Topic: PB Mining -- 5 year mining contracts! - page 127. (Read 378920 times)

That's a good point.


It makes sense for the price to drop when the difficulty increases.  If the price does not drop, then a new investor would be less likely to consider a purchase, since the odds of breaking even drop.  Yes, if it is operating as a ponzi, the price has to drop to keep money coming in, so that the operation does not collapse.  If it is operating legitimately, then it's a good business decision to lower prices upon difficulty increases, as long as the cost of a contract covers all current and future anticipated costs.


It may not be a well known company, or it could be custom made equipment.  It's a trade secret.  Sure, I would like to know, but doing business with pbmining requires us to leave things to our imagination.


LOL Butterfly Labs?  Are they even shipping anything currently?  Oh, looks like they have a used 200GH/s miner for $399.

Actually, I was looking at https://tradeblock.com/mining/ and the $/GH column.  The cheapest equipment there shows $2/GH.  After doing the math on the column, it doesn't look accurate, and the prices haven't really changed in a couple of months.  On eBay, it looks more like 60-90 cents per GH.

In any case, I'm glad to see that equipment prices have come down.  If pbmining can buy equipment today for 60 cents/GH, and they're charging about $1.23/GH now (0.0026BTC * 475USD), and each GH is about 0.5 watts or 4.4kW/year (let's say 44 cents a year if it is 10 cents/kW), then they are charging enough to cover their costs for the first year with 19 cents left over.  If Bitcoin gets back up to 600USD, then they'll have 52 cents left over.  After the first year, the cost of maintaining 1 GH/s becomes negligible if technology continues to improve and/or the value of Bitcoin increases.  I think the company is speculating that Bitcoin will increase in value and that technology will get cheaper, however, if that doesn't materialize, the company could fold.

You're also correct that the cost per GH on new contracts has not fallen fast enough to keep up with difficulty increases.  A contract that I bought at the end of July might only give me back 85% of my money if difficulty continues to increase at an average of 16%.  If it is indeed a ponzi, then that would be good news / profitable for them.


Pbmining charged us for electricity.  We paid for it up front, so it isn't free.  I'm sure pbmining positioned themselves as a long-term customer of a supplier.  Petamine may have just negotiated a single purchase at a slight discount.  I'm not sure what to think about Petamine.  They charged high maintenance fees, the dividends suffered, and the stock price fell way too fast.  I think someone mining at home could have probably done better than Petamine.

Wow! A 21% difficulty increase.

New price is 0.0027.

What happened to timetobit. Did they turn out to be a ponzi?

i am speculating the new ghs price of pbmining

i am expecting it 0.00234 btc/ghs

any other guesses?

Not have to. in washington near the river (forgot his name) there is dirt cheap electric (0.02-0.03$ per kwh)
Some mining there, why not a big data center also. You can even send your miner there but it´s more than 0.03$ then

Not everyone is paying 0.15$ (US) or 0.25€ (Europe) per Kw/h. There are some places in the world where electric is cheap.
Egypt etc , there are a lot of options also making self with water weels.
I don`t know, not my business thats why i choosed PB mining. i think they can do better than me.


Not everyone is a scammer and bad who offer good service , and i warned you many times about LunaMining. I even posted some screenshots from google street view in this thread.

Opposite was sexy dessous shop for woman and next was a bank i remember , LOL that had "Scam" written all over it. Can not understand some bought there.

They collect energy from active volcano in their basement

Occam's Razor: All things being equal the simplest explanation is the most likely. If I make more assumptions this compounds my chance of being wrong.

This is real world thinking not bitcoin world thinking. In the bitcoin world you are guilty until proven innocent. Due to the scammy/irreversable/untracable nature of bitcoin you don't have the luxury of throwing up a website in an afternoon and expecting everything to be taken at face value.


Not sure what you mean exactly. The price should not drop when there are huge difficulty increases, only when the price of hardware drops. If it's difficulty dependent, it's a ponzi.


Which company? He could let us know which manufacturer they buy from in one sentence (maybe even one word) and we could easily verify it with the company.


From where? Butterflylabs? These days everyone is paying ~$0.6-$0.9/gh but pbmining doesn't reflect the huge drop in HW prices in the past few months of low difficulty increases.


Petamine, a real mining operation, recently bought 1PH worth of hardware from bitfury and hosts it in their 20PH farm. They paid $1.8/gh + $0.07/kwh at the same time pbmining was charging $2/gh+free electricity. Do you really think pbmining can buy 5-50TH at a time for half the price real bulk buyers pay?


PBmining is not only getting a good price, they are getting the absolute best price while not buying in bulk. I would love to know this trade secret but I am sure they will tell me that after they tell me how their free electricity generator works.

I think we're starting to talk in circles.  I'm not saying pbmining is legit or ponzi.  Nobody knows the answer for sure, we can only speculate.  I am going under the assumption that they have a legitimate business model.  The admin has a formula that he uses to calculate the price of a contract.  He knows the formula, and we can only speculate.  The price drop when difficulty increases doesn't necessarily mean that hardware has gotten cheaper.  Most likely, it is because difficulty has increased and profit margin must decrease in order to remain competitive.

I'm assuming that they have a super good deal with a mining equipment manufacturing company.  The average person must pay $2/GH for equipment alone these days, but that's retail.  Typically wholesale is 50% of retail, and pbmining could be buying or leasing the equipment wholesale due to large volume pricing.  Maybe they have an exclusive agreement for the arrangement.  Businesses don't want to divulge details on how they get a good price, because that's a trade secret.  The next time you buy something new for a low price on eBay, just ask the seller who their supplier is or what their profit margin is, and see if they'll tell you.

Is this a risky investment?  Yes, so don't put all of your money into it.  Has pbmining been a better investment than Lunamine, CEX, or PETA so far?  Yes.  Are you convinced it is a ponzi?  If so, don't invest.  Will you absolutely need the money that you invest with pbmining in the future?  If so, don't invest.  Do you need to fully understand the business model?  If so, don't invest.  Do you think they will run off with your money and disappear?  If so, don't invest.

If they bought hash power from bitfury as one poster mentioned, then 1.7 Ph/s is possible? If that's the case, then adding hash power fast is not a problem, there will be few servers to maintain. If they indeed bought or rented hash power, of course they won't say it publicly. If they did, every other businessman will do the same and availability of that hash power from bitfury may dwindle quite fast.

You don't find it remotely suspicious that the admin can predict the cost of hardware in the future?

Of course the price will drop when difficulty drops, but only if it's a ponzi and not using actual hardware. If they used real hardware, we would have seen a steady price decrease in the past 3 months similar to how the price of hardware dropped. But pbmining is oblivious to hardware pricing because they don't use hardware, they just look at the difficulty like a ponzi would.

If they are not a ponzi then the equation for pricing should be something like: hardware + electricity + hosting = pbmining price

If they are a ponzi then their pricing equation is something like: daily mined btc per GH * 100 days = pbmining price.


I'm assuming that when one pays for a new mining contract, X% goes to pay for new equipment, Y% is set aside for future operating costs, and Z% is set aside for profit.  There are a few possibilities why the contract price may not have fallen much recently.  1) Since June 29th, difficulty has not increased much.  2) They decrease the price to remain competitive, however, they are almost the best current deal around. 3) They have significantly optimized costs, such as hardware and electricity, but there might not be much more room to decrease costs until the next generation of mining equipment is available.