^^^ What he said. 

If you don't want to list publicly, toss me a PM also.  I've got a handful of these, I can trade one, or as camolist suggested a fresh one could be purchased and sent to you directly in exchange.

BTW, OgNasty, any update on the 5oz pucks (so as to redirect back on-topic at least slightly   )?  Can't wait to get my hands on them...

Apologies for the confusion everyone!

I was intending to do up to 15 credits, per round, for 3 rounds, with no carryover.

Round 1 (winner announced 4/17) - 12 credits issued, 3 unclaimed.
Round 2 (winner to be announced 4/24) - so far only 3 posts qualifying, 15 available credits.
Round 3 (winner to be announced 5/1) - 15 available credits.

So, because of my lack of clear communication, and the fact I might have been causing folks to stay away:

I WILL EXTEND THE CREDIT PROMO FOR ONE MORE ROUND

Round 4 (winner to be announced 5/8) - 15 available credits.

I will also update my OP in post #3 to clarify this.

There's not "slots"... the 3 in the title thread was to indicate how many more times I was going to run the credit promotion (which should actually read "2" instead of 3, need to fix that).

Feel free to go ahead and make a prediction, just follow the directions in the first thread and you'll be fine.  If you post your tx id in the thread, if you're one of the first 15 with an incorrect prediction, you'll get a credit back for 0.01BTC as part of the promo.  As of right now you'd be guaranteed to qualify for the credit, there's less than 15 people in total who have guessed.  

The more shares you have in the chain, the higher your payout.  That could be because of better luck, or the fact that hashrate has been leaving (or both), thus you are able to get more shares that way.

Nothing is "hop-proof".  But, in this case PPLNS is the next best thing.  By design there's a ramp-up period (3 days in this case) where you don't reach full block payout potential until after you've been mining for 3 days.  If you know you've got to put in that much work before you see your "proper" payouts, you're less likely to leave in-between to seek luck elsewhere, lest you've lost most of your past 3 days' worth of work.

From April 5th to April 8th you would have seen payouts increasing since that was your ramp-up period.  Then in the past 12 days we've gone from 304 miners (4/8) down to 267 miners with the most recent block today (woo, another one 2 hours ago!), so in theory you would see earnings increase there as well since there are less shares from the other miners competing with yours.

I think there's been at least 2 SHA256 coins released over the past week.  Over the weekend my SPTech rentals reported over 3000 blocks found, so it sure as heck ain't Bitcoin...

Whatever it is, I'm fine if they keep it going, I'm getting double on my rentals and everything I have has been rented solid.

I'd be in for a tube of 20 each.  Those look pretty neat.

Wish they were silver tho....

Up to the top we go!

We've decided to continue using this as the prediction thread, there will not be a new thread opened.  Continue to post in here.

Predictions are open for this week's contest.  Next block winner will be on 4/24/15.

Good luck!

I believe there's also work being done to use the proxy to be able to balance miner hashrate.  The idea being there to try to mitigate the effects of "swamping" a node if a large miner comes onto a node with a lot of smaller miners, they could be proxied to a different node where their hashrate is more appropriate.

Yes, if you're using PoP method, you're tied to either of those nodes.  However you can still connect to them using standard P2Pool methods like any other miner and if you failover your normal shares still count.

The ideas behind the way they're doing it are interesting - sub-pools which in effect create a hub/spoke architecture.  This could well be a viable workaround to the variance issues, as smaller miners can find a local sub-pool to join which under the covers helps make sure they're mining on a node that is appropriate to their mining power.

Ok, credits have been issued!

By my count there were 12 incorrect predictions which qualified for the credit.  Below are the userid's who qualified as well as the TX id of the transactions for each credit.  Please let me know if I have made a mistake anywhere, as this process was all manual.

Thank you everyone for participating, and we will put up the thread for Round 2 in the near future.

valkir:
a9bc2fb7d8a00bc842b5b5deb8183157588120a48e0db5065e28eea14ce438dd

Squirrel Dearing:
dd52df249d6f2ad24c7f452d8fe6cc4c165c3bf8b71c44cf6096f6a73e684897

Injust:
a3b6be8d04c3826a1784a78c0b399d71e715035103ccda65a93e409d0632bf4d

jeffthebaker:
cd76c29ad9086b4aa1953d03b6c2c46ecbb8a11c855132668632479e9033b61a

bobolini:
61548e71d06592b98a6e2f1d4227993ee841f6d2969ee665f01912a3f6b774b2

jasonslow:
ce9e8d95268e2610e25e696a81ccd525b31b2d92bb5064942f307cc6d75503ae

arallmuus:
2ac4849d33d4abaf29f679e1b8bb5975c2d00ba03882d8a73c1f8ffb78d482c5

TriggerX:
66c5366a81e30e427f59b1d5540d09ad23a4d49f53c95871ddbbc15f38045672

naypalm:
886ae94d2d6edcfa2e59803f6d5a90f2997a5303e71476d13e647716790e171f

warmach:
024fdd348212b2e157cdb82a5da8e0a567e0cd0337f64ef3324d50e89f21a7ac

MCHouston:
ddef405ae38d6a1200aa79dc9448a1d338acc8e6ab798a95c7108f3420999a32

shulio:
294c9a585ef687c4feab04edd0a2187031e2d58906dbc54ba3a3b562ab504d6c

Congrats to the correct predictions!

I will pull together the incorrect ones today and issue the credits.  I will post in this thread later with the info and TX id of the payouts.

What, have you no faith in your prediction?   

As it stands now, I counted 14 posts in the thread with TX id's, including yours.  I believe as long as my math is correct you should be fine.

Down to the wire folks!  We'll soon have a result...

Bump up!

Less than 24 hours to get a prediction in!

I received my silver BTC coins today.  Everything looks great, was packaged well.  Very happy with transaction (BTW no escrow used, no problem).

First off, this is no cloud mining offering, far from it.  Mining is part of the picture, but for different reasons and utilities.

Think of it this way.  You could use the term "fund" if you want to compare it to a traditional fiat-type investment (with one distinction I'll outline below).

1 seat = 1 share in the "fund"

There's 30,000 possible active seats (shares) available in total in the "fund".

If the fund is able to raise 30,000 Satoshi, each seat would get a dividend payback of 1 Satoshi.

The fund attempts to grow it's total BTC holdings by several means.  Currently the main sources of income are sales from physical silver cold-wallet type storage coins, and mining donations.  Several people, myself included, run miners which donate some or all mining proceeds to the fund, which are then distributed as donation payouts to all seats.  A Keno guessing game was just created which we hope will gain interest and bring additional income into the fund.

There are other things being developed which, over time, hope to increase the fund's income significantly, so that your eventual distributions are greater than what you put into it.  By doing that, it should in theory increase the value of the seat you purchased which can then be sold for profit.  For example, you can easily track what you put in, and what your value out is within the user pages on the website.  According to my panel, I'm up about 7% value from what I've invested so far over the past 3 months.

The main difference here is that unlike many of the other "investments" you see around, the fund does not hold onto the BTC it takes in, rather each week a distribution is made to all seat holders for whatever BTC are made during the past week.  This prevents a lot of potential issues other funds see, such as hacked or stolen hot wallets with all proceeds - no one holder has the main stash of BTC funds so it cannot simply be run off with by one person (or a group) thus leaving all the investors with a total loss of investment, etc.

I hope this helps answer your question(s) a little more, but please keep asking as you need to.  There's plenty of people here who believe in seeing this succeed and are willing to help.

I haven't seen the boxes for the SP-20, but if it's anything like the ones for the SP-31/35, I would agree. Those boxes are awesome, perfect fit and sturdy as hell.  I saved those for sure for if/when I need to ship mine out in the future. 

A day later and a dollar short, but ANNOUNCING ANOTHER PROMOTION

Current Promo - 0.005BTC credit for the first 10 confirmed incorrect predictions per round

This promo will run for 2 weeks (rounds ending 5/15 & 5/22)

Rules:

• Does NOT apply to instant predictions feature
• One credit per Bitcointalk user id, per round
• Valid TX ID must be posted in this thread to qualify (a payment address will also help)
• Credit TX ID's will attempt to be posted within 48 hours of round end

At any time during the round you may post the TX ID for any or all of your predictions.  

The credits will be for 0.005BTC, no matter how much is sent.  The promo winners will be taken first come, first served as shown by the forum post timestamp.

Yes, the promo is per userid, per round.  Unlimited userid's can predict, but only up to 10 will receive a credit per round.

Results so far:

Round ending 5/15 - winner to be announced

Good luck!

Got me beat, I've no experience in that area, I just like jerky and am willing to help...

If there are 2 samples left, they could ship both to one of us to save on their end and then we could work out a deal between us if you'd like.

Ooh, I'd love to get a sample pack, and would even pay for the shipping to the US.

BTW, in reply to one of the above about shipping to the US, if you guys do make it and garner enough interest, one obvious solution would be to find a US-based distributor.  Most of your goods would probably fit into either a small or medium sized flat-rate USPS shipping box or padded envelope, which are all under $13 anywhere in the US.  Shipping a large amount once overseas and then doing the sending once local will probably be much more cost-efficient in the long run.

I'm in the NorthEast US and have some garage space available for rent if it ever comes to it....

I bid 2.05BTC

Birds of a feather...

Besides, I figured I needed to attempt to complete a full collection now that I own most of the other Lealana LTC/BTC round denominations (thanks again BTW... )