FWIW, I own my server farm (as made rather public on the first day or two of the coin launch), and definitely pay my own electricity. And despite being one of the few that did implement GPU mining of YAC (just not necessarily one that performs as spectacularly as people seem to think every GPU implementation is going to achieve), I still CPU-mine YAC at this point. Tons and tons of cheap Xeon-based IBM BladeCenter blade servers that people dump on eBay for pocket change just because they're a couple years old and not the latest-and-greatest blade servers on the market, reasonable power costs, and sensible and efficient design of data center cooling are key here. Per unit of CPU performance, I pay less than half what someone would pay merely for a motherboard, a bit of RAM and an i7-2600k, to achieve the same level of performance, and end up with carrier-class hot-swappable hardware, with more redundancy than you can shake a stick at, that just doesn't fail except under unusual circumstances. This was formerly IBM's hardware platform for building supercomputer clusters for NSA, who tend not to have a sense of humor about power supplies that fail when you look at them funny. This just comes down to resourcefulness and ability to scrounge the right hardware (or even to know what to look for in the first place) to keep costs down.
You can bet I would've really cleaned up had I seen the delayed YAC announcement sooner than 8 hours after the coin finally launched.. I even had the entire server cluster all prepared to network-boot a YAC-specific Debian Linux image off one of my file servers, and it was all tested and ready to go prior to the originally scheduled YAC launch date/time, I just needed the final version of the client. But alas, I was asleep (and/or in the wrong part of the world) at the time the coin finally launched.
Hi WindMaster!
I've read a lot of your posts around these forums regarding YAC as I've followed its developments quite closely. I inserted the caveat in my above statement specifically thinking of people like you. I have no qualms with the way you're mining and in fact I think it's great. As you explained... you've been resourceful and smart in the way that you've gathered your equipment and I really respect that. I understand that you own and pay for all of your equipment (and apparently can still profit from YAC mining) so I'm not trying to disparage you in stating that a large percentage of the YAC network hash rate is in server farms. I just think it's the truth (again, I don't have proof, it's my opinion). And I'm not saying there's anything right or wrong with server farms ruling the network, just that they probably do. ;P
As for GPU mining, I don't think either of us can really be sure what's happening on that front. You state that you are among the few who managed to implement GPU mining but can you really be sure of this? I think no one can. In situations such as this where there is money on the line, a lot of smart minds (like yours) go to work. I would hazard a guess that
most people capable of creating a YAC GPU miner are not the kind who would be quick to telegraph such things to the world.
It sounds like you were indeed prepared for the YAC launch -- it's too bad it didn't go off as the developer had stated (there was even one false launch!). I'm sorry to hear that you missed it.