I am considering partnering with someone who has funds, renting some office space, retrofitting it with whatever electrical and cooling is necessary for a small datacenter, and renting out server "slots", for people who can no longer host their rigs in their apartments/houses/basements.

The service would only use a basic internet service with connections only allowed for VNC/SSH and the bitcoin mining applications themselves.  No webhosting, etc allowed.  Mining rigs ONLY.

The service would track electricity usage, and would charge a base rate per rig + actual electric usage each month.  If mining became somewhat unprofitable for a week or two, you could simply turn it off, and only be charged the base rate for that period.

You wouldn't have remote control of the power directly, so in the even of a hard lockup or shut down, we would provide a "request power on" button in a web interface.  Your rig would be powered back on within 24 hours.  For this reason, it is imperative that you already have a stable configuration prior to shipping to our facility.

All management of your mining rig(s) would be done by you.  We wouldn't touch it.  You would be responsible for remotely accessing your server, once we unpackage it and start it up, to get the mining running.  You would also be responsible for your own software security.  Given that many machines would be on the same network, you should set up a software firewall appropriately to isolate your rig(s) from the other rigs.

A security firm would be hired for installation and monitoring of a security system intended to protect the building from theft.  Insurance would also be purchased to cover the contents of the building in the event of damages.

Rates would be something along the lines of:
$20-$30 per rig per month
$0.10-$0.15 per kwh per month

Would you use such a service at such rates?  If so, how many rigs would you rent space for?  Vote in the poll!

Also, do you see any potential problems that I have not addressed?  Any potential security or performance issues?

Tis an interesting idea.  Shipping a rig with already-installed, extremely heavy video cards is a bad idea though, which means you would have to have people ship their rigs without the video cards installed, and you'd have to deal with installing them yourself.

You could charge a base amount for a tower, then additional based on electric usage.  With high usage throughout the facility, you should be able to negotiate with the local electric company down to rates like $0.03/kwh.  That would help make up the difference for what it costs to rent the facility.  You'd have to have a way to track total electric usage for each rig each month, which could end up being expensive.  Or you could do it the ghetto way, and just have each rig run through its own kill-a-watt, writing down the data each month and resetting it.

You could offer "rig reset" requests, so that if someone needs a hard reset done on their rig, they submit a request through some web panel, and then next time you are at the data center, you can reset the rig manually.  Or better yet, rig up some sort of PLC that is controllable from the web interface that allows them to cut power to the machine if they like.  Just remind them to set their BIOS to power-on after power loss prior to shipping the machine to you.

One potential problem is having each rig on the same network.  I suppose you could say that each person is responsible for their own rig's security, but that could fall apart if someone hacks into another person's server from their own server and hosts something illegal on it.

I'm not sure there's enough margin in in mining anymore to make something like this profitable, but let's take a look.

Take a typical mining rig:  A Sempron with 3 5850's.  It probably draws about 500w under full load mining.  Ok, so charge a base fee of $25 and $0.15/kwh.  Assume that your actual electric costs are $0.035/kwh, and that you use twice the actual electric draw per rig (to counter the heat produced by the rig, you must have A/C to cool it).

This rig would cost you $25.20/month in electricity.  It would bring in $79/month in revenue (paid by the miner).  It would make the miner 0.61 BTC/day, conservatively (assuming 333MH/s from each of them), or about 18.33/month.  At today's prices, that's $256.66.

So the miner makes $177.66 profit, you make $53.80 profit.

How many such rigs would you need to employ to cover the rent of a facility?  Probably not a whole lot, as small rental offices can be had in my area for a few hundred a month.  8 rigs might be enough to cover the rent for a small office area, and a 9th to cover the internet expense.  But, you'll likely have to upgrade the A/C and electrical prior to starting the project as well, which means higher capital costs that must be eventually recovered.

Interesting thoughts though.  I think there's definitely a market for it, but it might be difficult to find someone willing to take on the risk of spending a bunch of money on remodeling a rental whose sole revenue is reliant upon bitcoin mining continuing to be a profitable operation.

Lol, completely agree on the videos.  I hate trying to watch videos for intellectual stuff.  Much easier to comprehend if it is just read.  Reading also lets me move at my own pace.  I can't easily speed up or slow down a video.

Anyway, I agree with you about the difficulties facing a spiderweb of trust.  I suppose it could potentially be fixed by giving two ratings to a person - one as a trust rating for how much you trust them to pay back, and one as a trust rating for how much trust you put into their trust ratings.  These trust ratings would be compounded - for example, if you trust Sally's judgement for 50%, and Sally trusts Joe's judgement for 50%, and Joe has an overall feedback rating of 80%, then you would trust Joe 20%.  That way, the only people who would be at or near 100% trust would be those in your close circle of friends who really do trust each other 100%.

Of course, that kind of negates the whole purpose of a web trust system, since you're likely to know those people at or near 100% through other means already.  But I suppose new strands of relationships and trusts could be formed... it would just take a lot of people using such a system to make it useful.

You'd also have this issue:
- A scammer creates Sally, does various legitimate transactions to gain trust ratings by other people
- Scammer then creates Bill, with 100% trust from Sally.  Anyone who trusts Sally now also trusts Bill at the same trust rating
- Scammer scams people with Bill.
- Scammer then creates Bill #2, with 100% trust from Sally.  Etc etc...

Lots of difficult problems to solve with a web of trust like this.

That would be a great feature of an online wallet website.  Just send funds with the parameters and addresses, and it'll all be done automatically by the site for a small fee.

I like how Atlas hasn't even responded to this thread.

It's called opportunity cost.  And yes, the threat of opportunity cost DOES cause people to not spend money.  This is why I do not believe an inherently deflationary currency will ever work.

Excellent point, and I'll add BTC used in the transaction as a field in the feedback form.  BTC used in the transaction will likely have to be an optional field though, as I imagine many people will not want to give away the amount of BTC they spent.  But I do think it would be helpful to know if someone made 30 1 BTC transactions or 1 2000 BTC transaction.

I never could get phoenix working real well.  There were always weird quirks about it that I didn't like.  I'm just happy to have a miner that is much faster than guiminer without any weird quirks.

Will probably move my 2 GH/s over to this miner/your pool and see how things go.

What you find funny and what other people find funny could be completely different things.  You can't say "Most of these images are not even funny," because it's simply not true.  You can't make statements like that with the implication that they apply to anyone and everyone.

And none of those texts would be funny without the corresponding images.

I've thought about implementing a weighted trust system with bitcoinfeedback, but it would definitely require more usership.  A weighted system would be more along the lines of "X has a rating of 75%, and rates Y with a negative feedback, which is weight to 0.75 of a negative feedback."

It would be interesting to have a spiderweb of trusts like you talked about.  If you trust someone, and they trust someone else, then you can trust that person as well.  I'm not sure how well that would work in practice (for instance, a large company doing business with lots of people might be trusted 100% by you, but it would also introduce trust of everyone they've done successful business with - can you really rely on a person because they made one transaction with a large company?), but it is interesting to think about regardless.

An image can convey a lot more than text can.  Especially some good laughs.

Smooth enough - thanks for helping the noob. 

Speeds are impressive!  Just trying this out on my 5770, and I'm getting around 185MH/s instead of 168MH/s with guiminer.

Some people like images... especially the funny ones... like the one Atlas posted above.  I enjoy those sort of things.  And I'm not some teenager from 4chan, I just enjoy that type of humor.

Just because you don't like it doesn't mean everyone else agrees with you.

Question:  What can I adjust to make mouse movement less jerky on a machine that I regularly use?  I tried setting the break interval to 1000 ms, but it didn't help.  Anything else I can try?

Doesn't seem to be going anywhere... 14.3 is all.

Do NOT change the circuit breaker for one with higher amperage!  The whole purpose of a circuit breaker is to ensure you aren't drawing more than 15 amps through the wiring, because it can't support it and could heat the wire up and start a fire.  If you increase the limit until the circuit breaker trips, you are bypassing the whole purpose of it.

Definitely sounds like you had too much on the circuit if it hasn't tripped since you removed everything else.  Does the trailer have more than one circuit you can use?  Or are you just not using some things now?

Bug is fixed, thanks for reporting!

Not true.  I care.  And not just sympathetically for the victim, I like to learn what techniques hackers use so I can better protect myself.

That's true to some extent, but keep in mind, nearly 1/3 of the coins have been minted now (2.5 weeks until we hit 7M).  So that means, at max, bitcoin will only inflate an additional 200%.  It's still kind of orangish since people expect that deflation to happen in the future, so that extra bit of future value is built in to today's value.  Similarly, the future and expected devaluation of the dollar is built in to today's value of the dollar.