[GLBSE] Introducing: Bitcoin Syndicate, a new mining op trading publicly!

[Glasswalker]

BinaryMage: I'm not at my computer right now but I will make your suggested alterations later tonight when I do the IPO. Would you by any chance be willing to add an "edit" to the end of your earlier post where you reccomended against investing? If not, I understand. But if you would I would be grateful, as I think seeing that post early may discourage some who may not read the thread from investing. I'm not asking you to edit the post content itself simply append a note.

Thanks again for your questions and suggestions.

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[Glasswalker]

Just an update, the IPO is delayed slightly, we are sorting out a minor transaction error on GLBSE, I'm working with Nefario on it now. I'm hoping to release in another 15min or so.

Sorry for any delay.

Thanks!

[Nefario]

It turns out there was no transaction error. Everything is fine and I approve the launch of this IPO.

I have verified Glasswalker's real life identity, passport, and online profile for facebook, google+ as well as his home address and place of work, and his whois details.

I called him to verify his phone number.

Glasswalker is indeed a real person, and is relatively well known in his field.

I am keeping a record of this information.

Nefario.

[Glasswalker]

Thanks nefario!

The IPO is now live, the shares are trading in the wild!

Some trades have gone through already!

Thanks everyone, and I look forward to seeing how it turns out!

Also, as always, please don't hesitate to ask me any questions, or bring up your concerns.

Happy buying!

[BinaryMage]

BinaryMage: I'm not at my computer right now but I will make your suggested alterations later tonight when I do the IPO. Would you by any chance be willing to add an "edit" to the end of your earlier post where you reccomended against investing? If not, I understand. But if you would I would be grateful, as I think seeing that post early may discourage some who may not read the thread from investing. I'm not asking you to edit the post content itself simply append a note.

Thanks again for your questions and suggestions.

Edited. I don't generally do that, because I think it likely that any potential investor would read the whole thread, and edits can make it hard to follow a conversation, but I'm willing to comply with your request in this case.

You don't need to thank me, but gesture appreciated nonetheless. Thank you for reading and honestly answering those questions. I can say that I do now recommend investing in this company. (Not that I'm an expert by any means)

Glad to see the IPO went alright! I do plan to invest, but it's late here and I'm exhausted. It'll have to wait until morning.

[mila]

Some trades have gone through already!

I placed my orders before IPO to see if it crashes the BTCSYN code was advertised, so I created a test buy with real btc
I hoped it would execute as first thing after the IPO would launch at glbse (wanted to see if glbse sorts orders by timestamp of creation)
My observation was it executed quite early, probably triggered by the ipo start and it was probably the first public trade after founding members swapped their gpu mining commitments for shares and the rest went public.
as soon as it was possible I acquired 10+2 shares but forgot to note order in which they were created and this test result is not available.
it's still visible in the trade history

Glasswalker: can I lend you FPGA as you borrow gpu rigs? read: I get it back in 1 year, in the meantime you collect the mining reward and develop the company. I keep stock and get the board in 1 year back? similar to current gpu loan, shares for mining capacity borrowed
smiley

edit: FAQ on homepage answer this question ^^

[Glasswalker]

First of all, Thanks BinaryMage! (I know you said no need to thank, but I do appreciate it, and I also want to thank you for your (future) Investment/Support of the Bitcoin Syndicate!)

Mila, Also Thank You for your investment!

To respond to your points in order:

- I understand the point you are making, that 1GHash of mining power in somewhere with 50% electricity costs will profit that much more. However in this case, the electricity to run the GPU gear is "free" to the syndicate (provided as part of the loan service by the founding members). But this will eventually come into play with the FPGAs once we have enough of them to justify moving it into a datacenter for higher quality hosting. However I have a plan in place (and an existing relationship) with a very good Datacenter which I suspect we can get a fantastic deal on hosting (well below market price). Or possibly even free hosting in exchange for some shares. We'll explore those options (and vote appropriately) once the time comes to justify that move.

- Also consider, the dual 7970 mining cards that red star is talking about, that rig likely consumes approximately (this is a rough educated guess) 700 - 800W (and that's not counting extra wattage to keep the GPUs cool which on larger operations can easily get up to 50% of the power consumed by the Rig itself)? Let's assume I pay 10cents per KWh (the going rate roughly) and he pays 5cents per KWh (just to illustrate a major difference in electricity costs). If we use the lower of the two (700W) that's roughly 504Kwh in a month. At 5cents thats $25 in electricity. Now those do about 1200MHash for the whole rig (with 2 cards, tweaked well). So to match that we need 3 FPGA boards, which each draw around 18W. Now if we take that (lets round up to 55W). That's 39 Kwh per month. So at my 10cents that's $3.90 in electricity costs. Though I agree, if someone is using those same FPGAs to mine in a low electricity area, it makes a difference. But since electricity is such a small percentage of the total with FPGAs it reduces that advantage to a tiny percentage. (enough that operational efficiency and so on makes the difference). Hopefully that helps with figuring out the economics of FPGA mining versus GPU mining

- the 6Ghash of FPGA power I write about are based on the successful IPO. If/When we sell all shares, we WILL buy 6GHash of mining power immediately. That mining power is guaranteed provided we sell out our shares. Even if we don't the IPO period will result in SOME profits, which will be used fully to buy FPGAs right away. So that mining power can be counted in the share value. (because if the shares do not sell, they also aren't diluting the value of the other shares, though I need to figure out the mechanics of this with GLBSE). Either way I fully expect/hope that the shares will sell out within the IPO period. And we will be able to buy our target 6GHash of FPGA mining power. THEN after that initial wave of buys, we will grow from there. So basically much like the other operations that started from zero, got investors, and used that investment to buy mining gear. We are doing the same. Except in addition to that we also have 6GHash of loaned gear to start with. Giving us an "edge".

- For lending your own hardware. Normally in the spirit of co-operation I would LOVE to do this. It would allow others to pitch in, and grow the pool even faster. The idea I love, and I tried to come up with a way to make it work. The challenge is by opening that up, it becomes a management nightmare. People all over the world either contributing hardware (or shipping hardware to us) and figuring out how to host it, manage it, and the legal liabilities involved. It opens up a lot of legal and financial risk, which is unwise. In addition to creating much more management overhead. The only reason this works at all with the founders, is we are all physically in one location, we see each other every day, and we know and trust each other. So the management overhead is nullified, and the liability is minimal because each controls their own gear, and we can co-operate physically to help one another when needed. So I'm sorry to say, for now we can't offer that option for aquiring shares to the general public. Though I do have an idea which is not completely formed yet on how we could offer a similar service under the syndicate umbrella, but I won't discuss it in full until I've finished hashing out the details (and got the basic IPO phase of the syndicate done and things running smoothly)

Thanks again everyone for your interest! We already have several sales, I hope we see several more rolling in to buy up those shares! The faster we sell the shares out, the faster we can order our first batch of FPGAs and increase all our profits!

[Glasswalker]

Just another quick update, I've made 2 minor alterations in wording to the bylaws purely to clarify the intent as discussed earlier on this thread.

Those alterations are:

Under section 4.1:
"This mining power will be assigned a value in BTC at a rate of 0.18BTC per MHash (this rate is calculated based on the average "street price" of building a mining rig at the time of the initial share release to the founding members)" (was changed from "at the time of the formation of the syndicate" to better reflect the pricing model that was ACTUALLY used rather than the planning phase info)

Under section 3.5:
"all liquid assets that the Syndicate holds (all Bitcoin Values) will be used to clear any debts/expenses outstanding for the Syndicate (note currently there are no debts/expenses, but in the future with growth and addition of operating expenses this may come into play)" (was changed to show that currently there are no debts, and no need for "expenses" right now, but over time as the operation grows, there may be needs for this, which is why this clause was put in place).

Hope that helps clear up the legal mumbo-jumbo a bit

Because these changes do not effect anything, and are purely clarifications, I did not hold a motion to make the adjustment. If any shareholders dispute this, I will gladly hold a motion.

Thanks!

[Glasswalker]

For the immediate term we are pointing at deepbit. That's not our intent long term (And wasn't the original intent). We have our proxy pointing at deepbit with failover to slush. We originally had it pointed at slush, as I'd rather mine there than deepbit to be honest, but we were for some reason seeing extremely high rejected share rates there, so our payout on deepbit was better. As soon as we have enough MHash to justify it (and I can complete setting it up) we'll begin mining solo (Against the bitcoin network directly, rather than through a pool) to cut out the added fees the pool charges, and allow us to contribute to the security of the bitcoin network without giving too much strength to a single large entity like deepbit.

If you have any suggestions for a mining pool that we could try out other than deepbit (I have not yet tried eligius for example). We had the deepbit and slush mainly due to stability and lower variance at least while we were getting stabilized. For now the focus is on getting things rolling, then once we are operating the other thing to consider is the target of our mining power will be open to vote by shareholders (the choice of pool will be voted on, and the same goes for the decision to move to "solo" mining, or our own pool).

Does that help answer your question?

[Glasswalker]

I agree completely about the principal of it, and our intent was always to not contribute to deepbit. But because at the time we were pushing for a quick launch, we went with what was easy and fast, which was deepbit/slush (with the intent being to focus on slush with failover to deepbit). But because of the unexplained spike in rejected shares we dropped off to deepbit as our primary. Also we hadn't had the time lately to do a ton of research in pool options. Back when many of us started mining deepbit and slush were the ones to go with. A lot has changed, but we just stuck with what we knew and what worked. I never worried about it too much with the Syndicate because my feeling was always that a pool was merely a short term stopgap (we would quickly reach a hash rate allowing us to mine solo, and so would not need any pool, or would start our own).

That said, I would LOVE to switch to P2Pool from what your describing. But I will need to do a bit more research to validate this. And unfortunately at this point, it's not up to me anymore (any change at this stage would require a motion to be raised and voted on). But if my review confirms what you're saying here, I agree, it would be a no-brainer. Likely easier than setting up our own dedicated pool, and would be a great stepping stone to move towards fully solo mining.

I think the setup you describe is inline with many of our goals longterm. So I'll review and let you know what I come up with (and if we raise a motion to switch it).

And yes, we are definitely very serious about bitcoin and the future.

[BinaryMage]

I agree completely about the principal of it, and our intent was always to not contribute to deepbit. But because at the time we were pushing for a quick launch, we went with what was easy and fast, which was deepbit/slush (with the intent being to focus on slush with failover to deepbit). But because of the unexplained spike in rejected shares we dropped off to deepbit as our primary. Also we hadn't had the time lately to do a ton of research in pool options. Back when many of us started mining deepbit and slush were the ones to go with. A lot has changed, but we just stuck with what we knew and what worked. I never worried about it too much with the Syndicate because my feeling was always that a pool was merely a short term stopgap (we would quickly reach a hash rate allowing us to mine solo, and so would not need any pool, or would start our own).

That said, I would LOVE to switch to P2Pool from what your describing. But I will need to do a bit more research to validate this. And unfortunately at this point, it's not up to me anymore (any change at this stage would require a motion to be raised and voted on). But if my review confirms what you're saying here, I agree, it would be a no-brainer. Likely easier than setting up our own dedicated pool, and would be a great stepping stone to move towards fully solo mining.

I think the setup you describe is inline with many of our goals longterm. So I'll review and let you know what I come up with (and if we raise a motion to switch it).

And yes, we are definitely very serious about bitcoin and the future.

I am in definite agreement with Holliday; I don't want to (no offense to you or them) support Deepbit in any way, shape or form, simply due to my concerns about centralization of mining power. I agree p2pool is the best long-term option, but for a short-term, easy to switch to one, there are many options other than Deepbit. BTCGuild & ABCPool both offer low-fee PPS, EclipseMC offers zero-fee double geometric. (close to proportional, hopping-proof) At least in my opinion, any of those would both be more profitable (lower fees) and less potentially damaging to the future of Bitcoin.

[Glasswalker]

I have looked into it further and P2Pool definitely looks like the way to go. It won't be a technical challenge at all, with my IT background setting it up will be a snap. The only thing holding it up is a bit of time.

So likely tomorrow depending on how my time looks I'll raise a motion to vote on the idea of switching to P2Pool. At which time I'll build out a dedicated secured P2Pool install (independent of our main webserver and not touching our wallet of course) and redirect the mining proxy setup over to the P2Pool box. That should result in zero downtime.

Provided the vote passes, I'll post an implementation plan, as to how we're going to do the transition, and what the timeline will be (we'll schedule a test for 1hr to confirm it's working well so that we can fall back if something goes wrong, and if it succeeds we'll continue there for now).

Any other shareholders I'd love to hear your opinions on this topic as well.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to point out we have our own forums at forum.btcsyn.com (can be linked to under our main page at www.btcsyn.com too) and I'd love to see the contributing members of this thread register there too. Conversation can continue here for sure, but that forum lets us keep things like polls for decision making, and more internal planning on a seperate board controlled by the syndicate. (It also allows shareholders to register and be identified so that we can centrally communicate to announce motions and such).

I'll keep this thread as the main "info portal" for the bitcointalk forum, and post motions and dividends here as well, just to have the info easily accessible at multiple points of course.

Thanks!

[Glasswalker]

Sorry for the double post, but I felt this one deserved it's own post...

I just want to say THANK YOU to who ever just invested in 1500 shares of BTCSYN!

I know myself, and the other founding members (And the other shareholders) all appreciate your support. That's FANTASTIC!

The faster we sell out the IPO the faster we'll purchase our FPGA miners, and move ahead into the growth and profit phases of our operation. (and begin pursuing other initiatives as well).

So once again, GOOD JOB COMMUNITY!

So far we've sold nearly 50% of the shares released for public trading in less than a 24h period. This is just FANTASTIC!

Thanks again! (and keep up the good work! lol)

[BinaryMage]

Sorry for the double post, but I felt this one deserved it's own post...

I just want to say THANK YOU to who ever just invested in 1500 shares of BTCSYN!

I know myself, and the other founding members (And the other shareholders) all appreciate your support. That's FANTASTIC!

The faster we sell out the IPO the faster we'll purchase our FPGA miners, and move ahead into the growth and profit phases of our operation. (and begin pursuing other initiatives as well).

So once again, GOOD JOB COMMUNITY!

So far we've sold nearly 50% of the shares released for public trading in less than a 24h period. This is just FANTASTIC!

Thanks again! (and keep up the good work! lol)

You already have the highest 30D volume of anything on GLBSE - after one day! Congratulations!

I'm investing, just waiting for the transaction to confirm.

EDIT: Confirmed, shares bought.

[mila]

also online the forum.btcsyn

day by day trade history, from the  charts
traded total: 2,903 shares
volume current day 23/2/2012: 127 shares
volume first day 22/2/2022: 2776 shares

this just data aggregation and not an investment advice

also interesting page with more numbers

would be nice to see some official summary of initial distribution between ipo and founding members
my guess is 6704 shares on ipo on glbse exchange. it will be obvious after stats are reliable
or an confirmation will do. or maybe there is on the home forum, did not see all categories yet ; )

glbse waits for 6 confirmation to credit incoming paymens, while waiting
please export & backup your glbse keypair of the account you fund.

1)
go to Account Management or List Accounts
and click on Export Accounts

2)
save content of the popup window (if you use a web client)
optionally encrypt it with and protect it with a passphrase (built in feature)

the keypair is stored in your browser memory and will be lost when you clean locally stored browser files.
you can import it on multiple browsers or create always a new one if you wish just to observe at the source.
and don't mind the keypair would be lost from the local browser storage

[Glasswalker]

Here is how the breakdown of the initial distribution of shares looks (I rounded off hash numbers to the nearest 50MHash division due to day to day fluctuations). Also Warf's miners were acting up at the time we issued, so I used previous averages from an earlier period. And we estimated 600MHash for andrew based on his rig which is 3x 6770 GPUs as this one will be back operational in the next day or two (expecting 200MHash per card).

BTC Per MHash/s - 0.18BTC as per bylaws

Paul: 2,200 MHash/s =  396BTC
Warf: 600MHash/s = 108BTC
Isaac: 1200MHash/s = 216BTC
Jeff: 500MHash/s = 90BTC
John: 1700MHash/s = 306BTC
Andrew: 600MHash/s = 108BTC

Total MHash: 6800MHash (as I said a couple of these are rounded up by a couple mhash, and Andrew's 600MHash approx aren't in the pool yet so this number looks to be accurate).
We only advertised 6Ghash because of this discrepency and the numbers on the chart fluctuate due to error rate and luck. (as mentioned earlier in the thread)

Paul's initial contribution in expenses registration, asset creation, domain, hosting, site dev (about 30 hours work), and so on: 100BTC

Based on the above, and a price per share of 0.25BTC for the IPO (market IPO price):

Paul: 1,984 shares
Warf: 432 shares
Isaac: 864 shares
Jeff: 360 shares
John: 1,224 shares
Andrew: 432 shares
Total founder shares: 5,296 shares
That will leave 6,704 shares for release in the IPO.

Of those 6,704, only 3,885 are still available. after not quite 24h.

With a 100% successful IPO, that's 6704 x 0.25BTC which is 1676BTC. Which should be enough for about 15 FPGA cards (when combined with the output of our mining efforts leading up to the end of the IPO, which currently totals about 25BTC). Perhaps more if we can negotiate a good volume deal.

At 15 FPGA cards, at approx 400MHash per card, that adds another 6GHash, as I predicted in some of my earlier posts, bringing our total to approximately 12GHash immediately following successful IPO.

So get buying up those remaining shares! the faster we sell out, the faster we can end the IPO period and get those additional FPGAs ordered and on their way so we can profit that much faster!

Hope that helps keep things transparent!

Thanks!

(edit: altered wording about warf's miners acting up, it was worded to sound like they ARE acting up, in fact they are not, but they were at the time the initial shares were issued, changed the wording to be more clear).

[Nefario]

For anyone who wants to see the latest trades on GLBSE in near realtime visit GLBSE on Twitter

Thanks for fixing the link mila.

[Nefario]

In the news!

http://bitcoinmedia.com/crowdfunding-gets-some-back/

[Glasswalker]

Wow!

That's awesome coverage!

Thanks Bitcoinmedia & Nefario!

[matthewh3]

Sorry to jump in your thread but RSM is offering 4.56MegaHash/s per BTC invested.  1.664GH/s for £20 of electricity a month.