PowerHash – Good replies, and thanks for clearing up a number of points. I’ll see if I can tidy the post up a bit so we don’t end up with a massive wall of text
Secondly, due to the major raise of questions I am going to cancel Mondays release of the shares until a later date. We do not want to come across as those who are looking to raise the money and run, and that is one of the main reasons for this cancelation. James at Havelock; who I have dealt with over the last few weeks is unaware of this decision yet, and I will be discussing it with him shortly. I want to have everything answered and clarified and be on good standing before the IPO starts. This should help ease everybody into being more comfortable, as well as give time for any more questions to be answered.
Excellent news, and thank you for taking time to consider our questions
[1] – This is impressively short notice when we no really nothing about what you’re trying to do or who you are. Why Monday, July 15th, and why 300,000 shares?
Our initial IPO writeup stated we wanted to release 1 million total shares at a low pricepoint each. The reason for this was to provide opportunity for anybody to have the ability to buy in. Whether its 1 share or 10,000 a person, we wanted to appeal to everybody. We were later told to leave the "1 million" part out of it, and just release as needed. We were working with Havelock all week and this seemed to be a good date to release it. This would allow the announcement on the 12th and the weekend for people to review. That’s good advice, and I was in the same situation months ago. I’ve discovered that, overall, it’s better to release slowly than to toss out the word “million” to investors. Staying low will help you get a feel for how the public reacts to your investment opportunity…knowledge I wish I had when I started off.
Also, are you planning on maintaining the $0.20 per share for the IPO as well as later releases (if there are any)? Just curious, especially given the recent vast price fluctuations.
[2] – Hoping to add, or will add? In monetary terms, how much will it take to get up to 50MH/s? What equipment will you purchase?
The word hoping to was used because 50mhash was our plan. We didnt want to necessarily say we WILL add 50mhash only to fall a little short due to major issues arising. In that case, the whole 50 couldnt be added in that time frame and action would be taken. Whether this is a dividend reissue to re-imburse for what couldnt happen, or things may be a little delayed while the technicalities got worked out. Our plans were to run 20 servers, each sporting 4 7950 GPUS. We priced out everything through WTCR and BitcoinStore. It worked out to (at the time btc was around $100) 17 btc each. This would provide about 2.5mhash each build. Makes sense, and thanks for clearing that up. Given the hardware quantities you’re ordering, is there any way to get all the parts / cards wholesale? Maybe you’d be able to work something out with BitcoinStore? I’m not sure anyone has these capabilities, but it still may be something to consider checking out.
Dividends
Shareholders will receive dividends weekly on each Wednesday. Dividends will be paid as 85% of the net profits earned after expenses. Mining expenses are Rent, Electricity, Replacement Parts, and Repair. Labour fees or time-consuming work will not be expensed and are covered by the 15% of profits being retained by the operators.
Coins will be converted to Bitcoin for dividend payments. Conversions will be done in a strategic fashion, to best maximize profits and minimally impact conversion rates.
Just to make sure I’m reading this correctly, whatever is generated within a week (Wednesday to Wednesday) is the revenue. From that amount, you will deduct all expenses for that week (rent, electricity, any replacement parts, and cover any repairs). [1]
From what’s left over, you will keep 15% as a “management fee”, distributing the rest as a dividend.
So we’re essentially purchasing the hardware for you…and giving you 15% (after expenses) just because “labor”? I can understand the expenses part, but 85% (after all expenses) is quite shallow given you’re asking for our coin.
What price point would you see fit? Our initial plan was to withhold 100k / 1,000,000 shares for our personal hold. To collect the dividends off this. We were later then told to simply hold 10% of all issued shares. This was then changed to us not being allowed to do this, and to hold a percentage of profits. It’s hard to say without looking over the numbers, but most managers take 5% off the top. Given all expenses are already taken out of any generated revenue prior to dividends, a smaller managers fee seems more reasonable.
Are you planning on purchasing up a percentage of shares in the fund? [EDIT: Found the answer to this at the end, but that’s ok]. If so, then you’d be paying yourself dividends on top of the manager’s fee, which may make up the difference (depending how much you buy in).
[1] – Bunch of questions here:
How much is rent per month?
How much is electricity per kWh?
How much power does your rig currently consume?
How much power will the fully developed rig consume?
How often do the GPUs break, and when they do what fails first?
How much do replacement parts cost?
Rent is $1000 a month. Electricity averages out to $0.09/kWh. (Different costs depending on the time of day/day of week. But the overall overage consistently is at 9 cents)
Each rig consumed 1200 Watts of power. For a total of 24k watts.
As for GPU failures, I have run cards for 1-2 years solid back for Bitcoin mining without issue. In the event that cards do fail quickly in this scenario, warranty does cover this.
As for replacement parts, It would really depend on what fails on the card. The usual result is getting a new card, as there isnt much that could be directly replaced.Thanks for clearing that up. With this data in mind, do you have any profit (revenue – expenses) projections for a week/month (just an example)? I can’t say I follow Litecoin all that much, so I’m not terribly versed in its past network hashing speed and average difficulty increases (more on all this momentarily).
IPO & Share Issuance
The initial public announcement will be on 7/12/13. This announcement will outline the plans and release dates for PHM. On 7/15/13 the initial public offering will be released at the Bitcoin equivalent value of $0.20 per share at the time of release.
Additional shares will be released in the future, for further expansion and growth. No set dates for these releases are planned at this time. After the initial IPO shares are sold and mining has started, we will assess when to announce and release additional shares. The price of newly issued shares will beset to the 7-day average price of the week prior. New shares will not be issued until any hardware purchased previously has been implemented and is mining.
So you will, without a doubt, dilute our shares in the future?
If they are newly released shares for the sole purpose of adding more power, it does end up balancing out does it not? If we added new shares and did not add new mining power then yes, that would be a horrible dilution as it would reduce dividends. This will not be the case, and after the initial setup newly issued shares for expansion will only increase your dividend payments.Ah ok, I see what you’re saying. I feel like there could be complications down the line for this, but for whatever reason I can’t put my finger on ‘what’ or ‘why’. I’ve spent the last 10 minutes thinking through scenarios where good and bad things can happen, but they seem to work themselves out.
Anyway, it’s probably just me. I prefer the “set limit” method to issuing shares (what ASICMiner, HIM, and others have done), where there’s only so many shares issued and will never increase or decrease. It makes predicting dividends a lot easier and no need to worry about more shares popping up later on
Mining
Shareholders own all PHM mining equipment. Currently, PHM is GPU-mining Litecoins at approximately 2.4Mh/s. We have an established dedicated mining room, which is properly temperature-controlled and secured. PHM also has plans of purchasing 2 ASICS from BFL. These include one Jalapeno and one 30Gh/s miner. These will provide about 35Gh/s toward mining Bitcoin directly.
The primary coin being mined will be Litecoin, but we may switch to other promising alt coins at will. Provisioning of hashing power can be spread to multiple currencies. During times when no alt-coins are more profitable than Bitcoin, the mining power can easily be moved to mine Bitcoin instead.
Just so I understand, should you sell the full 300,000 shares (valued at $0.20 each), you’re plan with the $60,000 is to purchase $1,600-ish worth in BFL gear, and push the remaining $58,400 in GPUs for alt-coin mining?
I don’t think I have a problem with that plan, I’d just like more detail on the GPUs. And why BFL? Why not splurge the extra $400 for a 100GH/s Mercury from KnC?
Well, you also need to take into account the other startup expenses within that raise. As for KnC, I am currently reading up on them. I did not follow their cycle much, but seems very promising. I presume the startup expenses you’re referring to (aside from GPUs) are the cases, racks, cooling, power, etc? Or does it also include the fixed costs (labor, rent, etc)?
Reserved Rights
The issuer reserves the following rights:
1. Make changes to this agreement, as long as it has the best interest of its shareholders in mind.
2. Create motions for changes to the business, contract, or strategy of the company.
Uhh…but you just said there’s voting rights? So shareholders get to vote “upon decisions that affect shareholders as a whole or changes to this agreement”...but then you reserve the right to change it regardless?
Or are you saying that we can vote on the changes, but only you have the ability to implement the change?
Votes would be for things that hurt the shareholders. For example, we withhold 15%. Would everybody have an issue and demand a vote if one day we decide for whatever reason to reduce that to 12%? Critical changes that potentially hurt any prices, dividends or anything that is not what the shareholder initially bought in and it negatively effects them, will have a vote.Got it, thanks for the clarification.
Dissolution
In the event that mining becomes only marginally profitable or a losing effort, or an act of god causes such, PHM reserves the right to close the business. Existing hardware will be sold, and remaining funds will be distributed back to all shareholders as a special dividend. The owners of PHM cannot be held personally liable for any losses incurred due to investments.
This is guaranteed to happen. You haven’t specified how you plan to expand your operation, so I can only assume you’ll mine on 50MH/s until your hashing power is drowned out by larger or more efficient operations.
Well, hoping between new coins and dumping at the right time is always a great way to make profit. This is one of the big things PHM will be doing to try and maximize profits for everybody. New shares will be released to further expand that 50mhash as well. How do you decide which coin to mine, or how to split between the various coins? Would it be something you’d decide on daily, weekly, or sporadically based on market conditions?
And yes, these are hard questions to answer since there are quite a few factors at play!
Final thoughts:
With all honesty, I like the idea. Building up a large scrypt mining operation can certainly generate an income, but this investment is still quite risky.
After going over everything, here are my final questions to you:
-- Who are you? You joined today and yet you’re already asking for $60,000 worth of Bitcoins. In my experience, rarely has any offering fitting this pattern NOT been a scam. I’m not saying you fall in this category, I’m just saying it’s a bit odd, that’s all. Trust is a HUGE factor here..or at least to established members (newbies throw money at everything and anything).
-- Proof of Mining? Where are you currently mining now where we can see the 2.4MH/s in action? What GPUs are you currently using?
-- Financials? Do you have any financial and network models where you show where you think the network is going to go (for Litecoin or the other alt-coins)? As a potential investor, I want to see you do your due diligence on hashing speeds and how our hardware will ultimately benefit us in the end.
-- Your Investment? What are you putting into the fund? Anything other than the already established 2.4MH/s?
Bottom line here is TRANSPARENCY. Give us detail..so much detail that if we printed out each word we could literally swim in pages. Investors want to see what you're doing with their money down to the smallest detail. If you can do that, while providing a reasonable investment opportunity and managing your fund correctly, then I can assure you money won't be a problem in the future.
Currently mining at WeMineLTC. I will provide pictures of the current setups when my partner is around to take them. As of this moment, the servers are down as we are experimenting different builds of operating systems. Our plans for the big setup are to essentially have everything setup on bootable usb drives, clone them and then can mass deploy them with ease. We are currently using Saphire 7950s in the main setup, and 6950s in a second rig we are experimenting with as well.
Honestly? No. Its really hard to predict where we think the network is going. We will be working with many networks. Whether its the most profitable ones to mine today, be it Feathercoin, BBQcoin, Litecoin etc or something new released in the future. We will have the power to jump onto new currencies and essentially have a nice dominating head to start. We cant really give a guideline as to exactly where we will be going with this and what we will be working on. What if we are mining coin X and suddenly coin Y becomes the most profitable thing? This is not something we can predict.
Our investment, both me and my partner are putting in a minimum 10BTC each, most likely more. That way we can secure some shares and hold in the company itself.
I hope all this clarified alot of the questions, issues and concerns.Very cool, thanks for the information and I’m glad we could hash through quite a bit of this!
On network difficulty, I certainly agree with you there. It’s one thing to pull together data and averages to try and predict where the Bitcoin network will go…but that becomes quite a bit more convoluted as you jump between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Feathercoin, etc, etc.
My advice on this would be to grab as much data on how Litecoin has been growing over the past 2 (maybe 3) months, take an average, and try to extrapolate that over the next 3 months. Add in the data on your operation and how you see yourself growing, and with that you’ll have an idea regarding revenue. It’s not perfect of course, but seeing sensible numbers on paper will certainly put minds at ease.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to under promise and over deliver. I look forward to seeing how this project develops.