You're so far off in your estimates, it's apples to kumquats.

First, the pricing PDF you showcased is for their discounted minting program for Military/Schools/Non-profits, which obviously does not fit.  The correct pricing guide would be here:  http://silvertownemint.com/Portals/0/PDF/custom%20prices.pdf

Second, back in 2014 when these were actually minted, silver was around $20/ounce, highs close to $30 depending on when it was bought, not today's price of just under $16.  Add for each round over spot at least $1, plus the charges for the blanks which is $2.50 from Silvertowne.  You're up in the mid-twenties at least already per round before anything else.

Custom dies can go anywhere from $200 - $5000 depending on intricacy.  Let's take a reasonable price for the dies, say $1500 for the front, because the Gen2 design was more intricate, and $500 for the back.  Pray you don't crack a die and have to re-create another set.  Typically you'll create two sets just in case for that very reason.

Each round comes with a set of 3 holograms, which as stated were around $1 each, so $3 per round, or $3000 for the batch.

There is a fee for the actual minting run, usually $250 - 500.  Not much, but we'll toss it in there.

Any idea how much it costs to package in capsules 1000 ounces of silver, then in tubes and boxes, and then ship it, oh, BTW, insured?  Tack on another easy $3000.  This is before any shipping cost back out to the buyer.

At this point you're up double what you initially thought it would cost.  For just materials.  No labor, no other incidentals for the process, not counting anyone's time.  It's a far cry from the estimate you thought, and the profit margin has also shrunk quite much.

Oh, and this:
Dream on.  There is no "smoother" part about the minting process.  All the above is a hard, set price, no matter whether you're minting your 3rd, or 300th batch of coins.  You get breaks on quantity of coins in the actual order, not the minting batch.  Even at 10k rounds, you're probably only shaving off a dollar or two from the cost of the silver blank, if you're lucky.

The spreadsheet is saying -1.75%... come on, just .. need .. .01 more % ...

My opinion - stay away from Antpool, I find them untrustworthy as far as what they claim to be, and what they actually deliver.

Kano and CKOlivas have 2 pools at the moment, and I have mined at both (and currently do mine at Kano).

CK's solo mining pool - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=763510.0 - this is pure solo mining (gambling), if you hit a block you get the full 25BTC reward.  If you don't, you get nothing.  I will point some miners there every once in a while for a gamble, but have gotten no blocks to date.

Kano's pool - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=789369.0 - this is a traditional PPLNS mining pool, but they go out to 500% for payment which is longer than most PPLNS (means more chances at higher amounts of shares, i.e. higher payout per block).

I personally have about 1/3 of my hash pointed to Kano's pool, 2/3 to Nastypool (P2Pool based.  Disclaimer - I recently donated a server to the Nasty Mining pool setup, running as their US node, so I'm pretty biased to there).

I have also used BTCGuild and my own P2Pool node in the past.  BTCGuild is still in most of my miner configs as my 3rd ultimate backup pool.

I'll call dibs on the coin at that price.  I just got home from work so please hold it until I can settle in and PM you.

Personally I'm thinking BTC price will affect more the crazy growth than the next gen chips.  I don't doubt there will be growth spurts, probably 2 or 3 mid-teens adjustments are likely, but I think it will be more measured.

For giggles, let's assume next gen chips are still 28nm, just more efficient, able to hit say .35w/gh which would be a 30% gain on the best existing chips (.5w/gh).  Let's assume also a June/July delivery timeframe.

I would believe that the largest adoption of those rigs would be with mining farms running on older hardware, say anything that's >6months and over .8w/gh.  For those miners, they've been running the older gear longer, probably at or close to positive ROI where upgrading will benefit them in the long run because of reduced power expenditure.

The mining farms who are spinning up now on the last bits of stock from SPTech and BMTech wouldn't (well, I should say "shouldn't") be in a position to drop large chunks on buying brand new hardware when the ones they just spun up are barely 2 months old.  I honestly don't think they'd be able to match the same 30% difference in the price of selling the old hardware (in other words, they would get 30% positive gain from the new chips for power consumption, but would be selling their hardware for more than a 30% loss, thus equating to a negative total ROI).

The first group, if that happens, will then start a cascade effect for smaller miners, where they can now also replace the higher wattage gear they're running with much cheaper use equipment (say those running S1's for sure, and some S3's will now pick up used S5's on the cheap).  IT'll turn into a sine wave of diff adjustments, dip while old hardware is turned off and sold, then an uptick as the hardware reaches the next set of miners and gets powered on, and then lather, rinse, repeat down the chain.

But, the whole thing with this is the price of BTC.  If it stays low, then even the large farms aren't turning as much of a profit, and that should result in the ability to purchase and deploy less hardware than they could if BTC were higher.  If BTC goes up considerably, then these same places could deploy much larger amounts of hardware, which would drive difficulty through the roof, quickly, much like was seen from middle through late last year (June - November).

If hardware isn't being bought at a rapid pace, that leads manufacturers to not have as much revenue and on-hand capital to push forward on newer, more dense chips like 20nm and 16nm.

Then again, we can speculate till we're blue in the face... who the hell really knows what will happen...

When I first started mining I read everywhere the perils of mining with ghash, from the 51% possibility, to the double spends, etc.  I eventually mined here just to see for myself whether there were any issues or whether it was all just fud.  Pretty much came to the same conclusion lots of others had, that there was something that just didn't add up at the end of the day. 

But do a simple test for yourself and you'll see. Split your hash power between 2 or 3 pools (I'd suggest Kano, btcguild as two good alternatives) and you'll see quickly why you shouldn't stay on ghash.  I did this (I used btcguild and p2pool since Kano wasn't around yet) and payouts with ghash were consistently 20-30% lower than the others.  And yes, I ran the miners for about a month this way to lessen the impact of bad luck streaks skewing the numbers.

I don't know the reasons and frankly don't care as much anymore.  The bottom line is that I earned significantly less than I should have while on here compared to everywhere else I tried. 

I've got a roll of 20 from gen 1, but not numbered, and a roll of 20 gen 2, numbered.

What number is the gold plated, and is it graded?

Nice Silver Wallet!  That's a series 1 design correct?

Well, possibly, but not necessarily.  Anacs is one of the cheaper grading companies, but still you're looking at easily $50+ to have a coin graded with shipping and insurance back and forth.  It all depends on the situation and the seller, and all depends on the coin.  At some point someone paid out of pocket for the grading and I think very reasonable to me if they are including the costs of grading in the overall price of the coin, resulting in a higher premium.  It saves me the time and hassle of sending it out myself which is worth the extra.

Just like many other things, the subject of grading is a holy war.  Me, I prefer it for a multitude of reasons, from simple verification of authenticity, to the fact that my own grading skills are not great and I'd rather take someone else's opinion who is an "expert" in the field. 

All that being said, I would expect any graded coin to have a premium over the ungraded.  How much is usually a sliding scale, with lower end grades being a smaller premium simply for the cost, and higher end being large due to the rarity.

The grading scale goes up to MS-70, with the 70 being considered a "perfect" coin, no nicks, scratches, defects, etc.

Generally speaking most coins/rounds of these series will grade MS-63 through MS-65.  A lot depends on the original minting quality of the strike (how sharp the details are, if there's any weak areas of the die, etc), and whether it's been handled by folks out of the roll (outside of holding by the edges, which is the "proper" way to hold any coin).

People will grade low-quality coins as well, all depends, that's a larger discussion than for here.

In MS-64, it's a decent looking coin, and you'd really have to get a close up to see most defects.

Hope this helps.

smoothie - might want to clarify the wording, is the coin funded, or unfunded?

You are bidding for the following unfunded coins:

1. ONE 2013  0.5 BTC 1/2 oz 999 Fine Silver CASASCIUS Coin


This coin is funded with 0.5BTC by Mike Caldwell in 2013.

Ba-dump-dump.  Will you be here all week?  Should I try the veal?

 

If no one else has claimed them yet, I'll take them.  I can set up escrow.

xestr - I've pm'd you a couple times, have you seen them?

Escrow is fine for me, if that's preventing you from replying to me.  Thanks.

They can be, especially if you either have 220 power and can use the 2000+ watt server style PSU's, or you are upgrading from s1/s3 where you already had them deployed.

I use the DPS-2000 PSU's, they're more efficient than what you can find on the s4, and I can power 3 over clocked s5's on one PSU with no issue.

I bid 2.55 BTC

I'd like -1.76 to -2.00 please.

I think with Spondoolies out of stock on most of their hardware, Bitmain also not selling tons, there's just not enough supply to deploy to push the hash rate up significantly.  Also it's going to start warming up soon, maybe not in time for this adjustment, which will tip a lot of the marginal miners with expensive power into the red.

I'm starting to agree with diff under 50 through to May.

Actually, Equinoxx, that's probably the best option for you.  Given the 13% eBay/paypal overhead plus the shipping to get it to you, that's a very reasonable price.  A lot of US sellers don't like shipping abroad because a lot can happen, there's stories of packages getting "lost in transit" all over the place.

xetsr - I'd offer 1.25 BTC for the lot of 3.  I'm in the US.

I bid 2.10 BTC

Perfect, that explains it!  Thanks!