Topic: [BOUNTY] Advanced Visual Mining Profitability Calculator (Read 3188 times)

Hi there,

We’re currently looking to implement a mining-contract profitability calculator on our website (www.mercurybtc.com) to help people to make an informed decision.  

There are some good calculators already out there, but we’re looking for a calculator which can visualise cumalative profits and predict difficulties over the course of a year in the form of a graph.
At the moment mining.thegenenisblock.com does this quite well already, but we want a calculator which can incorperate different future scenarios instead of a static increase in difficulty or exchange rate.

The scenario in particular I want to see added is a big jump in in October when KnCMiner will start to ship and later on a decline in difficulty increase around January/February with, for instance, a maximum increase of 10% per month from then on. Basically you should be able to add ‘events’ which will visualize their effects on the difficulty or exchange rate. For example ‘Ebay adds Bitcoin support on date X’ and an increase in 10% in exchange rate from there on. You should be able to set your own values for these events, but we would like to provide some ‘default’ scenarios ranging from pessimistic to optimistic.

Some examples of other mining calculators:
http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/
http://www.coinish.com/calc/#
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/
http://btc.anapaapps.com

Our intended calculator should make use of the same input variables as other mining calculators but we basically want the results visualised in a graph and the possibility to add and look at different scenarios and their effects.

We know it’s quite subjective to add events and ‘guess’ their values, but we think it’s better than to just ignore these possible events entirely. There are various topics available on bitcointalk.org discussing the future of Bitcoin, use these as inspiration for possible scenarios.

Design
To use custom values, there could be a button implemented to switch to ‘custom’ where you can enter values for yourself. In this way people could check the profits for their own hardware or compare mining-contracts to each other.
Don’t make the available data in the calculator too overwhelming as people should be enlightened after using the calculator instead of confused. You could hide some advanced data under some buttons for example.

Branding & Colors
Our main goal for the calculator will be to use it for showing the possible profits for our mining-contracts. So a feature where you can select one of our mining-contract to use as input values for the calculator would be of great use to us.
Later on we would like to brand the winning calculator too with a logo of MercuryBTC.
But first just focus on getting a working calculator, these are issues for later.
For the color-palette, just look at our website. It’s mostly blue, white, and a bit of silver/grey and black.

Bounty
To stimulate the development of the calculator we’re offering a free mining-contract of 5 Gigahases for one year starting in October. We are scheduled to have our hardware send to us on the first day of shipping, so you will get an early start when profits are highest. If people want to collaborate to make the calculator we can easily split the contract for you to divide it over the team.

When we have chosen the winning design, other submissions can be unbranded and can be used to inform the community too. We would appreciate it though if you add us in the credits as one of the reasons for developing the calculator.

Good luck
We’ll be following the progress made in this topic and add information if needed. If you’re missing something or think something should be added, go ahead. Use the information provided here as guidelines and use your own incentive if you think it benefits the calculator.

with kind regards,

Bjorn de Graaf
MercuryBTC
www.mercurybtc.com