Closed

[Oleander]

Let's break this out, per share.  We have approx. 1000 XPM mined, divided by 50 shares = 20 XPM / share.

Assume that this represents 4 days of mining, or 5 XPM / share / day.  We get another 3 days, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, for an extra 15 XPM, or 35 XPM total / share.

Current price at mcxNOW is about .0064 x 35 XPM = .225 BTC return for .5 BTC invested.

So this venture is unprofitable by a factor of 2, for roughly a 50% loss of any BTC invested.

There is some guesswork here, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but if a 50% loss is the right order of magnitude, it will take more than a bit of tweaking to make this profitable.

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[somestranger]

I am all out. This is half as many as the lowest amount "estimated" on the order page. Ridiculous and clearly was not planned out adequately to be taking investors' money.

[maco]

I failed to deliver the initial goal. I propose this similar to kickstarter, except we can actually earn something from it if it doesn't fully happen.  
My initial tests showed a larger amount of earnings if we deployed more servers when I was clearly wrong, and I am working on the bugs.  

I deployed a few extra servers on my own investment and started earning more blocks thinking we could do the same here. I can admit, the challenges ahead I was not prepared for... however, I recovered with a backup plan. Note: Less servers were deployed because of the mishap with the initial investment opportunity, and that opportunity is no longer an opportunity as we were clearly shut down by the host.

But how can you claim something is good or bad without trying?
You have the right to voice/express your opinion, no doubt. If you did not think this was worth your time to move forward, you can cancel out... I gave you a no obligation cancellation. I am disappointed that we did reach the goal, but as you can see, I am trying to work out the bugs of where I failed... and give back with a solution as presented, or if you can offer a alternative solution, I AM HAPPY to hear it.

I have implemented HP10, not sure if this will be a tremendous difference but we will see.

Here is our new chainsperday stats... this is a pretty big improvement from our previous results.

Every 5.0s: primecoind getmininginfo & primecoind l...  Sun Aug 25 06:10:24 2013

{
    "blocks" : 132952,
    "chainspermin" : 20,
    "chainsperday" : 2.51289462,

Every 5.0s: primecoind getmininginfo & primecoind l...  Sun Aug 25 06:10:31 2013

{
    "blocks" : 132952,
    "chainspermin" : 15,
    "chainsperday" : 2.52884065,

And in terms of exchange pricing, no one expects the price to go down or up...

so what if the price went to 0.015 per XPM again, would you then be doing the math how this was a success and spreading the word for me? Off course not, or most people wouldn't... because the demand would increase for this service, meaning more shares, and increased prices. So touting about the loss in the current exchange price is unfair. I didn't even bother calculating exchange prices because I know there is no sense in building hype of the 0.009 price jump a few days prior to this launch or when it was 0.018 a few weeks ago.

I hope you stick around because I am going to work twice as hard to improve in the upcoming week, and if you do not, I understand and respect your decision.

[Oleander]

so what if the price went to 0.015 per XPM again, would you then be doing the math how this was a success and spreading the word for me?

Yes, of course!  Instead of cancelling, I'd be trying to buy more shares.

If you're going to deal with investors, you have to run this thing like a business, and that means multiplying your XPM by the exchange rate to find out whether you're profitable.  If you're losing money, stop mining.  You're better off buying from an exchange.  It really is that simple.

[patapato]

so what if the price went to 0.015 per XPM again, would you then be doing the math how this was a success and spreading the word for me?

Yes, of course!  Instead of cancelling, I'd be trying to buy more shares.

You are not right on that. If you had purchased XPM the date of the proposal instead of investing in mining you would also have lost value. We must use the price of XPM on the date-time of the proposal. Or better, we must not convert the dividends to BTC, but  just compare the amount of XPM that we will get with the amount that we (and he) expected as a minimum.

Anyway, there will be notable loss this first week. The question now is trying to analyze data correctly for next week.

[hayek]

Congratulations maco on killing BTC12.5.

Straight out of our economy and right back in to US fiat.

Good Job. At this rate we won't need any of the conspiracies/legislation that threatens BTC. We just need to let you run things.

Out. out. OUT. OUTTTTTTTT.

[Oleander]

You are not right on that. If you had purchased XPM the date of the proposal instead of investing in mining you would also have lost value. We must use the price of XPM on the date-time of the proposal. Or better, we must not convert the dividends to BTC, but  just compare the amount of XPM that we will get with the amount that we (and he) expected as a minimum.

OK, go back to the original post, and see the estimate of 8 - 16 XPM per share per day.  The minimum is 8.

Or take last week's exchange rate of about .0075, divide that into .50 XPM and you get about 9 XPM per share per day that you could get by not mining at all and just buying at an exchange.  At the time, profitability seemed plausible... a little tweaking to get the XPM per share per day closer to 16 than to 8, maybe space out the selling a bit and get a higher average price than .0075.

Anyway, there will be notable loss this first week. The question now is trying to analyze data correctly for next week.

Not much data to analyze, and that is the real failure of this venture.  I've already passed the cancel / renew decision point, and I don't know what today's dividend will be, much less Tuesday's.  My best estimate is that we made about 5 XPM per share per day.  Not 8 - 16, not 9, but 5.  I suppose we won't know until Tuesday.

[Oleander]

23.0 XPM received.  I assume this is the Sunday dividend.

Note that this is a round number, and unlikely to be the result of actually doing the math and dividing total XPM mined by the number of shares.

[somestranger]

Oh wow 3XPM per day... just less than 38% of the lowest amount estimated, and at the current exchange rate a 72% loss.

[pascal257]

Also 23 and 3 can't be properly divided

[hayek]

23.0 XPM received.  I assume this is the Sunday dividend.

Note that this is a round number, and unlikely to be the result of actually doing the math and dividing total XPM mined by the number of shares.

What a complete space cadet this guy was. We basically paid him to learn to deploy virtual servers and find out he can't do basic math. Thoroughly pissed about this chumps complete lack of the basic skills required to even communicate with people. Not to mention the blatant lies he made on top of shoveling all the repercussions from his own inability and lack of planning on to the investors.

What an utter failure. Anyway we can get this guy blacklisted as a scammer?

[somestranger]

I left him a negative trust rating. I now notice there was a rating from 3 weeks ago saying he pulled this same bullshit but it isn't in my 'trust network' or whatever so I didn't see it before, sigh.

[revilo]

Well, seems like I may have lost out on a bit of BTC. Not too bothered, I new it was a risk and I only invested what I was willing to lose. You guys all want to just get rich quick! I'm just happy to have supported the XPM network 'hashrate'
I have not yet received my share of the XPM though

[somestranger]

You guys didn't get scammed, you lost money on an investment.  He had his own initial estimates for return, you should have had your own estimates (the reason I didn't buy).  Due diligence guys.

My own estimates based on what? He didn't post any info about how many blocks he was finding until after the subscriptions were sold, and I don't understand how my estimate is supposed to come up with 70% less than his lowest estimate. My estimates said somewhere between -30% and +60% profit if he didn't lie in his ad, not -72%!! There is a non-zero chance that he scammed us because he sent out integer amounts of XPM per share -- he could have easily just purchased these instead of mining.

[maco]

Okay. It is time to address a few things.

A) I lost on my own investment... you think I made it out with no scratches?  I lost big time on this investment maybe a few snapshots of my TOTAL costs would be enough to put an end to this madness, but I can understand why you would take the route you are talking about because you expected to earn more, and surely, my personal results and estimates did not make it through.

Why is the XPM exchange rate going down? Not sure exactly, but I believe it is due to the fact that MINING is EXPENSIVE. No doubt about it. Even the 1st and 2nd week of Primecoin Official Release where mining was nearly impossible even at that time and even with VPS, it wasn't affordable.

An estimate is simply an estimate, and I have stated enough information all over this thread and my site, in order for you to make your own estimate and educated guesses. We faced a challenge of the new host, and I made the executive decision to go with Amazon EC2 (pricey servers) because no host would allow us to deploy the amount we were doing.

I didn't say you would go home rich after this. I simply stated this is something I want to try, and if you give it a try with me, then lets see what happens. I didn't over hype and I didn't try to under sell... Challenges happen in every business... I have been mining primecoin since release... and its been a bumpy ride for everyone. Even if I had the best optimizations, there was a lot of things working against this plan, timing, exchange prices, difficulty rate, and new HP10 release (which dropped earnings daily)

1) Exchange prices going down - This seriously made a negative impact because a few days prior to release of coins, the prices dropped by a lot, and perception is everything so some of you perceived it that way... I get it, at the time of exchange of receiving coins, it was not looking good as an investment.

2) Affordable Host was a challenge...
My own servers cost $2,000/month Rounded up (batch of 50)
That itself is $500/week all dedicated for this investment in hopes to take off... It is a first release, either it goes forward or it doesn't.
I tried host after host even after the main setup of servers, and we were getting rejected in all corners of the street, so I kept EC2 online during this problem.

Plan A) failed because once we expanded to 130+ new servers, we were immediately asked to shut down by the new host providers.

I'll post this again if you missed it:
"It has come to our attention that all of your servers are using around 800% CPU usage. This is negatively impacting the host. We must ask that you please take appropriate steps to reduce your CPU usage, and update this ticket with the steps you have taken." - server host.

Plan B) Go to EC2 until we find an affordable rate elsewhere. I have tried Google Compute, but it doesn't match up in Spot Instance pricing; however, Amazon charges $0.5*/hour estimated for c1 large (non spot instance)... I had to run these for stability in the up rising of the block chains. Spot Instances Problem? and why even if I did deploy many of these, it would get cut off, and cause desync issues... Why would we desync? Because spot instances shut down normally after a few hours since someone beats us in price. This has happened on so many occasions but I put up with it. I would say testing daily has been my experience to know I have desynced a few times with Amazon EC2, and having servers go on and off isn't going to help us in mining, so I streamlined them accordingly from both: Non Spot Instance and Spot Instance of C1.Large

Look, I understand you may be frustrated because I am EXTREMELY frustrated that I lost in coins that I was mining myself, which added to this plan as a private pool, only to find out the goal I set was not achieved, and lose of future investments, and not looking good for the community.

Do you think I wanted all of this to happen? Heck no. I have given 100% back to the community... I am closing this offer completely off moving forward until I can figure out an affordable solution and a way to get better results or maybe this will never move forward.

Why was it a fixed integer?
Easy.. because why should I give you .5 XPM less per share if you owned more than that? I was the captain of the ship, and if I could do more, I would... and this is a negative to people? Really? come on.. give me a break, I rounded up on purpose. In addition to all that, I have been spending money for these 2 additional days of paying for EC2 Instances, which is a total loss for me, putting me past the budget. Instead of being more supportive and providing solution to the service and ideas to fix problems, all I heard was things that did not solve anything. I provided a solution, people listened, and some didn't.. but we never went anywhere in the right direction. I offered you to jump in with your idea, and not an idea was presented, so I went with PLAN B) Amazon EC2 as you know it was costly -- I said okay, I will take on the risk factor to spend more to deliver, that is fine. Off course I mined them, I posted them here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=276454.msg3002447#msg3002447

Go ahead... say what you want. I did what I can, It didn't work out... and I still delivered coins on Sunday, right? I showed you screenshots... and today was the final 2 days of FREE mining on the house, as I stated, and this will be delivered soon.

There is a couple people I am missing to send transaction/XPM to because they sent me BTC address not XPM. I have sent you an emails, please respond via pm or email.

I haven't even made up the 2 days free yet and you guys decided to say what you said without evaluating the entire service yet... that is uncalled for in all grounds, I didn't even finish my job, the same thing happened on the announcement on Tuesday, when I was letting you know we are extending dividend payouts from Wednesday instead of Sunday. This was very impulsive and uncalled for right off the bat. I took it as constructive criticism and I went ahead with Plan B) Amazon EC2

Conclusion, maybe I was not the right guy for it... or maybe I was... it is clearly your opinion.

Thanks again for all your support in this venture.

[revilo]

Yep, it was very optimistic project from the start! That's why I invested my 0.5BTC with you, because you seem extra keen to get the job done, and not because I thought my $50 worth of bitcoins was going to suddenly multiply into $$hundreds in a week!!
Yeah, I could have made a couple more $$ if I had just exchanged it on the market but where's the fun in that

Thank's for giving it a good trial, I now know that mining these CPU hungry coins in the Amazon EC2 cloud is very risky!

All the best for the future, and thanks for contributing to the community

[maco]

Thanks for being realistic revilo.

People jumped the gun on me throughout the entire week without even allowing me to finish the job/service.
Once again, I have sent out the final for Monday & Tuesday, again I rounded up the number.

If I missed you on the final dividends of the free service, or the couple others who I am still waiting on responses
from about Sunday's payout, please send me a message or email with the same address and I will look into it.

Thank you.

[Oleander]

Since maco would rather whine about ungrateful subscribers than provide useful information, here's a recap of this venture, per share:


XPM mined compared to original estimate

Sunday dividend: 23 XPM
Tuesday dividend: 8 XPM

Total dividends: 31 XPM for 7 days mining, or 4.43 XPM per day

Original estimate: 8 to 16 XPM per day (these estimates have since been deleted from the original posts). 

Actual results are 55% of the low end of the estimate.

Note that the high estimate is twice the low estimate.  With such a wide range between the high and the low, it is reasonable to expect that the actual results would be somewhere in between, and prudent to invest based on the low end.


Profit or loss expressed in BTC

Subscription: .50 BTC

Value of 31 XPM at end of week = 31 * .0055 = .17 BTC for a 66% loss
Value of 31 XPM at beginning of week = 31 *.0075 = .23 BTC for a 54% loss

...you guys decided to say what you said without evaluating the entire service yet... that is uncalled for in all grounds, I didn't even finish my job...

OK, the job is finished and the results are in.  If it wasn't fair to criticize earlier, it's certainly fair now.

[hayek]

For starters maco you are probably one of the most oblivious people on the face of the Earth right now - assuming you don't live on the moon. A fact that would not surprise me.

A) I lost on my own investment... you think I made it out with no scratches?  I lost big time on this investment maybe a few snapshots of my TOTAL costs would be enough to put an end to this madness, but I can understand why you would take the route you are talking about because you expected to earn more, and surely, my personal results and estimates did not make it through.

Well boo who for you. It doesn't change the fact that you lied, bold-faced to everyone who you took money from. You don't even consider yourself in debt right now. Anyone with an OUNCE of credibility would see how disastrous this venture was and feel indebted to the people who put faith in them. You aren't an entrepreneur. You're a leech who lies and deceives and relies on the productivity of other people to fund your lifestyle.

An estimate is simply an estimate, and I have stated enough information all over this thread and my site, in order for you to make your own estimate and educated guesses. We faced a challenge of the new host, and I made the executive decision to go with Amazon EC2 (pricey servers) because no host would allow us to deploy the amount we were doing.

No. You don't get it you baffoon. You don't advertise a rate and then tell people to do their own math to cover your ass. If that's your strategy you advertise what you can deliver (THAT MEANS HASH RATE). Then we do our own math predicting best case / worst case. You gave a projection you listed your best case and worst case. You. Failed. To. Deliver.

That's not our fault.

I didn't say you would go home rich after this. I simply stated this is something I want to try, and if you give it a try with me, then lets see what happens. I didn't over hype and I didn't try to under sell... Challenges happen in every business... I have been mining primecoin since release... and its been a bumpy ride for everyone. Even if I had the best optimizations, there was a lot of things working against this plan, timing, exchange prices, difficulty rate, and new HP10 release (which dropped earnings daily)

This isn't a business. This was you finding out you don't have a clue how to deploy and manage virtual servers. A trivial task for high school students and you failed. If has nothing to do with going home rich. No one who gave you money thought "Oh wow I'll give him .5 BTC and be a millionaire." The point is you slayed the investment. You didn't just fail. You gave back less than 65% what was put in to you. That is worse than government work.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

1) Exchange prices going down - This seriously made a negative impact because a few days prior to release of coins, the prices dropped by a lot, and perception is everything so some of you perceived it that way... I get it, at the time of exchange of receiving coins, it was not looking good as an investment.

No one cares about this. You don't control that. This is not the point. All you do is deflect. Grow a spine, take responsibility.

2) Affordable Host was a challenge...
My own servers cost $2,000/month Rounded up (batch of 50)
That itself is $500/week all dedicated for this investment in hopes to take off... It is a first release, either it goes forward or it doesn't.
I tried host after host even after the main setup of servers, and we were getting rejected in all corners of the street, so I kept EC2 online during this problem.

And you should be paying us back out of your pocket with this investment.

Plan A) failed because once we expanded to 130+ new servers, we were immediately asked to shut down by the new host providers.

That's your fault. Not ours.

I'll post this again if you missed it:
"It has come to our attention that all of your servers are using around 800% CPU usage. This is negatively impacting the host. We must ask that you please take appropriate steps to reduce your CPU usage, and update this ticket with the steps you have taken." - server host.

I'll say it again, because you are clearly missing it:
That's your fault. Not ours.

Plan B) Go to EC2 until we find an affordable rate elsewhere. I have tried Google Compute, but it doesn't match up in Spot Instance pricing; however, Amazon charges $0.5*/hour estimated for c1 large (non spot instance)... I had to run these for stability in the up rising of the block chains. Spot Instances Problem? and why even if I did deploy many of these, it would get cut off, and cause desync issues... Why would we desync? Because spot instances shut down normally after a few hours since someone beats us in price. This has happened on so many occasions but I put up with it. I would say testing daily has been my experience to know I have desynced a few times with Amazon EC2, and having servers go on and off isn't going to help us in mining, so I streamlined them accordingly from both: Non Spot Instance and Spot Instance of C1.Large

Not only did you pull the rug out from under your investors but you changed how you said you were spending the money. That's fraud asshole. As soon as you had a problem you needed to offer investors back their money.

Look, I understand you may be frustrated because I am EXTREMELY frustrated that I lost in coins that I was mining myself, which added to this plan as a private pool, only to find out the goal I set was not achieved, and lose of future investments, and not looking good for the community.

Oh boo fucking who for you again. You lost coins. Oh no let's comiserate. You didn't set a goal. You had a fantasy and you concealed that fact from the people who gave you money. You lied to let other people fund your daydream and it fell flat on it's face and it fell hard.

Do you think I wanted all of this to happen? Heck no. I have given 100% back to the community... I am closing this offer completely off moving forward until I can figure out an affordable solution and a way to get better results or maybe this will never move forward.

No I think you live in a fantasy world and you get other people to fund it. I think you're more upset that you lost your gravy train.

Why was it a fixed integer?
Easy.. because why should I give you .5 XPM less per share if you owned more than that? I was the captain of the ship, and if I could do more, I would... and this is a negative to people? Really? come on.. give me a break, I rounded up on purpose. In addition to all that, I have been spending money for these 2 additional days of paying for EC2 Instances, which is a total loss for me, putting me past the budget. Instead of being more supportive and providing solution to the service and ideas to fix problems, all I heard was things that did not solve anything. I provided a solution, people listened, and some didn't.. but we never went anywhere in the right direction. I offered you to jump in with your idea, and not an idea was presented, so I went with PLAN B) Amazon EC2 as you know it was costly -- I said okay, I will take on the risk factor to spend more to deliver, that is fine. Off course I mined them, I posted them here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=276454.msg3002447#msg3002447

Give you a break? You can seriously look someone in the eye who gave you money and trusted you and then AFTER YOU FAIL TO DELIVER tell us to give you a break? Eat Shit.

Go ahead... say what you want. I did what I can, It didn't work out... and I still delivered coins on Sunday, right? I showed you screenshots... and today was the final 2 days of FREE mining on the house, as I stated, and this will be delivered soon.

A lobotomized circus chimpanzee could have flung it's poo at a poster board and made better choices than what you made. Your best is not good enough.  Live with that.

There is a couple people I am missing to send transaction/XPM to because they sent me BTC address not XPM. I have sent you an emails, please respond via pm or email.

Why you would even more forward without making sure that was secure is beyond comprehension and further self-damning evidence that you are too inept to be trusted with anyone's money. Ever.

I haven't even made up the 2 days free yet and you guys decided to say what you said without evaluating the entire service yet... that is uncalled for in all grounds, I didn't even finish my job, the same thing happened on the announcement on Tuesday, when I was letting you know we are extending dividend payouts from Wednesday instead of Sunday. This was very impulsive and uncalled for right off the bat. I took it as constructive criticism and I went ahead with Plan B) Amazon EC2

Yes. Please lecture us more about how unkind and unfair we are to you. You are the captain, just like you said, you ran the ship in to an iceberg under your direction and now you are lecturing the people who paid for your ship and your crew and your supplies because it's somehow our fault you crashed the ship. You are such a filthy dickhead.

Conclusion, maybe I was not the right guy for it... or maybe I was... it is clearly your opinion.

You aren't even the right guy to butter toast. I'm surprised you figured out how to breath.

Thanks again for all your support in this venture.

die in a fire.

[ranmn7]

I think you guys are being a bit harsh on him to be honest.

This venture was an investment, with any investment there is risk. He didn't borrow the money from you, he shared in the risk along with you.

Now, that being said, he didn't do the proper math on this from the start. There wasn't a clear business plan showing the ROI etc.. And the fact that he was doing a subscription based investment plan was rather strange.

To set up a business that is supposed to go from start up to a decent ROI in one to two weeks is extremely wishful thinking at best.

You guys invested with him, without the proper information to back up his claims. Shame on you. Don't blame him because you didn't do your due diligence and verify what he was telling you.

The reality is that you invested approximately $50 per share per week you were involved. Did you lose all that much in actual cash?

There is not a business venture ever where the person starting it isn't basing his numbers on best case situation. Look at any business venture on the stock market, if you doubt what I'm saying. And people who invest in those and lose, definitely lose more than $50.

If you didn't learn anything from this, then you did in fact experience a loss. My hope is that you chalk this up to a learning experience, and remember it for the next time when you're investing bigger amounts.