Topic: [closed] Zeta Bitcoin Mining - page 4. (Read 12933 times)

Dear investors,

during the last two weeks mining business has gotten more competitive. We saw many new miners entering the bond market, along with established ones flooding the market with newly issued bonds in anticipation of the MiniRigs to be delivered soon.

As a result of this overcrowding, silently operating businesses (like I want Zeta-Mining to be) soon get lost from investor's radars: companies listed in the securities section of the Bitcoin forum disappear from the front page if they do not post news every day. Due to the fact that with continuous long-term operations like mining there are not always news to tell, people start to generate 'creative' news, like varying PPS or re-scheduling payout times. Those PR actions are established everywhere and it is completely legitimate to apply them here to stay in the news. But this is not the way Zeta-Mining will go. I expect my investors to know what they pay for and what to exactly expect in return - without the need for continuous publicity campaigns.

While this will remain a no-frills investment, I'll take care to update you at least once a week to let you know that business is alive - if not more, the payment of dividends is at least something worth to report for those of you who are not looking at the provided Google Doc spreadsheet.

That said, lurking in IRC I fooled around and made a statement that I need to post here officially to put my money where my mouth is:
The dividend payment for week 23.2012 is scheduled for tomorrow with ~4.434 mBTC per coupon. At current market price of 0.2788 this yields a weekly ROI of 1.6%. I will add 10% on top of the payments in case Germany beats Portugal in today's European soccer championship match. Not that I am a soccer fan or believe Portugal is stronger. But since Switzerland is not participating, I support the weaker side - go Portugal go!


Have a nice weekend,
Zefir

Update: dividends for week 21.2012 paid & announcement for upcoming expansion

Dear investors,

the dividends for week 21.2012 were paid with 420449 Satoshi per bond. Due to the lack of support for automated payments at pre-defined times at GLBSE and me being away from keyboard yesterday, I paid several hours early. With you being rather investors than traders sniping for the payment time to gain 1.3% profit, I assume you are fine with that until GLBSE provides according functionality to exactly schedule them.

The upcoming expansion is knocking at the door. The Cairnsmore1 Quads are scheduled to ship within two weeks. Enterpoint engineers are working on a modification of the Icarus bitstream to work around a layout bug they had with a RX/TX line in their HW design, but with their competence they proved so far I am quite confident to have the additional 40GH/s fully operational by the end of June.

My initial plans for short term growth were to offer the added mining power to the public quickly and collect enough capital to place another order for Quads at Enterpoint within June to get the pre-series price of 640$/board secured. While this is still an option, the order backlog at Enterpoint is filled up for July already, new orders will be processed for August at the earliest (maybe later due to summer holiday season). My attempts to establish a license agreement with existing FPGA manufacturers and build my own boards on demand were successful, but again with lead times for the Spartan6 of 8+ weeks it is currently impossible to quickly add hashing power.

Aside from existing FPGA based mining solutions, the development of alternatives and improvements got an increased momentum recently. BitFury showed up with a large scale Spartan6 based modular system that provides 100+ GH/s condensed in a 19" rack at BFL competitive prices per MH/s but with better energy efficiency. They use a custom bitstream providing 250-300 MH/s per chip, the same improvements that EldenTyrell is going to unveil and sell in June. ButterflyLabs themselves uncovered their work on a Bitcoin ASIC with the best possible performance and energy efficiency, along with a program to secure investments in current BFL products with a buy-back option. Lastly, the OpenBitAsic is working on a community attempt to produce a sASIC with better performance and energy efficiency compared to FPGA.

It is a fascinating journey to follow and exciting to be able to participate. No matter which technology will establish in the short and survive in the long run, the capital required to take advantage of the accelerating development is steadily growing. To be able to quickly react (like I did when ordering 50 Cairnsmore1 Quads to get them for pre-series price), a significant amount of liquidity is needed. If you trust in Bitcoin generally as I do and trust in me and my ability to follow this development to provide a solid and continuous participation in Bitcoin mining rewards, I'll be glad to have you on my side.

As soon as Enterpoint proves that their Quad boards are able to mine with the anticipated hashing rate and I get my shipment confirmed, I am going to issue more bonds and provide up to 75% to the public. They will be sold at the arithmetic average between bid and sell price at time of issuence. As with the pre-IPO, large scale investors willing to buy blocks of 50 bonds can PM me for early investing.


Cheers, Zefir

Update: preparations for first dividend payment & termination of bail-out period

Dividends will be paid Sundays at around 13:00 UTC, with the first payment scheduled for tomorrow May 20th.

I set up a Google Docs spreadsheet for weekly dividend calculations here. Dividends are calculated for each week Sundays at 12:00 UTC for the previous 7 days, with difficulty adjustments being taken into account with an accuracy of down to seconds. The update will be based on the timestamp of the according block.

The dividend for the past week at an unchanged difficulty of 1.733M is 0,00406229 BTC per bond.

Right before the dividends are paid tomorrow, I will remove the bid wall I set up for the first post-IPO week to allow investors a bail-out at no cost. I'll be glad if you stay invested with me, but if you feel unsure, do not miss to place your sell order in time. I might at my discretion set up bid walls to prevent investors from accidentally selling their bonds for Satoshis, but my guaranteed buy-back offer expires tomorrow.


Cheers, Zefir

Ztex power good to know.

Confirming, that my FPGA mining rig runs for zefir in order to secure this bond dividends until hardware is delivered.

Cheers,

roomservice

Update: external mining contract signed

I turned off nearly all my GPU based mining rig (left only the controlling PC active with 1.8GH/s) to keep ambient cold for the BFLS. GPUs will not be considered for expansion any more, I'll fully concentrate on FPGAs hereafter.

To back the bonds with real mining power, I reached an agreement with an established miner to provide me 6GH/s+ (FPGA based) until the Quads are delivered. This external mining farm is pointing to Ozcoin: you can find user 'zeta-mining' anytime either in the Top20, or if the mining-proxies are taking the top ranks in the round-share stats.

I let it to the provider's discretion to confirm here publicly, while the relevant numbers are publicly visible.

They are still good mining cards and if FPGAs did not catch up cost-wise recently, I'd bought more (especially the Gigabyte that runs at stock 1200MHz and handles 720MH/s at 220W).

As for believing in Bitcoins, while I was just mining and earning money for the next GPU, I got often to disbelieve in the idea of Bitcoin - mostly when I saw BTC/fiat rate tanking with my hard earned coins becoming less worth. With moving from just hoarding coins to using them, my attitude changed in 'subtle shades' ^{((tm)1993 Nuance)}: I am thinking more and more in the Bitcoin world and care less and less to its fiat exchange rate You know, like those people that don't care about gas prises - since they always fill up for 50 bucks...

Bottom line: Yes, I want to believe - and I do.

As for the risk buying 50 Quads: yes it is not foolproof. But compared to folks ordering multiple MiniRigs or even those working on ASICs, it is not extraordinary speculative. Plus with you folks willing to share the risk and participate in the profits increased my confidence that this is the right way to go.

Yes, they are expensive over here. I was thinking about them as a replacement for my 5850 but they are not paid off yet. Got them from Brack for 220 each. For the moment they still make a gain but at the end of the year things will change.

50 quads sound serious. Glad to see that other locals belive in Bitcoin. I don't have the funds for 50 boards but I support those who take the opportunity (with all the risks).

Bought them when they were short here in Switzerland (end of March):

• XFX HD7970 Black Edition: 580 CHF
• Gigabyte HD7970 UD: 618 CHF

Their retail prices went down 10-20% within less than 2 months, way more than they have mined so far - bad luck this time

What brand are the 7970s ? How much have you paid ?

Update: added some words on what is next on the schedule to first post.


Hi,

I have cold standby GPU rig worth ~3.7GH and gave it a try today - it did not work out well - after several hours the location got that hot that my BFL Singles started to throttle and loose a cumulated average of 1.4GH (and summer is still to come).

So while the GPU rigs for sure are still operating profitably, they are unusable in my setup with burning that much energy. Sad thing is, I bought 4 of the HD7970 just two months ago and won't get any reasonable resale price.

As written in the updated news, it is currently impossible to quickly add FPGA hashing power. To meet the maximum 75% sold to available hashing power in the contract without the GPUs, I am going to buy a 5GH/s FPGA based contract from an established miner until I expanded my own farm. I'll post details when the contract is signed.


Cheers, Zefir

Hiya,

Good news with the IPO, and I guess even better news for your that it's so popular...
Any thoughts what those older (possibly inefficient) rigs would do to the returns?

And I guess now it means expanding for you

Update: IPO took off successfully

Thank you all for your confidence and your will to invest in a long-term Bitcoin future. I'm amazed how - after Bitcoin suffered from all the bad incidents and people trying to rip off others - you trust me with your hard-earned coins and give me a chance to prove that there is room to make money the honest way. I am not planing to disappoint you.

Well, for some reason it was even over-successful.

I over-sold, i.e. had two large scale last-minute investments coming in parallel that added to 6000 pre-IPO sales in total. To not send the coins back and have at least some bonds for the public, I had a last-second discussion with Nefario and decided to add another 2500 bonds right after IPO to a total of 7500.

A total of 7.5GH/s is still within the hashing power I have available (though I'll have to re-activate GPU rigs that I turned off for inefficiency), i.e. all issued bonds are backed by mining power.

Furthermore, with a bond and deterministic dividends, there is no negative implication to price with a higher number of total outstanding bonds.

Nevertheless, since there was not enough time to announce the increased issue, I will grant you all an option to bail out of your investment with zero looss: I've put a bid wall at 0.297BTC (IPO-price + 0.5% GLBSE fee + small compensation) to allow you all to give back the bonds if you feel uncomfortable with the decision. I will grant you that option for one week after the IPO.


Getting late here and I need to get some sleep for my (hopefully soon to be terminated ) day job.

Good night,
Zefir

Hot Bond!

zefir does serious business - i'am in too!

I'm ready, start the sale

Update: IPO-details finalized

Meni contacted me personally and gave me some insights in his Puremining business that clarified why there is a significant premium on the price when just comparing the bare hashing values. Bottom line, the higher price is justified alone by the reputation he has as initiator of publicly traded mining power and the very complete contract he set up.

I am going to license that contract for ZETA-MINING soon, right now I have to accept that I first need to build up reputation and therefore can't include Puremining fully to the price building formula.

Considering this, I set the IPO price at 0.295BTC per 1MH/s 100%PPS bond and updated post #1 accordingly, including the number of 4350 bonds available to the public, after 13 blocks have been sold to pre-IPO investors.

Happy bidding / trading.
Zefir

PS: those having time to fool around and place satoshi bids, you won't get any I am going to set up a bid wall at 0.28BTC during the first week for investors that change their mind, so you won't get them cheaper than that.

Short update on GLBSE verification (also updated post #2 accordingly):

• my email address has been verified meanwhile
• I won't get my home address verified. According to their verification policy, addresses in Switzerland can not be checked

If my home address is vital for your trust, PM me and I'll disclose for your personal verification.

Yes, thanks for the clarification.

I added the formula for IPO price calculation to post #2, along with some pre-IPO statement that was requested via PM.

As for PUREMINING, I also do not get why it is that much overpriced. From reading the contracts, it is just a mining bond for 1MH/s at 100%PPS (i.e. exactly what I am going to offer), yet it is traded at 60% premium. I like it as it pushes the average price up , at the same time I'm unsure if there is something I have missed. If you know more or have an explanation, I'm okay with removing PUREMINING from the price calculation formula.

See OP:


Current average should be something about 0.35 BTC per MH/s, I'd expect the IPO to be around 0.3 BTC, like nearly every other 1 MH/s bond out there (except for Puremining, their prices are crazy! )

What's supposed to be the starting price of every share?