Since it's the season of giving in my home country of the US, I thought I'd take a moment to write up a quick guide to the most common questions I've come across as a GB Coordinator, or GBC, when it comes to the somewhat insular and cryptic niche that is this forum's Group Buys sub-forum.
Some quick tips can help save everyone here some time, which is our most precious commodity, and provide us a common base of understanding for both newbies and vets. I also wanted to point out to newbies how the trust system can provide a vetting method for forum members.
Trust SystemThis is your forum's method of (hopefully) sorting the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, when it comes to who you might trust to handle BTC deals for you. The scoring system itself is a bit of a mystery to me (something about weighted scores based on rep/activity) but generally:
GREEN = GOOD
RED = THE OPPOSITE OF GOOD
The Red-Green colorblind (and heck, anyone doing Due Diligence) should click the "Trust" button, since they won't have the same visual indicator via colors. (Tip o' the hat to philipma1957)
YMMV and all that, but this is your chance to see how well they've handled other people's BTC from the people involved themselves.
- The
first number represents their trust level.
- The
second number(s) is/are broken up into 2 sections. The first section is negative feedback / the second section is positive feedback. The numbers represent the strength of the of the votes either positive or negative.
Forum veterans will sway voting strength and Trust levels much, much more than newbies.
The decision to send someone trust isn't to be taken lightly or flippantly. Some people send negative trust to people that particularly irritate them for whatever reason, which is why you sometimes see trust ratings with 0 BTC involved.
Also: don't forget to use it,
so that this community can actually benefit from this pretty well done feedback system and tool (except perhaps for the colorblindness aspect). If a GBC, GBO, or Miner Host has treated you fairly or unfairly, then please let the world know!
When perusing reviews, also note *who* is sending feedback. A fun tactic by scammers is to sometimes send negative trust to the very people that they've scammed!
Group Buy TerminologyBlockchain = The Blockchain is a permanent, decentralized and encrypted ledger which holds a record of all previous transactions in that particular cryptocoin, such as Bitcoin or BTC.
Hashrate: Hashrate is a measure of a Bitcoin or Altcoin miners ability to attempt bruteforce cryptographic code breaking of a section of the encrypted Bitcoin Blockchain to hopefully "dig up" some Bitcoin for the lucky miner or miner(s) involved in the find.
KH/s = KiloHash (KH) per second or 1000 Hash attempts per second.
MH/s = MegaHash (MH) per second. This is equivalent to 1,000 KiloHashes per second.
GH/s = GigaHash (GH) per second. This is equivalent to 1,000 MegaHash per second.
TH/s = TeraHash (TH )per second. This is 1,000 GH/s per second, and as of Dec. 20, 2013, is the realm of Industrial Class rigs (of which none have shipped so far from any manufacturer, or mfg.)
GB = Group Buy
GBC = Group Buy Coordinator. This is the person (or persons) who are handling fund collection, ordering, ordering and shipping details, miner ops, troubleshooting, and payouts. Some of these roles may be shared or delegated/contracted to others in GBs run by co-ops.
GBO = Group Buy Organizer (another term for a Coordinator)
Group Buy Shares or "Shares": Are these Shares, like stocks? At this time, no these are *not* considered the same as honest to goodness SEC filed shares trading on a big exchange. Instead, what you're buying into is fractional ownership of Industrial Class miners or GB "shares".
One purchases a share in a GB which should have the terms spelled out somewhere in the GB listing. An example would be
1 share = 40 GH/s for x amount of BTC or fiat depending on how it's listed.
This ownership is usually into perpetuity, or until y'all hopefully decide to sell it together somewhere before it's completely useless as far as hashrate.
Miner Host: The person or persons that are hosting the Industrial Class Miner rig. Hopefully, they have ample power set up as we're well past the era of homes being able to power miners to TH class rigs, without electrical system upgrades. Hopefully they also have insurance or business insurance, cheap electricity, UPS unit(s), AC and fans, experience with miners, and a history of professionally hosting rigs.
Payment TermsMost GBCs and GBOs are only set up to take BTC. Some do this by choice, some due to the cost/complexity of dealing with CC companies and <shudder> PayPal.
PayoutsMost GBs pay out twice a month. For example, in our co-op: we've settled on the 1st and 15th for BTC GBs and the 7th and 22nd for LTC GBs.
Unless one purchases a mining contract, there is a hosting and management fee that is usually deducted from the miner payouts before they're sent.
Also: you can run estimates all you want with profitability calculators but to be brutally honest it's all "voodoo" in that no one can accurately predict the future all of the time, and calculators are only as good as the data, assumptions, and the algorithms upon which they're based. I would also add that the further out one projects, say: 3 months+, the murkier the estimates become. This is just my opinion and is definitely *not* investing advice.
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Hope this helps! If you're a GBC or GBO: Please let me know if there's any questions that just always seem to come up from customers that you think should be added here. I didn't want to get *too* technical as we don't really need to go into all the various coins and encryption algorithms in this primer.
Mahalo!
