Thank you for the update Black Arrow. This is nice specificity and transparency.
Unfortunately difficulty increases are killing the positive ROI on these. I hope you revisit your compensation program when you get closer to delivery.
Lets phrase that as a question and see if we get an answer...
BA, since you originally promised customers that if they did not hit a positive ROI within 6 months, and now you are telling us you will have extra miners and a brand new facility to house them in for the expansion of the Rent a Minion program, is there a plan to revisit the compensation package to make your customers happy?
Positive ROI on what terms, USD or BTC, whatever currency they paid in?
I am thinking this could turn into big mess quickly.
The only thing people are going to measure against is "What would I have today if you had delivered on time" That's the line in the sand, be it in BTC, or in USD. You can't really say "what if I would have had your miner and exchanged BTC low on day 4 and then sold high on day 16 of not having it" b/c that's all 100% theoretical. What you can say for a fact is, if I got this on time I would now have X BTC. Or I could cash them out today for X USD. And even that scenario works against us as the price has been dropping, but it's the only real measure I can think of that isn't complete theory math.
I personally would like to see a menu of compensation packages to choose from comprised of different ratios/combos of:
A. Discounts on scrypt hardware (which is great for BA b/c they're making this stuff, so it's a win for them)
B. Time on Farm hashing
C. More hashing hardware. If profits are there,.. eventually throw me an X1 or some minions along with my X3.
D. Pool payouts (Setup a "Founder" pool that does nothing but kick some coins back to gen1 "Founder" orders forever) Am I wrong in assuming everyone would like a 100% constant free trickle of small amounts as an option? (this would allow BA to "be the good guys" and turn the amounts up/down as their profitability allows.) Sell it as a "share" that we can buy or sell from each other within the pool and let BA take a per trade comission like some of the new profit share pools do. Again,..win/win.
And yes,.. I sent all this to BA as part of their survey.
Considering that you're only compensating the people who initially funded the effort g1'ers, (assuming BA sales continue and they don't botch another pre-order) at some point, it's going to be a trivial thing to "pay off" or even god forbid "overcompensate" those people for their investment.
That's the one thing that I haven't seen any mining hardware mfg do on their pre-orders,.. Lay it out like it is and say "Hey,.. without your amazing willingness to fund/support a new (risky) product,... We wouldn't be here,..so YOU deserve a reward,. for that alone if nothing else. But I guess I'm biased, I've run several startups and I give away the lion's share in order to fund the next big project every time, because I know it's the people who "take the leap" with you, that deserve a huge part of the credit for any/all success.