Dear Bitcoiners and Ex-investors,
the wind up is almost complete: all but 27 shares were bought back. The holders of those did not respond to my emails so far, so I need to assume they left the community. If they remain silent until end of March, I am going to donate 2.7BTC to some Bitcoin related project.
As promised, with the closing of ZETA-MINING I want to provide some numbers as reference for the chronicles of failed bitcoin mining ventures - here we go.
ExpensesZETA-MINING was build around 5 BFLS and 50 Cairnsmore1 FPGA boards. Setting up the rig and operating it in 2012 took
46.1k$ as follows:
Type | Amount (k$) |
Setup Costs |
50 CM1 boards | 32.0 |
5 BFLS | 3.0 |
Taxes + Shipping | 4.1 |
Installation + Infrastructure | 2.8 |
Currency Conversion Fees | 0.7 |
Operational Costs |
Electricity | 3.1 |
Redundant ISP | 0.4 |
Total | 46.1 |
Income / AssetsDuring 2012, ZETA-MINING mined
2337 BTC.
The remaining value of the assets is hard to estimate. While BFLS still have a resale value matching their initial price for the trade-in program, CM1 boards are more or less worthless. With ASICs existing, I do not expect to get more than 100$ per board - considering shipping costs and handling effort, it barely makes sense to sell them. Same goes for infrastructure: PSUs do have value, but are heavy and costly to ship, USB hubs and cables are worthless.
Asset | Resale Value (k$) |
47 CM1 boards | 2.0 |
5 BFLS | 2.5 |
Installation + Infrastructure | 1.0 |
Total | 5.5 |
Result46.1k$ were invested to mine 2337 BTC. With the remaining asset value of 5.5k$, the investment per mined BTC is 17.37$/BTC, which coincidentally more or less matches the current exchange rate.
Investor's PerspectiveAs stated before in this thread, investing in ZETA-MINING was a loss, like any other investment in Bitcoin mining in 2012 was. Many investors took my offer to swap their shares for ASICMINER, therefore it is difficult to quantify how high the loss for investors effectively is. What can be quantified is the number for someone who remained invested from IPO to the final buy-out. Those investors bought shares for 0.295BTC, received 0.0819BTC in dividends and finally sold for 0.1BTC per share.
That's an absolute loss of 0.113BTC per share or
38% of their initial investment.
Issuer's PerspectiveQuantification of my own loss is even more difficult: on top of the ASICMINER swaps and other offers investors took (like buy-backs that always have been in favor of investors), it all depends on when BTC has been converted to fiat to cover my expenses.
This is roughly how it went:
- sold 7500 shares for a total of 2212.5BTC
- converted those at ~5$/BTC to 11k$
- paid back investors ~1350BTC
- sold mined BTC regularly for $, averaged to 8.5$/BTC
As a result, my net investment was 35.1k$ compared to a net mining income of ~8k$. Minus the assumed remaining asset value of 5.5k$, my net loss is somewhere at 21.6k$, or
61%.
Bottom LineI am tempted to modify the valuation parameters to let this look better, like denominating it fully or partially in BTC, assuming ideal exchange rates / times, assuming ASICMINER will succeed and sky-rocket, etc.
But that's not relevant. No matter what:
this was a disastrous investment - for investors as well as for me as the issuer / operator.
Sorry for that and all the best,
Zefir