Topic: Announcing GPUMoney, “Monetize Your Gaming!” GPUMoney.com (Read 5373 times)

Way to gravedig

Ah yes another one of Goat's scams. I hope this never took off.

Interesting venture, would be interested in investing if you can provide more business info, i.e. a business plan and budget.

I thought its about time someone resurrect this thread. Is this still on track to become a $1M dollar bitcoin company?
Did anyone actually invest in this?

A potential investor would disagree. Didnt you state you lost over a $1000 on the venture? In the end thats what really matters. Its fine and dandy if you pay miners profits that dont exist or investors dividends based on non existing profits, but its not sustainable and sustainability is the first thing an investor should look at. The saga about the server is something I wont hold against you, but the rest of the execution was not exactly stellar, nor were the financial results - either for you or your users. 



Maybe you learned a lot, but again you claim to be losing money and funding dividends from your own pocket. Its not exactly good evidence you can build and manage a profitable enterprise.



Execution.


Execution.

Who knows, maybe the 4th or 5th time will be the charm?
Anyway, I do wish you the best, and your investors. I also see a compelling opportunity, Ill be looking for ways to short your stock .

I loled, but hey good luck raising it! I wish you good luck on this one. I don't agree with your projections but I'm interested in watching this and seeing were it goes.

I don't recall CoinLab business model being praised by most.  The praise was more that a Bitcoin venture (any Bitcoin venture) was able to raise $500K in venture capital.  I am pretty sure that is a first.  If Goat raises $1M well that will be equally impressed no matter how profitable or unprofitable the venture is.

Actually I recall some talk about Coinlab's venture being a missed opportunity.  For example imagine if developers were paid in cash but a small amount of Bitcoins (say 10% of what is generated) were added to a user account.  If user never claims them they get returned to company but if they are it may introduce thousands to Bitcoin.  Kinda like an "earned" Bitcoin faucet.

I doubt it.  If you get big enough you will be sued over just about anything.  While warnings, checks, restrictions, etc don't stop the baseless lawsuits they do provide you ammunition in court.

Just recently:
http://gamasutra.com/view/news/168967/New_Facebook_lawsuit_highlights_trouble_with_kids_and_virtual_currency.php

Summarized version:
kid wanted to buy some facebook credits
kid has $20 cash
kid gave $20 cash to mom
mom unlock parental controls and gave kid her credit card (note here mom could have just bought the credits herself) to buy the $20 in credits
kid buys not $20 but $500 worth of credits.
Mom sues facebook for $5M.  

It looks like it has survived at least the first round of motions.  It "could" be certified as a class action by the judge (at which point facebook is look at hundreds of thousands in legal costs even IF they win).  Should mom win?  Hell to the no!  Still it has already cost Facebook thousands with the potential of costing hundreds of thousands and the small but real possibility of them losing the full $5M.

Now even a full loss wouldn't materially hurt facebook but it would bankrupt a startup.

"praised"

Years ago, I ran a website that sold Simoleans, the in game currency for The Sims Online. I rarely played the game but had associates who would stay online 24/7 with their character performing some mundane tasks to earn coins. I'd buy and resell. Not once was power usage ever even mentioned. Certainly having the computer powered on and a bot running for The Sims is not as power hungry as mining but I think it is pointless to suggest some warning might be needed reference "power usage".

Sadly, I started on the end of the 'boom' but there were those before me who made a great deal of real world dollars.

The point being: Don't underestimate the gamer when it comes to his/her desire for in game specialty items or lining his character's pockets with currency of choice. I'm not much of a gamer but I do see the potential of this. I'm in.

I believe CoinLab will fail as well if they want to use the hashing power externally. If they just use it for internal things, like a new pig on their own farmville style game that comes at 0 cost to them, any mining activity is a plus for them. If they sell things that are valued in USD however, the mining activity has to have a relatively constant value in USD as well - which it doesn't - or they have to charge hefty fees (like goat wants to) which might drive customers away once they learn they are getting ripped off.

Also, even stupid gamers might not be comfortable with running a password cracker for 1-5 USD/month... and you'd face a LOT of resistance if the client is closed source, including people trying to attack your workers + taking over your "voluntary botnet" for their own work.

CoinLab was praised, Goat get's slammed with doubt... Way to go!

All in all I must say that Goat's business model makes more sense than CoinLab and I will buy some shares for sure.

In my experience, the thing VCs look at first and foremost is the management and its ability to execute. 

Its not like I want to piss on Goats idea, it may have merit if executed properly, but honestly, Project 2 was a disaster, his mining company is by his own admission a constant money drain, his arbitrage bot seems to be going nowhere, and last I checked he had serious trouble selling honey because he couldnt get it packaged properly.

From there to valuing a new company at $1M and saying its going to sell its patents to google or the US government (?) seems a bit of a stretch, especially without a very convincing technology demonstration.

I'm looking at this from a very conventional venture capitalist viewpoint.

One of the biggest questions that ALWAYS gets asked when entrepreneurs pitch an idea is how are you protecting your startup? As others have mentioned, there is nothing here that is proprietary or patented, so others will compete and undercut you.

If I am not mistaken, you valued the company at 200,000 BTC, and the IPO is for 10%, 20,000 BTC worth of shares (100,000 x 0.2 BTC).

Increased awareness of btc is always a good thing

Good luck and be prepared to have your idea ripped off and undercut.

Hopefully you can come up with some incentives for games to stay on your system or offer premium accounts ? Otherwise I cannot see you retaining any users for long.

The chances that a significant amount of customers would read this thread are very low. Plus, remember what Zuckerburg used to call his users...

So a massive tax of 50% in exchange for 0 effort mining, I like the idea - I think its an absolutely terrible business model (no client aware of BTC will use it and a 50% tax ensures you will have competition undercutting you everywhere) but if it works it will be a ludicrous business model.

As for valuing your idea at $1'000'000 and asking for investors for $100'000..... good luck it seems some people here think its a good idea.

Try to remember kids above all others are extremely tech savy and quick to learn, they will figure out BTC mining in no time when they realize they can double their profits.

I might start tinkering with mining pool software myself. I believe there are many people  that would take the easy route if the tax was more reasonable.

Pool + Miner + frontend that requests Paypal addy = Profit ??

Referring to your target demographic as idiots on a public forum is not a good start PR wise

Sweet, a legal password cracking botnet!

They might care about the noise, the heat, the fact that their GPU is likely to die quicker and the people who tell them it's a scam and they create money that is used to buy drugs or something... also you can't play while mining usually, another big deal breaker.

This is not a sustainable business model. Trust me, I'm a doctor scammer.[/quote]

Best joke today !

I think this might work because of the little children that don't care about the heat and the power bill for a magical sword or something ...

To summarize, mining is a fixed-sum-game. As your service gains more and more users, their piece of the pie decreases. To compensate, the exchange rate needs to rise correspondingly; let's just say it hasn't so far.

This is not a sustainable business model. Trust me, I'm a doctor scammer.

Not to forget: As difficulty increases, GPU mining will be slowly driven out of business if the exchange rate doesn't go up. It can change quite a bit over time - how will you tell your customers that next month they will only get 50 Cents instead of one Dollar for the same amount of work + uptime?

It's a valid question. Piss off.

Your million dollar company will base its operations on allowing users to spend tens or hundreds (?) of dollars in power bills, in exchange for a $1 unit of virtual currency and... raffles?

Not a threadshit. Just a valid question.

That still doesn't solve the problem though. No matter how you cut it, the expected income per month is way too low to attract anyone's attention. With raffles, the odds will simply be extremely small. Having your computer running 24/7, dealing with the extra heat, noise and electricity cost, and all you get are raffle tickets worth aproximately $2? No one will fall for that; they will get bored and quit after a few weeks.

he probably forgot to sign out.

Way to threadshit using a PR account.

100,000 shares at .2 BTC each? So that's 20,000BTC... so $100,000. Since that's 1/10th of the company... You're giving yourself a valuation of 1 million without a single customer yet? Do you even have a prototype yet?

I've looked at this idea several times, yes u can get income, but what happens when the parents sue u? It will happen when kids leave their machines on for credits and parents power bills double or treble?

Very intrigued, I saw the link in your footer and got curious. I visited your site earlier, but it was vague. I figured I'd read about this soon enough! Good luck with this!

1 USD/month would mean a free game every 2-4 years or so... Not something most parents would accept to let junior keep his PC on full throttle each night...
Also there is already a service like this - with huge 30-40% fees and without the (against TOS in most cases) gaming part - operating for about a year already. You load a miner and get paid in fiat over Paypal...

Also I hate the idea of patents in the mining sector... especially in the USA where software patent trolls nearly sue you if you use a "graphical user interface that takes input from users and displays output depending on inputs".

If you are an experienced miner with a BFL Single why would you want to use this.  It is essentially a mining pool with a 50% fee.  The main draw would be the ease of user for non-Bitcoin users.  No need to figure out miner software, no need to create pool accounts, wallets, exchange accounts, figure out how to cashout, etc.

Given the proposal as written it seems an awesome deal for investors IF gamers sign up in droves.

Still I am not sure why gamer would do it?

Your estimation is avg gamer can pull in 60 MH/s.  Sounds realistic.  At 24/7 mining that is $6.00 per month.  Say avg gamer is more like 10-12 hours a day "most" days.   That is ~$2.50 per month.  Your post seems to indicate half will be taken as profit.  That leaves $1.25 per month.  

So in return for heat, noise, electrical cost, and wear and tear the gamer gets ~$1.00 in free stuff each month? Of course that assumes almost all of the expenses is in paying gamers.  Any non-payout expenses (staff, integration, developers, etc) reduce that further.

Do you have any more detailed profit loss or cashflow estimates to share with investors?

Will this venture be listed on GLBSE, MPEX or somewhere else?

Will you accept BTC deposits to GPUMoney accounts instead of mining too?

Will your mining client be open source - and will it only do BTC mining or "other calculations" too?

Can I run e.G. a BFL Single as well with your client? In the end it could just work like this that you give me a BTC address and anything that arrives there (via mining, transactions...) gets pulled over to your site and credited to my account. Then you'd just need to create a fancy GUI mining client + pool where users only need to input their payout address and done.

Very interesting idea indeed. I'm currently having a pilot doing almost the same thing as GPUMoney. Basically it's a wrapper around Bitcoin mining and paying users not in Bitcoin but in some other form of payment. In my case I'm giving out credits that can be spend on hosting services.

How many investors are you looking for to cover the first 200 BC? Any expected RoI numbers you can work out?

Interesting idea.

Announcing GPUMoney,     “Monetize Your Gaming!”

  ~Second round of investment funding ~

We would like to inform the community about GPUMoney, a project developing in TyGrr Virtual Industries laboratory for the last 4 months. GPUMoney is a system that uses the power of the gaming rig to solve various complex equations in return for credits and allowing the gamer to then trade these credits for games or game related products. The credits generated by the gaming miners are called “GPUMoney” and the gamer would be able to use these credits to buy products such as gift cards, WoW Gold, TF2 in game items, full steam games and more. The system is designed to operate whenever the operator chooses to work for credits and can be run 24/7.

We are in discussions with some of the established sites offering "in game" items and fully expect to establish strategic partnerships with a few of these companies.  Our marketing team is hard at work developing these relationships and an extreme marketing push.

A few months ago a few key investors helped us get this far with initial investments. Now that our coding is almost ready to go live, we wish to gather more funds for items such as registering the company in the USA, international patent applications, staff salary, professionally designed website, extreme marketing tactics and legal counsel.  We will also be purchasing some new hardware to improve productivity and server reliability.

At any given time there are 2.6 to 4.5M active users playing on steam. The total number of registered accounts is significantly higher. steamgifts.com gained over 100,000 users in their first year. Because of the type community and the buzz we can create with advertising and forum posts, we believe that getting 30,000 users at an average of 60 mh/s in 4 months is a conservative estimate. If the average user mines just 12 hours a day, this will bring in approximately $3000 a day at current rates.

Within a year we expect to have at least 100,000 active members and thus bring in $10,000 USD a day at current rates. Approximately half of this will be used for upkeep. Working in this range, an estimation of $1,000,000 USD after costs in a year is very reasonable. Keep in mind, this is only targeting steam users and assumes we are limited to only bitcoin. There are 100’s of millions of gamers out there and many alternatives for work other than bitcoin. We have developed our code to take advantage of these alternatives and are not solely relying on the continued success of bitcoin.

At this time we are going to take pre IPO investments of 200BTC in the form of BTC only. Pre IPO investors will see a discount to all future stocks sold. These shares will be nonvoting but will reflect a proportional percentage of all revenues the company generates.

In the second round of funding we are only offering 50,000 of a total 500,000 gpumoney shares. 400,000 will be reserved for the initial investors and the developers. Pre IPO shares will be sold at .2 BTC each.

Please feel free to ask any questions. A this time, we would not like to disclose our very aggressive marketing strategy or the specific details of the coding but will try to answer your questions to the best of our ability.


Edit: Changed the valuation of the company and number of shares that will be sold.