Okay. It is time to address a few things.
A) I lost on my own investment... you think I made it out with no scratches? I lost big time on this investment maybe a few snapshots of my TOTAL costs would be enough to put an end to this madness, but I can understand why you would take the route you are talking about because you expected to earn more, and surely, my personal results and estimates did not make it through.
Why is the XPM exchange rate going down? Not sure exactly, but I believe it is due to the fact that MINING is EXPENSIVE. No doubt about it. Even the 1st and 2nd week of Primecoin Official Release where mining was nearly impossible even at that time and even with VPS, it wasn't affordable.
An estimate is simply an estimate, and I have stated enough information all over this thread and my site, in order for you to make your own estimate and educated guesses. We faced a challenge of the new host, and I made the executive decision to go with Amazon EC2 (pricey servers) because no host would allow us to deploy the amount we were doing.
I didn't say you would go home rich after this. I simply stated this is something I want to try, and if you give it a try with me, then lets see what happens. I didn't over hype and I didn't try to under sell... Challenges happen in every business... I have been mining primecoin since release... and its been a bumpy ride for everyone. Even if I had the best optimizations, there was a lot of things working against this plan, timing, exchange prices, difficulty rate, and new HP10 release (which dropped earnings daily)
1) Exchange prices going down - This seriously made a negative impact because a few days prior to release of coins, the prices dropped by a lot, and perception is everything so some of you perceived it that way... I get it, at the time of exchange of receiving coins, it was not looking good as an investment.
2) Affordable Host was a challenge...
My own servers cost $2,000/month Rounded up (batch of 50)
That itself is $500/week all dedicated for this investment in hopes to take off... It is a first release, either it goes forward or it doesn't.
I tried host after host even after the main setup of servers, and we were getting rejected in all corners of the street, so I kept EC2 online during this problem.
Plan A) failed because once we expanded to 130+ new servers, we were immediately asked to shut down by the new host providers.
I'll post this again if you missed it:
"It has come to our attention that all of your servers are using around 800% CPU usage. This is negatively impacting the host. We must ask that you please take appropriate steps to reduce your CPU usage, and update this ticket with the steps you have taken." - server host.
Plan B) Go to EC2 until we find an affordable rate elsewhere. I have tried Google Compute, but it doesn't match up in Spot Instance pricing; however, Amazon charges $0.5*/hour estimated for c1 large (non spot instance)... I had to run these for stability in the up rising of the block chains. Spot Instances Problem? and why even if I did deploy many of these, it would get cut off, and cause desync issues... Why would we desync? Because spot instances shut down normally after a few hours since someone beats us in price. This has happened on so many occasions but I put up with it. I would say testing daily has been my experience to know I have desynced a few times with Amazon EC2, and having servers go on and off isn't going to help us in mining, so I streamlined them accordingly from both: Non Spot Instance and Spot Instance of C1.Large
Look, I understand you may be frustrated because I am EXTREMELY frustrated that I lost in coins that I was mining myself, which added to this plan as a private pool, only to find out the goal I set was not achieved, and lose of future investments, and not looking good for the community.
Do you think I wanted all of this to happen? Heck no. I have given 100% back to the community... I am closing this offer completely off moving forward until I can figure out an affordable solution and a way to get better results or maybe this will never move forward.
Why was it a fixed integer?
Easy.. because why should I give you .5 XPM less per share if you owned more than that? I was the captain of the ship, and if I could do more, I would... and this is a negative to people? Really? come on.. give me a break, I rounded up on purpose. In addition to all that, I have been spending money for these 2 additional days of paying for EC2 Instances, which is a total loss for me, putting me past the budget. Instead of being more supportive and providing solution to the service and ideas to fix problems, all I heard was things that did not solve anything. I provided a solution, people listened, and some didn't.. but we never went anywhere in the right direction. I offered you to jump in with your idea, and not an idea was presented, so I went with PLAN B) Amazon EC2 as you know it was costly -- I said okay, I will take on the risk factor to spend more to deliver, that is fine. Off course I mined them, I posted them here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3002447Go ahead... say what you want. I did what I can, It didn't work out... and I still delivered coins on Sunday, right? I showed you screenshots... and today was the final 2 days of FREE mining on the house, as I stated, and this will be delivered soon.
There is a couple people I am missing to send transaction/XPM to because they sent me BTC address not XPM. I have sent you an emails, please respond via pm or email.
I haven't even made up the 2 days free yet and you guys decided to say what you said without evaluating the entire service yet... that is uncalled for in all grounds, I didn't even finish my job, the same thing happened on the announcement on Tuesday, when I was letting you know we are extending dividend payouts from Wednesday instead of Sunday. This was very impulsive and uncalled for right off the bat. I took it as constructive criticism and I went ahead with Plan B) Amazon EC2
Conclusion, maybe I was not the right guy for it... or maybe I was... it is clearly your opinion.
Thanks again for all your support in this venture.