Who would pay 1btc for an S3 when you can order it directly from the BITMAIN for 0.58 for September delivery or when he could pay 0.66 for August delivery?
I'm guessing it's the same people who would pay $4200 for an sp30. S3's in hand are selling for ~$499 on ebay. |
|
|
|
I don't understand how anyone can make a profit now, even with cheap electricity and no VAT.
You can still make a small profit running your existing equipment, but no way investing in new equipment can be justified.
People have been saying this since last year. First batch S3's bought 1 month ago have already mined ~0.35 btc and can be sold for ~1btc so about 200% ROI in one month. And the home miners with S3's aren't even putting a dent in the network. Hardware manufacturers and other large scale operations have much cheaper hardware/electricity than the rest of us. Is the current spike in hash rate due to:
Randomness?
Hardware turned back on after summer?
Investment back log?
Irrational investors?
Or people buying miners for heating?
None of these make sense. |
|
|
|
I see no big problem in the pricing of spondoolies product, and the fact that they are sold out more than one month in advance speaks for itself (from an economical standpoint).
I have to disagree. Spondoolies really needs to keep up with the competition. They were asking $0.94/gh while Bitmain and AM are offering $0.6/gh. I really doubt most sp30s are sold at non-negotiated prices. |
|
|
|
If I walk into a data center with an SP30 and say I need space for this, it's going to use about 3kw, they're going to say no problem. I walk into that same data center with a bunch of S3s and say I need space, they're going to look at me funny. Then they're going to charge me for custom space and setup fees and whatever else they want to handle my non-standard servers.
Why would you go to a non-bitcoin-mining oriented and ask for space? The very few datacenters that charge you for space also charge $0.2/kwh or more. And even if they do charge you for space, those ancient DCs are only capable of cooling 10-20kw per cabinet so you won't be charged 2u per sp30. My point in all of this is that from a purely hosting standpoint the SP30 is going to win. It's a single unit. It's a standard rack size. It's easy for the data center to deal with. I already gave the S3 the price advantage for up front costs. I did not amortize savings across the board, as that wasn't my intent with the comparison. I considered each bolded section individually, and gave the advantage to whichever unit deserved it for that section.
Yes, I think we all agree that sp30 is more efficient and more dense. It is also one of the best looking asics and comes with possibly the best customer support available. But all that is pointless if it takes 30 months to pay off. |
|
|
|
Hosting advantage goes to the SP30 - it's less rack space and less power consumption.
Professional hosting is about $100/kw. SP30: $300/mo S3: $350/mo So you need to run the SP30 for 20 months to make up for the price advantage of the S3. Good luck with that. 10 s3's are now more than $1500 cheaper than an sp30 so it would be 30+ months. |
|
|
|
Yeah, that was the point; "5.4". Another pre-order promising to be delivered on time and if everything goes well, it might make ROI. The pre-order aspect of it, plus the fact that the world is beginning to boycott Israeli products - makes the spoondoolie miners your selling not as appealing as people thought they were just a few months back!
September batch is sold-out. Can't say the same about the tubes... That reminds me of when hashfast was selling out batches after their shitstorm began. Of course you can't say the tubes are sold out because there is practically unlimited supply. How can you still advertise sp30s ($0.94/gh) when they are now almost twice as expensive as the AM tube/bitmain s3? (~$0.5/gh) You might as well advertise for BFL if you don't care about a good deal. Will you still advertise for them when they fail to meet their "fixed" specs in october and give out grossly inadequate compensation to all earlier batches? |
|
|
|
I think we're starting to talk in circles. I'm not saying pbmining is legit or ponzi. Nobody knows the answer for sure, we can only speculate. I am going under the assumption that they have a legitimate business model.
This is real world thinking not bitcoin world thinking. In the bitcoin world you are guilty until proven innocent. Due to the scammy/irreversable/untracable nature of bitcoin you don't have the luxury of throwing up a website in an afternoon and expecting everything to be taken at face value. The admin has a formula that he uses to calculate the price of a contract. He knows the formula, and we can only speculate. The price drop when difficulty increases doesn't necessarily mean that hardware has gotten cheaper. Most likely, it is because difficulty has increased and profit margin must decrease in order to remain competitive.
Not sure what you mean exactly. The price should not drop when there are huge difficulty increases, only when the price of hardware drops. If it's difficulty dependent, it's a ponzi. I'm assuming that they have a super good deal with a mining equipment manufacturing company. Which company? He could let us know which manufacturer they buy from in one sentence (maybe even one word) and we could easily verify it with the company. The average person must pay $2/GH for equipment alone these days, but that's retail. From where? Butterflylabs? These days everyone is paying ~$0.6-$0.9/gh but pbmining doesn't reflect the huge drop in HW prices in the past few months of low difficulty increases. Typically wholesale is 50% of retail, and pbmining could be buying or leasing the equipment wholesale due to large volume pricing. Petamine, a real mining operation, recently bought 1PH worth of hardware from bitfury and hosts it in their 20PH farm. They paid $1.8/gh + $0.07/kwh at the same time pbmining was charging $2/gh+free electricity. Do you really think pbmining can buy 5-50TH at a time for half the price real bulk buyers pay? Maybe they have an exclusive agreement for the arrangement. Businesses don't want to divulge details on how they get a good price, because that's a trade secret. The next time you buy something new for a low price on eBay, just ask the seller who their supplier is or what their profit margin is, and see if they'll tell you.
PBmining is not only getting a good price, they are getting the absolute best price while not buying in bulk. I would love to know this trade secret but I am sure they will tell me that after they tell me how their free electricity generator works. |
|
|
|
Does anyone find it weird that price is stuck at 0.0029 for some time now...
The admin warned us a while back that the price would be at 0.0029 for a while. I think it dropped from 0.0030 late on July 25th. We have only had a 5.3% difficulty increase since that time. Perhaps the price will drop to 0.0028 on Tuesday afternoon, when the difficulty increases 16%. You don't find it remotely suspicious that the admin can predict the cost of hardware in the future? Of course the price will drop when difficulty drops, but only if it's a ponzi and not using actual hardware. If they used real hardware, we would have seen a steady price decrease in the past 3 months similar to how the price of hardware dropped. But pbmining is oblivious to hardware pricing because they don't use hardware, they just look at the difficulty like a ponzi would. If they are not a ponzi then the equation for pricing should be something like: hardware + electricity + hosting = pbmining price If they are a ponzi then their pricing equation is something like: daily mined btc per GH * 100 days = pbmining price. To me this is a sign that they need more money to feed the old contracts so everything doesn't collapse soon
Same as ponzi, when they are done they keep promising higher and higher returns just to lure those few that still did not invest
I'm assuming that when one pays for a new mining contract, X% goes to pay for new equipment, Y% is set aside for future operating costs, and Z% is set aside for profit. There are a few possibilities why the contract price may not have fallen much recently. 1) Since June 29th, difficulty has not increased much. 2) They decrease the price to remain competitive, however, they are almost the best current deal around. 3) They have significantly optimized costs, such as hardware and electricity, but there might not be much more room to decrease costs until the next generation of mining equipment is available. How do you propose they set aside X, Y, and Z, when they were charging $2/gh at the same time bitmain S1's were $2/gh? (cheapest hardware at the time) I assume you will assume they have some sort of super special deal with a manufacturer to buy hardware at half the price the rest of us pay. Firstly, that would be a very strange contract that will allow them to buy very small/irregular quantities at a time. Secondly, they can tell us who they are buying this massive amount of hardware from and we can verify it. But they won't because they have no intention of proving they are not a ponzi. The owner reads this thread often and knows about the pages and pages of ponzi accusations but instead of taking 2 seconds to prove they are legit, he blows a few hundred btc on every type of advertising instead. Totally not like every ponzi which needs to keep recruiting new investonomers in order to perpetuate the scheme. It's also funny thing about how they sell their hardware on ebay, that was all junk and they could not mine shit with it even if they put it to use
There are two Bitcoin mining equipment markets on eBay. 1) New equipment sold at a higher price that might mine enough Bitcoin to almost break even. 2) Used equipment sold at a lower price that is targeted towards newbies that want to have a toy. I'm not aware of pbmining selling anything on eBay at the moment, but buyers should do their research before buying. One man's junk is another man's treasure. Why do they only sell weak usb miners and 5 year contracts? If they can buy hardware at half the price everyone else pays, why aren't they selling it? Red flag #226 we are talking about 1.7Ph/s now, does anyone even have idea ho much this is in actual warehouse space, how complicated it is to setup this. If they have this they would be proud at it and forum would be full of impressive photos of their mining gear and setup.
1700th/s is around 4000 Antminers s3, doubt they even produced that much and they are the best what money can get now and still power supply is missing on it.
Yes, it's a lot of equipment. Again, we don't know pbmining's business model. My gut feeling tells me that other businesses manage (and possibly own) most of the mining equipment. Yes we do know pbminings business model. It's the same thing you will find here, but the BDD doesn't pretend to be mining and are very open about the financing. PBmining on the other hand will just disappear one day like it's sister scam lunamine. PS: if anyone want's to pay me money to slowly give half of that money back before I disappear, I'm open to negotiations. |
|
|
|
Agreed, but a score of 1 on that scale is perhaps too abysmal. I'd give it at least a 2.
Communication, on the other hand, is for me at -100, but that's a different story ...
Keep up the good work!
Its either 1, 5 or 10, otherwise there is too much human input and I get accused of being biased or being paid off. That score will go up to 5 in the next update though, as long as there haven't been more reports of the same issue. Giving blackarrow a 5 for quality is way too generous. Even with "premium quality components" (which cost us our compensation) there are still many reports of faulty units from the very few who have received their orders. Also why haven't you updated btcgarden and bitmains ratings? Btcgarden is way underrated and Bitmain has ethics issues (they have a megamine and refuse to release cgminer source code/potentially using unsecure cgminer version) |
|
|
|
My guess is that they are purchasing mining power from one or more third parties. Most of their mining operation is no longer in Canada, and I think they would go broke flying their employees around the world to set up new equipment in different data centers. One such B2B mining service is run by Bitfury, although they just announced it less than a month ago. http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/30/bitfury-announces-hosted-mining-services/Petamine bought 1PH from bitfury and it cost $1.8/gh + ~0.07/kwh about the same time that pbmining was offering $2/gh. If they actually do have some sort of contract with bitfury or any other manufacturer they would tell us and we could easily verify it with the company. |
|
|
|
I also have severe doubts that the sheep who follow the Asicminer banner (and their desire to 'distribute the hashrate' by piling thousands of Petahashes into the network) are living in the same reality as others and while AM is clearly not a scam, their business proposition is much. much worse than what Coinbau is offering.
As a sheep following the asicminer banner I can assure you that the goal is not to "distribute the hashrate". The goal is to dominate the network and crush the competition. I'm not sure how asicminer is offering a bad business proposition. They already completed their IPO almost 2 years ago and paid it back ~6 times over. I don't think there are any bitcoin investments that even compare. Coinbau is offering basically the same thing as asicminer besides having a much more halfassed business proposition with a bunch of promises and hardware which has only been seen by the scammers at MAT. Also asicminer asked for ~$200,000. Coinbau is asking for $15 million... |
|
|
|
Back to the subject at hand, they did in this thread post an eligius mining address quite a while back, and apparently had people trying to break in to both their homes and their facility (which at the time was a rented warehouse, nothing too secure). So they went with a mixer to make it impossible to trace it back. (which they're wrong about, but it would take a great deal of effort). I answered "no" to the mining address because *I* did not personally see it. Others in this thread did.
I'm confused. How can someone possibly locate their warehouse/homes through a mining address? I don't know enough about playing the spread to know if it's sustainable, but even so, it don't qualify as a ponzi. At some point the diff would indeed plateau. When the diff increase was very little, they did NOT decrease their price, and it looked like they still sold a healthy amount, so it again militates more to the idea that they are buying equipment and selling a portion of the hashpower. As for the payouts being "by the second", they explained that here in the thread some time back. The payout is not based on actual hashing equipment per person, but rather a standard calculator. It's an "ideal" payout. Which again, would only work if they had more hashpower than they were selling. Not decreasing the price after low difficulty increases is exactly what you would expect from a ponzi. Look at the b.mine charts on havelock to see the correlation. They can't afford to keep lowering the price (like hardware manufacturers can) because their payouts come from new payments. If the $/GH is too low the ponzi would collapse. They need to estimate how much 1GH will pay out in it's lifetime and price their GH slightly above. Even though the difficulty increases have slowed down, the cost of hardware has been steadily decreasing. If they were using real HW to mine, why would their prices not reflect that? Pbmining used to be priced at or below the best hardware rates when difficulty was increasing rapidly, but when it slowed down their price stopped going down and is now far above the best hardware rates. I suppose it's possible that the overpriced $/gh could be explained by factoring in electricity costs but even with ultra cheap electricity ($0.02/kwh and 1w/gh) it would still cost ~$0.9/gh over five years. Then there's the argument that they could replace their hardware with next gen cheaper/more efficient hardware but with what money? At these rates if they were actually mining they should be barely turning a profit. If they are turning enough of a profit from actually mining that they can reinvest in next gen hardware as well as spend boatloads on advertising, I would say they should forget about pbmining and just seek real VC funding for having possibly the most efficient and profitable bitcoin mining operation in existence. The rate they have increased is unlikely to work within a ponzi as well. I would argue the opposite. Their growth rate is very abnormal. They add hashrate in random increments from what I've seen. If it was a normal DC they would be adding several hundred KW worth of hardware at a time unless they built a massive DC with tons of extra space/cooling/electricity/infrastructure which can expand indefinitely. |
|
|
|
I'm not sure how far I should go here, and my word is all I can offer. But Pbmining did, in private, reveal quite a bit to me including the identities (actual, not virtual) of the people involved. This, while not conclusive enough for a courtroom, was sufficient for me. I am confident that they are a real company based on that, and said so. I do find it troubling that some months and many GH later they still don't wish to provide more concrete proof in public, but some of the shit they endured in their early days would make me skittish too.
Did they reveal to you a mining address or pictures of their mine? Did they also explain why they are mixing coins and why payouts occur every second instead of every block? Is it POSSIBLE that they are (a) a ponzi, or (b) using the BTC they gather to invest in something other than mining and pay out AS IF it were mining? Yes, it's possible. In the case of (a) I would think they would have already folded, and this has not happened. In the event of (b), so what? we get ours correctly and there's nothing illegitimate about it. Deceptive, but not illegitimate. I don't think either scenario is correct, I think they are mining at a far greater rate than what they sell. But I can't prove it.
In the event of (a), if they were not mining there is little chance they would have collapsed by now. Look at the bitcoin difficulty derivative (BDD) on havelock. It is essentially the same thing but without pretending they are mining. B.mine = pbmining customers and b.sell = pbmining. Pbmining makes money every time the difficulty increases. If difficulty plateaus and they aren't mining it will eventually collapse (or in BDDs case the game would end) but that could be a while. In the case of (b) I'm not sure how you would find that remotely acceptable. Jimmothy, I suspect, is bitter over BlackArrow. I would be too, had I not been too broke to invest at the time.
Blackarrow is not the only scam I've fallen for and probably not the last. Fact is there are way too many scams in the bitcoin world and many of them are far more convincing than pbmining. They know scams are thriving in the cloudmining scene and still chose to make their "company" appear as much like a ponzi as possible. |
|
|
|
I assume mike18 is me? Explain the dumbass bit please. Seems rather inappropriate and disrespectful.
Did you try reading your own post? You are calling people idiots for demanding a company prove they are not a ponzi, then label those skeptics as being like a lynching mob, then when called a dumbass you find it inappropriate and disrespectful? You're joking right? Investing/advocating others invest in something that has every trait of ponzi and no traits of a legit company is definition of an idiot. Since then the idiocy displayed by some has only grown bigger and bigger and I've seen nothing less then the virtual equivalence of hanging mobs. Totally disgusting. I don't believe PBMining will go public. Not with the owner having to turn from "hidden is best" to "out in the open", while general idiocy has grown bigger then ever.
You pretend like anyone is demanding they disclose their business registration info/address/names/SSN/birth-certificates. Nobody is asking they disclose who they are or where they are. We just want the most basic publicly verifiable evidence they exist. Instead we get zero pictures/videos, mixed payments (which can only be useful for hiding the fact that they aren't mining), and phony mining which pays out every second instead of every block. Being called a dumbass may severely hurt your feelings, but some of you really need to wake up. PBmining could change it's name to PonziMining and some of you still wouldn't catch on. |
|
|
|
To have mining profits, you need to have hardware. You don't have spare cash for hardware, and lowering the J/GH isn't a silver bullet, so I don't see what this magic plan is all about.
I guess you are assuming that the tape-out costs for 28nm are about $15M? Sorry, but these costs should not be higher than $2.5M. So they would still have $12.5M to produce probably more than 20PH with the raised money. Or did I get something wrong? If production costs are $1/gh how can they produce/deploy 20ph for $12m? I'm surprised so many people are assuming this is a legit company based on the lousy proof provided. I wouldn't be surprised if this was an offshoot of the MAT scam. I think most people just don't care enough to demand they prove their company is legit because the offer is so lousy. |
|
|
|
For a limited time this pool is currently open to the public mining community. There are no fees and a 12.5% bonus is paid out on all bitcoins mined. Totally not a scam. |
|
|
|
Anyone else see the upgrade kits available? Thoughts?
As I understand it you need to throw away 0.2 btc worth of HW to save 0.12 btc. |
|
|
|
|
If their miners are being hosted by bitfury, what exactly does petamine do? Just collect hosting fees?
Is the p2pool patch provided by bitfury?
|
|
|
|
Just check the weekly advertising threads by theymos, I've seen PBMining bidding up to 5 or so btc per week for advertising
And they must realize that half of that money is going to waste because half the people who see the ad think it's a ponzi. |
|
|
|
I don't think pbmining is using any money on advertising. All pbmining ad's I've seen lately has been paid by pbmining customers trying to get refferals.
Do they not pay users for advertising for them? That's normally how affiliate marketing works. Also jumping to a random page of pbminings post history it's clear that they spend tons of money on advertising: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=195208;sa=showPosts;start=260 |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
