Topic: FPGA Mining Contract - page 13. (Read 38737 times)

I'm not saying that shareholders should buy at a higher price, but if the goal is for the company to buy more boards by selling shares and the shares aren't sold because of people undercutting the price, the company won't get any of the money and won't be able to buy the boards.  I find it interesting that you want to expand the company and are complaining that fizzisist isn't willing to spend a ton of time on setting up a huge cluster that he wouldn't benefit from, but can't see the issue with the price being undercut.  If the price is undercut, the company won't be able to grow.



Again, not sure why being able to pay your life costs is anyone's problem.  Do you really expect a bitcoin investment to be able to pay your bills?  Fizzisist, I need about $500 a week to pay my life costs, so we need you to go ahead and put together a 60GH/s setup.  Nevermind that you're not getting paid or anything.

Ok, if you are interested in such a contract, I would rather arrange something this large privately outside of GLBSE, and under different terms than this contract. Feel free to PM me and make a proposition.

I already told my point.
I will have profit in about $5 per week. It might be totally different for me with $100 per week (i will be able to pay my life costs)


Shipping and defensive taxes will make prices more than 40% higher in my country.


it's 15/0.25 = 60 cards, which is around numbers i have in mind


That will be good from my point of view.

1) If there are 6000 shares and you own 60, you own 1% of the system, or about 18 MH/s. If we double capacity and there are 12000 shares and you still own 60, you still own 18 MH/s. I don't see how the size of the cluster matters to an individual shareholder. In fact, I think that a larger, more complex system would be more prone to failure and downtime so the profits could actually be negatively influenced.

2) Solo mining only slightly increases profits. For it to be feasible for us, I think we would need to be at a point where we, on average, find 2 blocks per week. That would mean the probability of finding 0 blocks in a week would be very small (about 14% according to Poisson statistics). 2 blocks per week would require about 15 GH/s. That is too large of a system for me to be worrying about day and night without making any profit from. Maybe under the terms of a different contract.

1) This changes weekly profit for shareholders. If that profit is low (in absolute amounts) - it doesn't worth to own.
2) If you will run your own pool the profit per share will be higher

High price was a result of the assumption that you will expand the business

I don't understand. How does the number of boards change the profit per share?

So, we clearly see the reason for the price drop
It is the decision of management not to arrange the profitability of the business for all the parties.

You don't look at this business seriuosly, just use it as a test platform for your other business.

Sorry, you're right that I never answered some of those questions. First of all, I currently have 16 boards running, but would not be willing to switch all of those over to FPGA.contract. The extra 9 boards are constantly being switched out for a different set of boards after an hour or two of testing to be packed and shipped to customers. I was thinking that we would offer shares for one board at a time, to see how it goes. At the moment, I'm not interested in running a 50 or 100 board system as a contract. The responsibility and risk would be too much, especially under the terms of this contract (where I make no profit). I would much rather you buy the boards from us and run them yourself!

As for the next generation of FPGAs, we're certainly watching those closely. Frankly, though, I don't understand what it matters to this contract. The 7 X6500s we have are already paid for and will continue mining until they either die or the electricity cost to run them becomes more than the money earned from mining. That will most likely be a very long time from now. I strongly doubt that the release of Artix or Kintex FPGAs will drive up the difficulty so much that our profits are significantly impacted.

-53%


Why should shareholders buy at high price, when they can buy absolutely the same shares at lower price?

If market estimates shares lower than management, it is the management to blame.
The shares mechanism was invented to resolve issues between management and shareholders.

It's the work of both parties to correctly determine the price.
If shares are cheap, then management can buy out shares itself.
If company is overestimated (from management point of view) and there are good ideas,
then management should propose to issue more shares.

Right now I think that price drops because fizzisist postpone solution of questions related to shareholders.


Are you ready to start 50 additional boards? 100 boards? How many boards are necessary to mine without external pool?
How the existing shareholders will vote for this, if this will significantly decrease their influence?
What will happen if three months later another company will begin to mine with Artix-7 ?
I asked these questions earlier.

Big movement on glbse. Someone filled almost all bids. Price have drop considerably.

Yeah, looks like some shareholders sold in the 0.66 BTC/share through ~0.40 BTC/share range.  Not a bad profit if you were able to buy in at 0.25 BTC/share and aren't interested in holding for long term.

As for more shares, if you have the boards available we may as well see if the shareholders will approve it.  I think it'd make sense to see if we can get up to 10 boards first and then re-assess to see if there is more demand.  It doesn't make sense to issue a ton of shares if they don't sell. 

One thing to consider - If the new shares have a set price and someone undercuts it, the least expensive shares will sell first and the company won't get any of the BTC.  We can get around this by doing direct transfers.  A buyer would send the BTC to an address that fizzisist provides and give him their GLBSE user ID and the shares can be transferred directly to the buyer.  This would make sure that the money is going to fizzisist for purchase of the boards and not someone who is looking to sell for a profit.  However, it can quickly become an accounting headache.  I know that JLP-BMD has had to go with direct transfers as someone undercut their IPO price with a sell order that is 0.001 BTC less than the IPO price.  Just something to consider if we issue more shares.

Yeah, everything's going great actually. In fact, I've cleaned up the cable mess for our FPGA cluster and it has been running at full capacity for some time now. I posted a picture of the setup here. What you see there is 16 boards, but only 7 of them are mining for this contract. If we release more shares and raise the funds for additional boards, they will be begin earning money for the shareholders immediately (just need to redirect the workers), so this might be a good time to discuss raising a motion again.

It looks like the trading volume shot up today, so a lot of shares are moving around. Some shareholders much have decided to sell off some shares now, and they offered them at the highest bids. Seems like odd timing, because we're on track to be receiving our largest dividends yet in the next couple days. Oh well, it's a free market!

business as usual over here?  just wondering because the stock took a pretty good dip?

teek

Thanks, molecular! It was very exciting to see these boards come alive.

Yes that is screen, but it's only on my end. You currently need to run a separate instance of the mining software for each board, so you can manage those processes however you like. I do have plans to handle multiple boards in one software instance, like cgminer does, very soon. I'll be working on that over the next weeks, and it should be a relatively easy change.

nice monday morning news. way to go fizzisist.

one question: is that gnu screen dividing the terminal real-estate?

I use a tiling wm so I probably wouldn't use that feature... but it's good to know.

1) How many additional cards can be attached to the current setup without adding another hardware (except USB-hubs)?

2) Do you have plans to redesign with Kintex-7 (28nm tech)?



Artix-7 samples is also available from Xilinx, just contact them

3) Was the "first hand" feature discussed with GLBSE ?

Yep, we're off and running! I'm currently pointing 11 boards at Eligius to make up for the lost time over the last few days while working on the code. That will go back down to the 7 you guys own soon.

Here's a screenshot of this madness: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13472215/screenshot_11boards.png


We're running the open source code developed by fpgaminer and makomk (among others). Since then, the other guys have pushed this FPGA quite a bit further. Now that these boards are finally built and are on their way out to customers, we'll turn our focus to improving that. These FPGAs are running at 133 MHz clock rate (266 MH/s / board) right now, but there's no reason we shouldn't be able to get the same as the others have achieved with the same FPGAs.

We need to work on both the FPGA code and the mining software. The mining software (that is, the code that you run on your computer) is very alpha right now. For example, it doesn't support long-polling yet.

Like I said, this will be our priority now that the hardware is built and on it's way out the door.

There are 11 of them now. There are some additional FPGA's

Virtex-7:
$30000 / 1600 MHh/s = $18.75 / MHh/s

Spartan-6:
$170 / 125 MH/s = $1.36 / MHh/s

Kintexes-7:
$1200 / 1000 MH/s = $1.2 / MHh/s

ATI 6990 = $0.89..$1.11 / MH/s


Might be there some cooling system which is not shown.
Or are the heat sinks required at all?


Then it can be used for other purposes (and probably can be sold then new technology arrive)

ad2) Price. That card have features that mining don't need and it costs twice more than needed. And propably voltage regulators are not suitable to deliver required amount of power, there's no heatsinks on chips.
ad3) Virtex7 costs 30.000$ (30 thousand !) when you buy 1000 then you get discount to 28.500. Do math yourself.
ad4) Atrixes7 will be propably the best replecement for Spartans6. Price is unknown for now but Xilinx says that it will be comparable to Spartan6.
ad5) Kintexes7 costs to much, 325T part is something around 1200$ and perfomance with good design should reach 1GH/s so lower MH/$ than S6.