As discussed in the Community Council meeting of 20th of July, the Community Council is planning to buy some G1 Mini miners and possibly a G1 miner from NHash.
The reason we want to buy miners are the following:
We want to have a continuous income of Grin to use for community relate activities such as contests, bounties, Funding Requests. Regarding using grin for funding request, this is something we will separately discuss during next meeting Community Council meeting and nothing is official yet, but some of us think it might be good to start using Grin for Funding request payments (e.g. 10% of the total payment requested).
If this would be the case, we need a larger inflow of Grin meaning, a larger number of miners.
We want to contribute to the security of Grin and use the miners to mine via community pools such as https://www.grinmint.com/ to balance the larger numbers of miners on bigger pools.
We are aware that our hash power would only be a modest contribution to this goal, but together, many small contributions do make a difference
These are the two options that we need YOUR OPINION on by LIKING
12 G1 mini’s + 1 G1, total of 66 chips, equaling 70.02 G/s
-estimate cost, around 50.000$ if bought without discount
12 G1 minis (total of 12 chips, equaling 15.6 G/s
-estimate cost, around 11 thousand dollar)
-The reason we do not by more G1 Mini’s but a G1 is because managing them would be to much administrative burden on Community Council.
We would like to know your opinion by voting/liking the two options, which will be posted below in separate response which you can like.
Please take into consideration that if we are going to use Grin in Funding Requests, option 1) would be best since we would need a lot of Grin. If you funding request should not be partly paid in Grin, option 2) would be enough to provide sufficient Grin income to organize community activities.
12 G1 mini’s + 1 G1, total of 66 chips, equaling 70.02 G/s
-estimate cost, around 50.000$ if bought without discount
-needed if we want to pay Funding Request for example 10% in Grin.
12 G1 minis (total of 12 chips, equaling 15.6 G/s
-estimate cost, around 11 thousand dollar if bought without discount
-sufficient inflow of Grin for community activities, but not for funding Requests
Lol, let me just calculate that for fun
12*36 +1 * 1.3 = 433 G/s
-estimate cost around 324.540$, I think that might set the community fund back a bit to much
I wonder about some practical aspects, such as the power supply issues with the G1 minis that some people had and where the miners are running. The initial idea was that council members would run them at home and I wonder if everyone has the means to put them in an extra room for example, since I think the thing can be noisy.
Would it be an option to house them at a hosting company between their servers? This way, it would not be an issue to run them 24/7 and the council could pay a monthly housing and electricity bill.
As someone who has been mining cryptocurrencies for a long time, I would like to share my experience.
Mining is an unpredictable thing. Because today the ROI period of a mining device may seem 1 year. However, this situation can change 10 times in just 2 months.
Because the market price is volatile, as the price increases, the number of devices increases and the share(coin quantity) decreases. After the number of devices increases, if the price drops, the earnings drop drastically. So mining is never unpredictable.
Another issue is new devices. Today G1 minis produce 1.2h/s, G1s 36h/s. However, if different devices producing 100-150h/s emerge after a few years, the gains of the old devices will decrease seriously.
As I said, mining is never predictable and very risky.
So what should be done?
The first rule in mining is cheap electricity. Therefore, mining in European countries is risky because electricity is expensive.
But electricity is cheap in China and can be do there. In addition, electricity is almost free in small, less well-known countries such as Abkhazia.
It can be do in such places.
Because even if the above risks exist, since electricity will be cheap, the risks will decrease somewhat and profits will increase.
Secondly, the budget should not be exceeded too much. Mining creates ambition on people. A miner constantly desires more hash power. So if a lot of investment is made in mining and the above risk factors start to work, then all is wasted. So, it should be done with a reasonable budget.
After all this advice, I can recommend option 1. Because I think the $50,000 budget is reasonable for the community. It will also provide reasonable strength within the grinmint pool.
I think the 2nd option is insufficient for grinmint and earnings due to its low hash power.
Thank you for your advice @grn and @minexpert. We will consider these aspects.
We already inventorised among the Community Council members, and we can manage around 10-12 G1 Mini’s. In addition we know some options for housing the G1 miner.
That is a bit more challenging, we will look if the G1 could be run in country with lower electricity prices. With the G1 Mini’s we will just accept the electricity prices for each Community Council member since most of us can house some at our homes.
The power supplies have been upgraded in the new design as well as the thermals (biger housing, better heat-fin). Also we have some experience with replacement power supplies since some of us already had some G1 Mini’s
The electricity costs we still have to discuss internally, most likely we will end up having some or all costs compensated.
The ROI is hard to estimate, it will depend on
if we can get a normal batch discount
if we can get extra discount in the form of NHash sponsoring us (good for their reputation and sales)
all the unpredictable factors that come with mining, e.g. new miners hitting the market, price of Grin etc. This last factor is huge, so I think no one can truly make a good estimate on the ROI of miners, just a well educated guess.
If we get a discount, my educated guess is that we will at least have an ROI of 1. For the G1, if we go for that option, we have a few options and are also taking electricity costs in consideration.
The investment is however not made with the aim to have profit, but with the aim to have a continuous flow of Grin. Otherwise it would also not be in line with our own spending guidelines:
Inappropriate use of Funds
4) Investing money in physical or digital assets.
Thanks, i was missing that part. I’m in favor of full compensation for electricity costs. The only problem i have with option 1 is what happens if G1 turns out to be a scam or just worse than advertised (it’s very expensive for a miner). I’m not sure but i think nobody here has a G1 right?
Why was this rule set?
Why should buying mining hardware be in line with that rule?
For me that is not easy to understand. For me it is important, if there are rules, to understand them, from there intention, there practice and from their results.
I think the key word for understanding this rules was mentioned by you intention.
These rules were set by our-self and are based on the spending guidelines of the original council. We agree with these rules.
The way that we intended these rules to be interpreted is that we should not use community funds for speculative investments with the goal/intention of gaining profit. In the case of the miners, we do not have the intention to generate profit, although it might very well be that it will be profitable. The Grin earned is not meant to be horded or sold, but to be used to fund community activities bounties and possibly even Funding Requests in the near future.
Hence the miners are just a ways to mean - a way to ensure we have a constant inflow of Grin so we do not need to exchange Bitcoin for Grin all the time and are also stimulated to distribute Grin within the community through various activities, bounties etc.
The shipment did arrive and once we finished with our tests I will write another article like I did with the “iPollo” batch where I ordered only G1-minis here:
Don’t we want to figure out the logistics first? Where are those miners being housed? Who will control the wallet(s)? How will we ensure transparency and accountability?
Sorry if this is already documented somewhere else.
We have it mostly figure out, but we still have to work out some details and make a formal report.
The G1 Mini’s can all ore nearly all be housed by Grin Community Council members (10-12 or so). We think it might be easier to keep it to council members since we already have a group to discuss such things and are all trusted (at least I hope we are).
The G1 is a story on its own, based on our internal discussions, I think we have at least two options for hosting the G1.
Transparency and accountability should still be worked on although it is not to hard to monitor since all miners will mine on Grinmint and should have the same hash rate (max 10% error per unit) since NHash performed some additional tests of the hardware.
The same thing goes for electricity, I think we all agree there should be full compensation for the electricity cost, I think all of us find it acceptable to get paid in Grin. But also here we have to formalize things, e.g. use a moving average, or quarterly average or so to determine the price we get paid in Grin. Suggestions on how to manage this best are more than welcome.
