I started a mining operation and decided to expand it through non-traditional means. Crowd sourced investments with dividends paid out monthly.
This is a common practice in Bitcoin mining, selling shares and then paying out dividends. The difference is in how I collect operating profit and pay for operating expenses. Usually, there would be a management fee, like 5%, off the top of all dividends forever. In this case, I am going to build out twice the mining capacity that is demanded by shareholders, and use the excess to pay operating expenses and expansion costs.
I'll answer questions here or you can email me at
mike@bitcoop.org.
http://www.bitcoop.org/The most common question I get is about the reason for using crowd sourced funding versus more traditional methods, which I've answered here.
If you've found such a profitable idea, why not invest yourself, or go through more traditional methods of getting investment capital? This is a really good question. The answers have more to do with who I am as founder and what I think good business practices are.
Firstly, I did invest a substantial amount of capital into this project, and I will continue to do so. I've been mining Bitcoin for a long time on my own, and Would have been happy to continue doing so into the future. What I want, though, is to expand the size of my mining operation. I looked into private investors and even spoke to a few VC friends, but in the end the terms weren't going to flexible enough and the people I spoke to weren't interested in Bitcoin itself just in shuffling short term gains into their pockets. Which is fine, but not really what I'm about, and not really what I want from business partners. Then I looked into traditional small business loans. This was another route that could have a huge potential upside, as I could gather enough funding to start counting my mining operation's output in the terrahashes instead of gigahashes. This would mean a substantial amount of risk on one individual's part in order to become a substantial player in the Bitcoin mining effort.
None of that speaks to the underlying philosophy of Bitcoin or my personal philosophy on business. Bitcoin is about decentralization. It's about distributed acquisition. It's about the crowd. And I agree! Crowd funding for projects is a huge boon to the creative process involved in business development. I've helped build five organizations in my professional life, and the ones I think are the most successful are those with flat organizational structures, focused on crowd sourcing and cooperation with the community around them, and dedicated to developing the ideas behind whatever industry they are a part of. The cooperative, the collective, the one to many model is something I've come to regard as the most stable and sustainable business model, if executed correctly.
So that's why I turned to crowd funding and cooperative development. I'm already going to be spending a lot of time honing and maintaining my mining operation, so I've invited you to benefit from that labor. In return, I ask for capital to expand and develop that operation to the benefit of every shareholder.
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