Talked boss into mining in our server closet

[BTCAssimilator]

I have talked my boss into allowing me to mine BTC without having to pay for electricity in our office server closet. He wants to see me generate a return with minimal investment. This has me wondering what route should I take. Should I seek investment for purchasing mining equipment with shared profits or would I be better off trying to offer remote hosting?

[btcmcdizzle]

Why not invest in the rigs yourself and keep the profits?

[Tribus]

Most servers do not have good GPU's in them.  Xeons are not very good miners either.  I would go with a PC with a AMD/ATI crossfire dual/quad card combo...

AMD/ATI cards are better at mining than Nvidia Cards.
 

[Kluge]

It might be a great time for remote hosting. It's getting hot, and difficulty's continuing to increase. You could probably get away with taking 50-75% of revenues for running others' GPUs, because they'll likely be unprofitable for the owner to run much longer (if still able right now).

You'll probably want a good gauge on boss tolerance, though. A few big clients, and you'll be blowing through thousands a month in electricity bills.

[Tribus]

You could order a Butterfly Labs (BFL) ASIC the little one is 5 GH/s and is around $280.00 US.

That is a minimal investment, but currently BFL will not be shipping new orders till July/August.

[Pichu]

It might be a great time for remote hosting. It's getting hot, and difficulty's continuing to increase. You could probably get away with taking 50-75% of revenues for running others' GPUs, because they'll likely be unprofitable for the owner to run much longer (if still able right now).

You'll probably want a good gauge on boss tolerance, though. A few big clients, and you'll be blowing through thousands a month in electricity bills.

Although, if it's a big office building, chances are the electricity price is going to be pretty low.

[mr_john]

We have a rented 19" server rack in a big datacenter where we host our company's services on our own physical servers (and we don't have to pay extra for electricity). Also you hace professional cooling and redundant power and internet connectivity.

So I also talked with my boss if I could use the available rackspace to place there a small mining rig and he agreed.

Unfortunately we do not have much space left in the rack, so at the moment I am building a small mining rig with 3 graphic cards (in a very small ATX case). It will not be a big player in the bitcoin network, but as long as I do not have to pay for electricity every single hash per second will be profitable.

And as a side effect will I learn more about the bitcoin technology and the community.. I'm just excited to get involved.

[theblazehen]

Litecoin should be much better on anything besides asic

[Kluge]

It might be a great time for remote hosting. It's getting hot, and difficulty's continuing to increase. You could probably get away with taking 50-75% of revenues for running others' GPUs, because they'll likely be unprofitable for the owner to run much longer (if still able right now).

You'll probably want a good gauge on boss tolerance, though. A few big clients, and you'll be blowing through thousands a month in electricity bills.

Although, if it's a big office building, chances are the electricity price is going to be pretty low.

Maybe, depending on the electricity provider. A lot of places, at least in the US (including my residence in MI), charge in a progressive tier system, where "buying in bulk" bumps you up into way higher price tiers. Provider for my house does ~$.075/kWh for the first 200kWh, then soars up to ~$.1125/kWh, then soars again to ~$.18/kWh after 500kWh or so. Idunno if there are laws in some places mandating it, or if it makes sense for some reason I'm missing -- maybe it's just a way to hike rates on significant consumers while claiming it's a policy for the environment. I've heard CA is particularly horrible with the price tiers.

[coinbender]

Haha good for you !

[crystalharmon13]

Not sure if it will be profitable to mine btc with server because it doesn't usually have great gpu. Not sure if mining litecoin will make it more worthwhile. Maybe someone more experience can comment on this.

[BTCAssimilator]

I am more interested in purchasing or hosting new equipment. Our existing equipment would not do much. I have been looking into listing on the various exchanges to raise BTC to buy ASICs. It seems like that would be the ideal situation. It would be pretty neat to raise BTC to start an ASIC mining operation with no costs. I think that might attract investors right?

[Wingman4l7]

If you're just using server CPUs, add my vote to mine LTC instead.

[BTCAssimilator]

If you're just using server CPUs, add my vote to mine LTC instead.

I do not want to have to talk to my boss about LTC after finally convincing him to give some Bitcoin investing a try. I think trying to raise funds to buy a few ASIC miners is the way I want to go. Is it necessary to go through an exchange like bitfunder or do you think I could raise funds on the forum for this?

[Wingman4l7]

If you're just using server CPUs, add my vote to mine LTC instead.

I do not want to have to talk to my boss about LTC after finally convincing him to give some Bitcoin investing a try. [....]

*shrug*  It'd be easy enough I'd think.  All you'd have to say is "Basically the same -- but this crypto-currency mines better on our hardware."

[xproperx]

i think it's a time loss and it's not worth it

[annoyingbird]

Don't mine it isn't worth it

ditto just spend the $ buying coins now it'll get you more in the end

[Joshster]

I bet you will come into work one day and your boss will have bought some big rig and really got into BTC haha.

[annoyingbird]

also, what if your boss'es boss finds out,  thinks this is a bad idea, why risk your job...

[pyra-proxy]

If you're just using server CPUs, add my vote to mine LTC instead.

I do not want to have to talk to my boss about LTC after finally convincing him to give some Bitcoin investing a try. I think trying to raise funds to buy a few ASIC miners is the way I want to go. Is it necessary to go through an exchange like bitfunder or do you think I could raise funds on the forum for this?

How much can you offer for remote hosting? (Power available/space/cooling). With the unhousehold friendly BFL mini-rigs cost some people may be interested in hosting off-site if your fees/% take is reasonable.  Something in the order of electrical + rent fee and 5% of mining proceeds to cover on-demand management.  That's likely to be your lowest cost to generate worthwhile revenue but you need to be able to host and provide cooling for many units to truly entice most bosses I would think....

Alternately, LTC is ripe for sweeping up low cost gpu and generating very nice btc returns with trading, your still mining "for" btc but your using a platform that produces better ROI with lower costing last Gen BTC hardware.... that could be your sales pitch for LTC if you want to brave it....