[On Hold] Hosted (or not) Gridseed ASICs -> Batch 1 Ordered

[CoinHoarder]

Hosting Space For 898 Units Are Available
Paid Batch One Gridseed Units: 130 units
# Of Lazy Mining Units Hosted: 67 units
# Of DIY Mining Units Hosted: 35 units
Please get your order in by this weekend to be included in Batch 1

What: All-inclusive Scrypt ASIC mining by the unit. Exchange units for physical hardware at anytime, or just give me your Bitcoin address and I will do everything else... all ordering, setup, maintenance, and payments will be done by me. You just need to sit back and relax. You are not buying partial shares of mining equipment, a company, or a security. You are buying Gridseed Scrypt ASIC mining hardware and each "unit" you buy is redeemable for actual hardware. I am simply offering hosting services for a set monthly fee and not operating off of a percentage of the mining income as is common in other group buys.

Who: I did a couple of the first ever group buys on these forums for seven Batch 3 Avalons last year and a diversified group buy in which we ordered from multiple manufacturers. I have handled over 1500 BTC through these group buys and other business dealings in a very transparent and honest way. I also make physical Litecoins, which many people that trust me to assemble the coins for them. This will be my first Scrypt ASIC group buy, although as mentioned I have ran ASIC farms before and have ran large GPU farms since before then. My identity is well known by multiple people in the community.

Where: A modified warehouse building specifically for Bitcoin/Scrypt mining. I have installed a 36,000 BTU A/C that is capable of cooling about 850 Gridseed units. I have also had an electrician install more than enough 240v 30amp circuits to provide power. 30 amp 240v PDUs for powering the units, PSUs, Raspberry Pis, and all power/usb cables are included in the unit pricing. This warehouse has been operating for almost a year now and has suffered very little down time. There is a 24/7 monitored security system installed with sensors.

How:
****Lazy Mining***
- Everything is done for you, you simply provide a BTC address for payments.
- Scrypt Multi-Pool with monthly BTC payments, pool chosen by majority vote.
- The hosting fees are taken out of the monthly BTC payments.
- If difficulty rises so much that one unit does not make the hosting fee, then you will be notified to pay for the equipment to be shipped back to you, or you may optionally have me sell your unit(s) and I will send you the proceeds of the sale. This sale must be done for cryptocoins, since it may put me in the field of being a money transmitter if I sold for FIAT on Ebay and converted it into Bitcoin to pay you. You will have one month to respond to this notice and let us know if you want me to sell or ship your equipment to you. If you do not respond within one month, your equipment will be automatically sold and the profits forwarded to you.
- I reserve the right to over clock or under clock the Gridseed miners at my discretion. I promise to take it easy on them.
***Do It Yourself Mining***
- You provide pool information and I will get your units up and running.
- After initial setup, it will be up to you to monitor and control your units. You will be given log in information and your own raspberry pi for only your units.
- No dual mode mining. Very important not to dual mine- you could possibly start a fire the way these will be wired up. I am using a custom power solution for the whole farm made for Scrypt only. Dual mining mode uses a lot more electricity and the hosting fees would have to be almost 9x higher. It is simply not feasible due to the costs, limited space, and accounting issues. Edit: Fuses will be wired in to prevent any fire or anything happening if someone dual mines. You will need to wait until I replace the fuse to get your units back up and running.
- You will be billed monthly for the hosting fees. I reserve the right to take over your units due to unpaid hosting fees and mine the hosting fees with your equipment. Your units will be returned to your control after the hosting fees are mined. I will only do this if you get more than 2 months behind on payments, as it will be a pain in the butt for both of us.
- Add $70 for your own Raspberry Pi with Case and 8 Gb SD Card to the total cost of the Gridseed units for every 50 units you'd like hosted.

What is included with Hosting?
This price includes all PDUs, PSUs, cables, USB hubs, raspberry pis (for DIY hosted units the Pi is extra), ordering, unpacking, setup, troubleshooting, security system, electricity, internet and other bills, and everything else that goes along with hosting ASICs.

Fees & Hosting Terms:
- The hosting fee is all inclusive of power costs, internet and security system bills, ordering, setup, troubleshooting, and hosting for all units.
- The hosting fee will be a flat fee of $4 per miner month
- First Month = Free Hosting  
- Bitcoinaverage.com will be used for calculating usd/Bitcoin ratio for hosting fees.
- All units can only be ran on Scrypt mode only due to power/accounting issues.
- You may request delivery of your unit(s) at any time. You must pay for shipping and the hosting fees through the end of the month.
- We are located in the USA and shipping will be $10* domestic and $20* international per unit.
* Shipping costs are subject to change, for the better or for the worse. If shipping multiple units it will likely be cheaper.

Frequently Asked Questions:
How can we possibly lower hosting costs?
I can likely expand hosting even further into my home once capacity has been reached. This can possibly bring down the hosting fees even further. I am already renting about the cheapest place I could find, so no dice there. If I can save up enough to upgrade the A/C, I can host more units to bring these costs down. However, upgrading A/Cs is likely going to put me out $5k+ even after selling the old one. I just don't really see it as an option unless I just have some extra cash laying around.. which I don't. An alternative would be to find trustworthy people (like... family & friends) and spread the hash power out to others that could host them cheaply in their homes. Any other ideas?
What pool will we use?
I will give my top three suggestions for multicoin pools to the group and outline what I deem to be their strengths and weaknesses. From that point a vote will be held on which pool we use and whichever pool wins by majority vote will be the one we setup with. We can always change pools at any time, again a majority vote will need to be held to change pools.
Will we be able to monitor the hash rate, worker speed, and income details?
This depends on several factors, the major one being what pool we decide to use. I will make sure to outline which pools have the best monitoring options when outlining their strengths and weaknesses for the vote. At the very least I plan to make the hash rate for the entire farm publicly available (so you could tell how fast your miners are running by doing a simple calculation), and also all accounting information regarding income will be made available in a transparent manner. If it is economically feasible I will look into getting a custom website for these purposes- for now I use private forums separate from Bitcointalk.
Can I ship you Gridseed units or other mining equipment I already own for hosting?
Sure, please PM me to arrange shipment.

Hosting Other Mining Equipment:
Are Gridseeds not your thing, or do you want to buy mining equipment from other manufacturers? Go ahead and I will host it for you for a flat fee of $0.57 per watt per month. This includes any Bitcoin and Scrypt ASICs, I have experience hosting GPU rigs as well. Please contact me for more information or to make an arrangement.

Risks: Any mining equipment purchase is risky, please do not buy more hardware than you can afford to spend and more money than you can lose. There is no guarantee, expressed or implied, that you will make any profit from buying this hardware. I promise to provide a good hosting environment, but I will not be held liable for anything that is out of my control. This serves as each group buy participant's legal notice that I will not be held liable for anything that happens that is out of my control. Anything that is "out of my control" includes but is not limited to the following: a Bitcoin/ALT coin price crash, Bitcoin/ALT coin network difficulty spikes, hardware failures, security intrusions by hackers or thiefs, computer software glitches, nondelivery of our order from the manufacturer, the manufacturer delivering the equipment late, a natural disaster, electricity spikes, electricity surges, electricity brownouts, or any other electrical problem that could harm the ASICs that is out of my control, fires, floods, vandals, or ANYTHING THAT IS OUT OF MY CONTROL.

Non-Hosted Terms: All cables provided for non-hosted units are for use at your own risk. Please make sure to research whether these cables will work for your PSU and do not over load the 12v or 5v lines of your PSU, or chain multiple cables together. Please ask for advice if you're not sure. You will be billed for the full shipping costs once the units have arrived. International shipments will be declared at the value that you pay automatically, contact me to change this. I am not liable for nondelivery of our order from the manufacturer or supplier, the manufacturer/supplier delivering the equipment late, or anything that is out of my control.

How To Participate:
Batch 1 will consist of however many people can get their orders in by the end of the week. All other batches will be on a weekly basis and consist of how many orders are submitted during the week.

Very Important: Someone lost 60 BTC this way in one of my previous Group Buys. The attacker quoted my OP and edited the Bitcoin payment address to his own. Please make sure you are looking at the OP of this thread when getting the payment address. Furthermore, I am taking precautions to prevent this from happening again and other man in the middle attacks, please validate the Bitcoin payment address by using the PGP Key in my signature. For more information on how to use PGP, please see this website: http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/beginners-guide-to-pgp/

1. Decide which option you'd like: Lazy Mining or Do It Yourself Mining or Not Hosted
2. Calculate total costs:
    2a. Lazy Mining Costs:
         - $190 per unit =
    2b. Do It Yourself Costs/Options:
         - $190 per unit =
         - Plus $70 for every 50 units hosted for your own Pi =
              + A case and a 8 Gb SD card is included
    2c. Non-Hosted Costs/Options (comes with just a Gridseed miner, no accessories whatsoever):
         - $180 per unit =
              + You will be billed for the full shipping costs once the units have arrived.
         - Accessories:
         - $90 for a Raspberry Pi host =
              + Pre-configured to work with Gridseeds. Can likely host up to 50 units depending on your USB hub setup
              + A nice case and a 8 Gb SD card is included
         - $1.5 per miner for Standoffs to stack your Gridseeds =
         - $1 per miner for Mini USB cables =
         - $30 per USB 10-port hub (Raspberry Pi compatible) =
         - Custom Cables (Scrypt ONLY)
              + Heat shrink, 18 AWG, Plug and Play ATX Power Cables, Hand-made Custom Cables
              + Disclaimer: All cables provided for non-hosted units are for use at your own risk. Please make sure to research whether these cables will work for your PSU and do not over load the 12v or 5v lines of your PSU, or chain multiple cables together. Please ask for advice if you're not sure.
         - $45 each for an ATX CPU/EPS 8 pin power cable =
              + Can power up to SIXTEEN [16] Gridseeds
         - $40 each for an ATX PCIe 6 pin cable =
              + Can power up to TWELVE [12] Gridseeds
         - $30 each for an ATX 4+4 pin CPU cable =
              + Can power up to EIGHT [8] Gridseeds
         - $25 each for an ATX Molex 4 pin cable =
              + Can power up to FOUR [4] Gridseeds and FOUR [4] 5v accessories (Usb hubs, Pi, etc.)
         - $30 each for an ATX SATA cable =
              + Can power up to FOUR [4] Gridseeds and FOUR [4] 5v accessories (Usb hubs, Pi, etc.)
         - Custom Cables (Dual Mining Mode)
         - Coming Soon

3. Send the total Bitcoin payment to:
    3a. Only send from an address you can control and sign messages with. Do not send from an exchange or service, this can cause an issue if someone else tries to claim your payment is theirs. A Blockchain.info wallet will work for this purpose, or a wallet that you have on your computer such as Bitcoin-QT.
    3b. By sending your payment to the above address, you are agreeing to all terms and conditions outlined in this post.
    3c. The payment address will be posted below. Please check the validity of the Bitcoin Address using the PGP key located in my signature.

Group Buy On Hold

4. PM (private message) or reply with the following information:
    4a. Lazy Mode or Do It Yourself Mode or Non-Hosted
    4b. Bitcoin address (for Lazy mode) or Email address (for Do It Yourself mode) or Shipping Address (for Non-Hosted Units)
    4c. The Bitcoin Transaction ID of your payment.
    4d. Your country (so I don't have to ask for it when shipping is requested and can accurately quote shipping costs efficiently)


Pictures of the Hosting Environment:






Some Farms I've hosted:

[AmDD]

I can vouch for CoinHoarder as a member of both his previous group buys as well as owning a few of the Physical Litecoins he sold (is still selling?)

He is a good, honest, hardworking guy, something rare in this community unfortunately.

Good luck!

[CoinHoarder]

I can vouch for CoinHoarder as a member of both his previous group buys as well as owning a few of the Physical Litecoins he sold (is still selling?)

He is a good, honest, hardworking guy, something rare in this community unfortunately.

Good luck!

Thanks for the kind words!

I just updated the hosting fee to make it more fair. It now changes with every batch of 100 miners ordered... let me explain why it is what it is. Each month I have a set amount of expenses for the commercial property... rent, electricity, air conditioning, and an internet bill. Other than the units themselves which use very little electricity, these expenses are the same month to moth. This is why the hosting fee is higher the less amount of units that are hosted and it will decrease with every batch purchased. Basically the A/C and expenses will be more economical the more units that are hosted. It is likely I will have extra room in my home to host additional units to bring down these costs even more from the price for 900 units, but this will not be done until capacity is reached at the commercial property.

[chriswen]

Yes, I can also vouch for coin-hoarder.  He's consistently paid dividends for the first group buy.  He also gave had an entirely transparent system.  We had information on stakeholders and also dividend information.  Also, when any problems occurred he did his best to fix them and make the best of the situation.

[CoinHoarder]

Yes, I can also vouch for coin-hoarder.  He's consistently paid dividends for the first group buy.  He also gave had an entirely transparent system.  We had information on stakeholders and also dividend information.  Also, when any problems occurred he did his best to fix them and make the best of the situation.

Thanks Chris

---

Ok, I realize the group buy terms may be turning a few of you off so I have sweetened the deal a bit:
- Lowered hosting fees across the board by $1 a month
- Lowered shipping costs to get the units delivered if you want to
- Added free hosting for the first month (hopefully we can reach half capacity+ in about a month and no one will ever have to pay >$9 for the hosting fee.)
- Batch sizes lowered to 20 units, so those that are interested don't have to wait forever for a 100 unit batch to fill up. The price needed to go up a bit since we're not buying in as high quantity anymore, I can't get as good a discount. Please note I am still getting bulk prices from different Gridseed distributors so I hope that the actual price paid will be lower, but I have it set at $230 per unit for now.

This is the absolute best deal I can give. I may make one more revision to the terms before starting this group buy, but the terms as you see them are not likely to change much. With expenses this puts me at about a $1500/month profit when the farm is at full capacity (900+ units.) I will lose money obviously by offering free hosting for the first month, but I feel like this will make it more fair for early group buy participants. From experience, I know how much time it will take to maintain this group buy including setup, troubleshooting, maintenance, making payments, and managing the books. I'm not going to take any less for this effort of running 900+ gridseeds and dealing with all of their owners... you guys can take it or leave it. There will be a lot of work to be done to set something like this up.

I am going to set a deadline of 60 units reserved by the end of the week (3/16/2014), or I will need to cancel this group buy. Again, my lease is up on March 31st so I need to figure out if there is enough interest in this quickly, because if not I have a lot of work I need to do to get moved out. I don't want to lock myself into another year of rental payments if I'm not going to be using the office space so I need to get this figured out ASAP.

At this time 17 units have been reserved.

Thanks,

Will

[CoinHoarder]

Some common questions answered:

Why not a set fee like x%? From experience I have found that setting up the fee structure like this does not work. My first group buys I set the fees at 3% and paying expenses out of that 3% can get very tight and I even have operated some months negatively. It takes a lot of work to setup and host a group buy, and I am simply making sure that it will be worth my effort. I was one of the first (if not THE first) group buy operators on these forums, and I think that most people that offer hosting for a set fee will realize sooner or later that this is not an ideal way to implement hosting fees. Although the fee structure may seem odd, it was the most fair way I could think of for all parties involved. If I was hosting this out of my home (which I am not and cannot.. already hosting Bitcoin ASICs there), then I might be able to work off of a 3% fee even though when profitability diminishes I would essentially be working for free (or very cheap.) However, this is commercial property and with that comes expenses that need to be taken care of. I have rent, internet & security system bills, along with a commercial sized A/C which is most efficient when cooling more hardware, so it is more expensive to host less equipment than it is more.

Ideas to lower the hosting costs in the future: I can likely expand hosting even further into my home once capacity has been reached. This can possibly bring down the hosting fees even further. I am already renting about the cheapest place I could find, so no dice there. If I can save up enough to upgrade the A/C, I can host more units to bring these costs down. However, upgrading A/Cs is likely going to put me out $5k+ even after selling the old one. I just don't really see it as an option unless I just have some extra cash laying around.. which I don't. An alternative would be to find trustworthy people and spread the hash power out to others that could host them cheaply in their homes. Any other ideas?

What pool will we use? I will give my top three suggestions for multicoin pools to the group and outline what I deem to be their strengths and weaknesses. From that point a vote will be held on which pool we use and whichever pool wins by majority vote will be the one we setup with. We can always change pools at any time, again a majority vote will need to be held to change pools.

Will we be able to monitor the hash rate, worker speed, and income details? This depends on several factors, the major one being what pool we decide to use. I will make sure to outline which pools have the best monitoring options when outlining their strengths and weaknesses for the vote. At the very least I plan to make the hash rate for the entire farm publicly available (so you could tell how fast your miners are running by doing a simple calculation), and also all accounting information regarding income will be made available in a transparent manner. If it is economically feasible I will look into getting a custom website for these purposes- for now I use private forums separate from Bitcointalk.

[coins101]

I have a bunch of r9 290s and tri-x cards.

Leaving the cost of power out, are you saying the units are now $130 each and not $230?

would it take 3 to match an r9 290 in terms of hashing, but with the lower power use?

[CoinHoarder]

I have a bunch of r9 290s and tri-x cards.

Leaving the cost of power out, are you saying the units are now $130 each and not $230?

would it take 3 to match an r9 290 in terms of hashing, but with the lower power use?

Thanks for pointing out the typo in my post earlier. I had meant to type $230, not $130.

In Scrypt mode the Gridseeds supposedly use ~ 7 watts, so yes it is much more efficient than GPUs. I would only be able to cool a farm a fraction of the size than I could with ASICs by using GPUs.

r9 290s from what I can tell (I'm still using 5xxx cards) can do about 800 Kh at 300 watts.

The Gridseed can do about 333 Kh (I have seen screenshots of 377 Kh+) at supposedly 7 watts.

Big difference.  

Hopefully this answers your question.. I'm unsure if you were just simply asking about the price or what.

[eightcylinders]

Two questions (or really one question, and one hopeful suggestion):

(1) If you are able to get a better price than $230, will you pass that along to the GB?  It looks like prices are coming down close to $200 as of now anyway

(2) It would be really great if you offered an option for someone to buy a "full controller block" of these with the option to self-manage the hosted units.  By "full controller block" what I mean is the number of units that are run off of a single controller (or rPi if that is what you are using).  I am not sure what the limit is (I know, because I have 10 now, that the limit for the controller that gridseed includes is about 10 in practice, though they claim 20... the rPi could probably handle 30-40 but then you run into USB hub limitations I suspect).  Whatever the number, each full controller block would have to be setup and managed individually anyway... if you instead allowed VPN access to that unit (to someone who is willing to buy that full controller block of units) it would alleviate some of your management as that person (me!) would not have to be included in the distributions, etc.  It would be a more traditional hosting-only operation... for which I would still expect to pay the full hosting fee of course.   I would be in for 20-40 units under this type of arrangement.

[coins101]

I have a bunch of r9 290s and tri-x cards.

Leaving the cost of power out, are you saying the units are now $130 each and not $230?

would it take 3 to match an r9 290 in terms of hashing, but with the lower power use?

Thanks for pointing out the typo in my post earlier. I had meant to type $230, not $130.

In Scrypt mode the Gridseeds supposedly use ~ 7 watts, so yes it is much more efficient than GPUs. I would only be able to cool a farm a fraction of the size than I could with ASICs by using GPUs.

r9 290s from what I can tell (I'm still using 5xxx cards) can do about 800 Kh at 300 watts.

The Gridseed can do about 333 Kh (I have seen screenshots of 377 Kh+) at supposedly 7 watts.

Big difference.  

Hopefully this answers your question.. I'm unsure if you were just simply asking about the price or what.

I ask because I am interested. A couple more Qs:

*I'm based in the UK. Any issues?
*Fibonacci is taking pre-orders next week. Delivery ~July. But it will be a hosted solution of some type, plus limited supply per customer. Any views vs. Gridseed?

[hephaist0s]

Great to see you working on another GB! I can also vouch that CH has handled the previous groups very well: good communication, good planning, good troubleshooting skills & always committed to making it work!

[coins101]

Great to see you working on another GB! I can also vouch that CH has handled the previous groups very well: good communication, good planning, good troubleshooting skills & always committed to making it work!

If he sleeps more than 4 hours, I'm not interested.

[CoinHoarder]

Two questions (or really one question, and one hopeful suggestion):

(1) If you are able to get a better price than $230, will you pass that along to the GB?  It looks like prices are coming down close to $200 as of now anyway

(2) It would be really great if you offered an option for someone to buy a "full controller block" of these with the option to self-manage the hosted units.  By "full controller block" what I mean is the number of units that are run off of a single controller (or rPi if that is what you are using).  I am not sure what the limit is (I know, because I have 10 now, that the limit for the controller that gridseed includes is about 10 in practice, though they claim 20... the rPi could probably handle 30-40 but then you run into USB hub limitations I suspect).  Whatever the number, each full controller block would have to be setup and managed individually anyway... if you instead allowed VPN access to that unit (to someone who is willing to buy that full controller block of units) it would alleviate some of your management as that person (me!) would not have to be included in the distributions, etc.  It would be a more traditional hosting-only operation... for which I would still expect to pay the full hosting fee of course.   I would be in for 20-40 units under this type of arrangement.

Hi, thanks for your interest.

1. Yes I will have a better price than $230. I am still getting quotes to see who can give me the best deal, but it will be around $200-$225. Gridseed is non-responsive.. I think they are only interested in dealing with 100s-1000s of units in one order, so I am going to be forced to deal with a reseller/group buy coordinator. I'm hoping that the resellers will see the big picture and that I will likely order 100s of units, therefore give me a better price although I'm only planning on ordering in 20 unit batches. The batch sizes could be increased no problem if we could secure a better deal that way, but I feel like there is a fine line in between savings per unit and making people wait for a large batch to fill up. They could be mining a week earlier than waiting, negating most of any price difference that would be had for a larger batch. Please keep in mind I am paying for Pis, stand offs to organize the farm, power supplies.. everything. These costs will need to be factored into my cost per unit, so it may be a little higher than what you see in other group buys in the forums, but it includes everything we can possibly need.

2. I think you have a good idea, and I would not have any problem setting up something like this. You have made me rethink my hosting options, I am thinking about offering an "automatic" service and a "diy" service to cater to both crowds. Automatic service I do everything for you, DIY service you pick your own pool, configure the miners. I can give access via ssh or whatever you prefer. I have seen a pi working with 50 Gridseeds.. you are right, the limitation is the amount of USB hubs you can chain together. The only thing about doing a diy service is I will have to bill you for the hosting fees and can't just take them out automatically. I don't really have a problem with this, just so you know. I think I would give someone up to 1-2 late on their hosting fee before taking of their units and mining the hosting fees. Some type of "contract" will need to be written and added to the OP to cover different situations that could come up with hosting diy Gridseeds, but I feel that's nothing that you and I can't come to agreement about. Let me think about it today and I will add a rough draft of the diy provisions to the OP later today.

[CoinHoarder]

Great to see you working on another GB! I can also vouch that CH has handled the previous groups very well: good communication, good planning, good troubleshooting skills & always committed to making it work!

Thanks 

Great to see you working on another GB! I can also vouch that CH has handled the previous groups very well: good communication, good planning, good troubleshooting skills & always committed to making it work!

If he sleeps more than 4 hours, I'm not interested.

I sleep with one eye open, I hope this qualifies to your standards!!! 

[eightcylinders]

2. I think you have a good idea, and I would not have any problem setting up something like this. You have made me rethink my hosting options, I am thinking about offering an "automatic" service and a "diy" service to cater to both crowds. Automatic service I do everything for you, DIY service you pick your own pool, configure the miners. I can give access via ssh or whatever you prefer. I have seen a pi working with 50 Gridseeds.. you are right, the limitation is the amount of USB hubs you can chain together. The only thing about doing a diy service is I will have to bill you for the hosting fees and can't just take them out automatically. I don't really have a problem with this, just so you know. I think I would give someone up to 1-2 late on their hosting fee before taking of their units and mining the hosting fees.

Alright!  I am in for a full controller block whatever that happens to be.

I think the easiest way to handle payment would be just require upfront payment for a term of several months (3 is probably a good number, since after that who knows what difficulties and feasibility will be on scrypt). 

Also, while I am getting everything I asked for I might as well add a few other nice-to-haves, but I am "in" for the self-managed block either way.

(1) a bulk shipping or at least a self pickup option for someone who has a lot of units at the end of the hosting term... at $20/unit returning 30 units would be over $600 which seems excessive. 

(2) just like with self-storage, at the end of the hosting term as an alternative to renewal or shipping back units, sell the units on ebay (possibly with the automatic hosting units), keeping a decent fee for yourself and remitting remainder (probably better than shipping back, especially if you have many units from multiple customers).

(3) option to ship my pre-existing units to you to add to my self-managed hosted farm (I realize this would have to include a setup fee to deal with the controller, hub, power supplies, etc. that you are already incorporating in the price of the GB units).

(4) option to power units sufficiently to mine BOTH BTC and Scrypt.. I have experimented with this and found that it is actually more profitable at times, especially with alt-coins recent drops relative to BTC .. I am working on a cgminer code that will autoselect BTC, Scrypt or both (don't hold your breath though, its really complicated) and would like to use this.  It would significantly increase power required so obviously would be more $$.

[CoinHoarder]

2. I think you have a good idea, and I would not have any problem setting up something like this. You have made me rethink my hosting options, I am thinking about offering an "automatic" service and a "diy" service to cater to both crowds. Automatic service I do everything for you, DIY service you pick your own pool, configure the miners. I can give access via ssh or whatever you prefer. I have seen a pi working with 50 Gridseeds.. you are right, the limitation is the amount of USB hubs you can chain together. The only thing about doing a diy service is I will have to bill you for the hosting fees and can't just take them out automatically. I don't really have a problem with this, just so you know. I think I would give someone up to 1-2 late on their hosting fee before taking of their units and mining the hosting fees.

Alright!  I am in for a full controller block whatever that happens to be.

I think the easiest way to handle payment would be just require upfront payment for a term of several months (3 is probably a good number, since after that who knows what difficulties and feasibility will be on scrypt).  

Also, while I am getting everything I asked for I might as well add a few other nice-to-haves, but I am "in" for the self-managed block either way.

(1) a bulk shipping or at least a self pickup option for someone who has a lot of units at the end of the hosting term... at $20/unit returning 30 units would be over $600 which seems excessive.  

(2) just like with self-storage, at the end of the hosting term as an alternative to renewal or shipping back units, sell the units on ebay (possibly with the automatic hosting units), keeping a decent fee for yourself and remitting remainder (probably better than shipping back, especially if you have many units from multiple customers).

(3) option to ship my pre-existing units to you to add to my self-managed hosted farm (I realize this would have to include a setup fee to deal with the controller, hub, power supplies, etc. that you are already incorporating in the price of the GB units).

(4) option to power units sufficiently to mine BOTH BTC and Scrypt.. I have experimented with this and found that it is actually more profitable at times, especially with alt-coins recent drops relative to BTC .. I am working on a cgminer code that will autoselect BTC, Scrypt or both (don't hold your breath though, its really complicated) and would like to use this.  It would significantly increase power required so obviously would be more $$.

Thanks for you suggestions.. they are very good ones.

Let me think it over a bit and I'll post an update this evening. I like all of your suggestions, but I'm not sure if option #4 will be feasible due to the extreme difference in power usage dual mining mode uses compared to Scrypt only. Since it uses more power, the hosting fee would need to be higher for dual mining units, so it kind of complicates things quite a bit. Also in dual mining mode the amount of units I will be able to host will go down, therefore hosting per unit will be more expensive.

I'm open to ideas though. Thanks again for the quality feedback.

[chriswen]

Also in dual miner mode because it uses more electricity it will also be generating more heat.  This causes a greater strain on the AC system.

[tal0n4]

I have participated in both of the previous group buys that CoinHoarder has ran. CoinHoarder has spent many sleepless nights trying to keep our miners running at their best and I trust his ability to run another successful group buy. There have been some minor problems along the way but I do believe he has done his best to be upfront and honest with us (the participants) as issues arose. Thanks dude!

I'm in for probably 20 units this time around... just let me know payment info

[helixminers]

Two questions (or really one question, and one hopeful suggestion):

(1) If you are able to get a better price than $230, will you pass that along to the GB?  It looks like prices are coming down close to $200 as of now anyway

(2) It would be really great if you offered an option for someone to buy a "full controller block" of these with the option to self-manage the hosted units.  By "full controller block" what I mean is the number of units that are run off of a single controller (or rPi if that is what you are using).  I am not sure what the limit is (I know, because I have 10 now, that the limit for the controller that gridseed includes is about 10 in practice, though they claim 20... the rPi could probably handle 30-40 but then you run into USB hub limitations I suspect).  Whatever the number, each full controller block would have to be setup and managed individually anyway... if you instead allowed VPN access to that unit (to someone who is willing to buy that full controller block of units) it would alleviate some of your management as that person (me!) would not have to be included in the distributions, etc.  It would be a more traditional hosting-only operation... for which I would still expect to pay the full hosting fee of course.   I would be in for 20-40 units under this type of arrangement.

Hi, thanks for your interest.

1. Yes I will have a better price than $230. I am still getting quotes to see who can give me the best deal, but it will be around $200-$225. Gridseed is non-responsive.. I think they are only interested in dealing with 100s-1000s of units in one order, so I am going to be forced to deal with a reseller/group buy coordinator. I'm hoping that the resellers will see the big picture and that I will likely order 100s of units, therefore give me a better price although I'm only planning on ordering in 20 unit batches. The batch sizes could be increased no problem if we could secure a better deal that way, but I feel like there is a fine line in between savings per unit and making people wait for a large batch to fill up. They could be mining a week earlier than waiting, negating most of any price difference that would be had for a larger batch. Please keep in mind I am paying for Pis, stand offs to organize the farm, power supplies.. everything. These costs will need to be factored into my cost per unit, so it may be a little higher than what you see in other group buys in the forums, but it includes everything we can possibly need.

2. I think you have a good idea, and I would not have any problem setting up something like this. You have made me rethink my hosting options, I am thinking about offering an "automatic" service and a "diy" service to cater to both crowds. Automatic service I do everything for you, DIY service you pick your own pool, configure the miners. I can give access via ssh or whatever you prefer. I have seen a pi working with 50 Gridseeds.. you are right, the limitation is the amount of USB hubs you can chain together. The only thing about doing a diy service is I will have to bill you for the hosting fees and can't just take them out automatically. I don't really have a problem with this, just so you know. I think I would give someone up to 1-2 late on their hosting fee before taking of their units and mining the hosting fees. Some type of "contract" will need to be written and added to the OP to cover different situations that could come up with hosting diy Gridseeds, but I feel that's nothing that you and I can't come to agreement about. Let me think about it today and I will add a rough draft of the diy provisions to the OP later today.

Hello CoinHoarder

I am a reseller for Gridseed and even went to Beijing to sign an agreement with them to be an authorized reseller and I get them at really cheap rates.  If you are interested and purchasing lots of sets I can pass on the lower rates to you and your group no problem!

Check out my site:  www.helixminers.com

You can visit the site and reserve the sets you need.  We are just finalizing the prices for the accessories but the first 1000 units should be coming in this next week.  Reserve them now so we know how many to separate!

Thanks!

-Helixminers

[CoinHoarder]

I have participated in both of the previous group buys that CoinHoarder has ran. CoinHoarder has spent many sleepless nights trying to keep our miners running at their best and I trust his ability to run another successful group buy. There have been some minor problems along the way but I do believe he has done his best to be upfront and honest with us (the participants) as issues arose. Thanks dude!

I'm in for probably 20 units this time around... just let me know payment info

Thanks for the kind words, I'll mark you down for 20 units.  


------------------------------------


I updated the OP:
- To allow for both automatic mining (you simply provide a Bitcoin address for payments) OR do it yourself mining (you receive log in information and do everything yourself).
- Offer the option to sell the units and pay you with the proceeds of the sale as an extra option as opposed to getting units shipped back to you when unprofitable/you want to end the hosting arrangement.
- Further reduced shipping costs to have miners sent back to you.
- I reserve the right to overclock or underclock the Gridseed miners at my descretion for units hosted in Lazy Mining mode. I promise to take it easy on them.  

Very Important: Someone lost 60 BTC this way in one of my previous Group Buys. The attacker quoted my OP and edited the Bitcoin payment address to his own. Please make sure you are looking at the OP of this thread when getting the payment address. Furthermore, I am taking precautions to prevent this from happening again and other man in the middle attacks, please validate the Bitcoin payment address by using the PGP Key in my signature. For more information on how to use PGP, please see this website: http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/beginners-guide-to-pgp/

I am still getting the final costs per unit from resellers & I'm trying to calculate in the cost per unit for power supplys, usb hubs, cables, etc... I expect to have this ready by the end of the weekend and I will open up deposits for the group buy at that time. There isn't really a good solution as far as power cables for a farm of this size. I may end up making our own cables just so I can set everything up how I want to- using ATX power supplies. Please let me know if you have any more suggestions for the terms or other options you'd like to see.

Thanks