Payouts will be accumulated and paid out proportionally to buyers in full when share transfer is done, i.e. payments become effective immediately after shares acquisition.

Launched and alive. If any funds (above my own 60 coins) are collected before the IPO window opens, it will be executed and the given guarantee becomes active.



No, I am not interested in deals I do not fully understand. As a former large-scale miner I understand that the AMHash offer is as good as possible (if you do not have free electricity) - any better conditions or higher profitability numbers smell fishy imho.

Look, I gave you already credit for your idea here:


What you describe (with the reinvestment option) is more a pass-through operation than a group buy. This is meant to be a pooled IPO order, i.e. the deal is over once the shares moved into the buyers' Havelock accounts.

As for the fee: I did similar group-buys last year and know how hard-earned the money is. I believe at 2% there is a slim chance to cover external fees and trouble, below that is charity. If you believe it is doable for less, I would gladly hand the thread over to you. What do you think?

In fact, I thought about it, but this is not a mining-HW group buy. The best place would be a group-buy sub-forum in the securities section - which so far does not exist. Mods might move it to a better place they see fit.

I am not sure if there is an interest at all, since adding an additional risk layer to make 3% does not look favorable. Saw someone suggesting it in the AMHash thread and thought: why not? No harm done if I delete it after 5 days of disinterest.


Thanks for feedback.

Done. Alas, 0.5% won't be worth the hassle.

About
After small-scale and hobbyist Bitcoin mining essentially died in 2014, AMHash today is offering one of the most competitive cloud mining service. With the IPO of the 3rd tranche (AMHash3) the issuer offers a 5% hashrate bonus on bulk sales of 100TH+.

This group buy is meant to pool smaller IPO orders together to reach those volumes required for the bonus. The paid-out bonus is split to 3% for the buyer and 2% for the organizer. Transaction fees and potential fees required to distribute shares to buyers' Havelock accounts are paid from organizer's income.

Note: AMHash offers direct bulk orders with an additional 1% bonus. At time of writing, it looks like shares would become direct ones, which won't be feasible for a group buy. If it turns out to be a viable option, bonus split will remain proportionally same, i.e. 3.6% to 2.4%.


Who
This offer is interesting for those of you who

• plan to participate in AMHash3 IPO
• want to buy at least 1TH
• can't afford to buy 50TH (you will get yourself 3% bonus at Havelock or even 4% if you order at AMHash directly)

How
Funds Collection
Funds are collected into one public address. Order quantities are multiples of 1TH.

To participate in this group buy

• ensure you send coins only from addresses you control - you must be able to address sign with your sending address
• pay 1.2BTC for each TH you want to order to 1amh3PN1oeU6PNaGFwp3ehw5HkLj3UVfY (blockchain)
• PM me with
  
  • the tx-id of your payment
  • one of the sending addresses you want your order to be assigned to (must be able to sign with, refunds or pending dividends would go there)
  • the email address you registered at Havelock (for share transfer)

Share Distribution
When the IPO window opens, I will spend collected funds to order AMHash3 shares. As soon as they are booked into my account, I'll transfer them to the accounts associated with the email address you provided above. For each 1.2BTC you participated with, you will receive 1030 shares.

Since Havelock puts this fat red warning to the asset transfer form
I refuse to take responsibility for shares sent to invalid accounts. Please very carefully ensure you give the correct email address.

If between share acquisition and share distribution dividends are paid, they are accumulated and paid in full once after the transfer of shares is complete.


Guarantee of Execution
I guarantee that every payment received entitles you for the bonus announced. That is, as long as the IPO is successfull, there is no option for me to cancel the group buy and refund you the paid coins. To ensure my capability to do so, I am forerunning with 50TH (first payment to above address) and reserved coins for an additional 50TH. At the end of the fund collection phase, at my sole discretion I will either add more funds to fill up the last 100TH order, or reduce my shares exceeding the last 100TH order.

Cancellation
All payments are final, i.e. not refundable. The only exceptions to this rule is a failure of the AMHash3 IPO in general, failure of the Havelock service, or force majeure.

If cancellation happens while coins are under my control (i.e. still on the address given), all payments will be refunded in full. If cancellation happens outside my control, the responsibility is shifted to the party in charge (Havelock, AMHash, God ).


Disclaimer
While I am an Asicminer board member, I am organizing this group buy as independent investor without endorsement or backing from AM. You should be aware of the mining economy and the difficult to predict ROI in the mining business in general. By participating in this group buy, you agree that your decision to invest in AMHash3 was done solely based on your own profitability estimations and independent of this offer. You furthermore accept that this group buy has no control or influence on the IPO

Aside from the formal blabla: use common sense and a healthy portion of fairness.

Offer
Described in 2nd post.

Updates
2014-12-05: offer opened
2014-12-10: IPO opened, offer closed

The payout calculation based on theoretical income (100% PPS after deducting upkeep cost) is the best possible and most fair one for the buyer, since it shifts all potential risk to operator. If you ever ran in situations where your mining rig idled over a longer period of time (pool DDoS'd, ISP down, PSU shutdown) or you sent your shares for days to a pool that suffered a withholding attack, you'll know how preferable this offer is (or why PPS pools used to have fees in the 5% range). Even if there was some potential to earn 1-2% on altcoins (no idea what they are worth meanwhile), I think it is not enough to compensate the involved risks.


@amhash: could you please comment on the following points:
1) IPO price
Prospectus says 1.25 mBTC, while price displayed at IPO order is 1.3 mBTC. Is this a rounding error, or do you adapt the price towards $0.5?
2) exchange risk
Would it be possible to move AMHash shares into some external vault (like done with AM direct shares)?
3) volume discount
Given the fair pricing, this might sound shameless but worth trying: do you offer discounts for larger block buys (like what we had with AM IPO)?

Thanks.

Are you serious? I ran that 'zeta mining' operation during the mining gold rush until GLBSE fell apart - after which I put tremendous efforts to find and pay-back investors. I can name you a dozen bitcoiners at meanwhile legendary status who would sign that this was one of the most transparent and fair security around. It is a past chapter of bitcoin history anyway, but naming it a 'disastrous investment' is simply misinformation / slander.

@Zeta Mining: in case you are serious, you should consider changing your name. Not only because of the naming collision with above mining operation that might associate you with a failed operation, but also since I have a registered company in Switzerland under that name. Furthermore, meanwhile there is the Zetacoin alt-currency around, plus a handful of other start-ups linking to that greek symbol - it is clearly worn out.

@btchip: do you intend to use this thread also for support, or prefer to be bothered at your dedicated support email address?

I'll start here, since it might be interesting for others - will delete if you prefer it done over other channels.

Received my 2 HW.1 wallets and started playing with them using your btchip-c-api. As a first use case I want to test the recovery of the wallet (e.g. after entering wrong pin 3 times), but fail with interpreting the generated seed. The setup step for a wallet initiated by command
returns as second factor a 129 digit key, which seems to be a 64 byte hex string followed by a capital X.

Obviously this is not the seed parameter that is expected by the btchip_setup command to restore a wallet.

Not sure if the c-api is kept up-to-date or there is some additional information for developers available (beside the API documentation).


Thanks for feedback.

My sarkasm was too subtle. Following the cgminer development I assume that if you take your invested time and divide through the donations and perks received, what remains is an income somewhere between junior SW developer and apprentice. Sure, open source does exist mostly founded by motivation other than money - but at the end of the month (and cgminer looked like a full-time project) still someone needs to pay the bills.

With that in mind, your decision to release ckpool open source deserves respect, since (unlike cgminer that is essential for the hobbyist miner) it more serves the 'big guys' who could afford and be willing to pay for such SW.

Ok, I'll interpret it as: if you are already running a bintcoind node, mining over solo.ckpool.org or over your private ckpool is essentially the same.

And re:
I seriously assume this will happen within the next year (when mining is done by a dozen giant solo-miners). What did not work out with cgminer, will do now with ckpool: you will be insanely rich - maybe...

What I don't get fully: is there any advantage of mining on your pool (on a dedicated instance) over running a private ckpol for one's farm? Or more generally: does it make a difference at all to any miner (income wise)? Only reason I could think of is your bitcoind is better connected to other nodes and therefore updates blocks faster - at the cost of propagating this info to the other end of the world. Or am I missing something?

Check OP:

Oops, Jutarul beat me to the minute


a) kind of and b) no.

b) friedcat does not need to 'work for himself' any more - if he did not care about the shareholders, he for sure could step aside and enjoy the life we all seek.

a) we had a board meeting last week. One of the discussed topics was the current information policy and a related consensus that it needs improvements. The search for a dedicated PR person is still active and situation is expected to get way more relaxed once this is settled. What is generally to note is, that there are no news to report as long as there are no news to report. Basically things are progressing as planned, but with the company maturing and being able to follow long-term plans, there is often nothing relevant to report on a weekly (or even monthly) base. Needless to say that in such a competitive business field there is also information not meant for the public (or the board).

Generally, board meetings are company confidential unless otherwise stated. Therefore observing that none from the board is posting in this thread or elsewhere is a combination of 1) there are no relevant news, and 2) if there were, we are not allowed to disclose. This is not because we are careless bastards, but to protect the company, ourselves and shareholders.

For now, please take the fact that the board is pushing for a better transparency for granted and look forward for this to improve mid term.

Just ordered one after reading the related CoinDesk article - without knowing if it is exactly what I expect, but the API looks like you can waste quite some time playing with it.

@OP: since this thread is where people are led to from your website, you should check your posts for outdated media / data. Most of the pictures and videos you link in your posts do not exist any more.


Good Luck with the sales.

Look, as you noticed by the chosen config options, the upstream cgminer currently supports A1 products from Bitmine only. Without knowing the architecture of a Gridseed (or whatever product using the A1), you won't be able to get it mining (unless it is a 1:1 clone of one of Bitmine's products). If you had the required details, you (or the manufacturer) could write a variant of the A1-board-selector that abstracts the product specific properties and makes it accessible as a vector of A1-chip-chains.

Knowing more or less what I am talking about (I wrote those A1 driver and framework), I suggest you better bother the manufacturer and ask for upstream integration of their private driver (assuming there is one). They essentially have to, i.e. if your product was delivered with a private binary version of cgminer, GPL grants you the right to request the source code. If they refuse to deliver, there are means to deal with GPL violations.

But I guess you were not looking for troubles, so the short answer is this: no, it won't work.

Bug: exported history not conforming to CSV spec

Symptom: if your exported history contains transactions with more that 1000 BTC, importing fails

Reason: comma is used to separate cells - while at the same time it is also used as thousands delimiter

Workaround: use semicolon instead of comma to separate cells in CSV export

Reproduce: a) make some small transactions, b) make a transaction over 1000 BTC, c) export history, d) import in your favourite spreadsheet application using comma as cell delimiter



https://blockchain.info/address/15i1ppL2JdW6xLT9HZh4tcbiqHYw2oFZee

Are you sure the bitburnerA1 is supported by upstream cgminer? When I bought a few of those some months ago, I was pointed to the private repository at https://github.com/someone42/cgminer

Worked for me. Good Luck.

AM franchised mining: an insight


Shareholders, miners, and bitcoiners,

catching up the last few pages of this thread I realise that there is a growing interest for franchised operations - along with a bunch of inaccuracy and speculation. To reduce that noise and add some facts to the topic, I herein want to give some insight into my past franchised mining operation.

About
When AM rolled out its mining farm and quickly surpassed 30% network share, in the board we discussed options on how to resolve the existing fear of AM approaching majority power. At that times I already had some experience with lending mining rig for a shared mining profit and proposed that model that later became AM's franchised mining. The idea was pretty simple: instead of growing own mines to disruptive powers, we lend rig to self-managed entities for a pre-defined share of mining income.

As one of the initial testers of blade based franchised mining I want to share some of my experience with those interested in franchising, or shareholders just wondering how that component contributed to dividend payments in the past.

Please note that all the information provided here is about past mining operations and not about those planned for BE200 and later franchising. Also, basically everything described is information publicly available (from blockchain) which I am only connecting the dots to.

The AM franchised mining model
The established model aims to get large volumes of hashing power operational out of AM's direct control but with a guaranteed and high share of mining income at zero risk. Zero risk is achieved by requesting for collateral that covers the manufacturing and shipping costs - which can be either as a deposit of BTC at escrow, or with direct AM shares.

High share of mining income was defined as 80/20. Income is accounted at nominal values, e.g. one blade is assumed to hash with 10GHps and to consume 100W. Furthermore, it is accounted based on theoretical values, that is: for one blade AM receives the mining income of 8GHps mining 24/7 (80%PPS), remainder goes to franchisee. This gives the franchisee full control over risk/reward balancing, i.e. he could try to squeeze out the most of the blades through over-clocking to get a higher share for himself - at the same time he is in charge for loss of income of any kind, e.g. pool DDOSed, power outage, theft, whatever. Failure to pay the regular franchising fees will ultimately result in the forfeiture of your collateral and termination of franchising agreement.

Use case: AM rev1 blades franchised mining
My first installation were 30 blades that during the first difficulty cycle mined as follows:
No, you are not dreaming: it is less than a year that 300GHps mined you 80BTC in one difficulty cycle

Four months later, I had my full capacity of 292 blades up and running. Notice how the 10x higher hashrate earned only 57% of what the first 30 blades made over a difficulty cycle.
Another fun fact: setting up those blades in a 80qm facility took 6 weeks installation time (customising shelves, power distribution, networking, blade set-up) and required a 30kW facility - which today is available at a desktop PC sized plug-and-mine product at 3kW.

Initially, electricity costs were negligible, but after 4 months became significant and were added to the fee calculation formula. The above output is generated by this script I wrote that calculates the franchising payments based on the agreed formula.


Finally, rev1 blade franchising became unprofitable in April 2014:

Bottom line

• mining 292 blades generated 762.138 BTC mining income for AM
• blades were mining profitable for 10 months
• franchisee made less than 160BTC in mining, which were sold to pay operation costs for an average BTCUSD rate of ~$300 and hardly covered expenses

Future
Franchised mining will remain a core strategy for AM. Alas, with the mining profitability marginalizing down, it became restricted to those who
a) do it on large scale
b) have enough funds / shares to provide collateral
c) have access to cheap electricity


Hope this retrospective gave you some insight and a better idea on AM's franchising model.