Bitcoin Forum

Hi everyone, this is my first post to the BC forums. I'm the CTO and creator of SpotCloud.com, a market for buying and selling unused / idle computing capacity based in Toronto, Ontario.

The reason I'm posting is as part of a bit of research into the possibility of adding GPU & bitcoin support to the SpotCloud market.

My question is whether or not this would be of interest to some of the bitcoin users / miners who may have some extra GPU capacity on hand and would like a way to sell it?

Comments and suggestions welcome.

@ruv
http://www.spotcloud.com (http://www.spotcloud.com)

I would be somewhat interested in this as I have several Nvidia cards which aren't really useful for mining.  I would also like to see more information about it.

Sounds interesting. How much would it cost? Guess it depends on that

Currently, the market is CPU and RAM centric. Essentially a buyer deploys a virtual machine to a sellers server infrastructure. The infrastructure (IaaS) software is a free download from the SpotCloud.com site.

Another idea, is an option to pay capacity providers using bitcoins based on current exchange rates. Also, the ability for buyers to use bitcoins would be interesting as well.

@ruv

It's free to signup as both a buyer or seller. We take 30% of anything sold. There is no markup on the buy side.

@ruv

One more point, the two biggest requirements for SpotCLoud other than the actual servers are IP addresses, each instance needs a public IP and bandwidth. So if you have 10 machines with 10 VMs per, you'd need 100 IP's. As well as a home DSL or cable modem won't really cut it. You need at least a T1 or better.

How would you monitor this and ensure you get your cut?  Maybe I don't understand the logistics of the process, but if a customer is using your hardware to mine and moving the coins into his personal wallet, how can you be sure he will pay you? 

Buyers make an up front deposit, 'pay as you go' model. As they use providers compute resources, the platform automatically (real time) debts the buyer and credits the associated seller/provider. At the end of the month any providers who have $50USD or more are sent a check via an automated check writing service.

What I'm thinking is offering an option to be paid in bitcoins, immediately, rather than at the end of the month.

@ruv

If the buyer is buying GPU capacity to mine bitcoins, wouldn't the seller make more by cutting out the middleman (you), and mining themselves?

30% strikes me as a rather large percentage - can you tell me how you arrived at this number?

For larger providers the percentage is lower. Essentially you're selling CPU resources that would otherwise go to waste. So 30% of nothing is, well you get the idea.

@ruv

One more thing, I doubt the buy side use case is for bitcoin mining.

@ruv

Interesting concept!

Why don't you just use the systems to mine for yourself?  Higher ROR that way, no?

I'd imagine it could work like this:
Sell side: You have running servers with GPUs too weak for economic mining.  You sell time on your GPUs to get in a little extra cash
Buy side: You need to do some work which a GPU is suited to but it doesn't make financial sense to buy one.

The only problem is that the kind of machines likely to be running 24x7 are servers, which don't tend to have GPUs fitted, but if you do... may as well make some money off them!

I'm speaking to a few companies that focus on GPU hosting. There also seems to be a lot of unused GPU capacity in the Bitcoin ecosystem now that mining has gotten much more difficult.

@ruv

What use would the GPUs be to buyers?  I'm curious how much software is optimized to use GPUs for purposes other than graphics processing.

Probably various HPC / grid applications mostly.

This is an interesting concept, but the cost would really need to be at the right pricepoint.

As other have mentioned in this thread from a sellers perspective, 30% is alot to lose.

I don't know what kind of hardware you are using, but mine definitely needs way more power under load :)

I'd say the price point is just as important as the percentage taken by the market. But I do see your point.

Just think this from a profit standpoint:

If you generated X bitcoin with Y hashing power, would you really want to rent that for anything less than what you'd be getting from selling bitcoins?
If you're buying Y hashing power, would you want to rent it for more than your making from selling X bitcoin?

Exactly, a classic arbitrage model. Although it might be easier to sell 10 or even 100 hours of GPU /CPU time for 1 bitcoin then it would be to mine that coin depending on the complexity and effort involved in mining a single coin.

@ruv

Interessting i also thougt about it last week, that someone should invent this business type for private users ;-)

1.30 % is no go
start at 3% and go up to 9% MAX. when you have grown up like a big Name like ebay (they also take 9% now in Germany)

2. It becomes an interesting alternative way , when mining is not profitable anymore in 2 Months or so.
ask then again .-)

greets