Ok, thanks for your opinion Sqeak, interesting perspective.
Hopefully we get some more opinions in here (and ones that aren't so hell bent on being holier than thou preachy dicks).
Agree with me on this or not, I don't care but I would like some more ideas from others on how we can get things moving in the right direction again.
My Opinion:
1. He should have stuck to the original T&C. This is what everyone signed up to and everyone was aware of (at least those who bothered to read them). If you couldn't be bothered to do your Due diligence, that's your bad luck.
2. He hasn't done as described in 1, but has produced a bonus hashrate directed at oldest 10 accounts. This is unfair and should be split evenly across all accounts. I am happy for the T&C to change for NEW MEMBERS OR ACCOUNTS but not for existing ones. Even this has not been done as I had some BTC in the queue and that is now under the new 'get the hashrate you buy' scheme and not the old scheme. Good for those accounts but not good for existing members.
3. Any talk of suspending accounts in profit until those not in profit have caught up is ludicrous. Why should sensible, early investors be penalised to offset the losses of late adopters who invested at the wrong time or set up their accounts poorly. That is penalising success and rewarding failure. I do not say this because I stand to gain, but rather because it is common sense.
4. Any solution similar to 3 above is simply robbing one group to pay another. This is unfair. Everyone should get what they signed up to at the time they signed up. You cant tell Warren Buffet he has had enough money from the stock market, so his fund will be suspended until all those who lost money in any market crash get a chance to get their investment back!! What is needed is a sustainable plan to generate more income. The amount owed is not going to decrease, so if we ever want to see those coins back, we need to increase the income.
5. Why have the referals not been fixed so people can advertise etc again? This may assist with 3 and 4 above.
6. The other alternative is for everyone to take a haircut. Write down all outstanding investments! This will be universally unpopular, but it will mean that people will get something back and should allow for further investment going forward. I am not saying I support this, but its an option. However, it would need to be a straight 20/50//80% across all accounts. None of this talk of 'he earnt more than me so he should now lose more!!).
Just my thoughts!
My opinion on points 1 and 2:
I can see the need for the change, although in my opinion there should have been an opt-in option.
In order to reconcile the goals of the pre-change structure with the new structure, I would say to assign all of the old accounts a blanket hash/BTC rate, based on the date of the switchover. (Take the total hashrate at the time of the switch, the total
active deposit amounts, and divide the hashrate by deposit amounts to make the base hash/BTC rate.)
Then, after the switchover, any new deposits would be considered acceptance of the new TOS, and applied the new, current scheme of hash/BTC (currently at 256Ghash/BTC) to each deposit.
Finally, apply the surplus hashrate equally on a hash/BTC rate. (By surplus I mean any new hashrate that hasn't been applied to a deposit yet, as well as any hashrate from old equipment that is "retired" from completed deposits, but the equipment is not yet decommissioned due to being less efficient than the exchange rate/difficulty allows.) This way, small but recent deposits don't get huge rewards (they're already being rewarded simply by being recent; there's no need to reward them for being small as well) which will allow old, large deposits to clear the system more quickly (which is the point of the "last 10" scheme currently in use) which will lead to clearing out even more "retired" hashrate for use by younger and smaller deposits.
And keep a tally of the "retired" hashrate. As equipment gets decommissioned or fails, pull it out of the surplus pool so that nothing is being over-promised. (On the same vein, there is no reason to undersell hashing, since it's actual
earnings that are divided among investors, rather than true hashrates. The hashrates are simply there to give a general guideline about what might be expected in a non-variable system.)
On points 3 and 4: I agree completely. Let's not lop off the top of the trees in some idiotic attempt to potentially benefit the bushes. Socialism works by uplifting the base; it was communism that failed by attempting to limit the top. If there's some ceiling to investments after which they get suspended, nobody will want to invest, and we won't get the benefits of new hardware. (I'll talk more in my rebuttal of point 6.)
On point 5: YES. We can't have multi-level-marketing without referrals.
6: I agree that it is universally unpopular. I also don't believe that it will allow anyone to get anything back, because all of the capital is invested in hardware. All dividends come directly from mining. There is nearly no liquidity.
Rather, I propose that we stay the course, because to do anything else would lead to failure. New investments must be encouraged, yet we can't allow old investments to hit a cap before they fully mature.
As it stands right now, any mining equipment bought today is expected to bring about 75% ROI based on BTC only. This works in fiat because BTC is a deflationary commodity; investments in mining equipment will continue to earn a
real profit using more stable currencies rather than commodities.
Tangent: Individuals are foolish to buy mining equipment directly; rather the smart option is to buy BTC directly and let the market price rise. For instance, buying 1 BFL 5.5Ghash Jalapeno at the start of their pre-order period (which turned out to be incredibly stupid due to their delays) would have netted a person about 1BTC. If bought in fiat, that gives a profit of about $400. However, if you'd have bought $200 worth of BTC at the time ($13/BTC), you'd be seeing about $9,500 in profit.
Back to the point: Pyramining guarantees 110% return on BTC deposits, regardless of fiat exchange rates, with the tradeoff being that a person needs to be patient; it could take years to see your investment mature. (Keep in mind that brick-and-mortar companies and established e-tailers don't expect 100% ROI for at least a decade, so 5 years to 110% is AWESOME,
besides the point that the value of BTC will also appreciate greatly in that time.) Because the difficulty continues to climb at exponential rates, Pyra's pool needs a constant influx of new hardware, and will continue to need new hardware until difficulty growth levels out.
That is, every deposit made today will
eventually have a hashrate that is (comparatively) so low that it would take decades to see the deposit mature. In order to keep the account active so that an account's older deposits will complete within reasonable times, new deposits must be made to that account. Eventually, when the difficulty settles down as the market finally gets saturated with the most efficient of ASICs, accounts won't
need new deposits in order to keep a reasonable earning rate, but I'm predicting that it will be years before this happens.
This isn't the fault of Pyra; it's the nature of the 110% return on BTC deposits and the fact of the difficulty climbing. Pyra is doing a good job of managing the current storm, and of encouraging new deposits so that the entire structure doesn't fail... however I can see room for improvement.
First, rather than the oldest 10 bonus, I would argue for a blanket, BTC-based bonus on all deposits. This will prevent the appearance of bias, and falls more in line with what the original investors signed up for. Second, it must be very clear that old, large deposits will not be capped, stopped, halted, paused, held, nerfed, gimped, or otherwise penalized. The whole point of Pyramining is to bring deposits to maturity. If anything threatens even the most exceptional and rarest deposits, then it creates doubt in the minds of everyone about the safety of their own deposits, and people will not reinvest.
And a new point, #7:
Bring back statistics. Yes, some statistics were depressing, especially as we were waiting for the new ASICs... however, we could have a "your estimated maturity date could become yyyy-mm-dd if you deposit XXbtc" somewhere in the statistics, that would encourage new deposits and reinvesting.
