Avalon ASIC Batch #2 Income Sharing; arrived and hashing

[ProfMac]

There was 6" of blowing and drifting snow.  The high today is supposed to be 3°F. 
I have re-configured the Avalon so that it is not next to the furnace as shown in the Wall Street Journal, and I have resupplied natural gas to the furnace.

[ProfMac]

I have purchased a 2nd Avalon, and I am offering it at auction in order to gain an idea of the liquidation value of an Avalon.  If things go well, I will offer to liquidate your shares at that winning amount before midnight, December 31, less than 48 hours from now.

Please feel free to let me know what you think a minimum bid should be, for the entire 3 module Avalon, for you to want to sell out your shares.

[ProfMac]

I will travel to Austin, TX.  The departure depends a bit on the weather, so I don't have a rigid schedule.

For security reasons, I may not put my wallet on a laptop.  I have the blockchain.info wallet restricted so that it only accepts payouts from my home IP address and a YubiKey.

So it looks like I will not make a payout for 1 or 2 weeks.

[ProfMac]

My plans are changing.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12etO7rLqwyKtVaDTNqNq_9sjf6pgEAU3Wz-OcBuovho/edit

[perseus]

Best wishes to you and your family, Prof Mac...

[sealkid]

My sincerest condolences. A wonderful Obituary.

[ProfMac]

My sincerest condolences. A wonderful Obituary.

Thank you.

[ProfMac]

I am in Austin taking care of some paperwork.  I did attend the Texas Bitcoin Conference last week.  I will be in Austin through this week, and will return to Minnesota after that.  I have locked down security on the miners and my wallets as much as I know how, and I will not make payments these two weeks, and if the miners have glitches, I cannot administer them remotely.

[ProfMac]

I scattered my wife's ashes in her favorite spot.  I felt a little dumb on the way there, but it was a beautiful experience.  I had a memorial service at our house in Austin, and had 25-30 friends drop over.  I went to Bitcoin Texas while I was in Austin, and went to a local meetup at Scholz's Garden.  I ate familiar Tex-Mex food many times.

I am back in Minnesota.  It is a big change from the 80°F there to the 21°F here.  We had winter mix changing to 2-3" of snow yesterday.  At least my miners like this weather.  Now that it is above 0°F outside, the house has warmed up to 62°F.

The miners ran well.  There was a half hour power outage a week ago, and my computer shut down.  The miners themselves booted back up and kept hashing.

I have distributed the current minings.

[ProfMac]

Soon, the miner will not pay for the cost of electricity.  In order to have tidy paperwork, it might make sense to hold an auction to sell it.  Please feel free to comment.

[ProfMac]

Soon, the miner will not pay for the cost of electricity.  In order to have tidy paperwork, it might make sense to hold an auction to sell it.  Please feel free to comment.

I have revived an auction.  I bought a second hand miner a few months ago so that I could sell it at auction and determine fair market price, and it is this other miner that I am selling in the auction. 

[ProfMac]

The mining calculator makes it look like I will lose profitability in mid May.

The rewards for this week are 0.04 BTC, or 0.0004 BTC for most shareholders.  I am going to let the amount increase a bit before I make a distribution, unless someone really wants me to make the distribution now for some reason.

It has been a week since the ground was covered with snow, and it is warming quickly.  It was 63°F today.  The miners are making the mining room pretty warm.  Although I have good winter heat in Minnesota, I don't have air conditioning.  I may get tired of mining before the profitability goes to 0.

No one bid on the Avalon at the auction.  I propose that it has 0 value, and when I shut the mining down, we are done with no lose ends.  If someone does want to buy the Avalon, I'll re-open the auction so that everything is transparent, and I will distribute the sales price to all the share holders.

I try to stay forward focused.  Whining isn't problem solving.  But it has been a tough year.  The bank wants to foreclose on the Austin house.  A short sale buyer wants to pay $140,000 less than the amount I get when I subtract the insurance itemization from the Zillow price.  I try to notice how I might produce value, not where life was unfair.  My response was to make a Kickstarter project.  I wish you would read it.  It is also on my Facebook account.  I wish you would share it on Facebook.

[ProfMac]

I ceased mining operations today.

It is 80+ °F inside the house.
It is becoming summer.
The profitability is gone.
I will be out of town for a while.
There should be a final distribution from Eligius to me, then to all y'all.

When the last mining payouts are made, I think we have finished our business together.

We all wished the profits were higher.  I have tried to be transparent and diligent, I hope you have been satisfied with my part of all this.

Thank you for your involvement.

[sealkid]

On behalf of myself and my clients I greatly appreciate your efforts in this endeavour ProfMac. My best wishes to you and yours. Trust and feedback has been posted. Until next time!

[SolarSilver]

So in the end, how did things balance out? Did the participants make back their initial investment?

[ProfMac]

So in the end, how did things balance out? Did the participants make back their initial investment?

I think it is fair to evaluate everything strictly in BTC.  From that viewpoint, all participants lost some of their investment.

A total of 79.71699897 BTC have been deposited to the embarcadero address.  The lowest cost that anyone paid for a share was equivalent to 86.83 BTC.

There are shelved shares on that address at Eligius that are worth almost 2 BTC.  These represent credit for shares that were mined, but were not paid due to orphan blocks and the like.  At the beginning of each new block mining period, the most recent 25 BTC worth of shelved shares are paid out, but as luck approaches 100%, this drops to 0 shelved shares, and when luck drops below 100% more shares become shelved. 

I view the shelved shares as losses inherent to the mining process.  By way of comparison, I found 3 valid blocks for Eligius (75 BTC + miner's fees), and 1 orphan block (total loss).

[ProfMac]

I have very mixed feelings about bitcoin at this time. 

During the bubble in Feb. through March 2013 Avalons were being offered for $30,000 on eBay.  It gave me a flush of hope at a very difficult time, and something new to talk about with my wife the last year that she was alive.  It was very difficult for her to form new memories, so every day we had a discussion of "what is bitcoin" and "what is that thing making all that noise." 

At the time, I felt fortunate that I was able to make a bid on a batch #2 machine, and I felt that I was doing a good thing to run the auction and allow others to participate.

The community realization that Avalon would not make their shipping targets ran in parallel my wife's decline.  As she sank into her dementia she increasingly trusted me to take care of her, and to run our household affairs.  This was a major turnaround from most of our marriage, when she was the smarter, stronger, and more organized person.  The more that she needed and trusted me, the more it was apparent that I could not have a professional job and also take care of her, and that the initial euphoria about the Avalon would remain unfulfilled.

Each night she would ask questions, a review of things she knew, as she worked with all her will to hold her mind together.  As the Avalon moved into the region of only paying for electricity, she sometimes asked questions that were deeply disturbing, such as "who are you" and "how many kids do I have."

I tried to build on this consortium experience and my sense that many of you respect me to form a bidders' group for the US Marshals Service auction, which happens to have ended today.  In a time when there is not very much good news from mining, it looked like a very safe effort to raise $200,000 or more, wire it to the Marshals, and bid perhaps $200 to $300 / BTC depending on the amount of money raised. 

It now appears that there are no new consortiums working in bitcoin.  The suits and the money have moved in.  I am crowded out.  I feel like "Harmonica" at the end of Serge Leone's "Once upon a time in the West" and it is time to move on.  This week, even Tuco is dead.

I am very thankful that my group have been publicly supportive of my administration.  You guys are the best in bitcoin land.  I wish there were more of us.