Searching co-investors for mining cluster

[LiquidMiner]

The cluster will be based on 2xHD6990 per rig and this can be expanded to as many rigs as possible. Income of the rigs will be divided between buying more mining rigs and paying out dividend for each of your shares.

If you're really serious about a cluster, you should use a PCIe expansion chassis designed for GPUs, which can hold 16 cards rather than a bunch of separate computers.  For example, the Dell PowerEdge C410x.  It works with ATI/AMD cards as well as NVIDIA cards, and can plug right into any computer to add 16 PCIe slots.  In a 42U rack you can easily fit three computers, nine of those, and a power distribution unit and you'll find yourself with 144 6990's--which is somewhere around 100 billion hashes per second.  All for a cost of under 140 000 BTC.

That is one very good option, but it would be hard to raise 140,000BTC from investors. This can serve more as a long-term goal for the project, and would certainly be sustainable even when the fees will be the main way of financing nodes.

[allinvain]

I worry that the difficulty level will increase to such a point BEFORE this project even gets started that it will make the whole venture uneconomical. Remember that you're chasing a MOVING target - the difficulty level. At some point the amount of money the investor will be making from his share of the rigs won't be enough to cover the cost of the administrative fees or whatever he will be charging.

This is the same scenario with minim on our own (non cluster) except if we do this on our own eventually down the road when the difficulty level is too high to keep our rigs mining we can just SELL our rigs and get some cash back. I don't know how we'd have that option in a mining cluster. I suppose we can sell our shares on the newly proposed stock market, but umm what if nobody wants to buy your shares - and you can bet they will not if they know that it will cost them more in electricity/administrative fees then they get back in BTC.

Please don't misunderstand me as trying to throw a "money wrench" in this venture. It's just that there are a few unanswered questions that need to be addressed.

[nster]

I will take 10 BTC per day in fees for power and internet connection.

i stopped reading there.

does seem a mite high
can anyone spell SCAM

indeed. $10 a month sounds reasonable, but $10 a day is super expensive.

electricity costs (where i live) $0.10 /KW/h. so * 24 = $2.4 per day.
it's not necessary to have high speed internet, so a cheap DSL line (@$30 a month, $1 per day) will do. you can probably have multiple machines running on the same line, because bitcoin mining isn't bandwidth intensive, so it's probably less than $1 a day. that leaves ~$6 per day for managing the servers, which is pretty expensive considering setting up mining rigs isn't very hard.

What if there are 5 rigs... that would be 12$ per day

[mjsbuddha]

I'm doing this exact thing right now but from 1 or 2 large investors. Having a lot of tiny investors will be a logistical nightmare. Also Im structuring a bit different. Im taking the money as a loan with 20% interest. $10,000 loan form investor= $12000 to be paid back within the year. Then I completely own the machines and all the bitcoins they make.

[martok]

Hello,
It's an interesting idea but how would you create your ownership structure?
Questions:
Would you form a private corporation to own the hardware, do GAAP accounting and provide that to shareholders?

Would an investment in the project result in a purchase of shares in said corporation? If not or if the rights are nonvoting, how do you propose to protect investors against fraud.

When the hardware is sold for whatever reason, would that capital be returned to investors. This is not an issue if your investors have voting rights in a corporation because they could force it at that point.

I ask about all this as your post said it was seeking investors rather than purchasers of mining contracts. So, if I invest, I want a slice of the hardware, say over management, fees etc, and how the system is run in proportion to the BTC I invest.

[LiquidMiner]

I worry that the difficulty level will increase to such a point BEFORE this project even gets started that it will make the whole venture uneconomical. Remember that you're chasing a MOVING target - the difficulty level. At some point the amount of money the investor will be making from his share of the rigs won't be enough to cover the cost of the administrative fees or whatever he will be charging.

This is the same scenario with minim on our own (non cluster) except if we do this on our own eventually down the road when the difficulty level is too high to keep our rigs mining we can just SELL our rigs and get some cash back. I don't know how we'd have that option in a mining cluster. I suppose we can sell our shares on the newly proposed stock market, but umm what if nobody wants to buy your shares - and you can bet they will not if they know that it will cost them more in electricity/administrative fees then they get back in BTC.

Please don't misunderstand me as trying to throw a "money wrench" in this venture. It's just that there are a few unanswered questions that need to be addressed.

Hello,
It's an interesting idea but how would you create your ownership structure?
Questions:
Would you form a private corporation to own the hardware, do GAAP accounting and provide that to shareholders?

Would an investment in the project result in a purchase of shares in said corporation? If not or if the rights are nonvoting, how do you propose to protect investors against fraud.

When the hardware is sold for whatever reason, would that capital be returned to investors. This is not an issue if your investors have voting rights in a corporation because they could force it at that point.

I ask about all this as your post said it was seeking investors rather than purchasers of mining contracts. So, if I invest, I want a slice of the hardware, say over management, fees etc, and how the system is run in proportion to the BTC I invest.

I'll answer you both because your questions are kind of alike.

I'm seeking investors, that mean I dont own the hardware more than any other investor (who has invested the same amount) and if bitcoin mining will become too poorly paid, the servers will be sold and the money goes to the owning investors. And for GAAP, every single penny which goes from the investor account will of course be written down and shown to all participating investors. You can this of this as buying shares in a company, where you get the right to vote for strategic decisions and right to get dividends based on your invested amount.

[demonofelru]

We will be launching a bitcoin stock exchange in less than 2 weeks, you can use this to get your capital if you can wait. It will seriously cut down on administration with investors and remove the need for a minimum investment.

Maybe I can migrate to the SE when it launches? Will there be any fees for getting the capital there?

I may be interested but this is your first post it would be foolish to send a non revocable payment.  What assurances could you provide?

I see that, I am a Swedish M.Sc. student and are not here to fool someone. It would be foolish of me to fool you, since the big money isn't the money you invest but the money the rigs will mine. I'll invest 500BTC in the project to get a share myself of this money.

Do you remember about difficulty adjustments ?

Hmm, may be I should offer such mining contracts too... ))

Of course I do, that's why i wrote "at current difficulty". Either me nor anyone else knows what the difficulty in the future will be.

What I'm asking is more on the lines of what's stopping you from taking the bitcoins and just going away? I understand that buying a rig would be expensive but there are no guarantees you would buy the rig at all.  It would be hard to do clearcoin in a situation like this since you seem to need the BTC to just get setup.  It's just too risky unless there is someway you can prove what you say.  No idea how you would do that but if you figure it out I'll probably be interested.

[nster]

Any Heatware or any other feedback?

[grue]

indeed. $10 a month sounds reasonable, but $10 a day is super expensive.

electricity costs (where i live) $0.10 /KW/h. so * 24 = $2.4 per day.
it's not necessary to have high speed internet, so a cheap DSL line (@$30 a month, $1 per day) will do. you can probably have multiple machines running on the same line, because bitcoin mining isn't bandwidth intensive, so it's probably less than $1 a day. that leaves ~$6 per day for managing the servers, which is pretty expensive considering setting up mining rigs isn't very hard.

What if there are 5 rigs... that would be 12$ per day

at the time of posting, my interpretation was $10 per person, per day, liquidminer later clarified that it was the TOTAL cost.

[dust]

The cluster will be based on 2xHD6990 per rig and this can be expanded to as many rigs as possible. Income of the rigs will be divided between buying more mining rigs and paying out dividend for each of your shares.

If you're really serious about a cluster, you should use a PCIe expansion chassis designed for GPUs, which can hold 16 cards rather than a bunch of separate computers.  For example, the Dell PowerEdge C410x.  It works with ATI/AMD cards as well as NVIDIA cards, and can plug right into any computer to add 16 PCIe slots.  In a 42U rack you can easily fit three computers, nine of those, and a power distribution unit and you'll find yourself with 144 6990's--which is somewhere around 100 billion hashes per second.  All for a cost of under 140 000 BTC.

That is one very good option, but it would be hard to raise 140,000BTC from investors. This can serve more as a long-term goal for the project, and would certainly be sustainable even when the fees will be the main way of financing nodes.

Unless I am mistaken, ATI drivers only support up to 8 GPUs on linux (and up to 4 on Windows), so that's 4 6990s max.  I don't think a special expansion chassis would get around that limitation.

[nster]

The cluster will be based on 2xHD6990 per rig and this can be expanded to as many rigs as possible. Income of the rigs will be divided between buying more mining rigs and paying out dividend for each of your shares.

If you're really serious about a cluster, you should use a PCIe expansion chassis designed for GPUs, which can hold 16 cards rather than a bunch of separate computers.  For example, the Dell PowerEdge C410x.  It works with ATI/AMD cards as well as NVIDIA cards, and can plug right into any computer to add 16 PCIe slots.  In a 42U rack you can easily fit three computers, nine of those, and a power distribution unit and you'll find yourself with 144 6990's--which is somewhere around 100 billion hashes per second.  All for a cost of under 140 000 BTC.

That is one very good option, but it would be hard to raise 140,000BTC from investors. This can serve more as a long-term goal for the project, and would certainly be sustainable even when the fees will be the main way of financing nodes.

Unless I am mistaken, ATI drivers only support up to 8 GPUs on linux (and up to 4 on Windows), so thats 4 6990s max.  I don't think a special expansion chassis would get around that limitation.

Even if the ATI drivers could, I'm betting the miners couldn't.

AFAIK you are completely right

[dust]

Even if the ATI drivers could, I'm betting the miners couldn't.

AFAIK you are completely right

Mining software would be fine with any number of GPUs (assuming we're counting OpenCL as part of the drivers)

[zoro]

guys, check this http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=44
above 3 cards(6 gpus), things get a little tricky with currents and mobo specs!

[martok]

You can this of this as buying shares in a company, where you get the right to vote for strategic decisions and right to get dividends based on your invested amount.

I will think of this as buying shares in a company if I am buying shares in a company. Will that be the case?