I imagine international postage would eat up a lot of the value, but I don't know exactly how much it would cost since in my normal business dealings I sell exclusively to the US and am not familiar with international rates.  It would ship from Maine in the United States if you want to figure it out, and I could use any method you want.  A rig would weigh between 10-15 pounds depending on the number of cards you bought, and a lot more if you want the case shipped with it.

When you buy the units and I operate them there is an upkeep cost associated with it of $1.50/day per unit.  So in your example 124 days x 4 units x $1.50 = $744 plus the cost of hardware.  In exchange for this I pay for utilities, give 100% guaranteed up time, and replace any hardware that fails at my own expense.  In effect though I deduct the $1.50 from your daily payments, so you wouldn't be paying the $744, you would just be earning that much less.

Electricity on one unit is just under 200 watts, or about 5 kilowatt hours per day, or 155 kwh in a month.

I have 14 units of mining capacity currently available for leasing.  Each unit is 250 mhash/sec and is zero variance.  The lease rate depends on the terms, with more favorable rates for longer term leases.  With leases there you receive zero variance payments daily.  A one month lease is $120, two months is $220, three is $300, and additional months are $60/month all paid in advance.  That's as low as $0.24 per mhash per month.  Months are always considered 31 day periods.  Compare that with the prevailing rates.  If you rented 1 ghash from me for 4 months it would cost you a total of $1440 ($360 x 4), while others would charge 1760GBP, which is more than double.

Payments will be based on the rate determined here http://www.btcserv.net/bitcoin-calculator/, which at the current difficulty level is 0.18232btc/day per unit leased.  As a bonus to my first customers and because I have a bunch of bitcoins sitting doing nothing, I'll give you at least one week of earnings in advance upon receiving payment.  So instead of receiving payments of .18232 BTC a day, I'll send you 1.27624 btc the first day (or more, haven't decided yet) and count that against your future earnings.  In the end you'll get the same amount of coins as if you were paid daily, but this way you'll get them quicker and I won't have to make as many small payments.

I also have an option where you can own the mining equipment and I will operate it for you for a small fee. The cost to own the rig would be $220 per 250mhash unit, and it would represent a rig with Radeon 5830s, 1 GB ram, a flash drive, and a sempron 140.  You own the equipment and at any time can shut it down and ask me to mail you the hardware (you pay shipping costs) or sell it for you and give you the proceeds.  The computers are online now, and you get daily dividends.  I operate them for you for $1.50/day in upkeep until it becomes unprofitable or you want to stop.  If something breaks while you are paying upkeep I replace it for you at my expense.  If there is downtime I cover it for you.  You can buy individual units (250 mhashes), so you can own just one unit for $220, but in order to redeem for a full rig you would need at least two shares and to pay for shipping from the east coast of the USA.  

I would prefer payment via some method with no chargebacks, so I will gladly accept bitcoin or Mt. Gox transfers when they reopen.  If you have any questions please post or PM.  

This isn't super relevant to the mining operation, but if you are worried about security, I also have an ebay business with nearly 10,000 feedback and monthly sales of around $30,000.  You will have all my details to see that I am legit.

It's not that I don't think the actions merit an article, but I don't think enough is really known about the person to distinguish him from the project as a whole. 

Getting a little OT here, but for people solo mining how are you checking if you have any downtime?  

The thing I like most about pools is I'm able to see instantly if any of my computers are down without any extra software.  I just have one worker per computer and can see whether or not it completed any shares in the past two minutes, and if not I know exactly what computer has the problem.  For me, this utility itself is worth more than the 3% fee charged by the pool.

They were just saying that the utility of money does not scale linearly.  To a dirt poor person $1,000 guaranteed is better than a 51% chance of $2,000, or a 25% chance of $5,000, or even a .1% chance of $2,000,000, while the math would tell you to just take the odds x the value to get your expected value.

I think that's still a little far fetched at the moment, since a block is only worth about $750 today, hardly life changing money to most.  

It sounds reasonable under your parameters, but there's no way I see 2% growth continuing longer than a few months, but I'll go with it.  I just did some really quick math and here's what I got:

Chance of solving with 1 hash today: 1.68814E-16, *500mhash = 8.4407E-08 of solving in 1 second * 60*60*24 = .007293 chance of solving a block today.

I multiplied the odds of solving with 1 hash by .98 in excel, did the same calculation, and continued out for 50,000 days, although excel stopped recording values after 33000 days because at that crazy growth rate you would have a 9.9x10-295 chance of solving a block in a day.

The sum of all the chances of solving a block in an individual day was 36.46%.  There's probably a more elegant solution to this, but I just ran the calculation for another purpose and already had the spreadsheet.

Solo mining is undoubtedly better mathematically, but you could mine for years without ever finding a block and I just can't see that sitting well with most people.  This is a bit of a simplification because I am not taking difficulty increases into account and because I am assuming every day as an individual trial instead of every share, but the average time to solve a block with a hash rate of 1ghash is 68.5 days at the current difficulty.  If you convert that to a percentage you have a roughly 1.46% chance of generating a block in any given day, or a 98.54% of not solving a block today.  

Chances of solving at least one block, at constant difficulty and 1ghash/sec:

1 day : 1.460%
10 days : 13.676%
50 days : 52.064%
100 days : 77.022%
200 days : 94.720% (1 chance in 19 of having a run this bad with no blocks)
365 days : 99.534% (1 in 214)
500 days : 99.936% (1 in 1,561)
1000 days : 99.99996% (1 in 2,436,681)

Those are the two trades:

Jun 22, 2011, 22:14:01   5000.00000   0.00   
Jun 22, 2011, 22:13:02   500.00000   0.01   

Not exactly a big influence on the real market, just messes with the graphs.  I don't know how the exchange works, but I can't imagine why the exchange would allow purchases so much higher than the actual market rate.  A market order or limit order should always try to match the buyer with the lowest current ask.  Were there just 0 sellers with standing orders so 500 and 5000 were actually the lowest, or is it just people trying to mess with the graph with tiny transactions?

Didn't stop Berkshire Hathaway - look up ticker brk.a, never split since it started in 1965.  It started at $19, now worth $114,122

Does not compute. That's some Yogi Berra logic right there.

Nobody mines anymore, the difficulty is too high.

I didn't mean to bump this again, I was meant to just edit the original post and accidentally quoted it.  There used to be a delete button, but I cannot find it.  Mods please delete this if you want.  I only intended to add a new post at most a couple of times a week if there had been a significant change.

You can't argue with a calculator.

Bump, prices significantly reduced.  Own for $0.80/mhash, lease for as low as $0.24/mhash per month.

Everyone will cash their BTC out of Mt. Gox, but they have no reason to panic sell.  Obviously growth prospects took I hit so I could see us back in the $13 range, but certainly not $5

If 260k bitcoins were sold at .01 each there is no way they could reimburse that, nor is it really fair that a few lucky people got to take advantage of the deal.

I don't see it going anywhere because it's so inefficient compared to other types of mining that the returns don't come close to the costs.  Even if it's just 30 watts or so for the CPU to do 1 mhash.  If wikipedia averaged 100,000 users doing 30 watts each 24 hours a day, that's 72,000 kilowatt hours a day for 100ghash, or about $11k in electricity for $1500 in bitcoins.

Some of us still need them



/sickbrag

Dealing with ebay and paypal is a necessary evil to being a seller online.  I've had probably $1,000 scammed from me in various chargebacks over the years, both paypal and ebay case resolution always sides with the buyer.  Paypal also is holding $6,000 of my money hostage indefinitely as a retainer presumably until I completely close my account.  Oh, and I also pay them about $6k a month in fees.  It sucks, but it won't stop me from using them until something better comes along.