance to calculate the estimated ROI ?

I'd like to point out the benefits of this service vs Burnin's manufactured boards. 

• BitcoinOxygen is a one-stop-shop.  They will order the chips and receive them directly.  Burnin will receive the chips from Zefir.  I'm not implying any malicious intent, but when every second counts a few days lost in shipping will add up
• Next, I'm not sure about Burnin's manufacturing strategy, but it appears that he has a metric fuckton of orders already.  He'll probably continue to receive more too.  Hopefully he hires some people to help his assembly, if he doesn't then there will be a huge lag and people will start bitching like he's the next BFL
• BitcoinOxygen's approach is rather simple, you pay up and they do all of the work.  You don't have to wait for someone to ship the chips, you don't have to wait for someone to ship the final product, you don't have to set it up.  You pay up and wait for some return.
• Someone calculated the estimate cost of a 10-chip unit that Burnin builds at 3 BTC.  So the value of 1 BTC = 942 MHash/s
• Applying the same value towards BitcoinOxygen 3500 BTC is the total budget that will have a rate of 2800 GHash/s.  So the value of 1 BTC = 782 MHash/s.  This is a difference of 17% from Burnin's machine.
  

Now, the difference in payouts is that with Burnin you will receive 100% of what you mine.  BitcoinOxygen will payout after a 15% fee + another undetermined fee.  I can understand why many people would be apprehensive to invest, Burnin clearly has a better return but BitcoinOxygen is upfront about their projected costs and they have made conservative estimates so that if they run into issues they don't have to ask for extra money to complete the project.  They both Project a July-ish delivery date. 

There will always be risks involved in anything here, so the question that's most important is who will deliver to you first?  Will it be Burnin's 500th order? or will it be BitcoinOxygen's monster miner?  Every second counts this summer.

I'll probably buy into both

Without Overclocking:
The Value per 1 BTC = 825 MHash/s. Not 782 Mhash/s.

With Overclocking:
The Value per 1 BTC = 1110 MHash/s.

It is not easy to give an accurate picture as there are many variables that affect this. At current difficulty, ROI would be achieved in a month. But three months into the future, difficulty will be higher. How high exactly depends on a number of assumptions.

e.g. organofcorti.blogspot.com forecasts that it will increase about 7 fold by end of July. In that case, ROI will take about six months. With overclocking, it will be four and a half months. He of course assumes that Avalalon batches 1,2 & 3 will have shipped by then, BFL will have shipped and ASICMiner will also have about 100Thps by then. If any of these assumptions do not materialize then difficulty will not increase 7x and ROI will be achieved much earlier.

In short, timing of essence. Miners who get in early will get a better ROI than those who wait.

You cannot estimate ROI with a static difficulty.  The hashrate will continue to increase every two weeks by a large factor - and likely at a ridiculous rate once the raw Avalon chips are available.  CONSERVATIVELY estimating you starting your mining the second week in July, if you somehow ordered today, got your chips in the 10 week shipping schedule projected by Avalon, and did all of your assembly, you are looking at a difficulty of no less than 35,000,000 and likely closer to 50,000,000. 

If you assume the lower 35 mil difficulty, and your overclocking is stable to the max of the chip (3,000,000 MH/S for your 10,000 chips), you will make about 300 bitcoins each week for the first two weeks for a total of 600 bitcoins. 

After those 2 weeks (which will be less than two weeks because the network will be solving blocks faster than every 10 minutes as more Avalon chips come online) the difficulty will jump by another 30% at least... so your next two weeks at 45,500,000 you'll make about 230 coins per week (you will now be at 1060 coins).

The following two weeks will be close to 60,000,000 difficulty... for 175 coins each week and a total of 1410 coins after six weeks of operation. 

Extending this estimate formula out to 3 months gets you to just over 2040 bitcoins in 3 months.

No one can know what the difficulty will be, but these projections aren't out of line and many think the hash rate will double each month until the end of the year and beyond.  I just think it's not reasonable to expect a ROI of 3500 coins within the next 10 to 12 months (or possibly ever) on 3000 GH/S even under the "favorable" conditions outlined above.

If you aren't starting until mid-July at the absolute earliest and you are trying to ROI in 3 months, you really can't have your all-in pricepoint set above 1400 btc.  Even at 2000 btc your product would be more palatable - but 3500 is quite high and I wouldn't expect to see your coins back for quite some time. 

This calculation completely omits the extra 15% admin fee, which will only hurt the numbers above when included.

You are correct that a static difficulty cannot be used for estimation. But no one can be sure what the network hashrates and corresponding difficulty is going to be in the next six months. Projections that say that the hash rate will double each month are not based on any hard data.

See the table below where I have assumed that the difficulty will be 35 million at the beginning of August and increased the difficulty by 15 and 20 percent alternating every two weeks.


If the difficulty is increased by 10 percent every two weeks, then this is the result in seven months:


Also, it is possible that we manage to keep our costs down to 3000 BTC or less. Additionally, with the re-investment plan, we can keep on increasing our hash rate giving better results.

With many factors at play here, there is no question that there are risks. But it is better to get into the game now than later when ROI will take years as difficulty keeps on increasing.

You can probably decrease the incremental increase with each difficulty.  Consistent 15-20% increase may be hard. But remember the cycles will not be 14 days.  Each difficulty will be closer to 10 days.

And 35.000.000 difficulty in August? Keep dreaming. It will be more like 60.000.000.

Plus, we can bet that you won't be able to have all the chips online by August. More by September/October.

The only winner in this project seems to be you.

The whole thing is too fuzzy for me, especially your costs...There are better alternatives for me :P

Correct. The cycles are more like 10-12 days each. I was trying to make some what-if scenarios for different difficulty values. Modifying the calculation as you suggested, it comes up like this:


In reality, no one can actually predict the actual difficulty. We have to see how it plays out.

The important thing to take is that the earlier one gets started on mining, the higher the chances of getting ROI sooner. If someone waits till 2014 to start mining, it might take many years to see any ROI especially if the difficulty really goes above 100 million or so.

Some folks interested in this have asked us to reduce the management fees. After consideration, we have decided to change it to 10%.

I would really like to know what better alternatives are out there. Currently, you cannot order ASICs from Avalon. The pre-orders for batch 2 are being sold on ebay for 30,000-50,000 USD = 200 - 330 BTC.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Avalon-ASIC-Bitcoin-Mining-Rig-Preorder-Batch-2-/271190359628?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3f24347e4c
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Batch-2-Avalon-ASIC-Pre-Order-Bitcoin-Mining-Rig-/321106241910?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4ac36c6976

We do hope to be able to provide a good ROI to those who invest. We have tried to be careful with the cost estimation. It was possible to hype up and say that we could do this project for 2000 BTC or less and get funding. But in the real world, stuff happens and we need to be prepared for contingencies. If we manage to get the project started for less, the extra amount will be paid back to investors.

As time passes and difficulty increases, it is going to take longer and longer to get good returns. Better get started as early as possible.

Time is running out? Yet the address to send payments (https://blockchain.info/address/1VbWxiGEa1d89ZigFuWWeP5CjDJSK6Xdi (https://blockchain.info/address/1VbWxiGEa1d89ZigFuWWeP5CjDJSK6Xdi)) has 2 transactions a total of 18.1 BTC. What's up with that, am I an idiot?

Yes, time is running out to get the project started before the difficulty goes too high. We were planning to order by end of April so we could start operations by end of July. If we don't get enough funds in a feasible time, then we will probably have to discard the idea. If that happens, then anybody who had invested would get back their bitcoins in full.

I have pledged 5BTC to this project, should it materialize.

Investor list updated in post 2 of this thread.

Additional 70 BTC has been pledged.

Just 3462 BTC to go!  :D

I had a long chat on IRC with BTC Oxygen (where he has OP rights in a well-known 275 person channel) yesterday and he might offer bitfunder for managing your shares. But more importantly I trust him now and his competence.

This is why I'm pledging an initial 5 BTC to this project. We could use http://www.pledgebank.com/ to track pledges.

And someone please correct wrenchmonkey's last post, it may be misleading.

At the current costs the ROI will be much better.
Also the price per GH/s is also very good.

1.5GH/s for 1 BTC.

I am shocked because in the PM section you did not request a freaking signed msg from the input address!  :o

Compared to what?

If any issue arises as to who sent the bitcoins, we will require a signed message. Also, dividends will be sent to the input address.

You did not buy chips yet, now that everyone else bought huge batches of avalon chips you will be like,.. the last person on earth to get hands on avalon chips?
Still you raise funds for this. This whole project is nice, but I feel sorry for you: you are too late.
Though the price/gh is good (a lot better than before), it will be too late by the time you get hands on them, i guess. Anyway, are the chips still for sale?

Now if you bought chips from someone else (like batch1) for some extra cost this project should be funded in no time. Acutally I would invest some btc.

just my 2 satoshis

Afaik, Avalon has not shipped the chips to anyone yet. They probably are waiting for enough orders to start production with TSMC. So, once they are done, everyone who ordered would get their chips in a reasonable amount of time.

We do realize that it is late. But we figured better late than never. Many people missed the early ASICs by Avalon because there were doubts whether it would materialize. Now that Avalon has proved that they can produce the needed ASICs, this is an opportunity to get into the mining game.

According to Avalon, these chips will be available until at least end of the year, 2013.

No one has received them yet. Ordering from someone else would add unnecessary costs to the project without providing any real
benefit.


just my satoshi change :)