FPGA Mining Contract

[SaltySpitoon]

Combine a raspberry pi, fpga miner, battery and solar panel. YOu could sell autonomous mining machines, they could scan for wifi, crack the code (if needed) and begin mining all while recharging the battery with a solar panel(which might be kind of hard, considering solar panels are not so great yet) It would still be cool to have one.

Put it all into a CubeSat kit and send it to space. You wont have to worry about the temps plus the solar panels would be much more effective outside of the earth atmosphere.  

I'm on it. I'll have to do some test runs first though, so instead of wasting all of the stuff sending it into orbit, Ill be launching various other things. I'm hoping bad dragon will sponsor me in my first attempts to Penetrate the atmosphere!

[1714147417]

1714147417

[1714147417]

1714147417

[notme]

Combine a raspberry pi, fpga miner, battery and solar panel. YOu could sell autonomous mining machines, they could scan for wifi, crack the code (if needed) and begin mining all while recharging the battery with a solar panel(which might be kind of hard, considering solar panels are not so great yet) It would still be cool to have one.

Put it all into a CubeSat kit and send it to space. You wont have to worry about the temps plus the solar panels would be much more effective outside of the earth atmosphere. 

You do have to worry about the temps.... your equipment can get very hot if you are aren't in the shade of the earth or moon.  And you have to be out of the shade for the solar panels to do much good.  Also, where is your internet connection coming from?  Anyway, let's take this to an new off-topic thread, pms,  or drop it.

[DoubleIcaras]

Bought Shares. looking forward to seeing how this goes.

[SaltySpitoon]

My question is though, is this actually profitable?  As of now, with 100 shares (aprox 35 BTC) you earn .25BTC per week. I understand that you also own the stocks as well, but wouldn't it be more profitable to just trade btc on mtgox? Or is the investment in the hopes that Hash rates will increase, and more fpgas will be added eventually?

[sadpandatech]

My question is though, is this actually profitable?  As of now, with 100 shares (aprox 35 BTC) you earn .25BTC per week. I understand that you also own the stocks as well, but wouldn't it be more profitable to just trade btc on mtgox? Or is the investment in the hopes that Hash rates will increase, and more fpgas will be added eventually?

That works out to about 37% return per year just on dividends. It's up to you to calculate whether that is enough for you or if you'd make more in another investment.

cheers

[torusJKL]

[...]
I'm definitely keeping my eye on the Raspberry Pi, but what I have right now works pretty well, too. I'm using an Atom based mini-ITX board (this one) which cost $100 and uses about as much power as one X6500. It runs bitcoin-mining-proxy, munin for monitoring, and does some other light serving for our house.
[...]

Interesting setup.
What is the actual workload on the CPU to run bitcoin-mining-proxy and manage the X6500s?

[SaltySpitoon]

My question is though, is this actually profitable?  As of now, with 100 shares (aprox 35 BTC) you earn .25BTC per week. I understand that you also own the stocks as well, but wouldn't it be more profitable to just trade btc on mtgox? Or is the investment in the hopes that Hash rates will increase, and more fpgas will be added eventually?

That works out to about 37% return per year just on dividends. It's up to you to calculate whether that is enough for you or if you'd make more in another investment.

cheers

Just wanted some input from other people that had bought in. 37% isn't bad seeing as its a safe investment, or fairly safe.

[notme]

My question is though, is this actually profitable?  As of now, with 100 shares (aprox 35 BTC) you earn .25BTC per week. I understand that you also own the stocks as well, but wouldn't it be more profitable to just trade btc on mtgox? Or is the investment in the hopes that Hash rates will increase, and more fpgas will be added eventually?

That works out to about 37% return per year just on dividends. It's up to you to calculate whether that is enough for you or if you'd make more in another investment.

cheers

Just wanted some input from other people that had bought in. 37% isn't bad seeing as its a safe investment, or fairly safe.

This... plus it takes a lot less time to hold shares than to brawl it out in the market.

[molecular]

My question is though, is this actually profitable?  As of now, with 100 shares (aprox 35 BTC) you earn .25BTC per week. I understand that you also own the stocks as well, but wouldn't it be more profitable to just trade btc on mtgox? Or is the investment in the hopes that Hash rates will increase, and more fpgas will be added eventually?

What do you mean by "just trade btc on mtgox"?

Investing in a mining company is comparable to mining, with all the risks/gains involved, but without the hassle of actually doing the mining.

[fizzisist]

Dividends have been paid for the week of 1/16/12!

This is the 14th dividend paid since we started back in early October!

Total paid to 6000 shares: 12.65966309 BTC
Dividend per share: 0.00210994 BTC

This brings our total earnings to 117.7 BTC!

[SaltySpitoon]

My question is though, is this actually profitable?  As of now, with 100 shares (aprox 35 BTC) you earn .25BTC per week. I understand that you also own the stocks as well, but wouldn't it be more profitable to just trade btc on mtgox? Or is the investment in the hopes that Hash rates will increase, and more fpgas will be added eventually?

What do you mean by "just trade btc on mtgox"?

Investing in a mining company is comparable to mining, with all the risks/gains involved, but without the hassle of actually doing the mining.

I mean, just sell BTC for $6.50 (or whatever the going price is) on MTGox, wait for them to dip, buy back in. Repeat.

[ZodiacDragon84]

I am all for the contracts. If more people actually invested in bitcoin instead of mass selling every time the charts drop 3 cents, bitcoin would be much more stable. I look forward to investing.

[ZodiacDragon84]

how many shares are currently held v. shares available?

EDIT: Answered my own question...lol

[chungenhung]

I am all for the contracts. If more people actually invested in bitcoin instead of mass selling every time the charts drop 3 cents, bitcoin would be much more stable. I look forward to investing.

i am looking for investors. PM me

[molecular]

how many shares are currently held v. shares available?

EDIT: Answered my own question...lol

good for you. care to share?

[ZodiacDragon84]

Its buried in GLBSE. I will hunt it down again, and Make a quick TUT

[ZodiacDragon84]

[TuT] Finding shares issued v. shares available

First, point your browser to https://glbse.com/assets/
Scroll down until you Find FPGA.contract.
Next to FPGA.contracts entry, you see the number 6000. That is current hares issued.
to find out how many shares are available (estimate), go to http://contract.fpgamining.com/?page_id=5
Take the number of yay votes, plus the number of nay votes minus 6000 shares issued.
That gives us 734. Assuming some didnt vote, that gives a ball park figure for you to see how many shares are floating around.

If any one has a better way of doing this at the moment, by all means, improve on my method, I beg you!

[molecular]

[TuT] Finding shares issued v. shares available

First, point your browser to https://glbse.com/assets/
Scroll down until you Find FPGA.contract.
Next to FPGA.contracts entry, you see the number 6000. That is current hares issued.
to find out how many shares are available (estimate), go to http://contract.fpgamining.com/?page_id=5
Take the number of yay votes, plus the number of nay votes minus 6000 shares issued.
That gives us 734. Assuming some didnt vote, that gives a ball park figure for you to see how many shares are floating around.

If any one has a better way of doing this at the moment, by all means, improve on my method, I beg you!

Thanks for sharing, ZodiacDragon84!

Here's another way to estimate the number of shares that were kept with the company:

according to http://charts.glbse.com/charts/FPGA.contract#vztgSzm1g10zm2g25 about 5500 shares where traded at the initial price after the IPO.

I think we can assume these were not sold back-and-forth, because the price didn't change and this was shortly after IPO.

So I arrive at a number of roughly 500 shares that where not issued publicly.

[molecular]

Haha, we can also read the first post:

FPGA.contract is an FPGA only mining company. A small FPGA cluster will be built out of X6500s and operated by me. 100% of all revenue is distributed to shareholders as weekly dividends. Operating costs (electricity, maintenance, etc.) are covered by the dividends paid to the 500 shares held by the company (amounts to 8.3% of the 6000 total shares). No revenue is held for future expansion.

^{(emphasis mine)}

Also: I'm not sure these 500 shares held back have voting rights? If so, your method of summing votes doesn't work.

EDIT: http://contract.fpgamining.com/?page_id=166 says there were 5500 shares issued on Oct 16th and another 500 on Oct 26th. hmm...

[zapeta]

Haha, we can also read the first post:

FPGA.contract is an FPGA only mining company. A small FPGA cluster will be built out of X6500s and operated by me. 100% of all revenue is distributed to shareholders as weekly dividends. Operating costs (electricity, maintenance, etc.) are covered by the dividends paid to the 500 shares held by the company (amounts to 8.3% of the 6000 total shares). No revenue is held for future expansion.

^{(emphasis mine)}

Also: I'm not sure these 500 shares held back have voting rights? If so, your method of summing votes doesn't work.

EDIT: http://contract.fpgamining.com/?page_id=166 says there were 5500 shares issued on Oct 16th and another 500 on Oct 26th. hmm...

Originally 5500 shares were issued, 5000 were sold to the public and 500 were held by the company to cover electrical/maintenance costs.  An additional 500 shares were issued later to allow us to purchase an additional FPGA.  There are a total of 6000 shares out there, 500 are held by the company, and 5500 can be traded by the public.  Fizzisist can correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure that's correct.