Your apparent re-invention of the Winkelvoss wheel,
There is more than one way to skin a cat. There are hundreds if not thousands of ways to create public offerings. The Winkelvoss are smart guys but as far as I know they have never successfully raised funds for an offering, never been registered or even worked in the investment business and are fairly new to the space. There are many major disadvantages of an ETF which someone who understands both spaces well can see: Regulatory- Despite whatever advice Winkelvoss received from the lawyers they paid to set up the vehicle, ETFs have several regulatory hurdles that other vehicles do not....they are learning this now as they are stuck in regulatory limbo. Trading redemptions: ETFs are required to allow DAILY redemptions.....this means that if there is a panic sell/ crash in the market and BTC is down 25% at 1pm ....then, because of that, $50,000,000 worth of ETF shares are sold by holders of the ETF....then at market close the Winkelvoss would need to sell ANOTHER $50 mm in BTC on the market to meet those redemptions....therefor causing the price to spin further lower....they would not have the luxury of time because the redemptions must be met..this of course causes more of a panic sell, more volatility and is also a logistical nightmare. Security/ logistics: because of daily purchases and redemptions the security and logistics issues are significant. Someone can literally buy $100 mm of the ETF on the market then sell it again the next day. An EFT would need ready easy access to all those BTC for redemptions totally all holdings backed by public investors because theoretically all those investors could sell. Securing the private keys AND having easy daily access to them is challenging. They cannot simply be locked in a safe offsite....every single day there are net redemptions, someone (actually several people) would need to access those keys. This brings up many other questions of logistics etc. Volatilty: because of daily purchases and redemptions, volatility would increase and panic sells would be worsened. I thought of an ETF a long time ago, long before the Winkelvoss announcement and determined that these flaws and the accounting of private keys for tens of millions of dollars daily would be a logistical hassle -- it's possible the regulators agreed and this is why the ETF is now stuck in limbo. It's a great idea but I believe there is a better way. For the vehicle I'm researching it would employ some of the features similar to a REIT, Real Estate investment Trust and could trade daily on the open market but not be subject to daily redemptions (because holders would sell shares to other investors, not the fund as is the case with an ETF). EDIT / added : I'm confident there are better options than EFT -- however, the Winkelvoss bros might very well have solved these issues in some way I'm not aware of and their vehicle may not have the need for them to do daily redemptions --- I won't negatively judge the details without knowing more than what has been listed in their documents because I don't think it's prudent to judge things unless one has facts No one has to sell because of ETF redemptions. They just need to deliver BTC to the redeemers. You really have no fucking idea what you are talking about. |
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Trading redemptions: ETFs are required to allow DAILY redemptions.....this means that if there is a panic sell/ crash in the market and BTC is down 25% at 1pm ....then, because of that, $50,000,000 worth of ETF shares are sold by holders of the ETF....then at market close the Winkelvoss would need to sell ANOTHER $50 mm in BTC on the market to meet those redemptions....
I won't bother to pick out all the other quotes illustrating the full range of utter baloney here, but clearly I stand corrected: to rescue your credibility, you'll need to spend a few minutes not just reading up about how the Bitcoin protocol works, but you'll also need to revisit the basics of ETFs and in particular the distinction between Authorized Participants, normal investors, and the fund itself. It would also be worth considering actually reading the Winkelvii's S-1 filing before prognosticating about how you imagine redemptions might work. There's a lengthy discussion about this from half a year ago available in the Economics section: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=252330.msg2688380As I have no involvement in your particular scheme, it doesn't matter a jot to me whether you actually want to rescue your credibility, but I've offered the suggestion -- twice now -- that you're not helping yourself in the least in the eyes of the people you claim to want to reach, and to whom you claim to be able to offer something of value. So just take it as a friendly observation of you shooting yourself in the foot, and if you believe I'm simply wrong about that and want to disregard it or dismiss it entirely, that's your call, and I'll leave it to you to keep shooting. By now, most or all of the large Bitcoin holders who grok finance will have left this thread, but best of luck with it all anyway. Anything that genuinely improves access and transparency for the wider community is bound to be a good thing. Some of us stick around for the lolz. It's always fun batting around the new wave of opportunists when they crawl out of their holes. |
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Not that I have any pertikuler reason to defend hashfast, but PCBs get "difficult" over a couple or three hundred Mhz... one of the reasons why memory controllers went on-die in modern CPUs.
Need to shove data in excess of those speeds? Go license some DDR, QDR etc IP.
The data rates in and out of these chips are very easy to handle. 88 bytes / 4 billion hashes in, and 4 bytes for valid nonces out, which can have arbitrarily large difficulty. High clock rates are difficult because you need to have clean power for internal signal integrity. But board level I/O isn't bad. The high power and resulting thermal loads are the difficult issues with this generation of chips. |
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•We will implement a feature, allowing CEX.IO users to mine bitcoins from
other pools. So when they purchase GH/s they can put it towards any pool
they choose. This is a smart move, well done cex.io A good move, but it doesn't actually prevent them from controlling 51%. It actually makes it so now you won't know how much they really control. At any point all that leased GH/s could be redirected at their own servers, because they still do CONTROL that hashrate. The pool has gained significant hashing power due to the 0% pool fee,
merged mining of alt coins, excellent real-time data presentation as well as
quality 24/7/365 support service.
....
We will not be implementing a pool fee, as we believe the pool has to
remain free.
So the sole reason they've gained any momentum (it sure isn't their support or uptime), and also the *only* way they're going to make people move to other pools, they have no intention of changing. It certainly wouldn't hurt you to compete on fees a bit. I doubt it costs you 1 days rake to run your pool for a month. |
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The problem with this is that it drives the price down.
using Bitpay or Coinbase, and settle in USD, they are just driving the price down.
You realize that you completely failed to explain why you think they're driving the price down, right? You state your theory but then have nothing to back it up. Why is it necessary to back it up? Because many would disagree with you on this. Many feel that adoption (which is the other side of this coin you present) balances out, if not increases price of bitcoin. So why do you feel it outweighs and in fact nullifies any benefit of increased adoption? -BB- People can disagree and thats fine. Most of the people who spend the Bitcoins on these sites, already had them. Meaning they aren't buying at market price just to spend them. Meaning, fiat is not coming in, rather Bitcoin is leaving into fiat. So when new companies get 1,000 btc worth of sales, their payment processors are going to dump that 1k btc to settle the merchant in USD. Thus driving the price down. Its helps bitcoin investors cash out easily, rather than bringing new money into bitcoin. You do seem to be saying "Everybody hold so I can dump mine at a ridiculous price" But just for the sake of moving the conversation forward: What makes you so confident that Bitpay and Coinbase are dumping coins immediately? They both allow merchants to keep coins instead of dollars. Further to this what if I were to tell you I have evidence that coins sold to Bitpay actually are sold to SecondMarket? |
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Can the speculators please stop trolling the Mining Boards?  Where exactly do you see this trolling? |
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Bitcoin needs to be useful as a medium of exchange in order to be adopted as a store of value.
As a store of value, it is mind boggling how valuable bitcoin could be.
But if you can't spend it people aren't going to stash money away with it.
Short term it might slow down the appreciation against fiat, but that's not a bad thing if you believe in Bitcoin long term. And if you're not a long term believer, all you are saying is "Everybody hold so I can dump mine at a crazy high price!"
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This was an epic post. I think there's another one with even more outlandish profit projections in it. SPRINGFIELD, MO, – May 29, 2013 – VMC a manufacturer of the Fast-Hash Bitcoin Mining Machines has announced today that they will purchase a second full batch (10,000) of Avalon chips to build ~31 Fast-Hash-80's for AMC should AMC provide the capital in the next few weeks, this would bring AMC's machine total to ~71 units. The ~71 machines will bring the cooperatives hash power to ~5,650,816 MH/s, ~35,651 GH/s, or ~5.651 TH/s. At the current Difficulty (which may be more or less in the future) of 12,153,412 this will bring the estimated total revenue as of this writing to a total of $30,318.86 per day and a yearly amount of $8,681,346.78. Active Mining Corporation is a Vanuatu International Business Company DBA Active Mining Cooperative (AMC).
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=219636.0;topicseen |
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Liquidity is the last thing a large holder of bitcoins needs to worry about these days. Being publicly identified is a more serious risk now. Targeted hacking and much worse is a real possibility at this stage.
I'm not looking to get people to sell or provide liquidity. That makes absolutely no sense. You have already said you want 10-20k bitcoins. Are you seeking donations? |
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I hear your point on the evaporation, it will be interesting to see how that plays out. The health effects of the stuff are not known at this time either.
For the cooler, I'm pretty sure no chiller is necessary, since it only needs to be cooler than the boiling point of the fluid itself, for example if the fluorenert boils at 56 degrees then any loop with a radiator and pump (assuming you don't live in a very hot dessert) would be able to cool it below these levels so it would condense back.
My plan was to use cold tap water flowing through a copper coil, which in this part of the country is always cold throughout the year. No added infrastructure cost, no radiator would even be necessary.
Not the greenest approach but it would decrease costs a lot. It will be interesting to see how it works out. All of my comments about cost would be out the window if you could achieve significant (20%+) overclocking I guess. |
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As others have said, the Cex.io calculator is a bad choice. They are trying to sell you overpriced miners so they can build their own farm with the profits.
I wouldn't be a buyer of gear that would come in May, for a lot of reasons.
But you purchased this hardware in November as a calculated risk. I assume that you made an evaluation of the risk at that time before spending such a large sum. What has changed about your evaluation?
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What is the solubility of water in these fluids?
The cooling fins are going to condense a non trivial amount of water along with Flourinert so you will either need to separate the water out of the tank, or actively extract it from solution.
Also with a non-pressurised 2 phase system, you will lose an appreciable amount of fluid each day. That will dramatically increase your operating costs and worse, make every nearby surface an oily mess.
You would be better off immersing the cooling radiator, using a circulation pump and sticking with a single phase temperature zone. Even with those conditions you will have trouble with losses of oil and mess due to surface tension driven creep of the oil on cables and pipes entering the tank.
If you have a look at the 3M site they have a lot of interesting pics including the answer to your question of water solubility. Basically its like the reverse of water / oil, in this case the water floats on top of the flourinert, they don't mix at all. So the way to combat water would be to have desiccant granules in a packet hanging in the case should take care of any water problems. According to 3M losses to evaporation should be next to nil, but I suppose it means you need to accurately size the condenser radiator for the heat source its cooling, otherwise yes, likely to have some losses. http://www.mgchemicals.com/downloads/3m/3m-FAQ.pdfLittle bit confused about talk of oil. Are you referring to mineral oil cooling now or compressor oil in a cooling loop? Flourinert product is not an oil, its not hydrocarbon based. The advantage of the flourinert over mineral oil is it can cool more much hardware per sq in than any other known method at the moment, plus its completely inert. It is desirable to have it change phase because it cools more efficiently and there is no need for a pump, at least not inside where the hardware is immersed. The downside of course is its cost. Every set up like this I have seen has problems with the flourinert creeping. Just because the guy selling to you says losses are zero doesn't make them zero. With an unpressurized vessel there will always be some vapor phase material exiting the chamber. I wouldn't care to be breathing that stuff for any period of time. Cost is the bottom line. This is an amusing engineering exercise, but you still have to provide chilled water / glycol to the system. And chillers at less than 100 kW scales are as expensive as AC systems of the same capacity. So the only benefit is higher density for higher cost. Unless you happen to live in downtown Tokyo it isn't going to be a good trade. |
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What is the solubility of water in these fluids?
The cooling fins are going to condense a non trivial amount of water along with Flourinert so you will either need to separate the water out of the tank, or actively extract it from solution.
Also with a non-pressurised 2 phase system, you will lose an appreciable amount of fluid each day. That will dramatically increase your operating costs and worse, make every nearby surface an oily mess.
You would be better off immersing the cooling radiator, using a circulation pump and sticking with a single phase temperature zone. Even with those conditions you will have trouble with losses of oil and mess due to surface tension driven creep of the oil on cables and pipes entering the tank.
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Bitcoin is stored securely on the blockchain redundantly in millions of locations.
Trusting your private keys to a third party reduces your security.
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Bloomberg seems to have completely moved from the laughing at Bitcoin stage to the fighting Bitcoin stage. That's excellent. When power hungry autocrats hate you, you're doing more right than wrong. |
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Good times. I miss VBS. Thanks for the links. I feel a lot better now. I was feeling seriously bad for the bagholders after today's debacle. Then I see how clearly I presented the facts of why this would be a disaster over 6 months ago, and how much shit was thrown my way for the effort... |
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I wonder if Ken has any assets that bag-holders can capture when the inevitable law suits start flying?
Nope, nothing at all. We have the Avalon money that would return about 2% of my investment. I'm talking about his personal assets. He's an old man. He should have a house at least. Yeah the house will just about cover lawyer fees. $300,000 = 330 bitcoin / 10,000,000 * 114,425 = An additional 3.77 bitcoin. That less than a percent of my investment. 1% > 0% You guys should at least prevent him from wasting whatever assets still exist in the company on trying to build a device he isn't qualified to build that would be obsolete if he had it in hand today. |
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Kerio updated their flood prevention rules to drop incoming packets from several pools last night.
So if your miners aren't running but everything looks kosher with your network, check the firewall rules.
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Opinions should be welcome, and self appointed censors should be ignored and / or deleted.
Puppet you should add a few dimensions to the evaluation:
Field failure rate: nothing sucks more than finally unboxing gear to find it doesn't function
Warranty coverage:
Customer support: is there dedicated staff? what is typical response time?
Response time for RMA:
Refund policy for advance orders:
If you want to sue them, can you find them?: a lot of these outfits make the mafia look accountable
I think your evaluation of Avalon is far too kind. I actually think less of them than BFL. They outright stole from Batch II customers.
We have had very good experiences with RMA'ing KNC hardware. Positive responses, helpful advice on resolving problems, and a quick turn in the case where replacement was necessary. The clip on design of the fan and heatsink isn't pretty, and forces every box to be opened and inspected but otherwise they have done well.
Cointerra customer support has been good. They are clearly staffing a professional team and taking the right steps. I hope the next months confirm the positive view I have today.
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A lot of these doom and gloom 'mining is the devil' approaches fail to take into consideration what is happening right now. In the last two hours BTC has shed %20 of it's value...TWENTY PERCENT people!
For a retail investor who has say 5-10k to work with this is a nightmare. Imagine two people who began their BTC investment today. One guy bought 8k worth of hardware and started and the other one bought
7BTC. Now of course no investment is judged by what happens in such a small time frame but that having been said...
Which one of those two people do you think is having a worse day?
Yes, I know there are plenty of days where it runs the exact opposite. But even on those days the guy mining can watch his existing and new BTC go up too!
I am still really new here and learning but from what I have seen there is a negative bias towards mining that seems to have it's own agenda.
JMO.
Let's take your example for a moment and see where it goes. So Andy goes out and buys a 2 TH/s miner from scamfast labs for April delivery. $8000 Brian buys $8000 worth of bitcoin. 10 BTC. Tomorrow Andy is broke and Brian has 10 BTC. And it's going to stay that way for a long time. Fast forward to April: Brian has 10 BTC. He might be happy, he might be sad depending on the exchange rate, but he still has 10 BTC. And he could do whatever he wanted with it at any time. If bitcoin hit $100k one day and he thought that was too high, he could cash in for $1M and walk away. Andy still has nothing. He checks bitcoincharts and sees that the network has crossed 100 Ph/s and is still climbing. It's going to take 140 days to get to 10 BTC if difficulty stops now, and more like a year if there has been no price appreciation and growth starts slowing. He better get hashing soon! Now where is Andy's scamfast machine? Better check the forums. Ah, Joe from Scamfast Labs is promising shipment in a couple weeks. Well that's 1 less bitcoin Andy will ever see, but it's not so bad, I guess, just 2 weeks. But wait, why is this guy complaining that his January order hasn't shipped yet? What does that mean for Andy's delivery date? Brian still has 10 BTC. Used in hand sytems are selling for 4 BTC / 2 Th/s. Andy realizes he's a sucker. To begin with I would like to say that without us "miners"...none of this shit would be possible. Don't ever forget that the spirit of Bitcoin was that everyone mined at least a little bit. Secondly, all the mining hardware I have ever sold has been for more than what I paid for it so the hardware is basically free. Don't forget that a lot of low hashing hardware isn't purchased by people that want to make money right away...they just want to learn the ropes. Go ahead and cite all the cases where you bought hardware for a price in Bitcoin and then sold it for a higher price in Bitcoin. The only times that has been feasible has been with pre-order flips, in which case you weren't actually a miner. Just a speculator in mining hardware. |
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