Or garrett could agree and he or havelock could release a shareholder list to a trusted party to tally the votes for us.  Or if he doesn't agree, maybe havelock could do something for us.

I originally voted against liquidation but I am inclined to change my vote (given the recent "mathing" - which though I haven't verified, looks legit).  Garr, Sam, if you have a counter-argument to "300BTC versus 50BTC", you should post it now, or expect a flood of vote changing. =/

I see an entry for the number of shares I own, but it doesn't match my email.  The hash that does match my email is lined up with 4 shares instead of 253. I presume a sort was done missing a column, or some other sort of error occurred.  Please let us know when this has been fixed.

edit:  if you are testing this from the CLI, ensure you do:

echo -n "me@example.com" | sha256sum

Don't forget the '-n' or it will include the newline and give the wrong hash.

Ah yes, if I read the contract correctly that includes cooling.  I seem to remember hearing the figure that 60% of a data center's power usage goes into cooling.  I am sure that is highly variable depending on the layout and cooling techniques used at the data center, of course.

So that is some interesting info about the hashfast thing.  I'm very concerned about that.  I believe Garr when he says this is a separate venture, but if Joe Entrepeneur owns Business A and Business B, the massive failure of Business B *could* impact Business A (and vice versa).  I understand why people are concerned.  Now there is Cognitive, Cognitive Mining, and FIMB all in-flight (any more?  If so, you should disclose them in case anyone else on this thread, like myself, doesn't follow the forums closely).

I think these are ok for now, but it is important for Cognitive Mining investors to understand these added risks due to your obligations and involvement with these other companies, separate though they are.

In other news, I've signed the Cognitive Mining NDA and Garrett has shared some documents with me.  I can tell you that I have viewed the contract for the data center space to run our machines.  It has Garrett's name on it, is priced in USD (but payable in BTC at the current exchange rate at http://bitcoinaverage.com/#USD), is in a location where power is likely to be very.  I don't have time to go figure out what the numbers mean, however, so if anyone can comment on how good ~$270/kWh/month is, that's what we've got.  Additionally, the contract specifies we pay for actual usage, not projected or total capacity, which is good.  Emergency support work is available for $100/hr, which seems reasonable should something explode.  Hopefully we won't need that of course =)

The contract required a down payment of ~8k to make it happen, and we all know garrett is running around like a headless chicken to make this happen, so I understand why he had to use COG funds for this.  If the motion fails, however, Garrett should pay back the funds to the reinvestment fund over time, as he is able.  We'll have to follow up about that later.  I believe he made that decision at the time trying to do the best thing for cognitive.

I have also viewed the contract with CoinTerra and I can confirm it is short and sweet.  The two main holes in the wording are:

1. The 30-days 30% thing (does that mean 0% after 29 days and 30% at 30 days, and 30% at 59 days and 60% at 60 days?  or 1% for each day)
2. Is "lateness" defined by the delivery of the first unit, or the last unit?

It sounds like Garrett has already gotten CT to commit to the reading of this document in our favor - and I think it is reasonable to presume that was the intent of the document (#2 is a stronger case for our favor than #1, but I think both could be argued if it came down to it).

I will continue to keep you guys up to date as more documents are shared with me, as much as I can do so within the confines of the NDA.  The cointerra NDA itself, for example, cannot be shared with me (which is weird, but having seen the contract between cog and CT, I don't see any reason to need the CT NDA itself).

It is my belief that none of the above information constitutes a violation of the NDA I signed with Cognitive Mining in order to view these documents, and furthermore, the only new piece of information I've revealed (besides to confirm what has already been said) is the price we are getting for power, which, in not revealing, would open the operators of Cognitive up to accusations of insider trading, so I am confident that is not a problem.

That's fair =|

Maybe Asicminer will have gen3 units in-hand and ready to sell in the next couple of months?  Has anyone been following them?  Their hardware has always been expensive, but they (AFAIK) have always only sold units in hand, shipped quickly, and delivered exactly as promised meaning the ROI calculation is straightforward, reliable, and low-risk.  Of course, on the other hand, (at least based upon their share price), gen3 might be vaporware itself and not something to rely upon...

FWIW, with the slowdown in network size increases, I have been running my 65nm BFL hardware longer than I anticipated and I think COG's BFL hardware will be economical to run for a while longer (the returns are small, but they more than offset cost to run still I believe).

Seems like a motion is appropriate, but I can see this working a few different ways:

1. Sell hardware, use proceeds to pay 100% div.  Raise COG.F3 if we need more funds for hardware purchase later
2. Sell hardware, use 50% of proceeds to pay div, keep 50% for reinvestment fund
3. Sell hardware, put it all in reinvestment fund

I think 3 is only reasonable if we have some other hardware to buy that we can have in-hand very soon (like, < 1 month).  Otherwise, I'd prefer 1 or 2.  Would 1 mean "the end of cog", or would there still be plenty of money left over for reinvestment in the next big thing?  Maybe to answer these questions, we need to see just how many CT machines we sell, and how much profit we can make from them.  Also, if some of the CT machines do work, or if we are able to run a smaller number of them reliably, maybe we don't sell them all - just a few.

Also, maybe before we are able to sell them, the data center comes through and magically fixes everything.  Who knows.  I'm still in favor of keeping our options open, so long as movement happens to keep as many options open as possible in the meantime.

People would rather sell our $6000 units for $12000 than have them sit idle, that's all.  50% could be paid as divs, the rest go to the reinvestment fund, and cog is no worse off than it was a year ago.  Unlike having the hardware sit idle, losing opportunity and value every day.

If the units can be made to operate soon, nobody is advocating selling them, of course that'd be silly, but if they are not what was promised, or cannot be made to run consistently, we would make more money selling them.  we are just reminding everyone of the options to ensure Garrett evaluates them all.

I think the average price under 8k and the (likely) lower future diff increases make selling a much less clear choice.  I like the idea of seeing if we get any bites at 10-12k while continuing to *aggressively* work to make these machines operational.  If power and cooling is really the issue and it will all be magically fixed in a week, that is unfortunate that we are losing a week, but I still believe we can come out ahead in the long run since lower diffs means these units can be profitable to run for a longer period of time...  I hope folks are right and the diff increase is going to be closer to 10% most periods...

Am programmer, worked for a giant online retailer - can confirm.

Seriously, 10TH/s is supposed to be making $35/hr right now, or $820 a day.  This means if it costs you $1000 to keep these miners running for a week, you should PAY SOMEONE $1000.  Can you not find someone you can pay to spend 1-2 hours a day restarting machines, and monitoring them?  This comment is spot on, this is a "sev1" event, all-hands-on-deck.  If you own any significant percentage of this company at all, you are losing as much as us.  Take it from me, studies aren't everything - the experience of running this company is going to mean way more on your resume than As versus Cs in some classes.  And so is running it into the ground.  This is real life.  Don't ignore real life to go to school and implement a "Dinner" class and a "TurkeyDinner" subclass.  Silly examples are nothing compared to the real-world experience you are getting, but it doesn't seem to be going very well =(

I also agree that if you can't keep these machines running, you should consider selling them on ebay and paying cog holders the proceeds in dividends (or, into the reinvestment fund to buy more reliable miners).  The calculation is easy - if it takes you 2 weeks to get these miners reliably running, then you have lost almost 50% of their potential to earn coin.  If you can sell them for over 50% of their profit potential (and realistically, you can probably sell them for a lot more because of speculators) then you should maybe do that.

1.6TH/s at current diff => $944 this week, 708 the next week, 708 the next week, 531 the next week, 531 the next week, 398 the next week, 398 the next week... etc
13 week profit @25% bi-weekly network growth => $5600, and that is if they started working perfectly a few days ago.  Currently on Ebay, I see buy-it-now prices of $10k to $12k for CT units in hand.  This sounds like a no-brainer.

In addition to my past analysis, I was wondering whether the current share price makes sense from an assets POV.  The market cap of COG is currently ~600 BTC at 0.044BTC/share.  We currently own or have on the way ~20 TerraMiner IV units, which are currently selling for 10-15k on ebay right now for "currently in hand" units.  Our reserve fund is about 20 BTC, so 580BTC @ 620 => $360,600 market cap minus liquid holdings.  20 TerraMiners @ 15k each => $300,000.  We also have several avalons and BFL rigs.  The BFL 60 gh/s units seem to be going for over $500 on ebay right now, and a 4-module avalon is $1000-$2000 it looks like.  Along with all our other equipment, it looks like the company's entire value is pretty close to our market cap.  That means if Garrett sold everything right now, and did a force buyback, we'd probably break even, or maybe be at like 80-90%.

IMHO, this means we are undervalued, because COG has value in a lot more than just our assets - once the miners are working, they are going to more than break even, which means the divs paid over the next few months are likely to exceed the current share value - plus the hardware can still be sold then (for a much smaller amount, but for something nonetheless) which can be invested in more hardware as well.

I plan to continue to hold COG and if the share price goes much lower I will probably buy even more, even though COG is already a larger part of my total portfolio than a strategy of diversification would like.

Garr - thanks for the update!

It's ugly as sin, but as we discussed, I whipped up something that I hope will help.

https://github.com/terabyte/cog-mon

This script should make it easy to set up monitoring to send an email/text when any miner drops below the desired threshold.  It is written in ruby, and it scrapes the eligius website directly because their APIs don't show individual devices separately.  You will want to modified the hardcoded values in the DEVICE_HASH variable and set the threshold/expected values to what you want.  The README file explains how to run the script and gives an example crontab that will email/SMS you if it is broken, every 5 minutes.  You might want the poll time longer, if you don't have free texts though =)

The next step will be to talk more about how we might have this script automatically trigger a restart of a specific miner that is failing, but to do that I need to find more time and chat a bit more about the current setup.  Even as it is, you could imagine writing a script yourself (if you are fluent in those sorts of things) and just using the return code of the script itself to decide to restart something or not.

We'll chat more tomorrow I'm sure.

PM received.  I don't check bitcointalk.org PMs very frequently, so I'll move the convo to another medium, but just so you guys know, they did reach out to me right away, and the delay in response is from my end.  I'll see if there is something I can do to help out and get our hashrate up.  Thanks all - I'll keep you posted.

12 hour hashrate is currently at 2TH/s still =(  Can you give us an idea of what it takes to make a malfunctioning unit function (i.e. 1. powercycle, 30 seconds 2. re-flash, 5 minutes, 3. run mining software 30 seconds - this is just an example, but what I would like to see)?

Is there really only a single unit functioning reliably right now?  are none of the units functioning properly but one is up "on average"?  Is cointerra doing something about this or are we expected to add automatic redundancy ourselves?

I am officially offering my technical services as a programmer, free of charge, to help out however I can.  I think I already PM'd my phone number, but in case I haven't, PM me to arrange communications if there is anything I can do to help.

This is one thing Garr has done right in his dealings with CT so far.  Please keep holding them responsible as far as our contract can (and ensure future contracts more clearly protect us against late/defective units).  If cointerra isn't planning on dumping a pile of shovels on us then disapearing - if they want to be in the long-term shovel selling business - then they actually care about their reputation and want us to be happy.  Let's hope anyways...

According to the spreadsheet, we currently have 18.5 TH/s of hardware "arrived", but looking at eligius, it looks like a lot of it isn't working reliably yet.

I think the goal this week has to be to get those things having reasonable uptime, whatever it takes, or to hold CT responsible for delivering working units.

Current diff is 3.815bil.  18.5 TH/s should make:

1.0/(3.815*1000*1000*1000*(2**32)/(18.5*1000*1000*1000*1000)/(60*60*24))*(25) => 2.439 BTC/day => 17.1BTC/week * 50% => 0.000628 BTC div

Our actual div was only 0.000087, about 14% of expectations.  Presumably due to hardware unreliability.

Depending on how fast we receive hardware, we should expect next weeks' div to be OVER 0.0006 and if we receive all of our hardware, it could be as high as:

1.0/(3.815*1000*1000*1000*(2**32)/(31.5*1000*1000*1000*1000)/(60*60*24))*(25)*7*0.5/13595 => 0.00107 BTC/share


TL;DR: projections for next week's divs are 0.0006 to 0.0012 depending on luck, hardware arrival, and hardware reliability.  If hardware continues to be this unreliable, however, we could see divs under 0.0006 and it'd be *very* bad for us.

EDIT: I misread the div by a factor of ten *facepalm* *fixed*

Wait, we have hashfast units?  I don't remember that... I mean, all units are in hand, but an inventory of hardware we have would be swell.  I thought I heard hashfast was a scam so units in hand is like, a pleasant surprise I guess?

I propose you create a google doc spreadsheet like this:

Device - Description - Date in service - Power Usage - Hashrate Each - Number of units - total
TerraMiner IV - Cointerra's 28nm Miners - <date> - <X watts> - 2.0e12 - 12 - 2.4e13

Etc. for each batch of devices, and link it on the main webpage.  Leave blank things you don't know yet, the entire thing should take 20 minutes to do tops.  THis way we can see our "promised hashrate" too

Oh man, I'm sorry, that sucks dude =(  If it is havelock's fault, they should reimburse you.  Have you done forensics to determine if there is any malware on your phone/machines with access to the google auth seed?

Is the chart on http://cognitivemining.com/charts/ not working, or are we really only getting <2TH/s right now?

EDIT: Heh, looks like some folks dumped their shares after COG.F1/2 was converted.  Good for us, cheap shares, whee!

I'm glad people are bringing up all these things, and for a nice change, Garr and Cognitive-PR are being responsive.  This really is a pleasant change.  Please keep it up.  It's reasonable that there will be some confusion while the accounting practices are fixed - but the most important thing is the path forward.  Let's get those CT miners set up.  Let's get the 1cog* addresses accurate so they reflect mining and current balances.  Let's get the scrypt miners working.  Then, let's talk about the past (i.e. will the scrypt miners break even, missing divs, etc).

Thanks to both of you for all your work so far.