[ANN] Post your USED mining equipment on SHOVELSANDPICKAXES.COM for FREE

shovelsandpickaxes.com is online in limited production/beta.

Sign up to post your USED mining equipment there for FREE.

Basically, I'm just a guy that recently started exploring cryptocoin mining as a hobby. I started with the ASIC Erupter Blade V2. The problem as I saw it, was that there was a lot of price gouging going on that contributed to a high cost of entry which made it difficult to mine a decent return on the money invested to purchase crypto mining equipment. Nowhere was this more evident than the graphics cards that now often sell for more than $100 over their MSRP. In some ways it reminded me of those late night commercials where for a nontrivial initial investment, you get the money-making "kit" that will lead you to your future financial freedom.

Anyway, I've been involved with computers for a long time... As a hobby, long enough to often subsidize many of my new hardware purchases with the proceeds from "cleaning house" on occasion. I figured that to the extent that I could encourage a similar ecosystem for this new mining hobby, we might _all_ benefit.

Like many of you, I first looked to Ebay to find my initial equipment. Let's face it; Ebay has everything... but sometimes when it comes to sticking people up for their hard earned cash, Ebay is more a part of the problem than the solution. It's long since moved away from the individual seller looking to clear out his/her basement to favor storefront/business based sellers... and with that shift in focus, many of the "deals" that many of us remember fondly from Ebay's early days have migrated to places like Craigslist.

The next place I went was Amazon which possibly has more stuff than Ebay. They also had crypto mining equipment, more straightforward purchasing and delivery, and slightly lower prices (about $80 when I bought my first Erupter blades). I ended up buying there from Jones Gear and was pretty pleased with my purchase but although lower than Ebay, this still wasn't the lower cost alternative I was looking for especially since in both cases, I was dealing with new equipment.

So I decided that I needed to do something to encourage people to sell their used equipment at a discount with a slight twist:

If you sell anything through Ebay, Ebay takes a cut, and if you use Paypal (owned by Ebay) to collect payment, Paypal takes a cut. A friend who sometimes sells on Ebay told me that this can be as much as 15%. If you sell through Amazon, Amazon gets a cut that I think is comparable...

My solution is simply to let you post your used equipment for free, and then depending upon how altruistic you feel, reflect some or all of the money that you are _not_ paying to Amazon or Ebay in your posted prices. Because such altruism can lead to lower prices, my hope is that it creates negative price pressure to counterbalance the gouging I was complaining about. People buying cheaper used equipment sap demand for higher priced new equipment, which hopefully leads to lower prices for new equipment and more people getting into crypto mining at a more affordable entry level.

That's the theory anyway, so to get this experiment started, I created shovelsandpickaxes.com. I am aware that greed can be such that individuals may choose to sell on the website at the same prices as Ebay and Amazon, but that is ok too because my hope is more people selling on the site will lead to more competition, if not with the other sellers of used equipment, with the sellers of new equipment willing to lower their prices to compete better with the used equipment sellers.

Is it a perfect plan? Nope.

Is it a perfect website? Nope. Not even close.

I'm a system admin, I'm not an economist, and I'm not a web designer but I hope that with your help, I'll be able to improve the website over time. I just figured that there needed to be somewhere else besides Ebay, Amazon, and here to facilitate the buying and selling of used crypto mining hardware, which in turn for users could potentially lower the price of and/or subsidize the buying and selling of new crypto mining hardware.

So if you want to be a part of the vision and help out you can:

1) List your used equipment on shovelsandpickaxes.com for free
2) You can offer your suggestions for improvement and desired features here
3) You can (eventually) buy premium ads on the website for any of the available categories
4) You can tell others about shovelsandpickaxes.com and what I'm trying to accomplish
5) You can donate however much or little BTC you feel like donating to offset my time and expenses
6) You can volunteer your own time and expertise in some way (lots to be done)
7) You can start your own classifieds website (because more competition is better) to do the same thing

How will I benefit from all of this?

1) Did I mention that this hobby is an expensive one? :-)
2) I'd like to enjoy lower prices for both new and used mining equipment just like you
3) It could subsidize my other projects such as my ASIC ethernet management tools which require me to purchase more and different kinds of Ethernet based miners. (Currently they only support the ASIC Erupter Blade V2)
4) There are worse things you can get a reputation for :-)

How will YOU benefit from all of this?

1) You get a free place to liquidate your used equipment either for profit or to subsidize your own crypto mining activities
2) As a buyer or seller, you get to strike back at all of the businesses engaging in the price gouging ecosystem from the gougers to the payment systems and other middle men taking their cut of the gouging.
3) You (hopefully) get a place to find less expensive crypto mining equipment.

Because of the site's mission, posting _used_ equipment will always be FREE. (Actually while in limited production, until I get the paid features of the site tested and running, I'd actually prefer for you to use just the free features) Other than that, I will continue to run the site for as long and as well as my limited resources allow. All suggestions welcome here. Also, because I am not much of a web designer or graphic artist, depending upon its reception, I'll probably offer bounties at some point to add beauty and/or functionality to the site.

In the meantime, let the experiment begin...

MP

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