Topic: [On Hold] Hosted (or not) Gridseed ASICs -> Batch 1 Ordered - page 4. (Read 5674 times)

You mean say, 1 to 2 amp fuse per 10 units running in Scrypt. Spec's say 5000mA max. So this would be a good current limiting range to use to prevent any possible serious problems. The 5 chip units will ever pull anywhere near 5 amps while running Scrypt mode. As I recall, in Scrypt, they pull around 480mA max.
If they trigger a SHA session, the fuse will simply blow and that will be that until it's replaced. Perhaps a charge for having to reset them for trying to mine SHA would be appropriate as well.
Wolfey2014

I am looking into adding 12v fuses inline with the DIY units to prevent any problems or accidents. I agree it will be better safe than sorry.

Fees & Hosting Terms:
- The hosting fee is all inclusive of power costs, internet bill, ordering, setup, troubleshooting, and hosting for all units.
- The fee will be dependent on the number of units hosted and will be as follows:
      100-200 units hosted: $11/month       200-300 units hosted: $10/month
      300-400 units hosted: $9/month        400-500 units hosted: $8/month
      500-600 units hosted: $7/month        600-700 units hosted: $6/month
      700-800 units hosted: $5/month        800-900+ units hosted: $4/month
- First Month = Free Hosting Hopefully we can reach half capacity+ in about a month and no one will ever have to pay >$9 for the hosting fee.  Smiley
- Bitcoinaverage.com will be used for calculating usd/Bitcoin ratio for hosting fees
- All units can only be ran on Scrypt mode only due to power/accounting issues.
- You may request delivery of your unit(s) at any time. You must pay for shipping and the hosting fees through the end of the month.
- We are located in the USA and shipping will be $10* domestic and $20* international per unit.
* Shipping costs are subject to change, for the better or for the worse. If shipping multiple units it will likely be cheaper.

***********************

Great idea! Good stuff!
So am I to understand that if I rent or rent to own 100 to 200 units, I have to pay out a hosting fee of anywhere from $1100 to $2200 per month?:

What happens after they are paid for? I can either have them sent to me for my own personal hands on or just leave them there and use them to make 'us' money? You your hosting fees and me my profits.

What are the odds of my miners paying all of that by themselves from day one?

At what point do I become 'owner' of the hardware? i.e. Psu's, controllers, miners etc? What exactly am I buying - if I go that way? Miners and support equipment or just the miners?

So I just send you my btc# and you set up the number of units I order, start them mining and making profits and if at the end of the first FREE 30 days they don't pay the rent / hosting fees, I have to pay if out of pocket?

Will the program e structured in a way that this will always be profitable and only become unprofitable if the market take a very marked dive? I mean in that case, it would hardly be worth continuing with the program, eh?

My farm should be making me a profit and hopefully paying some of my other bills too

Thanks for your ideas and offer to do this for people. I think it is very needed and wanted!
This could cause a boom in the mining side of the game which is what we need to help this industry grow and continue to be around from now on!

Wolfey2014

I understand your worries, but I honestly don't think it will be too big of a deal. I will make sure to change the default Login info on all Raspberry Pis that run the farm. The DIYers will only have access to their own Pi that only has their units on it. If they were to do something and somehow hijack the farms hash power, then I feel like I or someone else will be noticing that very quick. The options I'm choosing for pools have very good monitoring options, so I think everyone will like to check it every now and then. If they hijacked the equipment and changed passwords or something, I can simply unplug the power and reformat the sd cards and regain control of the farm pretty easy. So far there is only 1 DIYer.. so we will know who did what if something does happen. I don't imagine there being much interest in that type of hosting honestly.

I am a bit worried about it for other reasons though. Like.. perhaps someone accidentally choosing dual mining and starting a fire or something. I will make sure to drill it into peoples heads not to do dual mode mining.  There are a lot of things that come with it. Also I would probably be more worried about physical theft than intrusions by DIYers, but I am upgrading from a Motion Sensor camera to a 24x7 monitored security system which is included in the hosting fee. Whomever breaks in to steal our hashes... I hope they can run fast.

The price is pretty much finalized and I have updated the OP with it. I was able to get the costs down to $195 per unit including all PSUs/adapters/cables/hubs/pis/etc... You may see better prices around but most of the really cheap ones don't have accessories and you have to take the costs of those into account. Also, since our batches will be smaller I wasn't able to order from Gridseed directly. I designed a custom power solution that I am pretty sure will run 88 Gridseeds off of one 1000w ATX PSU!!! I sourced all cables as cheap as I could find them. I have already ordered all cables, components, adapters, pis, hubs, etc. for up to 500 units. Some components were ordered for all 1000 units, so we are pretty much ready to get going!

Ordering will open up tomorrow afternoon, so please get in any last minute terms/conditions suggestions in now.

Okay, I don't really want to do the do it myself mode.  I was wondering what type of security you would have.  With this you're more vulnerable to attack.  For example someone could switch your miners to a different payout address and you might not notice.

Thanks for the kind words, I'll mark you down for 20 units.  


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I updated the OP:
- To allow for both automatic mining (you simply provide a Bitcoin address for payments) OR do it yourself mining (you receive log in information and do everything yourself).
- Offer the option to sell the units and pay you with the proceeds of the sale as an extra option as opposed to getting units shipped back to you when unprofitable/you want to end the hosting arrangement.
- Further reduced shipping costs to have miners sent back to you.
- I reserve the right to overclock or underclock the Gridseed miners at my descretion for units hosted in Lazy Mining mode. I promise to take it easy on them.  

Very Important: Someone lost 60 BTC this way in one of my previous Group Buys. The attacker quoted my OP and edited the Bitcoin payment address to his own. Please make sure you are looking at the OP of this thread when getting the payment address. Furthermore, I am taking precautions to prevent this from happening again and other man in the middle attacks, please validate the Bitcoin payment address by using the PGP Key in my signature. For more information on how to use PGP, please see this website: http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/beginners-guide-to-pgp/

I am still getting the final costs per unit from resellers & I'm trying to calculate in the cost per unit for power supplys, usb hubs, cables, etc... I expect to have this ready by the end of the weekend and I will open up deposits for the group buy at that time. There isn't really a good solution as far as power cables for a farm of this size. I may end up making our own cables just so I can set everything up how I want to- using ATX power supplies. Please let me know if you have any more suggestions for the terms or other options you'd like to see.

Thanks

I have participated in both of the previous group buys that CoinHoarder has ran. CoinHoarder has spent many sleepless nights trying to keep our miners running at their best and I trust his ability to run another successful group buy. There have been some minor problems along the way but I do believe he has done his best to be upfront and honest with us (the participants) as issues arose. Thanks dude!

I'm in for probably 20 units this time around... just let me know payment info

Also in dual miner mode because it uses more electricity it will also be generating more heat.  This causes a greater strain on the AC system.

Thanks for you suggestions.. they are very good ones.

Let me think it over a bit and I'll post an update this evening. I like all of your suggestions, but I'm not sure if option #4 will be feasible due to the extreme difference in power usage dual mining mode uses compared to Scrypt only. Since it uses more power, the hosting fee would need to be higher for dual mining units, so it kind of complicates things quite a bit. Also in dual mining mode the amount of units I will be able to host will go down, therefore hosting per unit will be more expensive.

I'm open to ideas though. Thanks again for the quality feedback.

Alright!  I am in for a full controller block whatever that happens to be.

I think the easiest way to handle payment would be just require upfront payment for a term of several months (3 is probably a good number, since after that who knows what difficulties and feasibility will be on scrypt). 

Also, while I am getting everything I asked for I might as well add a few other nice-to-haves, but I am "in" for the self-managed block either way.

(1) a bulk shipping or at least a self pickup option for someone who has a lot of units at the end of the hosting term... at $20/unit returning 30 units would be over $600 which seems excessive. 

(2) just like with self-storage, at the end of the hosting term as an alternative to renewal or shipping back units, sell the units on ebay (possibly with the automatic hosting units), keeping a decent fee for yourself and remitting remainder (probably better than shipping back, especially if you have many units from multiple customers).

(3) option to ship my pre-existing units to you to add to my self-managed hosted farm (I realize this would have to include a setup fee to deal with the controller, hub, power supplies, etc. that you are already incorporating in the price of the GB units).

(4) option to power units sufficiently to mine BOTH BTC and Scrypt.. I have experimented with this and found that it is actually more profitable at times, especially with alt-coins recent drops relative to BTC .. I am working on a cgminer code that will autoselect BTC, Scrypt or both (don't hold your breath though, its really complicated) and would like to use this.  It would significantly increase power required so obviously would be more $$.

Thanks 

I sleep with one eye open, I hope this qualifies to your standards!!! 

Hi, thanks for your interest.

1. Yes I will have a better price than $230. I am still getting quotes to see who can give me the best deal, but it will be around $200-$225. Gridseed is non-responsive.. I think they are only interested in dealing with 100s-1000s of units in one order, so I am going to be forced to deal with a reseller/group buy coordinator. I'm hoping that the resellers will see the big picture and that I will likely order 100s of units, therefore give me a better price although I'm only planning on ordering in 20 unit batches. The batch sizes could be increased no problem if we could secure a better deal that way, but I feel like there is a fine line in between savings per unit and making people wait for a large batch to fill up. They could be mining a week earlier than waiting, negating most of any price difference that would be had for a larger batch. Please keep in mind I am paying for Pis, stand offs to organize the farm, power supplies.. everything. These costs will need to be factored into my cost per unit, so it may be a little higher than what you see in other group buys in the forums, but it includes everything we can possibly need.

2. I think you have a good idea, and I would not have any problem setting up something like this. You have made me rethink my hosting options, I am thinking about offering an "automatic" service and a "diy" service to cater to both crowds. Automatic service I do everything for you, DIY service you pick your own pool, configure the miners. I can give access via ssh or whatever you prefer. I have seen a pi working with 50 Gridseeds.. you are right, the limitation is the amount of USB hubs you can chain together. The only thing about doing a diy service is I will have to bill you for the hosting fees and can't just take them out automatically. I don't really have a problem with this, just so you know. I think I would give someone up to 1-2 late on their hosting fee before taking of their units and mining the hosting fees. Some type of "contract" will need to be written and added to the OP to cover different situations that could come up with hosting diy Gridseeds, but I feel that's nothing that you and I can't come to agreement about. Let me think about it today and I will add a rough draft of the diy provisions to the OP later today.

If he sleeps more than 4 hours, I'm not interested.

Great to see you working on another GB! I can also vouch that CH has handled the previous groups very well: good communication, good planning, good troubleshooting skills & always committed to making it work!

I ask because I am interested. A couple more Qs:

*I'm based in the UK. Any issues?
*Fibonacci is taking pre-orders next week. Delivery ~July. But it will be a hosted solution of some type, plus limited supply per customer. Any views vs. Gridseed?

Two questions (or really one question, and one hopeful suggestion):

(1) If you are able to get a better price than $230, will you pass that along to the GB?  It looks like prices are coming down close to $200 as of now anyway

(2) It would be really great if you offered an option for someone to buy a "full controller block" of these with the option to self-manage the hosted units.  By "full controller block" what I mean is the number of units that are run off of a single controller (or rPi if that is what you are using).  I am not sure what the limit is (I know, because I have 10 now, that the limit for the controller that gridseed includes is about 10 in practice, though they claim 20... the rPi could probably handle 30-40 but then you run into USB hub limitations I suspect).  Whatever the number, each full controller block would have to be setup and managed individually anyway... if you instead allowed VPN access to that unit (to someone who is willing to buy that full controller block of units) it would alleviate some of your management as that person (me!) would not have to be included in the distributions, etc.  It would be a more traditional hosting-only operation... for which I would still expect to pay the full hosting fee of course.   I would be in for 20-40 units under this type of arrangement.