[closed] Zeta Bitcoin Mining

[zefir]

Update: external mining contract signed

I turned off nearly all my GPU based mining rig (left only the controlling PC active with 1.8GH/s) to keep ambient cold for the BFLS. GPUs will not be considered for expansion any more, I'll fully concentrate on FPGAs hereafter.

To back the bonds with real mining power, I reached an agreement with an established miner to provide me 6GH/s+ (FPGA based) until the Quads are delivered. This external mining farm is pointing to Ozcoin: you can find user 'zeta-mining' anytime either in the Top20, or if the mining-proxies are taking the top ranks in the round-share stats.

I let it to the provider's discretion to confirm here publicly, while the relevant numbers are publicly visible.

[1714802027]

1714802027

[1714802027]

1714802027

[roomservice]

Update: external mining contract signed

I turned off nearly all my GPU based mining rig (left only the controlling PC active with 1.8GH/s) to keep ambient cold for the BFLS. GPUs will not be considered for expansion any more, I'll fully concentrate on FPGAs hereafter.

To back the bonds with real mining power, I reached an agreement with an established miner to provide me 6GH/s+ (FPGA based) until the Quads are delivered. This external mining farm is pointing to Ozcoin: you can find user 'zeta-mining' anytime either in the Top20, or if the mining-proxies are taking the top ranks in the round-share stats.

I let it to the provider's discretion to confirm here publicly, while the relevant numbers are publicly visible.

Confirming, that my FPGA mining rig runs for zefir in order to secure this bond dividends until hardware is delivered.

Cheers,

roomservice

[Turbor]

Ztex power good to know.

[zefir]

Update: preparations for first dividend payment & termination of bail-out period

Dividends will be paid Sundays at around 13:00 UTC, with the first payment scheduled for tomorrow May 20th.

I set up a Google Docs spreadsheet for weekly dividend calculations here. Dividends are calculated for each week Sundays at 12:00 UTC for the previous 7 days, with difficulty adjustments being taken into account with an accuracy of down to seconds. The update will be based on the timestamp of the according block.

The dividend for the past week at an unchanged difficulty of 1.733M is 0,00406229 BTC per bond.

Right before the dividends are paid tomorrow, I will remove the bid wall I set up for the first post-IPO week to allow investors a bail-out at no cost. I'll be glad if you stay invested with me, but if you feel unsure, do not miss to place your sell order in time. I might at my discretion set up bid walls to prevent investors from accidentally selling their bonds for Satoshis, but my guaranteed buy-back offer expires tomorrow.


Cheers, Zefir

[zefir]

Update: dividends for week 21.2012 paid & announcement for upcoming expansion

Dear investors,

the dividends for week 21.2012 were paid with 420449 Satoshi per bond. Due to the lack of support for automated payments at pre-defined times at GLBSE and me being away from keyboard yesterday, I paid several hours early. With you being rather investors than traders sniping for the payment time to gain 1.3% profit, I assume you are fine with that until GLBSE provides according functionality to exactly schedule them.

The upcoming expansion is knocking at the door. The Cairnsmore1 Quads are scheduled to ship within two weeks. Enterpoint engineers are working on a modification of the Icarus bitstream to work around a layout bug they had with a RX/TX line in their HW design, but with their competence they proved so far I am quite confident to have the additional 40GH/s fully operational by the end of June.

My initial plans for short term growth were to offer the added mining power to the public quickly and collect enough capital to place another order for Quads at Enterpoint within June to get the pre-series price of 640$/board secured. While this is still an option, the order backlog at Enterpoint is filled up for July already, new orders will be processed for August at the earliest (maybe later due to summer holiday season). My attempts to establish a license agreement with existing FPGA manufacturers and build my own boards on demand were successful, but again with lead times for the Spartan6 of 8+ weeks it is currently impossible to quickly add hashing power.

Aside from existing FPGA based mining solutions, the development of alternatives and improvements got an increased momentum recently. BitFury showed up with a large scale Spartan6 based modular system that provides 100+ GH/s condensed in a 19" rack at BFL competitive prices per MH/s but with better energy efficiency. They use a custom bitstream providing 250-300 MH/s per chip, the same improvements that EldenTyrell is going to unveil and sell in June. ButterflyLabs themselves uncovered their work on a Bitcoin ASIC with the best possible performance and energy efficiency, along with a program to secure investments in current BFL products with a buy-back option. Lastly, the OpenBitAsic is working on a community attempt to produce a sASIC with better performance and energy efficiency compared to FPGA.

It is a fascinating journey to follow and exciting to be able to participate. No matter which technology will establish in the short and survive in the long run, the capital required to take advantage of the accelerating development is steadily growing. To be able to quickly react (like I did when ordering 50 Cairnsmore1 Quads to get them for pre-series price), a significant amount of liquidity is needed. If you trust in Bitcoin generally as I do and trust in me and my ability to follow this development to provide a solid and continuous participation in Bitcoin mining rewards, I'll be glad to have you on my side.

As soon as Enterpoint proves that their Quad boards are able to mine with the anticipated hashing rate and I get my shipment confirmed, I am going to issue more bonds and provide up to 75% to the public. They will be sold at the arithmetic average between bid and sell price at time of issuence. As with the pre-IPO, large scale investors willing to buy blocks of 50 bonds can PM me for early investing.


Cheers, Zefir

[zefir]

Dear investors,

during the last two weeks mining business has gotten more competitive. We saw many new miners entering the bond market, along with established ones flooding the market with newly issued bonds in anticipation of the MiniRigs to be delivered soon.

As a result of this overcrowding, silently operating businesses (like I want Zeta-Mining to be) soon get lost from investor's radars: companies listed in the securities section of the Bitcoin forum disappear from the front page if they do not post news every day. Due to the fact that with continuous long-term operations like mining there are not always news to tell, people start to generate 'creative' news, like varying PPS or re-scheduling payout times. Those PR actions are established everywhere and it is completely legitimate to apply them here to stay in the news. But this is not the way Zeta-Mining will go. I expect my investors to know what they pay for and what to exactly expect in return - without the need for continuous publicity campaigns.

While this will remain a no-frills investment, I'll take care to update you at least once a week to let you know that business is alive - if not more, the payment of dividends is at least something worth to report for those of you who are not looking at the provided Google Doc spreadsheet.

That said, lurking in IRC I fooled around and made a statement that I need to post here officially to put my money where my mouth is:
The dividend payment for week 23.2012 is scheduled for tomorrow with ~4.434 mBTC per coupon. At current market price of 0.2788 this yields a weekly ROI of 1.6%. I will add 10% on top of the payments in case Germany beats Portugal in today's European soccer championship match. Not that I am a soccer fan or believe Portugal is stronger. But since Switzerland is not participating, I support the weaker side - go Portugal go!


Have a nice weekend,
Zefir

[GeoRW]

Dear investors,

during the last two weeks mining business has gotten more competitive. We saw many new miners entering the bond market, along with established ones flooding the market with newly issued bonds in anticipation of the MiniRigs to be delivered soon.

As a result of this overcrowding, silently operating businesses (like I want Zeta-Mining to be) soon get lost from investor's radars: companies listed in the securities section of the Bitcoin forum disappear from the front page if they do not post news every day. Due to the fact that with continuous long-term operations like mining there are not always news to tell, people start to generate 'creative' news, like varying PPS or re-scheduling payout times. Those PR actions are established everywhere and it is completely legitimate to apply them here to stay in the news. But this is not the way Zeta-Mining will go. I expect my investors to know what they pay for and what to exactly expect in return - without the need for continuous publicity campaigns.

While this will remain a no-frills investment, I'll take care to update you at least once a week to let you know that business is alive - if not more, the payment of dividends is at least something worth to report for those of you who are not looking at the provided Google Doc spreadsheet.

That said, lurking in IRC I fooled around and made a statement that I need to post here officially to put my money where my mouth is:
The dividend payment for week 23.2012 is scheduled for tomorrow with ~4.434 mBTC per coupon. At current market price of 0.2788 this yiwelds a weekly ROI of 1.6%. I will add 10% on top of the payment s in case Germany beats Portugal in today's European soccer championship match. Not that I am a soccer fan or believe Portugal is stronger. But since Switzerland is not participating, I support the weaker side - go Portugal go!


Have a nice weekend,
Zefir

so, if Germany beats Portugal or vice versa?  Now I'm confused

[zefir]

so, if Germany beats Portugal or vice versa?  Now I'm confused

If Germany beats Portugal I am going to pay the bonus. I am supporting the weaker one, which I think is Portugal here (might be wrong, since I am really not interested in soccer generally). So bets are good for the extra 10% maybe.

OTOH: Denmark just kicked Netherlands' ass some minutes ago! Favorites often fall, let's see

[zefir]

[...]

Oh my how I do tend to babble.

No, I don't feel you are babbling - you're just telling the obvious. Two things I'd like to comment:

1) Pirate's business and its impact on mining
True, everyone who is willing to take the risk would be just stupid to not put his money into BTCS&T and instead invest in mining business. My own money is with Pirate while I am waiting to pay the mining rig I ordered and guess what - I earn 5 times more from BTCS&T payouts per week than I do with mining. Now while this is a great opportunity, we all know that there is a mathematical necessity that this will not work for too long. From the number of direct and indirect investments of lenders, PPT bonds and other pass-through businesses I'd assume that Pirate manages 250kBTC. Now 7% weekly means factor 33 per year - how long can this work before all existing coins are held by Pirate? It is inevitable that the system either collapses if Pirate had dishonest intentions (which I do not believe), or he will adjust his rates to more realistic values. Still your argument is valid: if he came down to say 2% weekly, there's still no incentive to invest in mining for less than 1.5% Time will tell...

2) Inner value of mining bonds
Just stating mining bonds are generally overpriced and should consolidate at 0.2 per 1MH is shortsighted. You can't just take the current price of a BFLS and its hashing rate to calculate the supposed fair value. This would currently result in ~0.135 BTC per 1MH and since BFLS are price wise the current optimal choice this is the absolute minimum inner value. Add on top of that taxes (VAT), fees (shipping) and infrastructural investments (PSU, cooling) and you're approaching the 0.2 range. Now take into consideration that your rig is mining at 95% of its lifetime on average (service, downtime, network issues) but you are paying 100%, plus add the energy cost you as operator pay from your pockets, 0.2BTC per 1MH today would mean loss to the bond issuer. Based on my initial calculations (based on 5$/BTC), I'm able to guarantee mining for a bond issued at 0.27 for two years. With the recent rate increase I see the par line at 0.25 - not 0.2 if you do serious business.

Competition is good, since it forces operators to head for the most energy efficient devices. But if someone is offering GPU based 1MH/s bonds for 0.2BTC, it should be obvious that this won't survive for too long.


Cheers, zefir

[zefir]

Update: dividends for week 24.2012 paid & clarification on ASIC upgrade

Dear investors,

with yesterday's payment of dividends for week 23.2012 we had a row of relatively constant weekly returns of around 1.5%. I wish I could promise that this will continue and allow us to recover our investments within less then a year. But while I hope for the best, there's no room for promises. The decline in mining bond prices that started last week is continuing and brought back some of them for almost 40%. One component of this decline is clearly the rise in BTC-to-fiat exchange rate, since a given amount of Bitcoins buys you more mining rig and consequently the price per MH/s should be less. While this almost always is only half the truth (coins collected from investors are put in pre-orders or converted to fiat to prepare rig payments), there is an evidence that market is currently behaving irrational: the top five mining bonds (which I do not count Zeta in) are issued by highly respected and trustworthy community members - but the market price for their bonds normalized to 1MH/s differs significantly. Ideally all face the same risk (assuming all are evenly trustworthy) and offer identical returns - still some are 60% more expensive than others. Heads up for more glitches to come until mining bonds consolidate in the long run.


The other large disruption we had the past week was BFL's announcement of their 'soon to come' ASIC based mining rig. The related forum threads are long and entertaining enough for an enjoying weekend reading - no need to add more to the ongoing speculation. But I've been contacted by investors who are asking for some free upgrade to ASIC based mining bonds that other issuers are offering. That gimmick would imply that when the issuer upgrades his existing rig to ASICs, the issued 1MH/s bonds become 20MH/s ones... As you'd already guessed by my choice of the word for this 'instrument', there will be no such free upgrade feature for ZETA-MINING.

The first and practical reason for that is that most of my mining rig is not from BFL - my inventory is 5 BFLS and 50 Cairnsmore1 Quads. The Quads are, as soon as Enterpoint provides fully operational bitstream, the most efficient mining devices around (maybe the MiniRigs are comparable). Consequently, all today's mining rig needs to be wiped out first before I need to pull the plug due to negative mining ROI. Needless to say that I will upgrade to ASICs as soon as they are available to remain competitive, but until then lots of blocks are to be mined.

The other reason I see such upgrade program will fail is its inherent lack of transparency. How do I as a bond issuer prove or disprove that I already traded my BFLS for SC Singles? Fact is, bonds are traded per MH/s, not as MH/s generated by GPU or FPGA - the rig used to mine is completely irrelevant and therefore renders any upgrade or exchange program useless.


Now what does all this ASIC hype mean to you as an investor? It comes down to exactly the same as it does to me: will it allow me to get back my investment and earn some profit before the next generation mining rig pushes me out of the market? If you do not believe in that, you should bail out from any mining investment (bonds or mining equipment) right away. But think further: if the majority is scared off and stops investing in mining, the difficulty remains the same and helps ROI of existing miners. The self stabilization of difficulty to give miners enough incentive to mine worked so far and I personally think this was Satoshi's most ingenious idea.



Have a nice week,
Zefir

[zefir]

Update: dividends for week 25.2012 paid & Cairnsmore1 Quad shipped

Dear investors,

dividend payments for the past week were processed. With a return of 4.2456 mBTC/bond and today's 5-day average price of 235 mBTC this week's yield is 1.8%.

The 50 Cairnsmore1 Quads I ordered for expansion has been shipped last week and will be at my company early next week. Currently, a modified Icarus bitstream can be used to operate the Quads in dual-FPGA mode at 360+ MHps per board, while a dedicated bitstream (being currently worked on by Enterpoint and community developers) should push it more to the 800 MHps range. At the final performance level and the resulting efficiency gain along with the recent increase of BTC/fiat exchange rates I will be able to offer new bonds worth 30 GHps at a very competitive price to the public.

Those who are not convinced that FPGA mining becomes obsolete by October and also do not believe in the world's Armageddon by the end of 2012: stay tuned for a promising investment offer.


Have a nice week,
Zefir

[IIOII]

How about an update?

While dividends are flowing nicely, investors still might be interested in the current status of the FPGA mining.

Moreover I think this quality asset deserves more attention from the investment community.

[zefir]

How about an update?

While dividends are flowing nicely, investors still might be interested in the current status of the FPGA mining.

Moreover I think this quality asset deserves more attention from the investment community.

Hi IIOII,

thank you for the remainder.

I stated earlier somewhere in this thread that I am not a fried of hyping public with pseudo-updates to remain in the news. I am confident that in the long run going the understatement route will be more profitable. So while I understand your concern and agree that ZETA-MINING could stand more attention from the investment community, I think a handful conscientious and loyal investors holding the majority of the shares will be more profitable in the end than having traders involved.

As for the news: yes, in fact there are some FPGA related updates. I have been holding them back from publication for some time now to present them when everything is up and running. But since you imply interest, I'll post some intermediate status update ASAP. Thanks for your confidence and patience.

[zefir]

Update: dividends for week 27.2012 paid & Cairnsmore1 Quads arrived & Expansion Planning

Dear investors,

with the payment of the dividends for week 27.2012 I added a calculation of total ROI since IPO in the Google Doc spreadsheet. Investors holding the bonds since IPO made 11.5% of their investment back after 8 weeks.

The 50 Cairnsmore1 Quad boards arrived 10 days ago. I definitely underestimated the effort required to set up such a high number of FPGA units and it took me all of my spare time to get some of the boards up and running. Since at the current stage the Cairnsmore1s are basically development boards that Enterpoint is still engineering with us pre-orderers acting as testers, they can not yet be set up to reliably mine. You'll find my problem reports and claims in the related thread. The most reliable operation I was able to install is with 25 boards running as Icarus (i.e. with only one active FPGA pair) generating about 11GHps (you should now find zeta-mining always in Ozcoin's top-20).

With updates on controller FW and bitstream the projected hashrate for the complete array is at least 36GHps. As soon as a stable configuration is achieved and the numbers are confirmed, I am going to offer more bonds to investors if there should be enough demand. With the investment volume of 37k$ I spent and the projected expenses for a minimum mining operation of two years, with current exchange rate of 7$/BTC I will be able to offer 1MHps bonds at or below latest market value.

Investing further in non BFL mining operations clearly comes down to whether you believe that ASICs will show up by the end of this year and wipe out any other mining technology. Since you are still reading, you might at least have some doubts. I will not dump additional bonds to the market without knowing that there is demand - either by creating a motion or by collecting positive feedback. Feel free to PM me with your interest and/or suggestions.


Have a nice week,
Zefir

[IIOII]

Thx for the update!

[zefir]

Update: dividends for week 29.2012 paid, external mining contracts terminated

Dear Investors,

the dividends for week 28.2012 were paid in time with no significant news to be told. With today's payment for week 29.2012, ZETA-MINING is independent again: the external mining contracts that backed the hashing power until the Cairnsmore1 boards arrived were canceled effectively by mid of July.

The current hashing power is around 20GHps:

• the 5 BFLS still provide 4GHps (so far, summer in Switzerland is cold )
• 30 CM1 boards work stable in Icarus mode with a constant 0.38GHps, providing another 11.4GHps
• the remaining 20 CM1 are unstable with various problems (e.g. only one FPGA pair mining, low hashrate, no valid shares, etc.) and deliver a combined hashrate between 3 and 5 GHps; they will be soon returned to Enterpoint for further inspection.

Note that the given hashrate is provided in Icarus mode, which means that
 a) only half of the FPGAs are used for mining
 b) the bitstream is not optimized for the CM1 HW

An Icarus based bitstream working on all four FPGAs will be available soon and double the hashrate per board, while a dedicated CM1 bitstream is supposed to unleash the full power and provide up to 1GHps per board, but will take longer to get finalized. The week I first see ZETA-MINING total hashing power exceeds 50GHps, I will add a one time 100% bonus and double that week's dividend payments. Stay tuned!


Have a nice and successful week,
Zefir

[zefir]

Update: dividends for week 32.2012 paid, operational status, market situation

Dear Investors,

with the dividend payment for week 32.2012 it is time to give a sign of life, even if there are no relevant news to spread.


Operational Status
Since Enterpoint staff left for holiday season or is occupied with other projects, the community was basically left alone to help ourselves. Some enthusiastic developers were quite successful isolating the problems the boards initially faced, while the affected CM1 operators pledged a bounty to at least partially compensate their efforts (with 195BTC collected so far).

The outcome of this community work are FPGA bitstreams that allow the CM1 boards to operate at around 800MHps, at least with those boards being delivered lately. The risk I took buying the first large bulk of boards did not pay off for me this time, since almost 40% of my boards are not stable for mining. Nevertheless, my FPGA based hashrate reached 27GHps. Since the current market is not willing to pay reasonable prices for mining bonds and I am not willing to sell bonds at any price (I got almost zero interest for more bonds), I'll postpone further expansion until investors regain their confidence in the profitability of mining. For you as investor the relevant fact is: each 1MHps bond you hold is backed by almost 4MHps physical hashing power.

Another fact for successful long term operation is the achieved efficiency. For those 27GHps a total of 1.3kW is pulled from the wall. With my electricity cost of 0.12$/kWh and current exchange rates, I mine 1BTC for 0.03BTC operational costs - I will remain profitable until (difficulty / exchange rate) ratio increases by factor 30 from today's values.


Market Situation
After a longer period of steady (and by design depleting) price well over 0.2BTC, this week it was hit by strong and irrational movements. In a sharp downturn it fell down to below 0.1, to just come back to the 0.16 range. With other mining bonds already going down the road to ~0.14BTC/MHps, this reflects the current market valuation and was inevitable for ZETA-MINING to reach, too. Still, the only fundamental underlying for the bond price is the difficulty, and while it raised significantly with the recent updates, daily price swings of 100+% are irrational and harmful for the long-term investor.

I can't and won't participate in the secondary market, but I set up the following walls to prevent similar exaggerating price-swings in the future:

• at the ask side, I placed an order for 950 bonds at the 'break-even price', i.e. the initial IPO price of 0.295BTC reduced by the compound earnings received so far (as calculated in the online spreadsheet). Those bonds were issued during IPO and never sold. I'm not expecting the order to be intentionally executed, but it will prevent swings caused by fat-finger-trades.
• at the bid side, there is an order at the break-even price denominated in fiat, i.e. divided by 11.6$/5$. I hear your claims that it is nonsensical to mix fiat rate into the formula, but fact is: I converted the collected coins to fiat to buy mining HW - to return it to you, I need to reverse that conversion. Again, I do not expect this wall to be hit with regular trades, but it should prevent erroneous orders. If otherwise someone has to cash out at any price and the wall is not high enough, please PM me, I guarantee that I will buy any outstanding share at this price within a 72h period.

Those walls will be adapted weekly after the dividend payments and will hopefully prevent those irrational movements we saw.


Thats for now. Have a nice and successful week,
Zefir

[zefir]

Dividends for week 33.2012 paid early.

Due to RL issues I paid some hours early. I will seek to transfer at the scheduled time to keep a constant payment interval, but reserve the right to pay early when I am not online at that time.


Have a nice week,
Zefir

[zefir]

Dear Investors,

today ZETA-MINING price hit rock bottom. Someone first sold into my bid wall at 0.12, cleared it, and finally sold 882 shares at 0.00171 for a total of ~1.5BTC.

I can only suspect that either some account got hacked and cleared, or someone placed a wrong order.

If otherwise someone needed to cash out, selling them for any price was a really stupid idea. As promised two posts above, I am willing to buy back shares at any time for the break-even price denominated in fiat, which for this week was 0.12 BTC. Pirate's closing down of BTCS&T currently impairs my ability to liquidate assets I hold for a fast buy-back, so that I might not be able to keep the 72h buy-back deadline. But still, dumping shares for any price is nonsensical by any means.


Cheers,
Zefir

[zefir]

Update: dividends for week 34.2012 paid

Dear Investors,

I just paid the dividends for week 34.2012, and when I compared to last week's payments I noticed I made a mistake. Instead of paying 22.6566 BTC last week, I obviously sent only 22BTC. I must have entered either wrong decimal sign (comma instead of dot), or it was a GLBSE problem.

Whatever, I corrected the mistake and paid the remainder of 0.66BTC today. Please accept my apologies  for the inconvenience.


Cheers, Zefir