Bitcoin Mining Coop (GLBSE Investment Op)

[tweakedgeek]

Hi Everyone,

I'm thinking about creating a Bitcoin mining cluster, to be funded by shareholders on the GLBSE. I'd like to get peoples thoughts before I do this, as if nobody's interested, I'll save my 3 BTC
Updated on 08/28/2011 17:46 CST - thanks for the great input guys, keep them coming!
The Bitcoin Mining Coop aim is to constantly improve a bitcoin mining cluster. The Bitcoin Mining Coop cluster is currently capable of mining at
1200 MH/s, The Bitcoin Mining Coop will have 25,000 shares of stock, released at an IPO price of BTC 0.1 per share. All funds raised through the IPO will be used to grow this capacity as quickly as possible.
 
Technical Experience
The founder of the Bitcoin Mining Coop is an experienced Linux HPCC (High Performance Computing Cluster) system administrator. His specialized skillset brings Bitcoin Mining Coop a strong technical founding.

Facilities    
The Bitcoin Mining Coop cluster is located in the basement of an upscale residence in Madison, Alabama (USA). The room in which this cluster is
located is adequately cooled and ventilated to ensure the cluster continues to operate at the highest possible efficiency. This room also has adequate
dedicated power circuits to facilitate growth of the cluster to 30,000 MH/s.  Additional circuits can be easily added as the cluster grows.

Financial Details
After deducting the cost of electricity ($0.09/KWh) from each day's income from mining, earnings will be distributed as follows:
    
50%: Upgrades to increase cluster mining capabilities. This should help offset the impact of future difficulty increases.
50%: Paid as dividents on shares.
    
Shareholders will own 70% of the Coop, with the founder retaining 30% ownership. Although the founder will retain 51% ownership, in the interest of fairness he will only be paid dividends based on his initial investment of equipment (2,000 shares).

Dividend payment reports will be posted to this thread on a daily basis. As soon as possible a web interface to the Bitcoin Mining Coop will be created, which will show shareholders the cluster status and earnings. This is currently anticipated in late September, 2011.  

Changing the financial structure of the Bitcoin Mining Coop (such as dividend payments, change of amounts applied towards upgrading the cluster) will require a 80% majority vote.

Voting
Unless otherwise noted in this contract, all decisions of the company are done voting on motions on GLBSE, with a simple majority rule based on the number of shares held by each investor. These decisions would include such things as which crypto chain to mine and which mining pools to use for mining. Suggestions for motions should be made on this thread.

Liquidation
If at any time the cost of electricity exceeds the income generated by mining, the company can be liquidated with a 30% majority vote. Liquidation for any other reason will require a 80% majority vote.

In the case that the Bitcoin Mining Coop is liquidated, all mining hardware purchased with Bitcoin Mining Coop funds will be liquidated, with all proceeds going equally to the shareholders.

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[Bitcoin Swami]

Sounds good, just don't grow faster than you can handle.  Seems like that happens alot round here. 

I'll be following your progress.  I say go with it.

[dustintrammell]

Decisions for growth of the cluster or to change the payout schedule will be done by voting on motions on GBE. Shareholders will own 49% of the Coop, with the founder retaining 51% ownership. Although the founder will retain 51% ownership, in the interest of fairness he will only be paid dividends based on his initial investment of equipment (2,000 shares).

In other words, you decide, as you control 51% of the voting shares (:  Not saying I disagree with this, but why bother voting at all if whichever way you vote determines the direction?

Do you have a GLBSE ticker symbol yet and have you put all of this information in the asset contract for such?

[tweakedgeek]

Decisions for growth of the cluster or to change the payout schedule will be done by voting on motions on GBE. Shareholders will own 49% of the Coop, with the founder retaining 51% ownership. Although the founder will retain 51% ownership, in the interest of fairness he will only be paid dividends based on his initial investment of equipment (2,000 shares).

In other words, you decide, as you control 51% of the voting shares (:  Not saying I disagree with this, but why bother voting at all if whichever way you vote determines the direction?

Do you have a GLBSE ticker symbol yet and have you put all of this information in the asset contract for such?

Nope - haven't put it into the contract yet... just wanted to see what kind of response I could get on the forum before I spend the 3 BTC.

I understand the control 51% of the voting shares thing... seems to be pretty standard though. I think I'm being really fair regarding the dividends though - I'm only going to take the dividends equivelant to my initial investment. I'm open to suggestions, though - that's why I'm posting it here first.

[dustintrammell]

Nope - haven't put it into the contract yet... just wanted to see what kind of response I could get on the forum before I spend the 3 BTC.

There's a few other mining operations that are operating in a similar manner using GLBSE, and they're selling shares somewhat regularly, so it would seem like there are definitely interested investors.

I understand the control 51% of the voting shares thing... seems to be pretty standard though. I think I'm being really fair regarding the dividends though - I'm only going to take the dividends equivelant to my initial investment. I'm open to suggestions, though - that's why I'm posting it here first.

Yea, as I said, I don't really disagree with it, I was just wondering why you would bother holding an official vote at all, since none of it would matter; your 51% would prevail every time unless you abstained from a particular vote.

[tweakedgeek]

Nope - haven't put it into the contract yet... just wanted to see what kind of response I could get on the forum before I spend the 3 BTC.

There's a few other mining operations that are operating in a similar manner using GLBSE, and they're selling shares somewhat regularly, so it would seem like there are definitely interested investors.

I understand the control 51% of the voting shares thing... seems to be pretty standard though. I think I'm being really fair regarding the dividends though - I'm only going to take the dividends equivelant to my initial investment. I'm open to suggestions, though - that's why I'm posting it here first.

Yea, as I said, I don't really disagree with it, I was just wondering why you would bother holding an official vote at all, since none of it would matter; your 51% would prevail every time unless you abstained from a particular vote.

Makes sense. I'd really like to give the shareholders a say in how the operation is run. So I've updated the contract terms to state that I will abstain from voting with the exception of votes related to disolving the coop.

[Nefario]

You should note that its now a requirement to email a scan of your ID and proof of address to be able to list.

Send it to doctor.nefario@gmail.com, if you care about your privacy then uses gpg to encrypt.

This information will be kept personally by me an not shared with anyone (governments included) unless there is an attempt to scam. In which case I will release the information to the general public and throw you to the wolves.

Nefario.

[tweakedgeek]

You should note that its now a requirement to email a scan of your ID and proof of address to be able to list.

Send it to doctor.nefario@gmail.com, if you care about your privacy then uses gpg to encrypt.

This information will be kept personally by me an not shared with anyone (governments included) unless there is an attempt to scam. In which case I will release the information to the general public and throw you to the wolves.

Nefario.

No problem at all. Guess a drivers license / utility bill is OK? It'll be a few days (probably a week) before I set up the IPO, but I'll go ahead and send the docs now so you'll have them.

[Deprived]

A few things seem strange about this - especially the share distribution.

First off here's what's dodgy about the current proposal:

1.  You don't appear to be gaining anything for your labour.
2.  You're way under-valuing your initial contribution.  Not only are you contributing your existing computer(s), you're also giving the infrastructure and a rent-free office.
3.  You could do a quick pump-and-dump on this and be entirely in accordance with your documented proposal.  i.e. collect investment, get computers, use your 51% to vote to close the company and then pocket 51% of the proceeds of selling assets.
4.  If the 51% is reflected in share allocation then all dividends payment etc will be somewhat opaque as you'd have to dividend off an amount larger than you actually intended to and then give back most of the dividend that went to yourself.

Here's how I think you SHOULD do it:

1.  Give yourself more shares to start with - to reflect you providing the initial infracture and to pay for your ongoing effort in running the business.
2.  You would then receive all dividends on all shares in your name.
3.  All votes would be based on actual holdings of shares.
4.  A vote of 80% in favour would be needed to end the company OR to change the voting rules.

I'd suggest something like you having 10k shares with 25k more sold.  That would mean you could veto any vote requiring an 80% majority.

If you actually want investment then, as a potential investor, I'd be wanting to see spreadsheets showing likely profits based on various difficulty ranges/BTC exchange rates.

Do you intend only to mine BTC or to mine whichever of BTC/forks gives the best return (and presumably convert the others into BTC immediately)?

[tweakedgeek]

A few things seem strange about this - especially the share distribution.

First off here's what's dodgy about the current proposal:

1.  You don't appear to be gaining anything for your labour.
2.  You're way under-valuing your initial contribution.  Not only are you contributing your existing computer(s), you're also giving the infrastructure and a rent-free office.
3.  You could do a quick pump-and-dump on this and be entirely in accordance with your documented proposal.  i.e. collect investment, get computers, use your 51% to vote to close the company and then pocket 51% of the proceeds of selling assets.
4.  If the 51% is reflected in share allocation then all dividends payment etc will be somewhat opaque as you'd have to dividend off an amount larger than you actually intended to and then give back most of the dividend that went to yourself.

Thanks for the input... this is exactly the type of input I'm looking for. I'm definitely not out to rip anyone off, but of course don't want to be put into a position where I could be on the losing end either.

Here's how I think you SHOULD do it:

1.  Give yourself more shares to start with - to reflect you providing the initial infracture and to pay for your ongoing effort in running the business.
2.  You would then receive all dividends on all shares in your name.
3.  All votes would be based on actual holdings of shares.
4.  A vote of 80% in favour would be needed to end the company OR to change the voting rules.

I'd suggest something like you having 10k shares with 25k more sold.  That would mean you could veto any vote requiring an 80% majority.

That sounds very reasonable. At least that way the investors do get more than me (which is important as they'll be fronting a significant portion of the hardware cost for building out phase 1 of the cluster), and equal voting rights. And nobody could come in, buy up the shares and liquidate the assets.That's the main thing I really want to protect myself from - I don't want to build this magnificent creation then it just gets ripped out from under us.

If you actually want investment then, as a potential investor, I'd be wanting to see spreadsheets showing likely profits based on various difficulty ranges/BTC exchange rates.

I can definitely do something like this. I'll try to get something up this evening, will be interesting to see.

Do you intend only to mine BTC or to mine whichever of BTC/forks gives the best return (and presumably convert the others into BTC immediately)?

I'd prefer to mine whatever earns us the most ROI, but don't want to take risks like mining new chains and ending up getting stuck with a lot of worthless coins. Most likely we'd put things like this up for a vote, if the majority wants to take the risk of mining the forks with all or part of the cluster, we do it.  Definitely open for discussion.

Guys, keep these good ideas coming if you're interested. I'll keep updating the contract as good ideas are put forth. My current plan is to IPO on 09/05 as I'm still mining the coins for the cost of the ticker symbol on GLBSE, and also want to make sure to give enough time for others to chime in with ideas.

[Bitcoin Swami]

I'm having a hard time following this one.

4.  If the 51% is reflected in share allocation then all dividends payment etc will be somewhat opaque as you'd have to dividend off an amount larger than you actually intended to and then give back most of the dividend that went to yourself.

Can you elaborate?

[tweakedgeek]

I'm having a hard time following this one.

4.  If the 51% is reflected in share allocation then all dividends payment etc will be somewhat opaque as you'd have to dividend off an amount larger than you actually intended to and then give back most of the dividend that went to yourself.

Can you elaborate?

Basically, my concerns have been that one person would hold enough stock to make vital changes such as changing the payouts of dividends, stopping liquidation in case mining became unprofitable (sticking me with the overages in electricity), or liquidating the capital assets.

I agreed with the comment from Deprived - having a 70/30 split would help reimburse me for the time I spend maintaining the cluster and giving it 160 sq. ft. of space. But to protect from the concerns I have above, the contract would require a supermajority of 80% to change voting rules, payouts or to liquidate the Coop. With me holding 30%, I can veto it. So basically the IPO will be for 25,000 shares, and I will keep 10,000 shares. 

So the math... say that all 25,000 shares sell at 0.1 BTC. At $9US / BTC, that would be $22,500 to add capacity to what I already have. With that much, I could add  14 additional systems to bring the cumulative hashing power of the cluster up to 26 GH. At the current difficulty, that would result in 440 BTC per month gross. Power would cost (at most) 98 BTC per month, leaving a net profit of 342 BTC. Out of that, 171  would be used to increase cluster hashing power, and 171 would be equally shared among all shares as a dividend.

As upgrades are made, the hope is we can keep up with the difficulty changes (at least). If we outpace the difficulty, we will get more profits. If we don't, we can vote (with a 80% majority) to change the dividend payout percentage to allot more funds for cluster expansion to keep pace with the difficulty.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

[Deprived]

I'm having a hard time following this one.

4.  If the 51% is reflected in share allocation then all dividends payment etc will be somewhat opaque as you'd have to dividend off an amount larger than you actually intended to and then give back most of the dividend that went to yourself.

Can you elaborate?

I assume you want clarification of what the issue I had was.  So here gos:

Simiplified explanation.

Assume there were 100 shares and you held 51 (51%) but were only entiteld to 20% of dividends (i.e. dividends on 20 shares) - which is what your initial suggestion proposed.

Now you have 10 BTC to give out in dividends.

Usually you'd do a dividend of 10BTC profit here and give 0.1 BTC dividend per share (10BTC profit/100 shares).  But you can't do that as that would short-change investors (as there's only 70 shares actually entitled to dividends - 50 of other people's + 20 of yours).

So you have to declare an amount being paid as dividends of 142.82857142 BTC so that investors get the right dividend each.  And if this is being done through that stock-exchange place then that means you likely have to actually deposit that amount there rather than the 100BTC actual profit to be distributed (depending on how they do dividend payments - e.g. whether you have to have the full payment there or just the amount less what would be due to shares in your own name).

And now records show a total dividend payment of 142.8etc being made - so you have to then edit your accounts to show the 42.etc excess payment to yourself being returned.

All because you allocated yourself shares on which no dividend was due.  Hope that explains it a bit.

[Deprived]

As upgrades are made, the hope is we can keep up with the difficulty changes (at least). If we outpace the difficulty, we will get more profits. If we don't, we can vote (with a 80% majority) to change the dividend payout percentage to allot more funds for cluster expansion to keep pace with the difficulty.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

As a (potential) investor I'm not sure of the logic in this.  In a nutshell if mining became more profitable I'd want ALL profit to go to expansion - whilst if mining became less profitable I'd be more inclined to want less investment and more dividends.  Pretty much the reverse of what you're saying.  Here's why:

The profit made as a % of capital investment is essentially fixed irrespective of scaling.

i.e. if X GH/s makes Y profit per month then 2X GH/s makes 2Y profit per month.

If Y gos on a downwards trend (either by increasing difficulty and/or decreasing BTC value) - and it's been on one for a while - then extrapolation of that graph would indicate that at a certain point it'll head into the area of making a loss at some point in the future (i.e. the cost of electricty + the cost of writing off hardware will exceed the value of produced BTC).

At the point at which new hardware won't be paid off before that point is likely reached then there becomes no point expanding - as it probably won't make a profit any more.  Where that point lies depends upon your cost of power.

Once the point of no profits is reached then doubling, trebling, or multiplying by 100 your hardware won't turn a loss into a profit - it'll just multiply the loss in proportion to the expansion.

And it kind of gets worse - as the real point at which further expansion ceases to be worthwhile is before that.  Specifically, if I have a target ROI% (R) that I want on money then it's reached where buying new hardware won't achieve R+(return of capital less resale value of hardware) before mining becomes unprofitable.

I don't have much info on the trend of mining returns - but I'd definitely want any mining pool proposal to show models based on existing trends and ones either side of the trend before I could seriously consider investing.

[Deprived]

So the math... say that all 25,000 shares sell at 0.1 BTC. At $9US / BTC, that would be $22,500 to add capacity to what I already have. With that much, I could add  14 additional systems to bring the cumulative hashing power of the cluster up to 26 GH. At the current difficulty, that would result in 440 BTC per month gross. Power would cost (at most) 98 BTC per month, leaving a net profit of 342 BTC. Out of that, 171  would be used to increase cluster hashing power, and 171 would be equally shared among all shares as a dividend.

EDITED to fix simple mathematical errors in number of shares.

Last post from me for now.  Going to do some quick math on profitability/return for investors.  Will be doing it as I type - so don't actually know the results yet

With 35,000 shares that equates to 3,500BTC in capital for the purposes of working out returns to investors.

We can treat all profit as actual profit for simplicity, so 342 BTC profit per month equates to a bit under 10% gross profit per month for investors.  Very nice!

However, that's not the whole story.  As there's two additional things which need to be taken into account:

1.  Equipment is going to fail and need replacing from time to time.
2.  There's only a certain period of time before the computers/cards will totally fail anyway.

Pretty hard to assess either of these - but let's try anyway.

For #1 let's assume 42BTC per month in repair costs - leaving a round 300 BTC profit per month.  You'd have 2,750 BTC worth of computer gear total - so that's only assuming a 1.52% failure-rate of equipment per month or that on average cards etc will last 5 years before breaking.  That's optimistic - but not totally unreasonable as it's not covering case 2.

(TBC - as have display issues editing long posts so wil ldo this in 2 parts).

[tweakedgeek]

As a (potential) investor I'm not sure of the logic in this.  In a nutshell if mining became more profitable I'd want ALL profit to go to expansion - whilst if mining became less profitable I'd be more inclined to want less investment and more dividends.  Pretty much the reverse of what you're saying.  Here's why:

The profit made as a % of capital investment is essentially fixed irrespective of scaling.

i.e. if X GH/s makes Y profit per month then 2X GH/s makes 2Y profit per month.

If Y gos on a downwards trend (either by increasing difficulty and/or decreasing BTC value) - and it's been on one for a while - then extrapolation of that graph would indicate that at a certain point it'll head into the area of making a loss at some point in the future (i.e. the cost of electricty + the cost of writing off hardware will exceed the value of produced BTC).

At the point at which new hardware won't be paid off before that point is likely reached then there becomes no point expanding - as it probably won't make a profit any more.  Where that point lies depends upon your cost of power.

Once the point of no profits is reached then doubling, trebling, or multiplying by 100 your hardware won't turn a loss into a profit - it'll just multiply the loss in proportion to the expansion.

And it kind of gets worse - as the real point at which further expansion ceases to be worthwhile is before that.  Specifically, if I have a target ROI% (R) that I want on money then it's reached where buying new hardware won't achieve R+(return of capital less resale value of hardware) before mining becomes unprofitable.

I don't have much info on the trend of mining returns - but I'd definitely want any mining pool proposal to show models based on existing trends and ones either side of the trend before I could seriously consider investing.

Points taken. Do you think it would be better to have a monthly financial statement, then decide on dividends via simple majority vote?

[Deprived]

For #2 the question is how long, on average, do we think mining rigs will run nonstop before they pack in and have to be junked.  Because that's the period of time in which they need to have covered their costs for this to have any viability.  Not only is that the case - but there's also only a period of time before they become obsolete/innefectual.  i.e. if new motherboards/graphics cards come out with more GH/s than ours for similar power consumption then we become inefficient.

I'd make a guess at around 2 years covering both of these possibilities.  So, in two years we have:

24 months * 300BTC profit per month = 7200 total BTC profit.

Less the 3500 inital BTC investment (yes it was less but we have to use 3500 to get investors back their capital) and that's an overall profit of 3700 BTC over 2 years.

That's still a pretty good return.  BUT it relies on a few assumptions, mainly that the profitability of mining won't drop.  And that's the real big issue.

And there's also a second issue - which needs proper modelling to work out.  Our investment would be tied up in computers which have a fairly fixed value in US$ but a value in BTC which alters as BTC value varies.  So if BTC rise then the (BTC) value of our investment is falling whilst we'd have been making a gain (in US$) had we just left our BTC in wallets rather than investing.

That's why I'd like to see models for varying exchange rates and difficulties - as without such models it's really hard to work out quickly how, for example, investing in your project would compare to keeping funds sat in BTC if the exchange value of BTC rose over 2 years whilst difficulty rose at a similar rate (such as to produce a similar US$ profit per month - but a lower BTC profit per month).

[Deprived]

Points taken. Do you think it would be better to have a monthly financial statement, then decide on dividends via simple majority vote?

Honestly, the answer is that you need some sort of model built which will show the likely returns from initial investment.  Then you just tweak that as things progress - and the output from that would give a pretty clear answer (hopefully) of what to do each month.

[tweakedgeek]

Points taken. Do you think it would be better to have a monthly financial statement, then decide on dividends via simple majority vote?

Honestly, the answer is that you need some sort of model built which will show the likely returns from initial investment.  Then you just tweak that as things progress - and the output from that would give a pretty clear answer (hopefully) of what to do each month.

http://www.tweakedgeek.com/bitcoinminingcoop.pdf

Is something like that what you're thinking of?

Basically I did not take into consideration the hardware replacement costs for failed cards, as I do not intend on significantly overclocking the chosen cards to achieve the performance. There should be no problem with getting warranty replacements for any failures.

The numbers at the top are what I change to see what different outcomes are:

DIFF INCR: The increase in difficulty
(Note, difficulty decreased 4% last two weeks, and is expected to decrease again next go around)

BTC INCR: BTC to Dollar increase per month

CAP DEP: Percentage to depreciate assets per month

As far as how long you can run systems - in the HPC clusters I work on we anticipate running systems at full throttle (100% cpu all the time) for 4 years, although we really only retire them at that time typically due to more energy efficient and faster technology being available (Moore's Law). Now that SSD is so inexpensive (for small drives, which is all a HPC or bitcoin node would need), those are used rather than traditional drives which are typically what we see fail.

So long as you keep systems cool, solid state devices (including CPUs / RAM) typically don't fail. Mechanical devices (fans, hard drives, etc) are normally the culprits. Scripts will be written to monitor the GPU temps, and notify me of any over-temp situations, for example if fans on the cards fail.

If anything looks off, let me know. It's pretty late here, so it's possible I've made some errors.

[tweakedgeek]

http://www.tweakedgeek.com/bitcoinminingcoop.pdf

Equipment valuation looks way off. I'll try again tomorrow.