Bitcoin Forum

FPGA.contract is an FPGA only mining company. A small FPGA cluster will be built out of X6500s (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40058.0) and operated by me. 100% of all revenue is distributed to shareholders as weekly dividends. Operating costs (electricity, maintenance, etc.) are covered by the dividends paid to the 500 shares held by the company (amounts to 8.3% of the 6000 total shares). No revenue is held for future expansion.

The official FPGA.contract website can be found at contract.fpgamining.com (http://contract.fpgamining.com). You can check on the hash rate and see a graph of the total hashrate for the last 24 hours. It also pulls info from GLBSE including ticker, dividends, and motions. If you subscribe, you'll get an email when a new motion has been raised, which I think is very helpful because GLBSE itself has no way to do this. We'll also be posting updates there, so it would be a good idea to subscribe if you're a shareholder.

Links:
FPGA.contract Page (http://contract.fpgamining.com)
FPGAMining.com (http://fpgamining.com)
X6500 FPGA Miner Thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40058.0)
Asset on GLBSE (https://glbse.com/asset/view/FPGA.CONTRACT)

Just purchased my shares.  Can't wait for this to fully take off.

How much are shares and where do you apply?

Should have included the share price in the first post. Added it now.

To buy shares, you need to create an account at glbse.com and deposit BTC. Then use the asset ID FPGA.contract (case sensitive, I believe).

Creating an account at GLBSE is a bit different than most sites. Your browser stores the account information client side, so the password you enter will only serve to keep people out of the account if they have access to your computer. To access your account on a different machine, you will need to export your public and private key and import it on the second machine. I remember seeing a guide on this before but can't seem to find it now.

I'm waiting for a first dividends, then maybe I will buy more shares. Since mining is no longer profitable to me, I'm considering to convert earned BTC into shares, so maybe i will lose less ;) Or everything if this is some sort of scam...

It would be silly of me to run this as a scam, given that my real business is in making and selling FPGA boards. Why destroy my reputation to run off with a couple hundred BTC from the sales of these shares?

Although it certainly doesn't prove that this isn't a scam, here are some screenshots from the account at Asrbitcoin (until Eligius gets up and running again):

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13472215/hashrate_graph.png

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13472215/arsbitcoin_stats.png

When dividends are made, any balance in the FPGA contract wallet will be distributed to shareholders. The first dividend will be this weekend.

Thanks for your investment!

Just an idea, can we move the mining to nmcbit or some other similar pool that does PPS and merged mining until Eligius is back up?

Wow, someone bought a significant amout of shares. You may now run few boards, not only one ;)

Wow indeed...there were 4400 or so shares outstanding last night, only 1686 now.

And it may be a reaction to info that you will pay first dividends this weekend. Then share holder will want to sell shares...
But since it is just a begining it maybe very difficult to achive reasonable profits...
So, alot of headroom for speculators and share price... But every stock exchange works that way, right? Freedom of choice, sell or buy, pay more or less...
Just a thought....

Dividends have been paid!

Despite not actually mining anywhere near full capacity (only one board right now) I decided to pay a bonus dividend as a thank you for the great positive reaction I've received from this. I paid a dividend of 9.59 BTC, which is the expected revenue for a full week of mining with the full system. Divided over the 4392 outstanding shares, the dividend per share was 0.00218351 BTC.

Indeed, I may only confirmed that...
So, its probably a good time to buy more shares ;)

What is the current cost per BTC in this adventure?

0.25 BTC per share.

Im going buy 120 shares just for a punt. Just waiting for the BTC to be confirmed :) Worth a gamble :)

I put FPGA.contract as an asset, requested to but 120 shares at 30BTC and now its sitting in 'orders'

Do i need to do anything else?

THanks

Bonus received, thanks. Do you plan to issue more shares to keep share price at a fixed 0.25 ?

If you go in to GLBSE and click Portfolio it will show you what you own.  Its the easiest way to see if your trade has executed.  I'm guessing it hasn't based on what you said.  In the buy screen, you'd want to put FPGA.contract as the asset, 120 shares, and the final line you put in the amount you are willing to pay per share, in this case 0.25.

Also, look out for the "short_btc" bug. It seems that if you place your order before your deposit is confirmed, or even too soon after it is confirmed, it will get stuck waiting for you to make a deposit even though the funds are there. If it says "short_btc" under "status" on the Orders page, just cancel it and place the order again.


I won't issue more shares unless a motion passes by 2/3 majority, as required in the contract. If more shares are issued, it would be at the going market price, I suppose. Doesn't that make the most sense?

Cheers, i missed the 0.5 charge so was insufficent funds :) Waiting now and will purchase once its all ready. Hoping these will come into there own and its worth a bit of a gamble i think, I'd pay £250 for a 400 m'hash card so these arnt far from been worth while and the power saving will make that up (even if it will be about 2+ years at the current rate :))

Thanks ;)

It does make sense to issue more shares at face value, if you always back your issue with new hashing power.

There is only a 0.5 BTC charge if you are creating a new asset...buying doesn't have a transaction fee.  Did you click "New Asset" in GLBSE?  What you want to hit is "Buy", then put in FPGA.contract as the asset on the first line, 120 shares on the second line, and 0.25 on the third line.

Eligius is back up! http://eligius.st/~artefact2/5/1FPGAxkfHskMq9fg2gbAWhPrnqwXydbX93

I've been pointing the X6500 and my two GPUs at it for the last few hours. As I've said before, there could be a lot of downtime with the FPGA board when I'm working on the software or running other tests. To make up for that, I'll keep the GPUs running so that we have some steady income.

Almost all shares are sold out...
I'm just wondering, it is possible that you will share with us a worker name and password to eligius? I'm considering to setup it as a backup server. After all, shares submitted by my rig will return in form of dividends (well, few percent of it ;) )
Maybe other users will go that route and this will increase value of shares... It may pay off in time...

I noticed after following the link to our miners that we need to register an NMC address so we can collect the namecoins.  It doesn't make sense to let part of the reward go to waste.


Eligius doesn't require worker names or passwords.  The worker name is just the address you want the payout to go to, and the password can be anything.  To set it up as your backup, the worker name would be 1FPGAxkfHskMq9fg2gbAWhPrnqwXydbX93 and choose anything for the password.  More info can be found at:  http://eligius.st/wiki/index.php/Getting_Started

You're right, all shares are almost gone. Should I raise a motion to issue more? If we did, I would personally buy at least a few hundred shares myself. This would be for an increase in total hash rate, not to dilute the value of each share.


You're right, I haven't set up merged mining yet, but I plan to soon.


Yep, that's what's so cool about Eligius!

Ok, it's done. But I don't know if it's working. Some shares are accepted but I don't see any increase in hashrate on stats page...

Well, when last share will be sold the price will start depend on share holders. It's just how stock exchange works...

I'd like to have the final 230 shares sold before we go out and issue more.

Ok, good point. I'll probably buy about that many, but I'll give others the opportunity first.

I'm right now adding up all of the current holdings as a result of the IPO. This will determine how many boards we will be able to afford. Remember that I calculated 8 boards for 5000 shares (1250 BTC) when the exchange rate was at $3.65. The markets really crashed right after the IPO, so we're definitely going to have somewhat less. I've been exchanging BTC for USD as shares are sold, so it's time to take a look now at the total USD raised.

Wow, it looks like you added about 400 MH/s! Thanks for your contribution!

As for the share price question, yes, the price can be set by the "hand of the market," but FPGAs aren't sold in BTC, unfortunately. If the shares sell for more, the BTC will be converted into USD and as many boards as we can afford will be purchased. If it looks like we can buy an additional board for say, 200 BTC, then we can issue enough shares to raise that much BTC at whatever is the current market price for shares.

It's a little bit of a confusing concept, I know. In a sentence, the Share <-> BTC <-> USD conversions might fluctuate, but in the end the only constant thing is USD <-> FPGAs. That's what the contract is based on, and what will ultimately determine our earnings.

Something like that, for test. I can see now a spike ;) If primary pool will fail, theres should be over 800 MH/s added. So, if more share holders will follow my steps dividends should skyrocket ;)

Summary of holdings:

As of right now, 4770 shares have been sold at 0.25 BTC, for a total of 1192.5 BTC. I've been exchanging this for USD as it comes in, trying to get the best possible exchange rates, but hedging against the market dropping further. Mostly, this meant setting up a lot of sell orders at various levels. Right now, the current balances are: $2771.53 and 255.34 BTC.

If the BTC was converted to USD right now ($2.65), this would be $676.65, for a total of $3448.18.

If we include the 230 remaining shares, this is 57.5 BTC, or $152.38. Because I will buy those extra shares if no one else does, we can assume they are sold for calculation purposes. This brings the grand total of holdings to approximately $3600.

This is quite a bit short from the $4560 I originally budgeted (21% less). This shouldn't be a surprise because the market is currently 27.4% down from the price at the time. Subtracting $100 for the PSU and various parts, that leaves $3500 for FPGA boards. At $560/board, this is only enough to buy 6.25 boards. I'm willing to lower the price per board to $545, given that those that pre-ordered can currently buy a board at $560 and I promised that this company would get the boards at a lower price than anywhere else. This brings us to 6.4 boards. I suggest issuing at least enough shares to buy that additional 3/5ths of a board. This would be $327, or 125 BTC, or 500 shares at 0.25/share.

If I've lost you with all these numbers, please let me know and I can either send you my spreadsheet or write a more clear explanation.

im jsut waiting for money to transfer over im buying 40 shares.

So are you going to raise a motion to release additional shares?

Yes, when all shares have sold. Only 166 left so this could be very soon.

All shares from the IPO have been sold!

I raised a motion to issue 500 additional shares, which should be enough to bring our 6.4 boards up to 7. You can't really mine with 2/5ths of a board, so it makes a lot of sense to me!

The motion will pass with 3667 votes, or fail with 1834 nay votes. The motion will expire in one month (Nov. 24).

I personally am interested in buying this many shares if no one else is, so please vote yes for my sake! :)

Just voted my shares yes.  Assuming my pending deposits show up while shares are available I will be buying.

Thanks, zapeta!

I'm still learning to use GLBSE, so I realize now I should have put the name of the asset in the motion. I hope you folks with big portfolios can tell which asset this came from...

1) You should first fulfill your promises and build first 6 FPGA cards and give their photos :)
to prove and describe the setup (might be there will be USB-performance or other issues?)

After that it will be logical to issue more shares with the promise to setup proportional amount of new FPGA cards.

2) What be the price of new shares?
Will they cost more, because of exchange rate drop ?

If not - it will be unfair to previous holders

The current tally on the motion is:

Yea: 4008
Nea: 317

So, the motion passes. I will issue 500 additional shares, but at what price? It looks like there were a few trades after the IPO ended at higher prices:

Price, Volume
0.29990, 3.00
0.29990, 1.00
0.29000, 1.00
0.30000, 3.00
0.30000, 12.00

What do you guys think, what's the right way to price it? Based on the last price? Some kind of weighted average? The current weighted averages based on time:

4h: 0.299 (4 shares)
12h: 0.2577 (128 shares)
24h: 0.2519 (509 shares)

I'm leaning towards the 24 hour average, as that is the generally accepted method for the BTC-USD rate. Please let me know your thoughts on this.

The price should be more than ~0.2616 (calculated from $2.5 per 1 BTC),
otherwise you will not achieve your management goal to buy one more FPGA

Yes, totally agree. I need some namecoins to register .bit domain

That's a good point, but the number of shares should vary based on how much money is needed, not the price per share. At the current exchange rate and the 24h average price per share, this should work out fine. If it's a few bucks short, I'll cover it.


Unfortunately, GLBSE won't allow you to pay dividends in NMC. Any earned from merged mining would have to be converted to BTC before paying to shareholders.

Might be you should wait till 24 November, when the poll will be closed, because
one can change his decision, because he have no all the information (about the price of new issues).
Right now the votes are
Yea votes: 3964 / Nay votes: 361
Which is less then 4008

If it will change before poll closing - then you will have no justification for that movement.

This is a good point. I'll wait for now, especially because the price per share isn't settled yet.

In other news, I moved the mining to btcserv.net because of the high PPS offered (due to merged mining). The fact that it only pays in BTC eliminates the need for the NMC->BTC conversion. This simple move increased our earnings by 13%.

That's great!

Now we are lookingreading forward to the information about farm building progress.

Btcserv is nice small pool but they have problems with payment. I'm waiting over 1 week for my 3 BTC. Becuse this round last almost 15 days the buffer was drained... They don't have enough hashing power to solve blocks quickly and resupply buffer. So it's better to get back to eligius.

Slush's pool also good, and support merged mining

Once a price per share is decided I don't think it makes any sense to wait until the end of November to issue the shares since the vote has passed.  It doesn't make sense to wait a month to bring the additional mining hardware online, and based on the market trades there is some demand for the shares.

I think $0.26 is a fair price...close to the 12h moving average, rounded up.

I haven't used BTCserv, but if they have payout problems that could be a problem for us.  If we are looking for a way to convert the mined namecoins to BTC easily, the nmcbit.com pool has a button in the interface to cash out NMC to BTC automatically.  It might save you a step in the process, and I haven't had any problems getting payouts from them.

I agree, but I also understand the desire to wait until the vote is more definitive. The current tally is 4418/361. This is 86.8% of shares voting, and I'm sure CNN would call it for the yeas at this point. Still, I want to give more people the chance to chime in with an opinion about the share price before I go and do anything rash. I'll check in on it again later today.

Thanks for the tip about btcserv. I switched to nmcbit as of now. I'll try to get merged mining on Eligius going tomorrow, as well as set up mining proxy. I never had the need for that with my little GPU rig before. I always just relied on a a few cron jobs to make remote monitoring easy, but it would be better to have a more reliable fail over setup for this system. This also gives me the chance to thoroughly test the mining software, which is still very alpha.

I don't understand the difference between
issuing more shares to buy 7-th FPGA and
issuing more shares to buy 7-th AND 8-th FPGA.

If the design allows to attach more cards, why not to add them up to complete initial design ?

I hear that the limit is around 128 usb devices for one computer ???

So, I want to see the thing in operation for some time,
and then to invest in more FPGA-s (might be much more than just 1..2).

did mining stop? http://eligius.st/~artefact2/5/1FPGAxkfHskMq9fg2gbAWhPrnqwXydbX93

thanks for the info. can I check the balance/hashrate there, too?

I agree, as well. I especially like 8 because it's an even number. :) Let's wait until we settle how to release this additional 500 shares, then we can begin a new motion for an extra board. I thought the 500 shares would be a no brainer, because what will we do with a fraction of a board, but this is a democracy, so we need to agree on what to do (at least 2/3s of us do).


What I'd really like to do is set up a public monitoring page which pulls from the API for whatever pool(s) the system happens to be mining at. This is what I did for my GPU rig originally, so it wouldn't have to be completely from scratch. I'll definitely have this up and running by the time the full system is built.

For now, you can see the hashrate on the http://www.nmcbit.com/statistics under user 'fizzisist.'

I saw this motion on glbse. Unfortunately that web interface doesn't seem to tell you which Asset the motion relates to :(

I want you to publish road map (which tasks should be done in which order) and main milestones.
When boards will be purchased, when farm will be physically assembled, when software will be set up, when operation starts, when additional miscellaneous works will be done.

I've been getting a lot of questions from people that are confused by GLBSE's unusual web site. I can't seem to find a definitive guide to this anywhere, so I'll write it up here.

Here are the steps to create an account and purchase shares on GLBSE.

Create an account in the web client.
The web client can be found at https://glbse.com/client/glbse/index.html (https://glbse.com/client/glbse/index.html)
1) On that page, create a password and you will then be logged in to the client.
2) On the Account Management page, click "Register a new account."
3) Enter a name for the account and click "Generate new key pair" at the bottom.
4) Click "Register." You'll then be taken back to the Account Management page.

Login to the account.
From the Account Management page, click "Use" next to your new account.

Buy the shares.
1) You can look up the outstanding sell offers to get an idea of the share price. You can also make a lower bid. To look at the orders for an asset, click "Asset" on the left side. Enter the asset ID, which is the ticker code for the asset. Ours is FPGA.contract, and this is case-sensitive. A good place to look for historical prices is the charts page: http://charts.glbse.com/markets/ (http://charts.glbse.com/markets/)
2) After deciding on the price you will offer and the number of shares you want, you need to deposit some BTC. Click "Deposit" on the left side and send some BTC to the address shown. There are no fees to deposit or to buy shares, so you can send the exact amount you will need.
3) I believe it will wait for 6 8 confirmations before the balance will show up in your account.
4) When the funds are available, click "Buy" on the left side. Enter the asset ID, the number of shares you want, and the price per share you are willing to pay.
5) Click the "Buy" button.
6) You can then check on your order by clicking on "Order" on the left side.

Backup your account.
The next thing to do is to export your account to somewhere safe, because it is not saved on the GLBSE server.
1) Click on "Account List" to go back to the Account Management page.
2) Click "Export Accounts."
3) You can copy the text shown to a file on your computer, but I recommend you first encrypt the text. Click "Encrypt" at the bottom and enter a password.
4) Paste the text into a plain text file on your computer.
5) If you want to access the account from other computers, you will need this file the first time you do this. I recommend emailing the file to yourself so that you can easily access it from anywhere, and to keep a back up offsite.

Please let me know if I left anything out or you have any other questions!

Edit: Fixed the number of confirmations. Thanks, Arsen!

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/806/how-do-i-develop-web-applications-for-bitcoin (http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/806/how-do-i-develop-web-applications-for-bitcoin)

Yeah, that seems like a major flaw with the web client. In the future, I'll remember to put in the asset name.


Good idea! Right now, the plan is as follows:

1) The next week or so should be spent ironing out the software and setting up a robust mining operation with failover, public monitoring, etc.

2) Get a few more prototype boards built and mining. We already have a few extra PCBs from the prototype run so this can be done more quickly than it will take to get the large order finished and shipped to customers who have pre-ordered. This is important to test the stability of a multi-board system. I hope to have these in about 2 weeks, maybe slightly longer.

3) Get the rest of the boards made. These will be a part of the mass produced order we expect to start in about a week. The finished boards should arrive back here about 3 weeks after that, or 1 month from now.

4) Assemble the system and turn it all on! Lots of photos will be in order at that point, as well as a celebratory beer, I'd say. :)

The finish line then appears to be in 4-6 weeks (to be conservative) to get the system mining at full capacity. Until then, I'll be distributing all earnings we get, however small. I'm making no promises of repeat bonus dividends like that first one, but who knows! ;)

I'm not the most technical with this but i thought this might be interesting....

http://semiaccurate.com/2011/10/25/xilinx-sets-new-fpga-record/

We have been discuss this in another topic. This chip costs 30.000$ So, propably we will never see it in our whole life ;)

haha, i see. Just something i came across and thought it might be interesting :)

Has anyone considered forming a research group as a non-profit and ask for some chip sample of some hardware?
The rules are pretty simple and easy. Basically, we cant use the chip its self in a item for sale. We can however use that chip in the design or a demo unit to show and test applications. Detailed information regarding the projects using donated and sample hardware would have to be detailed, but would totally be worth it.

Companies will give out products like this. 3M over years has sent boxes to my door without even letting me know what it is until I open it and find its a resistor kit with some advancement, or sheets of polycarb with only a paper saying thank you and not to resell.

I have workshop commcial space in Southern California near LAX, if anyone is interested in building a hardware  building club related to FPGA and other hash/bitcoin based hardware, I would be willing to provide the work/meeting spot.

Otherside of pond :(

well on another  not looks like a share is going for .3 i wounder what it will be in another week i think if it got to like .5 a share that would be a good time to release the 500 new shares we wanted to release.

The tally on the motion is 4871 yeas to 315 nays. This is 94.3% of shares voting, so I would consider this motion passed. For it to be blocked, the 404 remaining shares would need to vote nay, and 1115 yea shares would need to switch their vote to nay.

The price per share will be 0.26 BTC. This is the weighted average for the last 100 trades, rounded down to a nice number.

Also, I forgot to mention in the motion that I was supposed to reserve 10% of shares to cover operational costs. So, these will be a freebie, and the 500 reserved shares will then account for only 8.3% of the total shares.

The shares have been issued. Get 'em while their hot! :)

You misunderstood my question.
What is the price for a one BTC mined in this contract.

Interesting question, but I'm not exactly sure how to answer it. Do you mean what is the $/MH cost of the mining hardware? Assuming each board gets 250 MH/s (it should get at least that) and each board is $545 (special deal only through this contract), the system will be cost $2.18/MH/s.

Or do you mean the electricity costs? At the current difficulty, it should be around $0.35/BTC. To keep things really simple, I won't be subtracting this from the revenue. All revenue goes straight to shareholders, although I reserved 8.3% of shares for myself so that the dividends I get should roughly cover the electricity costs.

I'm confused. Did you issue the 500? It seems so, since the number of shares jumped from 5500 to 6000.

It also seems you issued them for 0.4 BTC/share and 50 are left to be bought?

They were issued for .26 and all of them were bought within a day, the orders you now see are not from the IPO.

allright, I see the post now. Sorry, didn't see it before. Thanks for clarifying.

Ugh, how did I miss this post...*rage*

You just need to ask, how many FPGA-s can be connected (what are power constraints and how many USB-ports remains free).
After that it will be possible to raise a new motion to add few more FPGA-s, i think

Maybe it makes more sense to issue new shares at market price, or at least a little higher.

so what kinda time fram befor all the fpgas are up and running?

I believe low running costs is the primary benefit of FPGAs.

Yep, and with the latest difficulty, it just dropped to $0.291 per BTC.

Bought some shares here.  Let's get this farm up and running :D

Any plans for Cacti stats ?  I know Luke-Jr's pool is back up, hopefully you've registered your address for NMC ?  The extra NMC could be kept and sold depending on the market rate, or sold on the spot.

Dividends have been paid for the week of 10/24!

Earnings for the week totaled 3.2514542 BTC, which has been distributed to shareholders. This means a dividend of 0.000541909 BTC/share.

Current holdings:

After the IPO and the additional share issue, I tallied up the total raised. We now hold $3832 and 59.5 BTC, or about $4000 total. I will get this turned into some more FPGA boards ASAP! See the planned timeline here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49166.msg593719#msg593719).

Question.
If I will mine on Eligius to 1FPGA... address earnings will automaticly come to you? I want to support and 30min of hashing power per day cost me only 1$ per month, so why not ;)

Absolutely, and the payouts will all be distributed to shareholders. Thanks for the support!

That's basically a donation to the shareholders, right? Well, thanks a lot Dexter!

Yes, indeed. But I'm a shareholder too ;) So, part of that will return too me. And imagine when all shareholders will do the same! It costs only 1$ per month (at least running my rig half a hour per day at 800MH/s) and dividends may double or even triple they value ;) Not too mention that value of share may also go up. I know that I'm idealist but with some time it may be worth alot more that single $ per month... Many says that they will mine just for support of bitcoin even with loss. Loss of 1$ per moth is just a one beer less, I think I will live without one beer ;) 

I'm not about to take the $1 out of my beer budget but I may throw a little mining power this way, I would like to see the share prices jump.

Dividends will not double or triple. It's more in the range of +1% at most. Running 800MH/s 1/48th of the time is equal to running 17 MHash/s all the time.

About "imagine all shareholders do the same": well, you then have 2 groups of shareholders: One group does not contribute and one group contributes hashpower to varying degrees. The profit however will be distributed by the number of shares each person holds. A pool is a fairer way to share hashpower income, I'd say, because it distributes the profits by amount of contributed hashpower.

As for pumping the share value by adding hashpower: That might actually work, since some (potential) investors will judge the value of the stock mainly by looking at the dividend (which is temporarily artifically incresed) and the value might well rise. I'll keep that in mind should I ever want to sell my shares ;)

Well, I've done my homework for today. 1.5 hour of one 6950 at 350MH/s. Enjoy dividents ;)

Thank you!

Thanks for your generosity! If folks really want to do this, I can create a worker on the proxy for them. We almost have a site set up with stats, just a few final touches and I'll post a link. If you send shares to the proxy, you'll be able to see the contribution on that page. Let me know if you're interested in this and I'll PM you a worker name and pass.

In other news, I just received a nice big box from Newegg! Here's a photo of the asset's current inventory:

http://fpgamining.com/wiki/images/1/18/Contract_stuff.jpg

So where are you mining?  Looking at http://eligius.st/~artefact2/5/1FPGAxkfHskMq9fg2gbAWhPrnqwXydbX93 seems to show that you are mining at multiple places since the hash rate is not consistent.

I'm interested in buying shares (waiting for funds to transfer to GLBSE right now), but I would be willing to invest more if I could see stats.  Maybe you have a link posted and I'm just missing it.

The site is live! Here's the link: contract.fpgamining.com (http://contract.fpgamining.com)

You can check on the hash rate and see a graph of the total hashrate for the last 24 hours. It also pulls info from GLBSE including ticker, dividends, and motions. If you subscribe, you'll get an email when a new motion has been raised, which I think is very helpful because GLBSE itself has no way to do this. We'll also be posting updates there, so it would be a good idea to subscribe if you're a shareholder.

The site was created by shareholder kakobrekla, so we can all thank him for his hard work!

The site is live! Here's the link: contract.fpgamining.com (http://contract.fpgamining.com)

You can check on the hash rate and see a graph of the total hashrate for the last 24 hours. It also pulls info from GLBSE including ticker, dividends, and motions. If you subscribe, you'll get an email when a new motion has been raised, which I think is very helpful because GLBSE itself has no way to do this. We'll also be posting updates there, so it would be a good idea to subscribe if you're a shareholder.

The site was created by shareholder kakobrekla, so we can all thank him for his hard work!
[/quote]

Very nice indeed!

kakobrekla, care to publish an address for donations for making the site?

So am I computer illiterate or does http://contract.fpgamining.com not exist?

Works fine for me.

works for me.


maybe dns troubles?

Thanks, I used one of my proxies and I can now view it.

I'm glad you like the page and taking suggestions if anything else is needed.

As per request, I added a donation address on the bottom of 'About us' page.

WORKER   SHARES   SPEED EST.
fpga0   A: 0    R: 0   0 Mhash
gpu0   A: 453    R: 7   2195 Mhash
gpu1   A: 196    R: 6   963 Mhash
A: 649    R: 13   TOTAL: 3158 MHASH

!!!

please add:
1) a "roadmap" page to the site, with estimates from this post:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49166.msg593719#msg593719

2) and add link to charts at the main page (it is inconvenient to move from price to charts through "Links" page)

Dividends have been paid for this week!

Earnings for the week: 3.2548021 BTC. Amount paid to shareholders: 3.2548021 BTC! That's 0.00054246 BTC/share.

If you saw the stats page last night, you were probably quite shocked by some huge hashrates, as notme saw. No, we didn't suddenly increase our rate by 5. It looks like our monitoring setup just didn't handle the time change very well. Instead of showing the number of shares in the last 15 minutes, it showed the number of shares in the last hour and 15 minutes!

We have it all fixed now, so back to our paltry 850 MH/s or so. Sorry about that! We're working hard to get the rest of these boards ready as soon as possible!

And my hashrate on Eligius not included... Yesterday it was almost 2 hours of 330 MH/s ;)

Done and done! Thanks, kakobrekla!

Why first FPGA gives hash rate less than 250 Mhash/sec ?

Is it because only one of two FPGA used ?
The total hashrate then can be approximated as 114 * 2 * 7 = 1697 Mhash/sec, right ?

ARS pay better/quicker and more accuratly than any other site. Eligus sucks rotten eggs. Nearly as bad as deepbit.

Try ARS and see the difference ;) Server 2 has less than 0.3% stales

Yeah, one FPGA had stopped getting new work. I'm still working on the software all the time and was trying out something new that didn't work so well. :)

By the end of the month, I'll have a bunch of boards here, so the 7 GLBSE boards can mine away undisturbed why I hack at stuff using a different board. For now, this is the only X6500 I have, so it's main job is still development and testing. You guys are just picking up all the revenue earned during that testing.

Yes, your calculation of the total hashrate is correct, but you can use 125 MH/s as the single board hash rate. 114 is simply an estimate based on the previous 15 minutes, which was slightly unlucky for this example.

125 * 2 * 7 = 1750 MH/s is what we should expect, but I'm sure that we'll get even higher with improvements to the firmware.

i wish i was a millionaire, or even just rich with 1/2 mil as i would plummet 50-100K into your venture at a blink of an eye.

No risk, No gain ;) I want those 500 extra shares :P

I have a question regarding the 500 to be issued @0.26 BTC/share.

How can we buy some of these? Is it advisable to have buy order @0.26 BTC/share? Would that be filled as soon as the shares are issued? Or will this be like a "normal sell" and the best orders will be filled first?

those shares were already issued

Actually, those 500 shares were released on Oct. 26th, so they are long gone. If you guys really want more shares, we should start another motion. I would like to prepare the text of the motion to be a little more explicit this time, something like:

Motion to release additional shares to buy an 8th X6500 board.
The share price will be equal to the going market rate, based on the 24h or 200 share weighted averaged, whichever has a greater volume. The number of shares offered will then be determined by the amount of BTC needed to raise $545, plus 10% additional shares for management overhead.

I will set a time limit on this one for something like one week, so that it isn't lingering around long after the motion is passed. As far as I can tell, there's no way to remove a motion or mark it as passed/failed in the GLBSE client.

At the current rates, this would be around 0.5 BTC/share and about 400 shares.

If there seems to be interest in doing this, I'll gladly put it to a vote for the shareholders to decide.

thought i was able get A few the other day :)

I'd say yes :)

I'm currently selling 100 shares @ 0.48.

I don't think it makes sense to issue more shares unless you need more money to buy assets. If people want to buy shares, they'll have to buy the market price.

I just didn't want to miss the opportunity to buy freshly issued shares.

In general, I think new shares should be offered at some market price average.

I for one would vote no until we have the existing orders up and running.

+1

Same here...

Ok, sounds good to me. If we decide to issue additional shares later, it should be a much shorter delay from the time the shares are sold to the time the boards are up and running anyway.

Just to be clear, if additional shares are issued, it will always be at the market price. We can discuss exactly how to calculate this market average when that time comes.

Dividends have been paid for the week of 11/7!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 4.24112585 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00070685 BTC

In other news, the boards are now being produced and expected to arrive here around Thanksgiving (11/24), as long as they don't hit any serious road blocks.

watching

How about a motion to release more share to current investors :)

What exactly are you proposing?

i want more shares :) haha

How does distributing shares proportional to existing shares make any sense at all?  It will just lower the dividend per share and everyone will get the same total dividend.

Unless it's a rights issue. Each share holder has the right, but not the obligation, to purchase x shares for every y shares they own at a price of z, which is at a q % discount to the 5 day weighted average price.

Companies do it all the time. Can't easily do it on GLBSE in its current form though.

Not even that, I want them all before any of you get them haha :P

You took me too serious serious sam's :) I'm ok with my lowly 188 for now, just like boost my personal interest in it :)

I'll sell you a share for 10 BTC.

I bet you would :)

Well, you have 3760% more shares than I do.

:) I cant afford buy these things so this is the best alternative. Maybe in the future but for now i like this :)

Yes, i see your point :)

You can vote on the motion from within your GLBSE account, no?

As a stockholder I do agree as this would dilute the current worth of the stocks making every stock slightly less worth, the only reason I believe releasing more stocks is if the company needs more investment to expand or invest in more equipment. In that case the worth of the stocks will increase as there is more miners running :)

Wow, lots of discussion about this! Currently, there are no plans to release more shares. The motion on GLBSE is old and has already passed. Those additional 500 shares that were released raised enough money to buy an additional X6500 board for the cluster.

If additional shares are released it will always be to buy additional hardware, so the dividend per share should stay roughly the same. I think it makes sense to raise a motion to release some more shares after the 7 board system is up and running. This is expected to be before the end of the month.

I'll keep you all updated of any new developments!

Did you talk to mtgox about the possibility of shareholders privilege to buy shares before other people?
Is it possible to issue obligations instead of shares?

Anybody knows what is happening with GLBSE?
No charts available :(. I know that I can see everything with assets menu but charts are very helpful.

And to the topic. If you want buy shares then buy. There are many sell oferts. If new shares will be issued, price will be averaged from latest transactions, so propably higher then lowest ask on GLBSE. Correct me if I'm wrong.

would it make you feel better if we all had half as many shares (3000 in summa) and the price was twice as high as it is now?

I have no idea what's wrong with charts.glbse.com and it's been down for some time. You can always look at the FPGA.contract site (http://contract.fpgamining.com/) for the last price, max bid, and min ask, which is pulled directly from GLBSE, not the charts site. If the charts site continues to be down, we could think about adding some additional info to our site.

Yes, if folks want to increase their relative ownership share of the cluster, by all means, buy some of the shares that are already offered by other shareholders. The lowest ask right now is 0.49 BTC.

If additional shares are released, the price will be based on a weighted average, which right now is probably near 0.49. Unfortunately, I don't know how to figure out the weighted average without the charts site, so hopefully it'll be back up before that time comes. Anyone know if this is possible to figure out by looking through the twitter ticker @GLBSE? As far as I can tell, that ticker doesn't give any indication of actual sales, only orders.

It took me a while to find it, as my bookmarked links for the api were out of date, but this link https://glbse.com/GLBSE/api/trades/asset/FPGA.contract gives a list of all trades for the last 7 dates. You could import the data in a spreadsheet to calculate a weighted average, or write a script of some sort to do it for you.

Wow, thank you both, Peter and brendio! That API link is perfect. I'll get right on a script to calculate some weighted averages!

I told tcatm about it. He didn't even know, heh. Chart back up.

Well, that was easy! And I just finished my weighted average script!

Oh well, charts.glbse.com only calculates weighted averages by time, but I think it makes more sense to base it on the last 200 or so shares traded when the daily volume is so low, so my script isn't for nothing. :)

If you're curious, the current weighted average from that calculation is 0.363716 BTC.

Dividends have been paid for the week of 11/14!

Another week, another payment for our loyal shareholders.

Total paid to 6000 shares: 5.19582123 BTC
Per share: 0.00086597 BTC

Also, a quick update on the status of the rest of the boards. Everything is moving and they are being built right now. The latest from the manufacturer is that the PCBs are finished, and they will begin assembly on Monday. We expect them to be here on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, Nov. 30th.

What is PCBs? programmable controller boards ?
The assembly here actually is packaging for transfer?


They will fly by plane? where manufacturer is located ?

If this is internal information - will the shareholders only forum be created ?

And I have two more questions unanswered in the thread above:
1) did you do something to create the right of the first hand for existing shareholders, when new actions will be issued
2) is it possible to issue obligations instead of shares

PCBs are printed circuit boards. Assembly means soldering the FPGAs and other components to those boards. When they arrive here, the only thing to do will be to mount the heatsinks and plug them in.

They are being manufactured in Colorado and will ship overnight here to California.


We do not plan to keep this information private, and I can't really think of any other private information that might arise in the future. In this contract and in the FPGA development project we're very interested in transparency. We consider this a community project and the more community involvement the better!


No, GLBSE doesn't provide any way to give certain shareholders the first rights to buy additional shares. In fact, there isn't even a way for me to know who the shareholders are! If there was a way, I suppose I could offer the shares for sale outside of GLBSE, and transfer the shares directly to your account, in an OTC trade. I don't see why you want to do this, though. Shouldn't everyone have equal rights to shares?

I suppose it will be helpful to announce in advance at what time the shares will be issued. A script could be triggered to issue the shares exactly at that time. Another way to do it would be for you to put in your buy orders in advance, and they will be automatically filled by the newly issued shares, if your buy offer is equal or higher than the sell offer.

I'm not sure what you mean by obligations. Do you mean like a bond? Why are you interested in this?

Yep, in fact some of the IPO was sold this way. The problem is of course that I have no idea of knowing who you folks are. Still, why do you think the original investors should get first dibs on new shares?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3rhQc666Sg  ;D

What is stopping me from making several 'identification sell orders', one after another?

Example
sell order: 10 shares for 1000.12345
*got 10 shares with preowner right*
just after that
sell order: 10 old plus 10 new shares total 20 for 1000.67891
*got 20 shares with preowner right*
repeat

So 5.2 BTC was mined in a week with the current boards, correct?  What might be a projection of how much this might go up once the new boards are in place?

Currently, I have been contributing my two GPUs to this, which will be turned off when the FPGAs get here. The hashrate I'm getting on the X6500 is 250 MH/s and we will soon have 7 of those, or 1750 MH/s. The next difficulty estimate is 1133504, and 1750 MH/s should earn 10.87 BTC/week on average at that difficulty. Of course, there will be occasional downtime (like we had last night when my internet went out in a storm). On the other hand, I fully expect to reach higher MH/FPGA soon, with improvements to the code. That's probably a good ball park on the estimated earnings, though.

Thanks fizzisist.

Some people are not content with the centralization and coresponding lack of control surrounding GLBSE.

If a new exchange is setup, would you be interested in moving to it? Migrating/liquidating shares is something that we are going to have to figure out.

There's a thread discussing our GLBSE alternative here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=52494.0

I would certainly not be opposed to alternatives, although they seem some time off. My biggest worry about GLBSE is that I rely on the central authority to tell me who the shareholders are. If that was solved, I would feel much more comfortable.

The idea of listing a sell order with the shares you own is clever, but not bulletproof. One problem I see with it is that you could prove to me that you own shares now, and then immediately sell them. I need to see not only the current shareholders, but also a public list of transactions. I think if GLBSE would list all transaction history with account ids and I could match up users' public keys with those accounts, the problem would be solved. That's not possible already, is it?

We demand regularity of dividend payments!

http://i43.tinypic.com/x4epn8.png

Automate them!

Whoa, please don't Occupy GLBSE yet!  :P It's still the weekend here in California, after all. I don't really like automating things when real money is involved, just because screwups can get expensive. Also, a little variability in the dividend payment helps to encourage long term investment, I think.

I'm traveling this weekend but will make the payment when I get home in a few hours.

I, for one, don't care much how/when dividends are payed.

Please also update table at
http://contract.fpgamining.com/?page_id=34
because it miss previous payment information


Automation doesn't mean hardcoded amounts per share.
You can gather actual data (from pools?) and provide variability it this way.

Also, if you want a checkpoint you can add an approval step
into the automated workflow

Dividends paid for the week of 11/20!

A little later than usual, but also a little bigger.

Total paid to 6000 shares: 6.56708092 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00109451 BTC

ArsenShnurkov, good eye noticing that our site doesn't list the last dividend. It's actually automatically filled from a custom API kakobrekla built (using the python interface for GLBSE). I'll check with him to see why it's acting up.

As for automation, yeah, I didn't mean that I would automatically pay a hardcoded amount. If I implemented this, it would need to keep track of earnings and make the correct payment to shareholders. There's no way to automatically deposit funds at GLBSE (can't use the same address twice), so I would have to maintain a balance there. Right now, it doesn't seem worth the trouble. It could be a good idea for long term automation of this project in general, though.

It wouldn't be hard to modify the glbse python script to hardcoded the password and then you could use that in a script to get the deposit address.

Fixed.

One day to difficulty drop. Next dividends will be higher ;)

Astrologers proclaim (http://heroes.thelazy.net/wiki/Growth) the month of Hydra!!!
All FPGA cards are multiplied by seven.

Haha! I hope this seven headed beast is born quickly and painlessly (at least from now on). I'm expecting to get it up and running over the weekend. I'll keep you all updated!

Somehow FPGA.contract is not in the list:

> Public information about companies traded on GLBSE

http://companies.herokuapp.com/

I think it's absence affects the price of shares :)

Statistics site showing more fpgas now, but only a couple are running.  Status update?

The boards are here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40058.msg639925#msg639925

But I'm doing a lot of work setting them up and testing, so mining will be intermittent for the rest of the weekend at least. I'll post some pics of them mining away soon!

1) Why our spartan 6 is so slow ?

2) How our current solution compares to existing ones:
http://www.dinigroup.com/new/DNBFC_S12_PCIe.php

http://www.dinigroup.com/product/data/DNBFC_S12_PCIe/images/rev2frontb_thumb.jpg (http://www.dinigroup.com/product/data/DNBFC_S12_PCIe/images/rev2frontb.jpg)

3) How much does Virtex 7 (http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/fpga/virtex-7/) cost ?
"The Virtex-7 2000T the 2 million logic cell will begin initial sampling in August and November of 2011"
Is it possible to receive samples ? (somehow we already miss these intervals, but it is still possible to try to obtain samples)
Is it possible to get promotional discounts for it?

For the comparison, the price of SPARTAN 6 is

I am asking, because it uses 28 nm technology, which is more modern that 45 nm in Spartan 6

What will be it's approximate hash rate?

it contains 13x more logical gates, so 125 * 13 ~= 1.6MH/s

4) The same question about Artix-7
"Artix-7 FPGA initial samples will ship first quarter of 2012."

5) The same question about Kintex-7
It was already shipped: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-products/electronic-product-reviews/fpga-pld-products/4214345/Xilinx-ships-first-28nm-Kintex-7-FPGAs

ad2) Price. That card have features that mining don't need and it costs twice more than needed. And propably voltage regulators are not suitable to deliver required amount of power, there's no heatsinks on chips.
ad3) Virtex7 costs 30.000$ (30 thousand !) when you buy 1000 then you get discount to 28.500. Do math yourself.
ad4) Atrixes7 will be propably the best replecement for Spartans6. Price is unknown for now but Xilinx says that it will be comparable to Spartan6.
ad5) Kintexes7 costs to much, 325T part is something around 1200$ and perfomance with good design should reach 1GH/s so lower MH/$ than S6.

Virtex-7:
$30000 / 1600 MHh/s = $18.75 / MHh/s

Spartan-6:
$170 / 125 MH/s = $1.36 / MHh/s

Kintexes-7:
$1200 / 1000 MH/s = $1.2 / MHh/s

ATI 6990 = $0.89..$1.11 / MH/s (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison)


Might be there some cooling system which is not shown.
Or are the heat sinks required at all?


Then it can be used for other purposes (and probably can be sold then new technology arrive)

There are 11 of them now. There are some additional FPGA's :)

And one question remains unanswered yet:

Yep, we're off and running! I'm currently pointing 11 boards at Eligius to make up for the lost time over the last few days while working on the code. That will go back down to the 7 you guys own soon.

Here's a screenshot of this madness: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13472215/screenshot_11boards.png


We're running the open source code developed by fpgaminer and makomk (among others). Since then, the other guys have pushed this FPGA quite a bit further. Now that these boards are finally built and are on their way out to customers, we'll turn our focus to improving that. These FPGAs are running at 133 MHz clock rate (266 MH/s / board) right now, but there's no reason we shouldn't be able to get the same as the others have achieved with the same FPGAs.

We need to work on both the FPGA code and the mining software. The mining software (that is, the code that you run on your computer) is very alpha right now. For example, it doesn't support long-polling yet.

Like I said, this will be our priority now that the hardware is built and on it's way out the door.

1) How many additional cards can be attached to the current setup without adding another hardware (except USB-hubs)?

2) Do you have plans to redesign with Kintex-7 (http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/fpga/kintex-7/) (28nm tech)?



Artix-7 samples is also available from Xilinx, just contact them

3) Was the "first hand" feature discussed with GLBSE ?

nice monday morning news. way to go fizzisist.

one question: is that gnu screen dividing the terminal real-estate?

I use a tiling wm so I probably wouldn't use that feature... but it's good to know.

Thanks, molecular! It was very exciting to see these boards come alive.

Yes that is screen, but it's only on my end. You currently need to run a separate instance of the mining software for each board, so you can manage those processes however you like. I do have plans to handle multiple boards in one software instance, like cgminer does, very soon. I'll be working on that over the next weeks, and it should be a relatively easy change.

business as usual over here?  just wondering because the stock took a pretty good dip?

teek

Yeah, everything's going great actually. In fact, I've cleaned up the cable mess for our FPGA cluster and it has been running at full capacity for some time now. I posted a picture of the setup here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7216.msg645534#msg645534). What you see there is 16 boards, but only 7 of them are mining for this contract. If we release more shares and raise the funds for additional boards, they will be begin earning money for the shareholders immediately (just need to redirect the workers), so this might be a good time to discuss raising a motion again.

It looks like the trading volume shot up today, so a lot of shares are moving around. Some shareholders much have decided to sell off some shares now, and they offered them at the highest bids. Seems like odd timing, because we're on track to be receiving our largest dividends yet in the next couple days. Oh well, it's a free market!

Yeah, looks like some shareholders sold in the 0.66 BTC/share through ~0.40 BTC/share range.  Not a bad profit if you were able to buy in at 0.25 BTC/share and aren't interested in holding for long term.

As for more shares, if you have the boards available we may as well see if the shareholders will approve it.  I think it'd make sense to see if we can get up to 10 boards first and then re-assess to see if there is more demand.  It doesn't make sense to issue a ton of shares if they don't sell. 

One thing to consider - If the new shares have a set price and someone undercuts it, the least expensive shares will sell first and the company won't get any of the BTC.  We can get around this by doing direct transfers.  A buyer would send the BTC to an address that fizzisist provides and give him their GLBSE user ID and the shares can be transferred directly to the buyer.  This would make sure that the money is going to fizzisist for purchase of the boards and not someone who is looking to sell for a profit.  However, it can quickly become an accounting headache.  I know that JLP-BMD has had to go with direct transfers as someone undercut their IPO price with a sell order that is 0.001 BTC less than the IPO price.  Just something to consider if we issue more shares.

Big movement on glbse. Someone filled almost all bids. Price have drop considerably.

-53%


Why should shareholders buy at high price, when they can buy absolutely the same shares at lower price?

If market estimates shares lower than management, it is the management to blame.
The shares mechanism was invented to resolve issues between management and shareholders.

It's the work of both parties to correctly determine the price.
If shares are cheap, then management can buy out shares itself.
If company is overestimated (from management point of view) and there are good ideas,
then management should propose to issue more shares.

Right now I think that price drops because fizzisist postpone solution of questions related to shareholders.


Are you ready to start 50 additional boards? 100 boards? How many boards are necessary to mine without external pool?
How the existing shareholders will vote for this, if this will significantly decrease their influence?
What will happen if three months later another company will begin to mine with Artix-7 ?
I asked these questions earlier (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49166.msg640934#msg640934).

Sorry, you're right that I never answered some of those questions. First of all, I currently have 16 boards running, but would not be willing to switch all of those over to FPGA.contract. The extra 9 boards are constantly being switched out for a different set of boards after an hour or two of testing to be packed and shipped to customers. I was thinking that we would offer shares for one board at a time, to see how it goes. At the moment, I'm not interested in running a 50 or 100 board system as a contract. The responsibility and risk would be too much, especially under the terms of this contract (where I make no profit). I would much rather you buy the boards from us and run them yourself! :)

As for the next generation of FPGAs, we're certainly watching those closely. Frankly, though, I don't understand what it matters to this contract. The 7 X6500s we have are already paid for and will continue mining until they either die or the electricity cost to run them becomes more than the money earned from mining. That will most likely be a very long time from now. I strongly doubt that the release of Artix or Kintex FPGAs will drive up the difficulty so much that our profits are significantly impacted.

So, we clearly see the reason for the price drop :)
It is the decision of management not to arrange the profitability of the business for all the parties.

You don't look at this business seriuosly, just use it as a test platform for your other business.

I don't understand. How does the number of boards change the profit per share?

1) This changes weekly profit for shareholders. If that profit is low (in absolute amounts) - it doesn't worth to own.
2) If you will run your own pool the profit per share will be higher

High price was a result of the assumption that you will expand the business

1) If there are 6000 shares and you own 60, you own 1% of the system, or about 18 MH/s. If we double capacity and there are 12000 shares and you still own 60, you still own 18 MH/s. I don't see how the size of the cluster matters to an individual shareholder. In fact, I think that a larger, more complex system would be more prone to failure and downtime so the profits could actually be negatively influenced.

2) Solo mining only slightly increases profits. For it to be feasible for us, I think we would need to be at a point where we, on average, find 2 blocks per week. That would mean the probability of finding 0 blocks in a week would be very small (about 14% according to Poisson statistics). 2 blocks per week would require about 15 GH/s. That is too large of a system for me to be worrying about day and night without making any profit from. Maybe under the terms of a different contract.

I already told my point.
I will have profit in about $5 per week. It might be totally different for me with $100 per week (i will be able to pay my life costs)


Shipping and defensive taxes will make prices more than 40% higher in my country.


it's 15/0.25 = 60 cards, which is around numbers i have in mind


That will be good from my point of view.

Ok, if you are interested in such a contract, I would rather arrange something this large privately outside of GLBSE, and under different terms than this contract. Feel free to PM me and make a proposition.

I'm not saying that shareholders should buy at a higher price, but if the goal is for the company to buy more boards by selling shares and the shares aren't sold because of people undercutting the price, the company won't get any of the money and won't be able to buy the boards.  I find it interesting that you want to expand the company and are complaining that fizzisist isn't willing to spend a ton of time on setting up a huge cluster that he wouldn't benefit from, but can't see the issue with the price being undercut.  If the price is undercut, the company won't be able to grow.



Again, not sure why being able to pay your life costs is anyone's problem.  Do you really expect a bitcoin investment to be able to pay your bills?  Fizzisist, I need about $500 a week to pay my life costs, so we need you to go ahead and put together a 60GH/s setup.  Nevermind that you're not getting paid or anything.

+1.  Can you do all the work while we just watch?  :P

You would have to buy 20 times as many shares as you have now, you're surely aware of that?

There's no free lunch.

Dividends have been paid for the week of 12/5!

This is our biggest dividend yet, and the first one with a full week of mining at full capacity (7 X6500s)!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 11.27463457 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.001879106 BTC

Good news for all those that bought shares in the last few days at this latest price!

Dividends have been paid for the week of 12/12

Another week, another dividend payment. Sorry that this one came a little late. I was traveling and had only limited access to the internet.

Total paid to 6000 shares: 11.20173506 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00186695 BTC

This brings the total paid to investors to 59 BTC in the 2 months since the IPO! Not too shabby!

Is it still .25BTC/share? Im kinda confused how this works but on GBLSE I have a buy order on FPGA.contract for 4 shares @ total of 1BTC...this correct?
And, by spending 1btc I will get divdends weekly...and not have to spend more btc? right?

Current price you can find here:
http://charts.glbse.com/markets/FPGA.contract.html
0.35BTC/share last price. If you placed order to buy for 0.25/share then you have to wait until someone decide to sell at that price. But it may take very long time becuse the lowest sell offer is 0.35/share.
If you buy 4 shares then your weekly income will be 4*0.00186695=0.0074678 BTC. And of course that depends on bitcoin difficulty (most) and mining power of FPGA's, and some other stuff like network failures or other disasters...

Dividends have been paid for the week of 12/19!

Another late dividend payment this week, but this time it was because GLBSE was down when I tried to go pay it. Fortunately, nefario was very helpful and quick to bring it back online. I'll get back on schedule this weekend, I promise!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 9.85384928 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00164230 BTC

That brings the total earned to about 69 BTC!

P.S. Thanks for answering the questions about share price and projected earnings, Dexter770221! Everything you said was correct. The only thing I would add is that the weekly earnings will also fluctuate a bit due to luck.

I've just look at statistic page on contract.fpgamining.com and I saw that there is 8% of rejected shares. Why its so high?

looks like the mhash number went up recently. Any story to that?

To be honest, I'm not exactly sure the reason for the high rejects. I'm guessing that long-polling still isn't working perfectly (for example, I can see that shares occasionally get submitted right after a long-poll event, because it's not a hard stop). The software is a work in progress...


I was wondering if anyone would notice. ;) We're testing some new firmware with a higher hashrate! It should be released to the public soon.

Dividends have been paid for the week of 12/26!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 12.40767051 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00206794 BTC

Our biggest dividend yet!

Rate of all cards is displayed as zero...

http://i39.tinypic.com/5mjpqq.png

Indeed... I've PM fizzisist in case he gets notifications for that and not this thread.

Seems to be back up... Thanks fizzisist!

Looks like an extreme overclocking (in comparison with original rate) %)

and the graph is out of 3000 range in the statistics picture

Rejects also decreased. If this is result of new code then GREAT job ! Next dividends should be 30% higher!

Thanks, everyone for letting me know about the problem last night. By the time I fixed it I needed to go to sleep, which is why I didn't reply to you guys last night. Sorry about that.

What happened was that cdhowie's bitcoin-mining-proxy started going crazy. This is where you see the first jump off the top of the graph. At that point, the proxy started submitting huge amounts of duplicate work. I saw it do that once before and a simple "apachectl restart" fixed it, so I did that and went back out to the living room to spend the night with my family. When I went to check on it, it wasn't fixed. Finally, I discovered that mysql was to blame, and it was because the database had overfilled the hard drive on the server. Actually, it's not a hard drive but a 4 GB USB drive...

Figuring out how to clear out the database when I can't even get mysql to start up because the database was too large was a bit of a challenge. I ended up deleting some stuff off the disk to make just enough room, then started mysql and cleared out the work_data and submitted_work tables. Finally, it was working again. I restarted all the FPGAs and pointed a couple extra at this group to make up for the lost time (that explains why you saw huge rates on FPGAs 0, 1, and 2, Arsen).

The system is back in action running along smoothly! Anyone know the best way to set up a cron job to trim the database nightly? Also, I'll upgrade to a larger USB drive soon.

By the way, the clocks are currently at 166.6 MHz on all FPGAs, but I will boost this up soon. The number of rejects are vastly reduced due to m0mchil's beautiful bug fix (incorporated in x6500-miner v0.2).

Thanks again!

Make a sh-script that does this, then check the crontab (/etc/crontab?). Most system have directories (cron.daily, for example). Just put/link your script into that directory. You can also make an enty in crontab for the script, if you prefer. There's also a "crontab" utility to do this, but I never used that.

How do I buy shares?

I just noticed that fpga6 is reporting 0 MHash/s, what happened? :-\

Thanks for spotting that! I rearranged some things last night and must have forgot to restart one of the workers. Sorry about that!

Just realized I forgot to make the weekly dividend announceemt, even though I paid the dividend this weekend....

Dividends have been paid for the week of 1/2/2012!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 10.22168431 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.0017036141 BTC

Are you running the newer 166mhz bitstreams on them?

Dividends have been paid for the week of 1/9/12

The biggest dividend yet!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 13.59755802 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.0022662597 BTC


Sorry I didn't answer you sooner... I somehow missed this post. Actually, even better! I'm running 180 MHz on them right now, and have for the last couple days!

Are any shares still for sale/how would I buy them? Sorry I'm new to this

Neat thanks

Well, I bought in, and plan on buying more shares. This is pretty cool

Well, I'm up to 76 shares, figured it would be worth a shot, anyone that has been in for a while have any thoughts about it all in general?

Wait, the MHash is increasing?

It's possible. It might require an improved cooling setup, but more testing needs to be done to be sure.

Quick question, I own a few shares and I was wondering if power consumption plays a role in the amount of btc being paid out. While I know FPGA mining draws less power, you still have to connect to a PC. If that's the case right now I suggest you look in to purchasing a raspberry pi linux board run the cluster.

Yeah, the Raspberrypi could be a really nice money cutting method when they are officially released, they cost $40? I believe. And, in order to purchase more FPGAs wouldn't you need to sell more stock?

Actually, the way this contract is written, 100% of all earnings are paid to shareholders without subtracting power costs first. I reserved a number of shares for management overhead (8.3% of shares) which earn dividends like the rest. Those dividends go to pay the small electrical costs, mainly. If those dividends are more than the electrical cost, I get to keep the extra. If the electrical cost is higher, I take a loss. It's a pretty small amount either way so it works out pretty well. Other than that, I get no payment for administering the system.

I'm definitely keeping my eye on the Raspberry Pi, but what I have right now works pretty well, too. I'm using an Atom based mini-ITX board (this one (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131731)) which cost $100 and uses about as much power as one X6500. It runs bitcoin-mining-proxy, munin for monitoring, and does some other light serving for our house. This isn't owned by FPGA.contract, and wasn't factored into the power cost calculations when I set this up.


That's correct. I'm not retaining any percentage of the earnings as cash for future expansion, so any expansion would come from releasing more shares. The talk about adding MH/s is about increasing the clock rate on the FPGAs we have already. We're using 180 MHz now and we started with 125 MHz way back in October. I've tested up to 200 MHz, but if the cooling setup isn't good enough we could burn out the FPGAs. I need to do some careful testing before I set it to 200 (and forget it).

You could always put your computer + FPGAs into a freezer.

*Sarcasm doesn't read well over the internet*

Combine a raspberry pi, fpga miner, battery and solar panel. YOu could sell autonomous mining machines, they could scan for wifi, crack the code (if needed) and begin mining all while recharging the battery with a solar panel(which might be kind of hard, considering solar panels are not so great yet) It would still be cool to have one.

Put it all into a CubeSat kit and send it to space. You wont have to worry about the temps plus the solar panels would be much more effective outside of the earth atmosphere.  :D

This would actually be awesome

I'm on it. I'll have to do some test runs first though, so instead of wasting all of the stuff sending it into orbit, Ill be launching various other things. I'm hoping bad dragon will sponsor me in my first attempts to Penetrate the atmosphere!

You do have to worry about the temps.... your equipment can get very hot if you are aren't in the shade of the earth or moon.  And you have to be out of the shade for the solar panels to do much good.  Also, where is your internet connection coming from?  Anyway, let's take this to an new off-topic thread, pms,  or drop it.

Bought Shares. looking forward to seeing how this goes.

My question is though, is this actually profitable?  As of now, with 100 shares (aprox 35 BTC) you earn .25BTC per week. I understand that you also own the stocks as well, but wouldn't it be more profitable to just trade btc on mtgox? Or is the investment in the hopes that Hash rates will increase, and more fpgas will be added eventually?

That works out to about 37% return per year just on dividends. It's up to you to calculate whether that is enough for you or if you'd make more in another investment.

cheers

Interesting setup.
What is the actual workload on the CPU to run bitcoin-mining-proxy and manage the X6500s?

Just wanted some input from other people that had bought in. 37% isn't bad seeing as its a safe investment, or fairly safe.

This... plus it takes a lot less time to hold shares than to brawl it out in the market.

What do you mean by "just trade btc on mtgox"?

Investing in a mining company is comparable to mining, with all the risks/gains involved, but without the hassle of actually doing the mining.

Dividends have been paid for the week of 1/16/12!

This is the 14th dividend paid since we started back in early October!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 12.65966309 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00210994 BTC

This brings our total earnings to 117.7 BTC!

I mean, just sell BTC for $6.50 (or whatever the going price is) on MTGox, wait for them to dip, buy back in. Repeat.

I am all for the contracts. If more people actually invested in bitcoin instead of mass selling every time the charts drop 3 cents, bitcoin would be much more stable. I look forward to investing.

how many shares are currently held v. shares available?

EDIT: Answered my own question...lol

i am looking for investors. PM me

good for you. care to share?

Its buried in GLBSE. I will hunt it down again, and Make a quick TUT

[TuT] Finding shares issued v. shares available

First, point your browser to https://glbse.com/assets/
Scroll down until you Find FPGA.contract.
Next to FPGA.contracts entry, you see the number 6000. That is current hares issued.
to find out how many shares are available (estimate), go to http://contract.fpgamining.com/?page_id=5
Take the number of yay votes, plus the number of nay votes minus 6000 shares issued.
That gives us 734. Assuming some didnt vote, that gives a ball park figure for you to see how many shares are floating around.

If any one has a better way of doing this at the moment, by all means, improve on my method, I beg you!

Thanks for sharing, ZodiacDragon84!

Here's another way to estimate the number of shares that were kept with the company:

according to http://charts.glbse.com/charts/FPGA.contract#vztgSzm1g10zm2g25 about 5500 shares where traded at the initial price after the IPO.

I think we can assume these were not sold back-and-forth, because the price didn't change and this was shortly after IPO.

So I arrive at a number of roughly 500 shares that where not issued publicly.

Haha, we can also read the first post:

^{(emphasis mine)}

Also: I'm not sure these 500 shares held back have voting rights? If so, your method of summing votes doesn't work.

EDIT: http://contract.fpgamining.com/?page_id=166 says there were 5500 shares issued on Oct 16th and another 500 on Oct 26th. hmm...

Originally 5500 shares were issued, 5000 were sold to the public and 500 were held by the company to cover electrical/maintenance costs.  An additional 500 shares were issued later to allow us to purchase an additional FPGA.  There are a total of 6000 shares out there, 500 are held by the company, and 5500 can be traded by the public.  Fizzisist can correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure that's correct.

This sounds right.
And to answer Molecular about the voting rights. At the time of issue, he would have had to actually assign the 500 to himself in order to get the dividends from them. Consequently granting voting rights for them as well. Though he may or may not excercise them.

Yep, that is correct, zapeta. Those 500 shares were transferred to my personal account when they were issued, so they are full fledged shares with voting rights and all.

All 6000 shares are potentially available, if someone decides to sell. There are currently 314 shares for sale on GLBSE:

Thank god you guys did that...my method was half assed at best! :D

Dividends have been paid for the week of 1/23/2012!

Broke another record with our largest payment yet!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 14.04367400 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00234061 BTC

Total payments to date: 131.8 BTC!!

Dividends have been paid for the week of 1/30/2012!

The payment went out last night, but I was too busy to post.

We set a new record for the second week in a row!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 15.62244878 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00260374 BTC

Around the time that I paid the dividend last night, the machine running the cluster had a major failure. Then, after reinstalling the OS and bringing everything back up, TheSeven spent some time testing his Modular Python Bitcoin Miner (MPBM (https://github.com/TheSeven/Modular-Python-Bitcoin-Miner)) with it. I offered him full remote access to the cluster so that he could test hotplugging and stability. So far it looks great! I plan to pitch in some BTC of my own for the lost mining time on the cluster due to this, so it won't affect your earnings.

Looks like the cluster is back up running at its regular hashrate, this time using the MPBM (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=62823.0) software ;D
I expect that wildly varying hash rate to stabilize throughout the next couple of hours.

Hi, I've chosen the option "upload keys" for the other account (i have two accounts with glbse; one self made and one glbse keypair generated).
Nowhere I found it mentioned that the uploaded keypair must not be password protedted (usually every key pair I generate is password protected, kind of auto pilot).

My question is, can I change the keypair of the other account while I transferred assets to it?

Of course I can not use the other account. There's no prompt for password, just an error msg while I try to use the account.

I had that same thing happen, and Im still waiting for Nefario to get it on track. It usually takes a few days for him to get things done from my experience.

for me it's not urgent. as long as it's doable and I get my dividends, it can last a year.

by "that same thing happen" what do you mean? uploading password protected key pair?
uploading custom keys without password may save a lot of time in the long run. when glbse goes bitcoin mainstream this will happen probably very often

one of my keypairs was corrupted in email, or some issue I cant figure out. It tries to log me into that account, but then the script freezes up my firefox.

try pasting into write (wordpad) or notepad and turning off wordwrap, (or if on some other OS a decent editor)

it should have 7 lines.

if it looks like the following, that is with the data having blank lines between then they need to be removed and the lines joined. label, id, publickey and privatekey are each on one line.

[{
        "label":"mylabel",
        "id":"deadbeef...",
        "publicKey":"-----BEGIN RSA PUBLIC KEY-----

\u000aMIIBkkkkkkkkw7YXADObAYocKW/PBjjXqxOZ\u000amdOQmjA

JmNwlIpQiYk1RDOXfkkkkkkkkkkUAkT245a7JAa/Uemkkgkg\u000aCkuNllXVmVuitio1i

....

4eDVx\u000at5ks27zghhjh87ddDAQAB\u000a-----END RSA PUBLIC KEY-----

\u000a",
        "privateKey":"-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

...

\u=\u000a-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----\u000a"
    }


marked

New bitstream? There are some problems with 2 FPGA's.

I don't know what the cluster is currently running with, but if it's one huge MPBM instance (and that's likely), the individual FPGAs aren't tied down to their pool accounts, so the hashing power is probably just not distributed evenly. While some FPGAs show near zero hashrate, others show like 800MH/s, so on average it fits.

Yep, TheSeven is exactly right. Here's a screenshot:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13472215/mpbm_fpgacontract.png (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13472215/mpbm_fpgacontract.png)

The overall hashrate is 2.8 GH/s (or 7 x 400 MH/s), but it's being oddly distributed over the various worker names. I'll probably just do away with those all together and create one account for FPGA.contract.

Just to be clear, I know there has been a lot of downtime this week. When it comes time to pay the dividends, I will just make up the difference from a typical week so that you're all still earning a normal week's worth of BTC.

Hell, most corporations say you're SOL on divs if they have issues or losses. This is unexpected.

Yeah, except the issues were self imposed so that TheSeven and I could work on MPBM. There is bound to be down time now and then, but this week had more than typical.

Well, partially. The filesystem failure would have caused some downtime anyway, and we took the chance to try out MPBM while setting up things again.

You guys rock. I wish GLBSE worked like you guys do...lol

I second that on both points!

If anyone's interested in some FPGA.contract stock at a discount, I've been pushing the price down the past few days trying to offload shares (though I really want them) because I need the BTC before I have loans up. I have 73 remaining if anyone wants them for .38BTC/share. I'll buy in later -- none too happy I wasn't able to hold these shares for longer than a week.

I'll take 5 at that price, order is active.

Done.  :)

ETA: 53 remaining

My goal was to not push the price down further for others holding, but as you wish.

Put an order to queue and don't spam in this topic. Anyone interested in buying/selling will find what are current asks/bids.

Just kind of wondering, when are dividends paid? Is it just any day of the week, but normally a weekend? Not that I'm complaining or anything, just wondering. On a side note, I'v been using my dividends to buy more stocks :D

I know the feeling! :D

Dividends have been paid for the week of 2/6/12!

As promised, I chipped in 4 BTC of my own to bring our earnings back up to typical levels.

Total paid to 6000 shares: 13.73258085 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00228876 BTC

Yes, I pay dividends every weekend. If I happen to be really busy it might come on a Monday, though... I do my best to keep it consistent!

Also, so everyone knows, the stats page shows everything as down right now, but we are in fact mining. With the recent switch over to new mining software (MPBM), I've done away with bitcoin-mining-proxy and wrote a new API to poll MPBM for stats directly. This should be more accurate, and yield more information. Everything should be in place now, but kakobrekla will need to modify the site for this change. It might take a couple days for him to get the time. I bet a little donation to him could speed this up, though! ;)

http://images.cheezburger.com/completestore/2010/8/29/842e4ce0-ac69-4b7c-8760-b770ae3b87fc.jpg


Was no cable problem, but I fixed it anywayz. Also, URLs are now preety!

http://contract.fpgamining.com/statistics/ (http://contract.fpgamining.com/statistics/)

Enjoy refreshing!
kakobrekla

I must agree, this is not "usual" and I would probably not do that myself. big karma bonus for fizzisist.

The BTC could be considered a donation to a degree and was probably generous to a degree.  However, if the testing was for fizzisist's benefit (and I believe it was) as opposed to being for the contract's benefit (I say contract instead of company because I haven't read the contract to be certain there is a company), then technically the testing should be billable since the contract is publicly held.  IOW, as a sole proprietor, you can make your company do whatever you want, but if you borrow public company resources for your own use, those resources are be billable, and this makes (at least part of) his payment proper, while this is still upstanding and worthy of praise in our world (sadly cheating and stealing are more common and many wouldn't even feel they were doing either of those things), it isn't necessarily generous in that sense.  I don't hold any shares of this contract, but my point is that if the testing were for personal benefit and the contract was not reimbursed accordingly, I wouldn't have any interest in holding shares in it.  However, I suppose if fizzisist weren't outstanding he could have lied about the cause of the downtime and I would be none-the-wiser.

i don't think that testing newer software is for personal benefit
newer software means better performance or stability

This... he was improving the mining setup.

Then he was generous, but the testing should have been voted on (not that anyone in their right mind would vote against it).

Right, because a corporation should never take an action without asking shareholders.

"Should I answer the phone?"

"Hold on, let me put it to a vote."

Why? How many regular stocks on the NYSE payout dividends? How often is there a vote on matters considered day to day business? Testing and maintenance, in my opinion, would be considered day to day business.

The contract is for mining.  If you hire a contractor to build you a house and he decides to spend $1000 to install something that you didn't want that will save you $500 in 20 years (or perhaps just make your house prettier), are you going to want to pay for that?  Even if it will save you $5000 in 20 years, you didn't ask for or approve it.  Regardless of how well these numbers do or don't coincide with the downtime and potential gain (that was reimbursed anyway, making this entire discussion moot), my entire original second post (rather unclearly) revolved around this being a contract vs a company while the first one revolved around the testing being for personal benefit (which my second one acknowledged being a faulty assumption according to other posters in the thread).

by being "personal" benefit, does it not enrich us holders in the long-term? I am not here to make a quick buck on bitcoin. I am here to use the coins, and anything that helps make a few more coins in the future makes me happy. As you have said though, the point is now moot. Shall we go back to our respective corners and watch the coins roll in?   ;)

Indeed, as I said, I'm not even a current shareholder, so my opinion isn't of too much value anyway.  I normally wouldn't have commented, but it seemed surprising to me that everyone was so surprised to be treated decently by someone they are effectively doing business with (again, assuming contract).  But there's no reason to continue the discussion, pleased people are good whether they are customers or owners.

Indeed. Since you put up with my counter ramblings, a few satoshis you have earned.

Indeed
and thank you, satoshis are always welcome.  ;)  I am going to shut up now, though, I've already made too much unnecessary noise in this topic.

I stumbled upon the napkin with the math
total paid to 6000 shares: 13.73258085
where 4 come from fizzisist, thus rising the mining income
for that week by 40+ % :)

edit: the stats also look updated
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4484040/stats.png

Yeah, it's true, FPGA.contract benefited as a whole by the move to the new software. I hadn't really thought of that.

Though, I did promise that I would stop using these 7 boards for development, when the rest of the batch arrived and I had spare boards here. But, we sold out(!) so the GLBSE boards are all I have. I also felt that I could have rushed to get them online more quickly, and saved maybe a day of mining, but it relieved some of the pressure once I had decided I would just make up the difference. The few BTC were well worth buying me some time while I got the new setup up to speed.

Thanks for all the positive words, and thanks to kakobrekla for upgrading contract.fpgamining.com (http://contract.fpgamining.com) with the new graphs and stats!

This week's dividends will be coming as soon as I get the books in order and make a deposit at GLBSE.

Dividends have been paid for the week of 2/13/12!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 12.83166665 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00213861 BTC

A little later than usual because GLBSE was down this morning when I tried. Sorry about that!

Cheers and Happy Mining!

are we surprised?  :-\

i wish i had a few satoshi for every time glbse seems down for me ...
but otherwise it's great fun, experience and also the support is great (i needed it already)

It has been a lot worse with glbse. Down for day, up for one, down for days again.

Such is life, until bitcoin is more popular, and we have more options  ~\"_"/~

Dividends have been paid for the week of 2/20/12!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 12.8590481 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00214317 BTC

Well done, I love this venture.

Awesome!
I just bought two shares :3

I'll probably buy more as I accumulate more BTC.

Are there plans in the near future to release additional shares to buy an 8th FPGA?

Not really. My opinion is that the 7 boards we have are enough work for me given the amount I am earning in maintenance. If I was going to consider adding more X6500s, I think I would do it under a different contract. That's not to say that I'm at all unhappy with the current arrangement, though! I just thing expanding the operation would probably make sense under more flexible and favorable terms for me. Also, making and selling the X6500 keeps me busy enough as is. Maybe someone else would be interested in starting up a second X6500 contract? If so, I'd be happy to discuss pricing and maybe even a partial share trade. Let me know if you're interested!

I have been wanting to set up something exactly like what you have for a while, but I didn't want to steal your idea or form a grudge or anything like that, but if you think there should be a similar contract, I'd love to start it up!

I could give you a significant amount of share or whatever else you'd want. I think doing this together would be awesome!

Thanks,
Garrett

Dividends have been paid for the week of 2/27/12!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 12.79225257 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00213204 BTC

Hey Garrett,

I think it would be great if there were more FPGAs out there mining, and contracts make a lot of sense because of the high cost of entry. I received a lot of PMs today from people interested in this, so you're not the only one. I think the only thing to do is to hear everyone's proposals, and discuss pricing options on a one by one basis.

I think FPGA.contract is probably my favorite investment right now.  I look forward to other contracts coming and hope they are run as consistently as fizzisist has been.

Dividends have been paid for the week of 3/5/12!

This actually went out in the wee hours yesterday morning, but I finally have a minute to post it here. Sorry about that!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 14.02652257 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00233775 BTC

Pretty good week, despite the big difficulty increase!

Today is 3/13/12, so where is one week?

there is no missing week. the latest post from fizzisist refers to a week that started March 5th
this is how he reports the periods for which dividends were paid

Yeah, earnings are paid as dividends for the previous week of mining. Sorry for the confusion!

I've got me some shares. ;D

Whoo, I hadn't checked my GLBSE for a few weeks, came back and there was a BTC waiting for me. Up to 108 shares :D

is 1 board not mining? ; )

Sorry about the late dividend payments, and the cluster being down most of the day today. I just found a whole bunch of problems with the host that I finally had a chance to sit down and sort out after a busy day at work.

The FPGA.contract host machine had crapped out, needing an fsck. Then, the USB wifi adapter didn't seem to work. Moving that do a different USB port fixed it though, oddly. Next problem was that my "static" IP address had changed, so the API for the stats on contract.fpgamining.com were dead. That should be sorted out now, and as soon as the DNS setting is updated they should be back.

The problem I haven't yet solved is with GLBSE 2.0. I can't seem to pay the dividend, getting a "Not enough bitcoin available, cancel some buy orders or deposit more" error. I have plenty of BTC in there, and no buy orders, so I can't understand why it says that. Most likely I'm screwing something up with the administrative account stuff. I'll ask around and figure it out.

Anyway, the dividends will come soon, and the cluster is indeed hashing away again and earning us all shiny new bitcoins.

Sorry for the delay, everyone!

Dividends have been paid for the week of 3/19/12!

Finally figured out GLBSE 2.0! That was a confusing few hoops to jump through to pay the dividend, but all is well.

Total paid to 6000 shares: 15.25589979 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00254265 BTC

Oddly, I could have sworn I posted about the dividend payment from last week, but apparently I didn't... I did pay it though, so here's the report:

Total paid to 6000 shares: 13.54249554 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00225708 BTC

That was for the week of 3/12/12 and went out on 3/19.

So the host board crapped out and the wifi quit, but the dividend was up almost 2 BTC?  Thats cool. I knew I liked this investment.

Dividends have been paid for the week of 3/26/12!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 15.21068939 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00253511 BTC

Sorry, I got a little behind in making the payment again.

All caught up now, though! Thanks for your patience!

Dividends have been paid for the week of 4/2/12!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 9.64468067 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00160745 BTC

This actually went out earlier this week but I forgot to make the post. Sorry about that!

Dividends have been paid for the week of 4/9/12!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 10.9789915 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00182983 BTC

Probably because of the difficulty increase in that timeframe?

I believe merged mining has always paid 0.001 BTC per share no matter what the difficulty.

I think it was an effect of catching up. 2.8 GH/s should earn 12.5 BTC/week at the current difficulty with 100% uptime. Since I pay out the dividend manually, a "week" is more like 7 +/- 1 days. Over a few weeks, it of course averages out.

Dividends have been paid for the week of 4/16/12!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 12.57056845 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00209509 BTC

Dividends have been paid for the week of 4/23/12!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 14.01066939 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00233511 BTC

A little late this week because the script I use to tally up the weekly earnings relies on the blockchain.info API, and that was down for a few days. Sorry!

Thanks! Second best is pretty good considering the number of mining companies out there. :)

The stats are lying. :) We're mining away, but something broke in my stats script. I'm working on it...

Thanks for the heads up!

Stats are back!

Dividends have been paid for the week of 4/30/12!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 12.5127534 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00208546 BTC

Dividends have been paid for the week of 5/7/12!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 9.85367113 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00164228 BTC

Dividends have been paid for the week of 5/14/12!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 12.70565333 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00211761 BTC

fizzisist, whats the approximate amount of mh per bond?

It isn't technically a bond, but a shared ownership of an FPGA cluster. Currently the system does 2.8 GH/s and there are 6000 shares, so 0.467 MH/share.

Dividends have been paid for the week of 5/21/12!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 12.26958908 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00204493 BTC

I'm currently offering a trade for 2 FPGA.CONTRACT for 1 DMC

http://caspar.adterrasperaspera.com/dmc/trade/
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77469.0

If endeltyrell bitstream will be released and it will be compatible with x6500 will you upgrade? That should give 700MH/s extra speed (up to 3500MH/s). Worth to consider...

Most definitely. Right now it will require some work to present him code that wraps up his protocol inside our protocol. Then, we submit that to him and he will review it and generate a bitstream, if everything looks good to him. This will take some time, but we're working on it.

Great news.

Cognitive is looking forward to that :)

Dividends have been paid for the week of 5/28/12!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 9.95971002 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00165995 BTC

Dividends have been paid for the week of 6/4/12!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 8.00966961 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00133494 BTC

Would it be possible that the hashpower increase by 20%-30% after the update of firmware without any change of the FPGA hardware? It seems that all links below suggest so:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=79835.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49971.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83332.0

It would be very nice if it is realized.

Hi, what happened to the dividend payment this week?
Thanks!

I sold all my shares, so he decided to quit paying out :P.

I just found out about GLBSE, I only had a few BTC left after some of my services so I put them into here!

Sorry, I'm traveling right now and apparently my SSH port forwarding isn't set up properly so I've been unable to transfer enough BTC to GLBSE to pay the dividend. I've had no time to figure it out, but will see what's in te account tomorrow and pay out all of that, assuming it's less than the mining backlog. I get home this weekend so I'll get it all sorted out and caught up by next Monday.

Sorry for the delay!

I was noticing that. Thanks.

Dividends have been paid!

All caught up for the weeks I was away traveling! While I was away, I paid 20 BTC on 6/29 and the remainder today.

Dividends paid to 6000 shares: 26.75615312 BTC
Dividends per share: 0.00445936 BTC

Sorry for the delay! I used up all my vacation time so this won't be happening again for a while. :p

Dividends have been paid for the week of 7/2!

Dividends paid to 6000 shares: 10.44605765 BTC
Dividends per share: 0.00174101 BTC

Dividends have been paid for the week of 7/9!

Dividends paid to 6000 shares: 9.21204997 BTC
Dividends per share: 0.00153534 BTC

What's happening? No dividends, no news, no hashrate?

Thanks for the heads up! Looks like the host machine went down 2 days ago and I didn't notice!  >:(

I'll do the accounting today and see if this week's dividends should be boosted a little to make up for it.

Sorry, everyone!

Well, uptime is usually counted in months so I've stopped checking on it obsessively, if that's what you mean. I believe the last time it went down was March 28th (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49166.msg825474#msg825474). Still, I really should set up a script to email me when the hashrate is below normal for a few hours. I'll look into that.

Yeah, the only problem with that is that MPBM is constantly balancing over the pools, so an email from one pool isn't necessarily useful. I should be able to set that up on my own end, though, just never got around to doing it.

Dividends have been paid for the week of 7/16!

Dividends paid to 6000 shares: 8.76200486 BTC
Dividends per share: 0.00146033 BTC

Because of the downtime, I kicked in a few BTC of my own to make up for it. Sorry, and thanks for understanding!

I have not checked this a while cause when i went put the key in a new computer it was on V2 as opposed to V1.

CAn anyone guide me how to sort this out. The instructions back then were very vague

Tanks in advance

Talk to GLBSE support, and they can get you set up! Or look for Dr. Nefario when he is online here, and chat him up on it.

Why the tank on the contract price? this is a great buy!

Dividends have been paid for the week of 7/23!

Dividends paid to 6000 shares: 8.45786052 BTC
Dividends per share: 0.00140964 BTC

Dividends have been paid for the week of 7/30!

Dividends paid to 6000 shares: 8.93586778 BTC
Dividends per share: 0.00148931 BTC

Dividends have been paid for the week of 8/6!

Dividends paid to 6000 shares: 6.96897667 BTC
Dividends per share: 0.00116150 BTC

Dividends have been paid for the week of 8/13!

Dividends paid to 6000 shares: 7.84586201 BTC
Dividends per share: 0.00130764 BTC

Sorry for being late this week! It took forever to get the coins deposited at GLBSE because they were upgrading their bitcoin client, but I finally got them all in.

Thanks fizz.

Keep up the good work.

Dividends have been paid for the week of 8/20!

Dividends paid to 6000 shares: 7.41319913 BTC
Dividends per share: 0.00123553 BTC

I personally don't believe this will happen for a very long time. Though, if it does, I will look into selling the boards or FPGAs for some other purpose. For example, these boards can be used for Nokia unlocking, vanity address generation, or some other cracking purposes. If none of those are economically viable, the FPGAs can be scrapped and used in another project. All proceeds from those sales would be distributed according to the liquidation clause of the contract:

"...in the event of liquidation, all revenue from sales of the hardware will be paid to shareholders."

I'm more concerned about quantum computing...then what do we do?!?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer)

(Sorry, had to throw a touch of satire in there ;))

Fizz, I really appreciate the timely updates. And the coins! ;)

Would it be possible for you to also send updates to an opt-in email list? I don't check bitcointalk all that often and their notifications stop working as soon as I don't follow up (read: click) on one of them.

I would also be happy to have the option to subscribe to an rss feed somewhere.

Actually, we have both a mailing list and an RSS feed already (available at contract.fpgamining.com (http://contract.fpgamining.com)) but I'd mainly intended it for major announcements like new motions, not weekly reports. I could certainly start posting these there, too, though. Would you guys like that? Or, would it just be more spam in your inbox/news reader?

Either/both of these would be great, as far as I'm concerned.

I would Concur on the Weekly RSS feed

Some of these links are dead and most importantly the link to GLBSE contract page.

I just tested, the above links, and the 3 that are GLBSE 1.0 related I believe are dead. Perhaps the links need to be updated to link to the GLBSE 2.0 Server?

Dividends have been paid for the week of 8/27!

qxzn, you'll be happy to know that this report was posted to our blog feed at contract.fpgamining.com (http://contract.fpgamining.com), and you'll receive an email if you have signed up.

Dividends paid to 6000 shares: 7.55414357
Dividends per share: 0.00125902

Thanks for the heads up. I removed or fixed the dead links.

Dividends have been paid for the week of 9/3!

Dividends paid to 6000 shares: 7.02243042
Dividends per share: 0.00117041

Dividends have been paid for the week of 9/10!

Dividends paid to 6000 shares: 6.90677278
Dividends per share: 0.00115113

Dividends have been paid for the week of 9/17!

More dividends!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 6.40926487 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00106821BTC

What happend to one board? Dead?

No, just doing some rearranging/cleaning. The board is online now, but I'll be doing some more of that this weekend. I'll do my best to keep down time to a minimum.

After doing this, my plan is to switch the boards over to TML. This should provide us a nice boost in earnings!

Thats a great news. I tried to force Lancelot to work with TML bitstream but can't get urjtag svn 2027. That's funny that Endertyrell don't distribute this version.

Dividends have been paid for the week of 9/24!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 6.31721319 BTC
Dividend per share:  0.00105287 BTC

GLBSE is closed, what will happend now?

Indeed, we need a plan. Perhaps put forth a few proposals and have a shareholder vote on it?

It seems that for just about any plan, we'll need a list of who owns what. I assume nefario is distributing those to issuers? Perhaps Fizz can contact nefario to get the list? (of course, how do we prove we are the respective owners of the glbse account?.. hmm..)

Right now, my plan is to continue mining but wait in a holding pattern until it becomes clear what will happen with GLBSE. I will keep you all updated.

I imagine he will enable logging in as normal, then you get a claim code of some sort that the issuer knows how to read.

check out glbse today. There is a claim form when you log in. Looks like he's going to use email to transfer shares.

I did this. I guess all of you will need to as well, then I will receive emails with shareholder information. Let's see what happens.

Has anyone got any updates on what the plan is now that glbse is closed?

I'm still waiting for an email from GLBSE with a list of shareholders. Until that happens, the cluster is still mining away. We currently have a balance of 23.18284381 BTC.

Once I get the shareholder list, I plan to resume paying out mining earnings. Whether or not we'll be able to trade shares in some way is not clear. It probably makes sense to allow an OTC market, where you can trade with other people by signing a message with your BTC address that says you transfer ownership of N shares to x address. Then, you can send me that signed message and I'll update my database.

Another option will be to shut down, sell off the boards, and pay that out in proportion to shares owned.

Until we get the shareholder list, there isn't much I can do except for keep mining.

Anything new? Another 3 weeks have passed. I didn't recive any BTC from GLBSE, and I had few BTC on my account :(

It seems Gigamining has received the list.
I received an email from them stating how to reclaim my investment.

I must say I'm shocked.
Not only do they want a notarized document but also a copy of an government issued photo identification and my physical address.
Meaning I not only need to pay a notary money to get the document I also need to tell Gigamining all about myself and my identity.

Please FPGA Mining keep it simple. Don't go down Gigamining road.

fizzisist, is there any progress?
Did you get the list from Nefario?

Nope, nothing from him yet...

Breaking news! Nefario just sent me an asset holder list! Unfortunately, it shows less than 75% of the number of shares out there. As far as I know, people will be excluded from the list for 2 reasons: they never submitted their info to glbse.com after it was shut down, or they received a double payment but didn't return the extra to Nefario.

Here's my tentative plan for the next few days:

1. Send out emails to each of the asset holders on my list. I'll post here when I have finished sending all of those out. That way, we'll have a way to verify who isn't on the list, and you'll know that you need to take it up with Nefario.

2. Pay out the back log of dividends proportionally to each asset holder. I will do this based on percentage owned of 6000 total shares, so some of the dividends will be withheld to give those that aren't on the list time to get added. If you aren't on the list but get on it later, your dividends will be waiting for you, and I'll pay them out then.

3. Discuss what to do moving forward.

By the way, the list includes only 3 pieces of information for each asset holder: an email address, a bitcoin address, and the number of shares. If you need to communicate with me and want to prove that you are the asset holder, you should send an email from the account you submitted to GLBSE. If the information is especially sensitive, sign it with the bitcoin address (http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3337/what-are-the-safety-guidelines-for-using-the-sign-message-feature/3339#3339). An example of a reason you would need to do this would be to ask me to change the address where I send your dividends or change the email address I send to. Something like this would require a signed message to prove your identity.

Finally...
Waiting for email...

I received a short list of additions to the asset holder list from Nefario today, bringing the total number of accounted for shares to 5119 / 6000.

I also sent out a mass email to everyone on the list, so if you didn't receive one from me, you were not on the list. Please send me an email at fizzisist@fpgamining.com to confirm, then you will have to contact Nefario to figure out why you weren't on it.

I will be preparing to send out the 46.32920222 BTC from unpaid earnings very soon.

Great news.
Thanks for doing this the uncomplicated way!

Dividends have been paid!

I've been holding out for an updated list from Nefario, which he keeps promising (http://blog.glbse.com/) but hasn't yet delivered. He once again says updates will go out tomorrow, but I don't want to be strung along again when they don't, so I just made a huge payment:

http://blockchain.info/tx/fc4d161792cb5d413e0bf3a41bb6138269305934756c1eb68b72ca2f9afea34f

Total paid to 5119 shares: 46.07531283 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00900084 BTC
Total held for unclaimed shares: 7.92974225 BTC

If Nefario ever sends an update to the list, the other folks will get paid out of that fund.

Looks good, thank you kindly fizzisist.

If I remember correctly, I think FPGA.contract was the very first investment I made on GLBSE.  By the time GLBSE shut down I had holdings in 8-9 others.  Of all of them, yours was the quickest and least painful to verify my holdings, and is the very first to actually pay me back something since the shut down.

Thank you for providing an example for all how easy this can be.

Great, I've just recived my share. Thanks.

Dividends have been paid!

http://blockchain.info/tx/f770115fdfb36301e3859273ea02cbdeade7eccb5f578b2de5fd8b9e8c3f4aca

Total paid to 5119 shares: 3.30005569 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00064467 BTC
Total held for unclaimed shares: 0.56795254 BTC

Yep, dividends just came into my wallet ;) Finally I know how many shares I have ;)

I received an updated list of shareholders from Nefario on 12/28, and finally had a chance after the holidays to go through it and find the new additions. There are now 5883 shares accounted for, and some shareholders will be receiving back pay for the previous 2 dividend payments. Every shareholder on my list should have received an email by now. If you haven't, please contact me AND nefario (james@glbse.com) to sort out why you aren't on the list.

Also, some of the share holders on the recent list did not include bitcoin addresses. Those people should have received an email today requesting a bitcoin address. Please reply to the email with an address to receive payments.

By the way, if anyone would like to know the number of shares I have on file for them please don't hesitate to send me an email.

Dividend payments will be going out shortly. Sorry for the delay, I was traveling over the last week.

Keep up the good work.

What are your thoughts on relisting the security?

One of my other Mining securities has relisted over on https://btct.co

Any thoughts? Good? Bad?

Back pay dividend payments have been made!

I just made a payment of most of the back pay for the previous dividends to folks who are on my current list but were not on the list at
the time the original payments were made.

http://blockchain.info/tx/92b7b39ef7ba73067bf67e75fc791c3090027e142bbd5b599db092914e2b6a7a

Next, I will be making a payment for the recent earnings to the entire list. I know this is taking quite some time, but I hope you can understand that this isn't an easy process. I need to carefully compare lists, payment logs, and then double and triple check them before hitting the "Send" button on these. I'll have the next payment ready soon.

Dividend payments have been made!

Just made a big payment for a few weeks worth of earnings:

http://blockchain.info/tx/f40a3198756d3eefbea3314f6d40546713ceb6ec9e47512435eb1ce01d0585a9

Dividends paid out: 7.54928977 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00132653 BTC

There are still a few accounts on my list without BTC addresses. Please email me if you did not receive this dividend.

Dividends have been paid!

http://blockchain.info/tx/03dab4e7c009d9438cf3664666a3e818524d8c1dccc820da8ae343ba555c0609

Nice to see another pennies in my wallet ;)

More dividend payments!

Two different payments went out today. One as a catch up that went only to one account that I now have the address for and didn't before:

http://blockchain.info/tx/b7150eb2f33bdcf4ac1dffa4fc88dbb8d95c41df956d580e5187d6c91d05f892

The other was a general payment of recent dividends:

http://blockchain.info/tx/7191bc2c222592ff242def2c6bf30b8b59ecfcad5a4fd91855acb69e69c3fe80

When can we expect the next payment?  Seems its been a couple weeks since the last one.

More payments!

Sorry for the recent delay. Making payments is now a mostly manual operation, and requires lots of double checking and detail work, so I don't like to do it unless I have some good time I can spend focusing on it. Finally found the time for it today!

First payment, for backpay (received another address from a user that hadn't sent it before):
http://blockchain.info/tx/f475bf87e0a928bde2fd92bda713ed0d59cce83a827319076af89951023c36d7

Second, general payment:
http://blockchain.info/tx/0c0c9ae233ff666c593d9f6cc01b373c8e60d5a8786333a5cffa3ef066f3db79

New dividend payment

http://blockchain.info/tx/641ff689df58a871e5ff8374216761598be23a7850fdd79d98c75b035ae15603

thanks for the continued payment.
Iv been sitting on these shares for a long time.

Hi fizzisist,

I didn't catch this announcement last month that you've suspended sales of new X6500s:

http://fpgamining.com/news/suspending-operations

and it also seems all mention of the FPGA.contract have disappeared from your site.

Does this in any way imply any plans to wind down mining operations?

What is the current hashrate of the "farm" and what are you planning to do with it (and FPGA.contract holders) going forward?

Thanks!

Yes, we're no longer making new FPGAs, but our little cluster is still mining away at ~2.8 GH/s.

More payments!

Another user finally got in touch with me with their address so I made a back pay payment:

00f8180836c0e62e1570fa0aff9ef97a2249067c8f72360fb94dd54646706b97

After that I made a general dividend payment:

380d59311e237891e5aa0d870591c6867ac3b4f72c939029a8e08bcc9f58f669

woot!  who needs asics when you got fpga revenues  :P

Another payment!

https://blockchain.info/tx/b207638c6f8194e764749934f97118ca4de03f5958894695ff332edb32661440

Great !

It's been waaaay too long since my last dividend payment. Very sorry about that, folks. Here's the latest one:

https://blockchain.info/tx/f03e3fdcc32a47a28a5a1bc697573fc76a35d771f1d0696d3b626345b6372b58

Nice to see another satoshi in wallet....

Another payment!

159574c5c5919a15cea9c1e1aa860e2aca3f9706e05c7a2fa0c0e12e42c053f6

And, another payment:

txid: 05096425978646edb4adf6ff176eea2aa9dfd7defa18891fa77c93cc8e941af2

Payment time:

txid: 2487f5d874a344c4c77f3578634c6e659b52f18213f369e6b8d37a9b015dbab1

Nice :)

Nudge.

There haven't been any payouts anymore for a long time.
And the official homepage does not exist anymore.

Has this contract been canceled without notice?

Probably makes sense to cancel it, what with the hashrate being what it is. That said, a proper winddown and final payout would be nice. Not sure if there's any money to be gained by liquidating the cards, but that might be a nice gesture too.

We're still mining, but it's definitely getting close to the "not-worth-it" point. One issue is that each payment needs to be over 0.00005430 BTC for the client to send it, and with the shares spread out over so many people, the payment per account is tiny until it has been mining for months. I made a payment today almost 3 months since the last one and there will still some accounts that were under that limit. I had to manually remove those and will need to carry over the unpaid earnings for the next payment... an extra pain in the neck for me.

So, my plan at the moment is to just continue letting the FPGAs do their thing, and checking on the earnings occasionally. When it's enough for the majority of shareholders to receive a payment, I'll make one. I'll keep an eye on the difficulty/price ratio and not mine when the cost of power outweighs the earnings. At that point, we should discuss selling the boards off. Thoughts on that plan?

Today's payment txid: 986d9a5048e9b29ed4af96c3868f981955e645b9529c3ff93e511751480a91b0

Sell those obsolete FPGA's and buy some ASIC hardware. Based on bitfury chips for example. Reinvest 10% of dividends and we all be happy ;)

I talked to a guy a few days ago who is creating a sCrypt bitstream for the x6500s which will be finished in a few weeks. It may or may not be more profitable than mining btc on them, but keep your eyes open for that :D

Thanks for the update. Sounds like a reasonable plan. It might be nice to update this thread about once a month or so if it's not too much trouble, just to keep in contact.

I haven't, I'll ping him again.

ping. how's it going fizz?

Would it make sense to stop bitcoin mining and go for litecoin?
Maybe this can help:
https://github.com/kramble/FPGA-Litecoin-Miner