Yeah the plan sounds good when your hear it but when you delve into it, it doesn't really sound that enticing.
The thing that concerns me most is:
1. Pay more to earn back ROI
2. If difficulty jumps up a shit load (which it will), then they said they will just give you even more chips.*
*3. If they do give you more chips, that would mean you would have to spend EVEN MORE in-order to get em to mine
Let's just say they end up giving you 4 to 5 chips. You'll have to spend at least another $6-7.5k to make your money back.
The one thing it does do is make the math much more complicated to model. With a fixed price/Gh you just plug it into
http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ and see how it looks for a given difficulty increase rate.
The simple model would, given a start date t
0, a hashrate h, an overall network hashrate function f(t) - just integrate ∫(f(t)/h dt/d
BTC) from t
0 to infinity (where d
BTC is the change in the total number of btc already mined).
If you have a probability density function for t
0 you can just do a double integral over t
0, and t. f(t) is usually modeled with an exponential function so that should be pretty easy.
In order to model ROI given the MPP you need too:
1) Estimate the probability distribution for when you'll get your unit, call that x.
2) estimate your ROI over 90 days using the typical mining estimation model.
3) for each value of t0 and f(t), calculate how much hashrate you would have needed to see an ROI = 100%
4) then, divide that number by 400 and take the integer
ceiling, or 4, whichever is less.
5) now, estimate the cost acquiring the PCB for the chips,
6) also estimate how much time it'll take to get the chips and the PCBs and everything assembled call that t
17) do a new mining calculation on that starting at t
0 + 90 days + t
1, at which point the range of possible total network hashrate will be much more difficult to estimate.
8] see if the ROI on the second calculation, plus the first 90 day calculation is greater then 100% of your initial purchase cost + the cost of getting PCBs/Cases/etc for the new chips.
So... basically what the MPP does is massively increase uncertainty. You'll
probably make more then you otherwise would but it's basically impossible to guess how much more.
Especially since the extra chips will be based on the hashrate when you got the miner, not at the time you get the chips through the MPP. It's another example of HashFast foisting all the risk onto the "investomer". Unless there is a perfect balance between network growth and HashFast's ability to execute, the investomer loses. The MPP just creates a couple more possible 'balance points' the likelihood of which are impossible to guess and also depends on HashFast.
On the other hand,
no matter what happens HashFast makes a ton of money.
That's why I feel that investing in companies virtual-stock Labcoin are the best, and really the way to go right now. Maybe when the diff starts to max out you'll be able to buy cheap chips again. There are additional risks in that they could be total scams, and the principals could just run off with your money, or they could skim off the top and keep revenue for themselves.
But, excluding that (and it's obviously a big exclusion) the incentives are aligned. If they make money, you make money. And (again, excluding embezzling IPO funds) if they fail to execute and you lose your money - they don't get anything either.
Being treated as a "real" investor is much better then being an "investomer" who bears most of the risk despite low probability of rewards compared to the vendors.
(Plus, with the shares you can sell at any time. Labcoin is 3.2x it's IPO price at the moment...)
