Topic: Paid for ASIC hosting in the US to avoid EU import VAT. (Read 4185 times)

The point on using a datacenter is that you don't have to trust a member of this community with your hardware, but the staff of the datacenter.
Much better IMO.

IIRC, Inaba offered the hosting as a means of protecting international customers from paying huge shipment costs from returning a Single as part of their upgrade program. I don't really know why BTCASIC is offering this, except to reduce the cost of running one of their miners, which is actually a red flag in my mind.

Not a lot of details about Tom's hosting solution have come out yet, but I don't see centralization being a huge issue. Letting a customer control and direct their own hardware is the best option.

And as far as security goes, 100 customers pointing their miners to 100 different pools is still pretty decentralized from a network standpoint, even if they are all physically next to each other.

It's possible, but unlikely. BFL or at least Inaba is providing hosting services at this time so there will be at least some competition in this arena. It is a step toward centralization though and therefore a theoretical reduction in network security.

Regarding a hypothetical ASIC hosting solution, or the one being prepared by BTCFPGA/bASIC, I'm curious about how it will develop and how ownership will be structured. Will it threaten a 51% attack assuming there was one large hosting solution available?

I'm a little confused by this thread: How many people are offering a hosting service, and how many people are looking for their ASICs to be hosted?

i wish i would buy asics inside of EU

Subscribe to the issue. I do not want to import them into Russia.
I do not really need "hard" itself, but the result of his work.

Would anyone be interested in having an ASIC hosted in Thailand? One of my business partners lives there.Shared hosting in a colo facility could easily be arranged and the cost of electricity is about $0.04/kwh.

Do you even have any ASIC pre-orders? Are you looking for hosting? Just curious as it seems like a silly question for someone looking to have their hardware hosted. As a customer, I'd imaging you want as much protection as you could get.

Running your own mining hardware at your house is fine, as you will most likely not run into any issues like fire or electrical surges. The problem comes is when you're mining with someone else's hardware. You can't cut the same corners as you do when you're mining for yourself, or you'll just get yourself into bigger issues. You can't put a customer's host PC on a carpet floor (like I do with my gaming PC, woops). I can live with a crappy wifi connection at my house, but a customer who wants 24/7 uptime/remote access will not appreciate it so much.

I would agree with malevolent. Insurance is a huge factor. Fire, theft, electrical damage, etc. can all ruin your investment. If a problem ever does come up where an accident happens, and no home insurance will cover $5,000 worth of a customer's property, someone's going to get screwed. Either the hoster is now responsible to pay back that $5,000 he lost his customer, or the customer just lost $5,000 for choosing the wrong person. Now multiply this over 10 customers, and you've got a real headache. Related to this are any legal issues. When renting space/power/remote access from a company, you know what you're getting into, as opposed to forum PMs with AverageJoe69.

Bandwidth may not be a huge issue, but stability is. The only time our datacenter lost power or internet was when the hurricane hit the NE recently, but we were back up in less than 12 hours.

So you tell me, which would you rather have your ASIC hosted at:
   
Note: neither of these pictures are mine, but you get the idea.

Define ''adequate''.

What I can say (from my experience at least) is that something like this:



provides little protection, and it's not something I would rely on while running 5-figure sum ASICs.

what's the likelyhood of that happening when you're using an adequate surge protector?

Insurance? What happens when a lightning hits nearby and it's strong enough to fry the ASIC?

what's the point of hosting in a datacenter? you dont need tons of bandwidth, nor do you need 99.99999999% SLA, so why not host it at someone's house?

Richland WA chiming in...

$0.058/KWH here with a solid powergrid and redundant internet connections.

Host for power cost plus ?

I'm currently discussing the idea with someone in the states to host mine for about $15 a month for a BFL-SC-Single.  Which cost $1,300 so at 20% VAT then that's $260 or just under eighteen months of $15 a month.  An due to Moore's Law after eighteen months new ASIC then should be twice the hash-rate so you'd probably want to upgrade.  This person has also said he will set it up to Merge-Mine on P2Pool or provide full remote access.  So good for the network health in using P2Pool.  I'm just waiting on a legal letter for piece of mind.

I've got a colleague that runs a small datacenter about 6 miles from my house. We've worked together for many years, and I trust their entire team. As it's pretty much free power and a very fast internet connection, I've got a deal set up for at least a single 48U rack for hosting my own ASICs, and could easily access more space if needed. I'm kept on their payroll for odds and ends, and they are insured, so any legal issues should be minimal. PM me if interested.

I've got rack space - going asic myself.

I'd host it for you - What would you like to pay?

Interesting idea...
Trust will probably be the biggest issue...what are the costs and where would you like to locate it?

Have him send you his first born as collateral. No VAT there AFAIK.

call me the suspicious one... but isnt it a big leap of "faith" to entrust your equipment somewhere else that your familiar facilities ? 

When you have a consumer economy you still need to tax the producers to keep it going

Yeah if you purchase $10,000 of ASICs from the states then that means you need to save $2,000 for the tax man before they arrive.  When that $2,000 could buy you another ASIC and you'd pay the same as the lump sum VAT fee on instalments over two+ years.

Wow, that VAT is hideous.  Protectionist, eh?  People freak out in the US when protectionist measures are put forth for consideration in international trade.

It would work out the fees all in that you would pay the same amount in hosting fees (all in) over two years in monthly instalments as the 20% import VAT upfront.

Who's interested?