OK xhomerx10,
I see your point and have made some adjustments to my table to simulate a more realistic projection following a gradual drop in mining earnings with increasing mining difficulty over time. Thanks for highlighting it! I will entertain the idea and assume we have no plans of building bigger hashrates over time (even though we have plans to be Top 5 by next year), and other smaller miners don't fall off and quit from mining due to the increase in mining difficulty in the years that follow.
If this is still not "reliable" (which I think is a pointless term to use in this sort of comparison since all figures are speculative at best), by all means just use a lower figure of your choice, or just buy-hold and don't mine at all. Just remember that for the buy-hold column on the left, the later you buy and hold, the higher the price of bitcoin will be, and if someone were to buy bitcoin at the end of this year if or when 1 btc = $4,000 or $5,000, it would be less than 1 btc on the left column, but the mining column on the right remains the same.
You can view the revised table at the same page at
http://www.coinpurveyor.com/buy-hold-vs-mining-bitcoin/.
I have retained the same conservative estimate of 1 btc = $50,000 by 2024, instead of $500,000 or $1 million as some people would like to think. Again, feel free to use higher numbers here that seem more probable to you, but you will notice that just using 1 btc = $100,000 in 2024 now brings us back to the earlier end figures in my original table with constant returns yearly (which is why I think "reliable" is a pointless term and why my tables were just supposed to show the advantages and merits of mining over buy-hold and not how much dollars you can potentially make).
Now, let's go through your concerns one by one:
1. Our so-called "cloud" mining site allows members to opt out from the programme and reclaim their mining hardware by writing in officially. The individually-numbered mining hardware will then be unplugged and delivered to the member. You can't do this with a real cloud mining site like Genesis or Hashing24. Call it cloud if it suits you (or maybe calling it "vapour mining" to differentiate from the other usual cloud mining sites), but members who buy the Founder Pool
own their own hardware which they can reclaim at any time. To my knowledge, no one has ever done that in the 3 years since BCN started mining as it would be quite silly to do so, because no one has lost money mining with BCN since its inception in August 2014. As far as I know.
2. My site didn't mention or explain anything about margins, that's because the btc per year figures quoted are
net earnings to the members, after
all the overheads have been deducted. In the screenshot of my earnings which you have attached in your post, you can see that my total earnings to-date is about 0.98 btc (earned), and the net is about 0.57 btc (paid). The difference in between is the amount deducted for the overheads you're concerned about like electricity, maintenance, commissions, site staff salary (we have about 6 or 7 technicians on payroll if I am not mistaken), but above all else, INCLUDING...
3. ...repurchases set aside for future hardware upgrades. As I have mentioned in one of my earlier posts, since BCN started mining, they have upgraded from the AntMiner S3 to the S4, S5, S7 and currently S9, all without further capital reinjection from members. This arrangement is made possible because of the repurchases set aside. We always foresee the need to upgrade when the time comes, and it is compulsory for all members to set aside part of their earnings for this. No exemptions are made, because if some do and some don't, the whole pool will cease to be profitable prematurely. We personally know of individual miners who sneered at our programme and preferred mining on their own, only to come back months later and mine with us. The power of the repurchases and compulsory upgrades cannot be downplayed, and it is what makes BCN sustainable and one of the top mining pools today. To elaborate a little, our mining hardware is immediately upgraded the moment the existing one becomes obsolete, which are quickly sold off on the second hand market while they still hold some value to recoup some of the costs. We have an arrangement with the manufacturer where we are offered the first right of refusal for all hardware manufactured, before they are sold to the open market. Our hashrates are also guaranteed by the manufacturer themselves, who deploy their own staff to assist with the management of the pool. Our minimum hashrates are guaranteed, and any downtime or malfunction is handled by the manufacturer with their own resources to maintain that minimum hashrate. Also, it is these repurchases set aside that allow partial shares to be bought and accumulated over time, effectively keeping the "contract" perpetual even after the expiry of the first 1,000 days.
Some 200 of our members from around the world made a trip to Iceland to visit the mine a few weeks ago, and were given some of the older unsold AntMiner S5 miners to take home as souvenir.
Some of the discussion above may be found at:
http://www.coinpurveyor.com/benefits-of-joining-bitclub-network/ and
http://www.coinpurveyor.com/faq-bitcoin-mining-bcn/