Bitcoin Forum

I have talked my boss into allowing me to mine BTC without having to pay for electricity in our office server closet. He wants to see me generate a return with minimal investment. This has me wondering what route should I take. Should I seek investment for purchasing mining equipment with shared profits or would I be better off trying to offer remote hosting?

Why not invest in the rigs yourself and keep the profits?

Most servers do not have good GPU's in them.  Xeons are not very good miners either.  I would go with a PC with a AMD/ATI crossfire dual/quad card combo...

AMD/ATI cards are better at mining than Nvidia Cards.
 

It might be a great time for remote hosting. It's getting hot, and difficulty's continuing to increase. You could probably get away with taking 50-75% of revenues for running others' GPUs, because they'll likely be unprofitable for the owner to run much longer (if still able right now).

You'll probably want a good gauge on boss tolerance, though. A few big clients, and you'll be blowing through thousands a month in electricity bills.

You could order a Butterfly Labs (BFL) ASIC the little one is 5 GH/s and is around $280.00 US.

That is a minimal investment, but currently BFL will not be shipping new orders till July/August.

Although, if it's a big office building, chances are the electricity price is going to be pretty low.

We have a rented 19" server rack in a big datacenter where we host our company's services on our own physical servers (and we don't have to pay extra for electricity). Also you hace professional cooling and redundant power and internet connectivity.

So I also talked with my boss if I could use the available rackspace to place there a small mining rig and he agreed. :)

Unfortunately we do not have much space left in the rack, so at the moment I am building a small mining rig with 3 graphic cards (in a very small ATX case). It will not be a big player in the bitcoin network, but as long as I do not have to pay for electricity every single hash per second will be profitable.

And as a side effect will I learn more about the bitcoin technology and the community.. I'm just excited to get involved. :)

Litecoin should be much better on anything besides asic

Maybe, depending on the electricity provider. A lot of places, at least in the US (including my residence in MI), charge in a progressive tier system, where "buying in bulk" bumps you up into way higher price tiers. Provider for my house does ~$.075/kWh for the first 200kWh, then soars up to ~$.1125/kWh, then soars again to ~$.18/kWh after 500kWh or so. Idunno if there are laws in some places mandating it, or if it makes sense for some reason I'm missing -- maybe it's just a way to hike rates on significant consumers while claiming it's a policy for the environment. I've heard CA is particularly horrible with the price tiers.

Haha good for you !

Not sure if it will be profitable to mine btc with server because it doesn't usually have great gpu. Not sure if mining litecoin will make it more worthwhile. Maybe someone more experience can comment on this.

I am more interested in purchasing or hosting new equipment. Our existing equipment would not do much. I have been looking into listing on the various exchanges to raise BTC to buy ASICs. It seems like that would be the ideal situation. It would be pretty neat to raise BTC to start an ASIC mining operation with no costs. I think that might attract investors right?

If you're just using server CPUs, add my vote to mine LTC instead.

I do not want to have to talk to my boss about LTC after finally convincing him to give some Bitcoin investing a try. I think trying to raise funds to buy a few ASIC miners is the way I want to go. Is it necessary to go through an exchange like bitfunder or do you think I could raise funds on the forum for this?

*shrug*  It'd be easy enough I'd think.  All you'd have to say is "Basically the same -- but this crypto-currency mines better on our hardware."

i think it's a time loss and it's not worth it

ditto just spend the $ buying coins now it'll get you more in the end

I bet you will come into work one day and your boss will have bought some big rig and really got into BTC haha.

also, what if your boss'es boss finds out,  thinks this is a bad idea, why risk your job...

How much can you offer for remote hosting? (Power available/space/cooling). With the unhousehold friendly BFL mini-rigs cost some people may be interested in hosting off-site if your fees/% take is reasonable.  Something in the order of electrical + rent fee and 5% of mining proceeds to cover on-demand management.  That's likely to be your lowest cost to generate worthwhile revenue but you need to be able to host and provide cooling for many units to truly entice most bosses I would think....

Alternately, LTC is ripe for sweeping up low cost gpu and generating very nice btc returns with trading, your still mining "for" btc but your using a platform that produces better ROI with lower costing last Gen BTC hardware.... that could be your sales pitch for LTC if you want to brave it....

Because not everyone is a greedyass miner.

It is a large server room. It could host more equipment then I would feel comfortable operating and it has air conditioning units setup that were part of the building when we moved in. We are also located in the southwest and pay business electrical rates so it is very cheap. My boss said $0.03 per kwh.

Would anyone be willing to lend me BTC for a listing on bitfunder or another exchange in exchange for shares in the operation or a promise to repay when the IPO sells?

I'll just suggest that you reconsider this mining on the company dime with CPUs or GPUs. CPUs are just going to be plain underpowered and GPUs are probably just going to throw more heat into the server room than the trouble is worth.

If you are serious consider getting some Asic miners or even Used FPGA miners, rackmounting them is rather trivial and the rest of the servers will thank you for saving them from an early death.

I doubt anyone is going to be excited in mining bond investments after last year's drama... Or lending for mining in general... If you need to know why it is time to read MOAR...

That is what I would like to do with the BTC I raise from an offering on bitfunder. I would like to buy some of the ASICMINER blades as well as placing orders with Butterfly Labs. Then pay out the mined BTC as dividends to shareholders and keep 5%-10% for myself. Once I show that it is making money then my boss will invest some of the company profits into shares to collect BTC dividends.

I'm going to have to disagree, I think this is a great opportunity for you to get started working with the tooling, and begin to get your hands dirty with the technology (apps, tweaking the miners, playing with overclocking, posting on forums, etc.).

I started out just about 3 weeks ago with a couple of 7870 GHz editions that I found on craigslist for $180.00, slapped them into some old HP desktops that I had laying around the office, and got them pulling ~420 MH/s each with minimal heat (running stable @ ~60c).

I also added a 5770 pulling 210 MH/s ($65.00 on craigslist) , and then later a pair of 7970s (1 @ 150.00, 1 @ 300.00 on craigslist) each doing ~600MH/s.

So for an investment of 700.00 over a 3 week period, I'm pulling down ~1850 MH/s, all running at my office under my desk without anyone else in the office even knowing they exist.

The problem you run into is that Bitfunder or one of the other exchanges approve it and them???

Mining can be profitable. Mining bonds tend to leave people feeling burned though. Traditional venture capital firms like yCombinator tend to make shitty investments when they move into the BTC space, but They might have some loose money to throw at a mining farm.

Also I haven't checked in a while to see how Avalon is shipping, but I believe the Avalon ASIC units required minimal modification to become rack ready (think the height is 4U).

If you really want to mine something with off the shelf hardware though, at the moment it would be hard to avoid setting up some Radeon 6990s which though hard to find are some hashing beasts. Point them at BTC, LTC, doesn't much matter.

Might be decent practice, but it would make a horrible security.

I think bitfunder would approve it. It would be a company and not a bond. As far as I know there are not any companies currently offering a piece of the pie for hosting services as well as mining and the additional hosting services could give us an advantage for buying new hardware over other mining companies. We do currently have a few 7900 series cards but I am more interested in ASIC mining going foward. Any GPU mining would be just to appease shareholders until ASIC miners arrived.

I agree. I would not consider offering this without my boss knowing exactly what is happening and us having the additional space electricity and cooling ability to handle it.

There is actually a rather good chance Bitfunder would approve it. The line between a Mining company and a perpetual mining bond is rather thin.

Read this link. (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2012/the-problem-with-pmbs-ie-perpetual-mining-bonds/) Then proceed with questions. The reason there seem to be so few companies/securities on the market for this type of service at the moment arises from the collapse of a bunch of securities/companies built on this premise late 2012 which turned out to have invested in Ponzi schemes rather than equipment. It is understandable, they did the math on equipment and found the rate of return on the Ponzis more to their liking. Then the Ponzis collapsed, they couldn't pay share/bond holders and the only people to avoid scammer tags were none but the most corrupt, if any on that model did indeed avoid tags.

If you do this do it for yourself, your company, or some combination of the two. Once you have the business of mining down and the ASIC market has stabilized would be the time to maybe consider a security.

Nice.

I would do it for myself if I had the funds. I was hoping to raise a few thousand dollars. If I do it with only my funds it will be a big empty server room with a lonely 5GH ASIC miner in the middle. I want to take advantage of the space and I think that will take either a loan or some kind of IPO at this time.

So you have no experience with mining, even with a pc at home and you'll be using "borrowed" resources from your company.  Not to be callous but why would anyone invest in your "company"?  You should take some time to understand how the technology and the coin markets work before trying to raise money.  You won't be getting your hands on an ASIC anytime soon anyway.

I have been GPU mining since 2011. I have a perfect understanding of how the markets work. That is why I know how valuable a space with free electricity provided by my boss and air conditioning is. I also could get my hands on an ASICMINER ASIC very quickly with a little funding help. Thank you for asking about my experience and knowledge.

Mining litecoins has consistently been more profitable. Especially with the recent jump.

My boss isn't interested in litecoins so it is a lost point.

Is anyone interested in lending me 5 BTC for a startup on bitfunder? I would be willing to give you 6 BTC worth of shares in the operation that you could sell for a quick profit once it is listed if you desired.

I would also like to hear from anyone interested in having their ASIC or FPGA miners hosted at my office.

I envy those whose boss allows them to do this type of stuff. I don't think any that I knew would allow this type. Always too much on the corporate side of things.

I have been talking about Bitcoin for a long time and he has been looking for ways to reward me at work without giving me a raise.  ;)

This is great, so technically it's a raise then? Congratulations! :D If you are looking into some GPU usage, look into alternate cryptocoins on scrypt as they seem to be doing in the okay zone for cards; and since electricity isn't an issue, you've got a great thing going!

You didn't read that his boss agrees with him?:))

Agreed. AMD ATi 5850, 5870 to 5970, 6950, 7850, 7870 , 7970 have pretty good hashrates compared to Nvidia/CPU

:D

So that means I can farm at work?

That will be awesome, even when I can farm using all of the computers available!

It looks like I am going to have to ask for a loan to raise funds for a bitfunder offering. I will have to do some work on putting together a business plan and see if I can get some investors behind the idea. I think it is a great opportunity for everyone but raising BTC can be difficult at times.