Current transaction fees are so low (around 0.1 BTC/block) that it probably would be wiser to join a 0% fee pool and not get this transaction fee...

10 000 CPUs at ~5 MH/s (and this is VERY optimistic!) = 50 GH/s. Would be a barely noticable fluctuation in the current hashrate.

Absolutely 0, USD is less stable than the EUR, so no reason for me to have a worse currency at home.

Your statement in the OP: 1000 GBP initially per GH/s (approx.), 100 GBP per 1 GH/s per month for upkeep (approx.)
100 GBP/30 days/24 hours = ~0,14 GBP per hour "to run it" as you put it. I thought this would be most likely your electricity costs - if not, I'm sorry.

Honestly I'm not in the mood to argue around with your business model, whatever you want to achieve with it. Also asking for no answers/followups but on the other hand using mildly insulting/suggestive questions and words like:
might not be the smartest strategy for a respected businessman. Just saying...

If it is not ok for you that people voice their opinion (and yes, my opinion is still, that your own share is too high for my taste - your's obviously is different and it's up for other potential investors to decide for themselves) please consider advertising on a website/forum you control and that you can edit/restrict/censor as you wish.

Further questions:
If they are not 100% electricity costs, what other costs are covered with the ~100 GBP/month an investor should pay?
Until when are you looking for investments? If for example someone would start a collection on GLBSE, this might take one month or more - and by that time you even might be already "booked out".
What type of hardware are investors investing in? With that amount of money you want to raise, FPGAs/ASICs wouldn't be that much out of reach any more... but these have different 2nd hand value to be considered.
Which country will this data center be in? Still in GB or somewhere else?
What types of services are investors allowed to host on "their" machines? Only Bitcoin related stuff (what about hosting a pool server?) or also different services, like webservers, torrent boxes...

I already asked at the opposite if someine could drop in 100 TH/s from outer space, driving difficulty so high that it's nearly impossible to mine...

Difficulty can only increase max. 4-fold, so that is being taken care of.

On the other extreme, to have only 1 block per day(!) quite a bit more than 99% of miners would need to suddenly drop out of the network. This is not realistic at all.

Even if the hashrate goes down to 25% of what it is right now, difficulty would adapt within 2 months.


I guess that an emergency client could be coded though in such extreme cases that you describe and if the majority of the (now very small) network uses this, it could be done. The problem is, that the eventually returning miners would also need to accept this (and could fight it easily, as they have more hashong power by definition).

Well, then


But anybody in this town could just use their kid's computer to potentially gain a lot of local money or screw with the whole system, if it is a bitcoin fork with money generation per new block.
If you start limiting mining, you start harming your local economy + you still risk mining pool attacks (if only a hashrate of 5 MH/s is "allowed", let 60 miners run on one GPU and create a pool). Bitcoin is designed to be as open as possible to anyone who wants to mine, limiting this can have severe issues!

Again, there is also no real way to make sure only town people are mining (and if mining only has very small rewards it doesn't even matter!). IP adresses won't work, as you can go online with mobile phos too (and they usually are even NATed). Selling mining certificates (however you implement that into bitcoin...) makes mining non-anonymous again and harms your network security (and still certificate holders can form pools to attack the system).

With straight BTC rules you favor early adopters and high hashrate miners far more than people who trade with that "money" initially.
This is intentionally with BTC to make sure the network kicks off with a secure hash rate until enough money is in the system to really start an economy (which is currently happening as mining gets harder and harder + ppl start to sell stuff for BTC instead.)
BTC itself has a huge inflation initially (the first 1000 BTC become only 50% of all BTC after just 20 blocks!) which might also scare people away.

Right now you can easily get a fairly secure hashrate via GPU mining and what you wnat to have is I think a quickly working money system, not a bootstrapping economy, right?


In the end, if you want to have something VERY similar to BTC, use BTC - and if you want to have something that just uses a blockchain, make sure that you do NOT have to limit participating miners in any way artificially.

PPS has the downside that you pay for stale shares of others - even if the pool operator keeps as little as possible, this still means your income will be lower than in a pool with a different model. A proportional pool with 0 hoppers might be ideal "fairness wise", a score based pool raises variance and shifts some risks but this canbe tuned.

PPS however will very likely be worse, since it is not ver predictable for smaller pools how much they would really earn during 2016 Blocks to calculate correct values. This means they either have to have higher fees on PPS (deepbit for example has (or had, as they are down atm)) 10%(!) extra fee on PPS payouts.

The max. you can get out of a pool via hopping is 128% (instead of 100% which are expected).

Until THIS impacts everyone in the pool to -10% there must be a lot of hoppers...

Still I'd love to have eleutheria investigate about score based distributions - the pool is now by far big enough to be an attractive target for hopping.

Ah, thanks for the insights! I was already wondering why early hopping sould be bad at all, as early shares should be the most valuable anyways (as for example in a case where a block gets solved after just 10 shares by 10000 miners, the 10 lucky share submitters would get FAR more than expected).

Your electricity costs are ~0,14 GBP (0,16 EUR/0,23USD) per hour per rig. Assuming a 1MH/W efficiency (which is quite low as you claim to have an overhead of just 6% for cooling and many AMD GPUs have more like 1,5MH/W or better) this is still higher than the electricity prices where I live, which are already quite high compared to other places.

Also I don't really get the point of paying you to set up hardware, paying for (overpriced?) electricity and THEN paying you 35% or 30% on top of that. This translates to over 100 GH/s (if the full datacenter can be filled) just for your own pocket with 0 expenses. Even if 1 rig fails per day, you still would make profit (currently 100GH/s would be worth nearly 2000 USD per DAY), plus you own 1/3 or that rig too! Do you hand out guarantees/contracts/SLAs that include also commitments/penalty payments from your side if a rig goes down? What are your exact services that are worth ~1/3 of investor's incomes?
I'm also not that happy about the fact that investors pay 100% of the hardware but you own 30/35% of that hardware afterwards just for plugging it together.

What I value though, is that you are at least upfront and tell in advance what to expect, maybe there really are people that see this as an interesting business model/investment?!

They keep transaction fees... so yes, they do not pay out 100% of the income, thus having fees (as currently every pool known to me does).

Actually you should stay at least ~20% and max. ~60% of the expected round time in a proportional pool. Hopping off below ~20% is not a very smart decision, above 60 or 70% it gets more and more useless. 43% still is the optimum, but if you jump off at 40 it might be a better thing to do than to risk mining until 70%.

In practice you would probably have to rank pools according to their hash rate and if a pool finds a block, evaluate if it makes more sense to stay in the current pool or to hop on to the next candidate.

2-3 blocks actually at current difficulty... 

Might be useful to offer a compiled version with that "patch" too...

They could pay in cash...? 

If you want to create something exactly like Bitcoin, it might be more useful to just use Bitcoin itself.

To me it just seems YOU want to be an "early adopter". In 36.000 ppl one or two will be smart enough to google how bitcoin works, invest a few bucks in GPUs and mine the sh*t out of that village! As you could be happy to have a few hundred participants mining at home, if they only CPU mine, a single strong GPU miner might even be able to do 50% attacks...

Sorry, but first mining the towncoins out of thin air (and algorithms) doesn't seem very intelligent/useful to me. Besides there is NO anonymous way to guarantee that only townfolk have "mining licenses".

You could do something similar as the bitbill people did: Send batches of towncoins to addresses and print their private keys on cards or something. These then can be easily used to create a wallet and withdraw the money from there and also anonymously traded before. This would again look very similar to an already known concept (gift cards that are accepted in multiple local stores) but be more anonymous and if someone wants to, they even can mine along and earn a few towncoins from transaction fees.

It will be hard enough to convince even the town council (or however your hippie commune calls it ) of doing an experiment like this, adoption might be even more risky. The more you can relate to known models, the better I guess.

Btw. is it just me or is GLBSE down for quite some time now?!

Strange, I didn't yet have problems with that...

Well, if/when I finish my "poolpool"-software, this won't be an issue for me any longer anyways.

10% of 0.0001 is also 4 times less than 10% of 0.0004... if it was ok 1 month ago, it should be ok right now too...?

Advantages you cannot influence (or worse: only influence by investing a lot of money) make games become not fun very quickly.

Currently "proof of work" in shooters is how fast you can click on a moving pixel on the screen. Imagine someone with a faster computer running faster in these games.


You would need to "outsource" proof of work to the player - and input devices are also not that optimal, for example if you require to have something typed in, someone who is a fast typer has a real advantage and others might find this game rally hard and annoying.

Yes, you could implement various attacks/defenses etc. but then it gets complicated again.

Also you would kill a lot of computational power just to be able to not trust the persons whose game you bought and are playing... 

To implement such a system you would just need to do a "endgame scenario" with all 21 Million (or however many you want to have) BTC (or "towncoins") in the genesis block and miners only get income from transactions.

You then can in the beginning 100% make sure that the initial conversion rate stays stable (1 cent or 10 cents per genesis-towncoin for example) and then let the economy develop on it's own. This might also be beneficial to convince others in the town council etc. (as in the end you hand out something similar to gift tokens).

To gain a few coins every once in a while, ppl. can mine themselves and to cover your own operation costs you can also run a few dedicated mining rigs permanently to make sure you have at least enough hashing power for difficulty 1.


I only see problems for implementing a highly deflationatory currency that is also very limited in the beginning - and people might not like it that much too.
If they however can earn a little bit through transactions (where fees could be as high as 1 towncoin, depending on th initial conversion rate) and otherwise play a little bit with electronic money adoption might be much easier + smoother.