[BTC-TC] CIPHERMINE-PT - Industrial Mining & High Performance Computing

[dexX7]

Message from Kate to CIPHERMINE shareholders on Litecoin-Global:

This week and the future

Dear Investors,

There is good news and bad news this week. The bad news is that a) as you'll have heard this exchange is closing and b) we've had a rubbish week due to continuing to rise difficulty on all fronts. We actually made a very small loss this week after power, depreciation and the bond interest payments. The net contribution to the hardware fund was €306 so we are still net positive, it is just all going into reinvestment. I am not overly concerned by this since we have always been geared towards being hardware-reinvestment intensive.

However, my forecasts are looking a little more doubtful for scrypt mining given recent rises in difficulty. Further, I am not entirely satisfied that we will get good value for money from money invested in SHA256 ASICs either right now. Therefore I have decided not to reinvest the Avalon refund in more hardware. Instead I we are going to use this money to advance some of our diversification plans, the most notable of which is a gambit to purchase Burnside's code and re-launch this exchange and BTC Trading Co (some details here), which is the good news. For this purpose we will setup a new virtual security most likely and CIPHERMINE shareholders shall get a proportional number of shares in the new entity(ies). I feel it best to keep clearly different business operations separate. It should also be noted that I have personally contributed at least that amount to CipherMine's hardware estate out of my own pocket, so I feel that redirecting those funds is not innappropraite (and it will likely benefit you all more).

Finally, thanks to the aforementioned plans, CipherMine shall continue as a virtual security. The business itself is strong and we have significant ASIC pre-orders coming through in the next weeks and months. It is likely that there may be a period where the security is illiquid and not on an exchange. During that time we will continue to pay dividends to your public withdrawal address (please do make sure you've set this!). My aspiration is that we will have a new exchange operational for the start of December; ie. only one month of illiquidity (this exchange closes at the end of next month).

Finally, please also ensure that you have set an active and secure email address as your LTC Global email account. When reconstituting shares on the new exchange we will be using those email addresses (I have records of them from the shareholder reports .csv sent twice daily). If you are using an insecure or out-of-date email address then you will likely lose your holdings during the trasition!

Kate.

[Luckybit]

Message from Kate to CIPHERMINE shareholders on Litecoin-Global:

This week and the future

Dear Investors,

There is good news and bad news this week. The bad news is that a) as you'll have heard this exchange is closing and b) we've had a rubbish week due to continuing to rise difficulty on all fronts. We actually made a very small loss this week after power, depreciation and the bond interest payments. The net contribution to the hardware fund was €306 so we are still net positive, it is just all going into reinvestment. I am not overly concerned by this since we have always been geared towards being hardware-reinvestment intensive.

However, my forecasts are looking a little more doubtful for scrypt mining given recent rises in difficulty. Further, I am not entirely satisfied that we will get good value for money from money invested in SHA256 ASICs either right now. Therefore I have decided not to reinvest the Avalon refund in more hardware. Instead I we are going to use this money to advance some of our diversification plans, the most notable of which is a gambit to purchase Burnside's code and re-launch this exchange and BTC Trading Co (some details here), which is the good news. For this purpose we will setup a new virtual security most likely and CIPHERMINE shareholders shall get a proportional number of shares in the new entity(ies). I feel it best to keep clearly different business operations separate. It should also be noted that I have personally contributed at least that amount to CipherMine's hardware estate out of my own pocket, so I feel that redirecting those funds is not innappropraite (and it will likely benefit you all more).

Finally, thanks to the aforementioned plans, CipherMine shall continue as a virtual security. The business itself is strong and we have significant ASIC pre-orders coming through in the next weeks and months. It is likely that there may be a period where the security is illiquid and not on an exchange. During that time we will continue to pay dividends to your public withdrawal address (please do make sure you've set this!). My aspiration is that we will have a new exchange operational for the start of December; ie. only one month of illiquidity (this exchange closes at the end of next month).

Finally, please also ensure that you have set an active and secure email address as your LTC Global email account. When reconstituting shares on the new exchange we will be using those email addresses (I have records of them from the shareholder reports .csv sent twice daily). If you are using an insecure or out-of-date email address then you will likely lose your holdings during the trasition!

Kate.

Kate should create a Ciphercoin and let people trade that to fund Ciphermine's trading engine development. Using Avalon refund money is fine but I doubt its going to be enough.

When the engine is done then Ciphermine shareholders should own shares of it.

[evilscoop]

please dont give her idea's lol.....
And agree'd on the latter

[dexX7]

Just a quick reminder: I will freeze trading at 20:00 UTC. The state of the shareholder list will then be final. Please finalize all trades before this time.

To access btct.co on a Windows machine:

1. Edit the file: \Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
2. Add the following line: 141.101.113.21 btct.co
3. Save and you're done.

Edit: Thanks Rannasha!

[Rannasha]

Just a quick reminder: I will freeze trading at 20:00 UTC. The state of the shareholder list will then be final. Please finalize all trades before this time.

To access btct.co on a Windows machine:

1. Edit the file: \Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
2. Add the following line: 141.101.113.21 btct.co
3. Save and you're done.

Fixed a minor mistake in the name of the file to edit.

Also make sure to open the file as administrator.

[dexX7]

Repost of the announcement I made on Octobre 4th during bitcointalk.org's downtime:

Closure of BTCT and Litecoin-Global:

On October 7th, 2013 (2013-10-07) all trading activities of BTCT and Litecoin-Global will be halted. In case this is news to you, please read the official announcements of BTCT or Litecoin-Global for further information:

• BTCT: https://btct.co/
• Litecoin-Global: https://www.litecoinglobal.com/

bitcointalk.org hacked and defaced:

On Wednesday (2013-10-02) hackers - calling themselves "The Hole Seekers" - were able to deface bitcointalk.org. It is unclear, if they gained access to the database of bitcointalk.org.

It is strongly advised to change your password, if you use the same password on other websites. This is solely an additional security measure, despite the fact that passwords are hashed using sha256crypt with 7500 rounds and are not stored in clear text.

Softpedia.com published an article about the hack here. theymos (the admin of bitcointalk.org) commented on the hack on Reddit and offers a bounty of 50 Bitcoin for the first one who is able to reconstruct the hack.

Please be aware that the rumors about 150.000 emails and hashed passwords being offered for 25 Bitcoin are false. theymos analyzed the data sample and came to the conclusion that it is fake.

bitcointalk.org will stay offline until theymos knows how the hack was done.

The future of CIPHERMINE and CIPHERMINE-PT:

Due to the closure of BTCT and Litecoin-Global CipherMine has decided to continue with direct shares, at least for the time being. I also decided to continue this pass-through and until a solution is found for CIPHERMINE, I will go the direct share route as well.

This means CipherMine will not be traded on an exchange after the 7th October and dividends will be send to your Litecoin or Bitcoin address directly. Share transfers will be possible and further instructions on how to transfer direct shares will be published in the next days. I will also update the prospectus and shareholder contract accordingly soon.

What are your options?

Till Monday, October 7th, 2014 (2013-10-07) you are able to freely trade CIPHERMINE-PT shares on BTCT and CIPHERMINE shares on Litecoin-Global. But it is advised to finalize all trades before this date, because it is unknown when trading will be halted exactly. I will process all share transfers from BTCT to Litecoin-Global and vice versa till Sunday, October 6th, 2013 (2013-10-06) at 20:00 UTC. Please take a look at “Products and Services” under the tab “Details” on the BTCT listing of CIPHERMINE-PT for instructions on how to transfer shares.

On Monday, October 7th, 2014 (2013-10-07) at 20:00 UTC I will extract a list with all shareholders and use this list as basis for direct shares. Please make sure your public withdrawal address is correct. It will be used to identify you as shareholder and dividends will be send to this address also.

Please understand that I'm unable to verify your status as shareholder otherwise.

Positive news:

Kate announced the following on Litecoin-Global:

Excitingly, we've today had news that our first three 400 GH/s BitFury miners have shipped! They are from order #525 - actually our second BFSB order. I'm not sure why it has happened before #498, but I've emailed them to ask. We don't have an expected delivery date yet but it should be within the next few days.

KnCMiner also announced that they started to ship units. A video of this announcement can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFOcI8nK2xI

To give you an overview, the following hardware is currently hashing for CipherMine:

• 1 x Batch 1 60 GH/s Avalon miner
• 1 x Batch 3 60 GH/s Avalon miner
• 100 x Ztex 1.15y clones
• 10 x Quad 1.15y Ztex
• 6 x Cairnsmore CM1s
• 6 x Quintuple Sapphire 7950 Vapor-X GPU rigs
• 2 x Quad Sapphire 7950 Dual-X GPU rigs
• 1 x Quad Gigabye 7970 GPU rigs
• 1 x Quad mix GPU rig

Those units are on order:

• 9 x 400 GH/s BitFury units
• 2 x KNC Jupiter units
• 8 x HashFast BabyJet with Miner Protection Program
• 2 x HashFast Sierra with Miner Protection Program

Receipts for open orders can be found here: http://docs.ciphermine.com/orders/

Shareholder communication:

Until bitcointalk.org is online again, I will communicate all updates via the asset news channel on BTCT. I also created a backup thread for this pass-through on the Litecoin forums:

https://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,6255.0.html

I'm also available via email at dexx@bitwatch.co or under the nick dexX7 on Freenode (IRC).

Please feel free to ask questions, if anything needs further clarification.

[dexX7]

Message from Kate to CIPHERMINE shareholders on Litecoin-Global:

Dear Shareholders,

Apologies for not being in touch over the weekend; I was getting married.

We made a small loss again this week (~EUR 50, ~EUR 300 into the reinvestment fund), but we have seven 400 GH/s BitFuries on the way which should change our fortunes! I emailed them about why we'd only had a notification about our second order and the response is below.

We have not yet had tracking numbers from them but will let you know when we do. Giles got his little BF about one week after he got the tracking number so hopefully we'll have them some time next week.

Kate.

On 03/10/2013 13:00, Niko Punin wrote:

You should get a tracking number soon


On 3.10.2013, at 23:16, Kate Craig-Wood <kate@wood-tech.biz> wrote:

Thanks. :)

Is there any reason why this order, #525, is shipping before our first order, #498?

Kate.


On 05/10/2013 07:51, Niko Punin wrote:

Hello Kate, They were so close together that they were built simultaneously, but getting 4 full rigs done took more time than getting 3 full rigs and it didn't make it in time for shipment that day. Thank you for your understanding.

[dexX7]

First three BitFuries received!

CipherMine has received the first three BitFuries today. Four more should be delivered very soon, as well as the KnCMiners.



BTC Guild team ranking, here we come!

CipherMine is currently hashing at BTC Guild, which is verifiable via the team ranking:

https://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=rankings&section=teams

Kate said further:

Giles and I have been rather distracted by sorting out how we're going to keep the security liquid and tradeable post-LTCG close down, and Ross and Simon have had to rebuild three of the GPU rigs recently (two randomly melted their main motherboard connectors - still not 100% sure why - and another has an as-yet undiagnosed fault), so we've not had time to sort out live hashrates for the GPU rigs yet (sorry!). Things are actually looking quite positive on the new exchange front and I'll have more news soon; there are a number of options being explored, and we will continue to pay dividends regardless.

[dexX7]

First direct dividend issued

Kate sent out some test payments to test the the direct dividend payout. We received 11.13140127 LTC, which equal 0.16390988 BTC, given an exchange rate of 0.0155 LTC/BTC and a 0.556570302 LTC fee. I initiated a payout of 0.16390988 BTC for 5369* shares. You should receive approximately 0.000030415 BTC x amount of shares you hold. Please contact me, if something went wrong.

* Due to the minimum transaction amount of 5430 satoshi I doubled the share amount for this payout for four user, which only hold one share, thus the dividend was technically distributed to 5373 shares. This was only a work-around and I don't intend to do something similar again in the future.

Addresses to keep an eye one

Dividends issued by CipherMine go to this Litecoin address:

LKvW3g9EQyuk8B3GjYqqfFTAAQGshJYVj6

I will distribute the Bitcoin nominated dividend from this address:

1CiPhERsFPjVS1DyBUgFjndaigUGKbErXD

Cheers!

[medicine]

I guess I am one of those four people with only one PT share.  Ha ha ha, sorry for the inconvenience. I will initiate the transfer process because I don't think there is any reason to hold PT shares at this time.  

Is there a reason to hold onto a PT share?
Peace.

[dexX7]

2.8 TH/s (stock) out of 12.5 TH/s hashing

Dear All,

Our next four BitFuries arrived this afternoon! Simon and Ross are both away this weekend but I certainly didn't want those babies to be sitting idle so I've been busily building them this evening. We've now got 6/7 running and we're nipping at Avalon's heels on the BTC Guild team rankings!

In case you're curious, the BitFuries are very power efficient, as expected. I'm getting 1,120 Watts at the plug for three 400 GHs units (48 boards in total, including three fans - Seasonic 1,250W PSUs), and most of the units are doing about 450 GH/s rather than the billed rate. That makes it an impressive 0.83 Watts/GHs.

I'll hopefully have the final miner operational tonight too. Probably going to have to canabalise one of our GPU for spare PSU rigs but its not running ay the moment anyway.

One of the six live miners is misbehaving a bit (sitting at 300 GH/s not 450 like the rest) but Giles will sort it out tomorrow so we're getting the full goodness; diagnosing these units beyond re-seating boards is a bit beyond me I'm afraid!

Kate.

https://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,4582.msg49290.html#msg49290

Including FPGAs our total paid-for hashrate is about 12.5 TH/s. We've currently got 2.8 TH/s (officially - its actually running at a good 10% more than that) so we've still got 78% to come.

We need to decide where to spend more cash on hardware too. Please see the Where to invest next? thread.

Kate.

https://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,6354.0.html

Where to invest next?

This is for CipherMine shareholders. We currently have about €4,500 in the hardware reinvestment fund and it is about to start growing quite rapidly now that the BitFuries have started arriving; probably at least another €1k by the end of this week.

I would value your collective input on where we should invest those funds. I plan to share with you all my updated economics-based forecast of difficulty which suggests that we will be able to maintain fairly healthy profits of €30-40k/month by continuing to invest in the ever-cheaper ASIC mining gear on the market then switching to scrypt GPGPUs when they become a reality. However, there are some permutations we could do instead. Some options:

1) For now put all the reinvestment fund into SHA256 ASICs as per the current plan. This is probably the most obvious course of action for now. If we do stick with this the question is which vendor? BitFury are the most expensive per GHs, but they are delivering and their gear seems pretty stable (though we've only been running it for a day). KNC are reportedly having capacitor explosion issues which doesn't inspire confidence. I like HashFast since their CEO is a mate of a mate and I think their Miner Protection Program is pretty good, but they are looking expensive now compared to CoinTerra. I was skeptical about CT but having done a lot of digging and speaking to people I think they are legit, but spending money now on stuff that won't arrive until January makes me twitchy, even at their amazing prices.

2) Put some or all of the fund into more GPU rigs. This has the benefit that they will have residual value, but to be frank GPU rigs are proving to be a bit of a nightmare. That said, our new rackable design should help - we're moving to 4 GPUs/rig due to the constant issues we've been facing. However, with LTC diff over 1,100 (and other scrypt coins only offering 10-20% above that) their profitability is getting quite slim.

3) We save up for GPGPUs so we can splash out €10-€30k once they become available and really get the full advantage of that first wave.

4) Use the fund to pay off some of CIPHERMINE.B1 (the bond) early.

There are other options too. As previously mentioned I'm using the Avalon refund to help with setting up a new exchange, hopefully buying Burnside's code. We could "go large" on that and put the h/w fund into that new venture if we feel the outlook for mining is just not good enough; in that scenario you'd all get a larger share of the new venture as CIPHERMINE shareholders.

Equally, we could switch to 100% profit mode. This would double dividends in the short-term but we'd effectively become a perpetual mining bond. Our revenues would steadily decline and in the longer term my models suggest that this would be less profitable than continuing to invest. It is very contingent on GPGPUs becoming a reality though.

Anyway, just wanted to float this out there and get your collective feedback. I'll post a new public version of the business model at the weekend.

Kate.

PS. 4 BTC in the last 24 hours with just 10% of our expected total hashrate - we're cooking on gas now!

https://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,6354.0.html

If you have anything to add, I'll forward your opinion.

[inspiredinvestor]

  great hear, we Ciphermine is cooking with gas!
so glad i held on thru the exchange tornado

[dexX7]

This weeks dividend

We received 19.00723618 LTC dividend for 5369 shares. This results in 0.27807587 BTC dividend for this pass-through, given an exchange rate of 0.0154 LTC/BTC and a 0.95036181 LTC fee. I will initiate the payout within approximately four hours, when I'm back at home.

Message from Kate to CIPHERMINE shareholders:

Dear Shareholders,

Our first seven BitFuries arrived towards the end of last week and have been happily mining since. As a result revenues this week were €2,370, and a profit of €1,225, so a dividend of 389 LTC. €1,030 is going to the hardware reinvestment fund taking our total to €6,160. There is a debate as to what our reinvestment strategy should be going forwards here. You can see our BTC hashrate on the BTC Guild team rankings page (we're currently about 12th). I'm anticipating that revenues for the coming week will be over €5k.

Edit:

Dividend sent: cbf3ac5a1df7bef659dd668aa23fed19381176a2f5a812064b114d369be62edd

[dexX7]

I would suggest increase the interval of dividend payments as too much small transections will incure fees to the receiver.

Actually that's fine, I think. The last transaction fee was 0.0002 BTC and transported a value of 0.27857587 BTC, that's less than 0.1 % and the dividend should go higher for the next weeks also.

[iCEBREAKER]

Any word on our KnCs?

[dexX7]

Any word on our KnCs?

Not really. Our orders have order id #4442 and #5119. AFox maintains a list with order ids, dates and shipping time and looks like this whole range is still not yet shipped. The clock is ticking though..

All current paid orders will be shipped no later than October 15th.

https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-33

[dexX7]

This weeks dividend

From Kate on the Litecoin forums:

Hashrate fluctuations

The hashrate fluctuations are due to two things:

1) Me experimenting with multipool and switching some miners to other SHA256 coins (we've got a couple of the BitFuries running bfgminer now)

2) Some down time in the last few days. For some reason the rigs were randomly shutting down. The PSU was behaving as though it had been tripped despite the power meter at the wall saying 1,100 watts (they are Seasonic 1,250 W gold, so top end). Having reshuffled the PSUs and restarting them by disconnecting the motherboard connector (which goes nowhere - just to link the boot pins) they appear to be stable. Keeping an eye on them to try and figure out what the issue is, but they have been stable for the last 24 hours.

Dividends

Revenues this week: €5,800.
Profits: €4,580
Dividend: €2,290 -> 1,712 LTC
H/W reinvestment: €2,730 (now €8,890)

Hardware reinvestment

Following the discussions on the other thread, and having confirmed that it would not change the Miner Protection Program, I have placed orders for an additional 8 HashFast Golden Nonce chips for our BabyJets. They all have an additional socket, and at $1,500 per 400 GH/s chip it was too good value to ignore. That brings our hardware reinvestment fund down to -$314 (there was a $500 shipping charge).

Since it is quite a lot of LTC to buy and volumes are slack on BTC-E on a Sunday evening, I'm leaving the trade to complete overnight so we get a better price and will send the dividends tomorrow.

Kate.

I'll send out the BTC nominated dividend, after Kate sent out the dividend, to be sure the number of 1,712 LTC is accurate.

[dexX7]

This weeks dividend II

We received a total of 83.56116364 LTC for 5369 shares. This results in 0.78271742 BTC dividend for this pass-through, given an exchange rate of 0.00986 LTC/BTC and a 4.17805818 LTC fee.

Transaction: 682cde2e5b96fa8196733fbca11532eeea7bc317f06ee05b1d127593ef574e5a

[dexX7]

KnCMiners arrived yesterday

The KNCMiners arrived yesterday and team Ciphermine is now hashing with approx. 4.6 TH/s. Potential fluctuations on BTC Guild are probably due to power issues. According to analbeard some of the BitFuries are moved tomorrow, so expect our hashrate to drop for a couple of hours from around 1500-1600 GMT.



Exchange situation

According to Kate there is some progress related to the exchange situation:

We are in the late stages of creating a new exchange in partnership with a few other major issuers.

Neo also announced that they started investigations into launching their own regulated securities exchange:

We have spent time investigating the legal requirements and viability of establishing our own regulated securities exchange (CySEC), we have decided that this is something that we will now pursue further down the line once Neo & Bee has achieved sustainable growth as this is our highest priority. This is a viable business that can be open to US investors once certain barriers have been removed (JOBS act), certain barriers would still exist for US based investors but we would address them closer to the time.

Interesting times ahead.

[dexX7]

This weeks dividend

CipherMine sent out 1,661.9909 LTC as dividend. We received a total of 81.04309091 LTC for 5369 shares. This results in 0.90729305 BTC dividend for this pass-through, given an exchange rate of 0.0118 LTC/BTC and a 4.05215454 LTC fee.

Transaction: 823a4daf757ca1fd603d97d391b63a8550c8d5522157c1ece747600ce9c148aa