Since we are doing bulk ordering, maybe handy to also offer the opportunity for community members to add their own G1-mini to the order? I would love to order one for private mining and as way to improve security.
One connection of mine has a good storage space with reasonable electricity prices in Germany near NL border, I will ask if he is interested. This location is for professional mining so it could host a large amount of machines both for the Grin fund as well as for private use.
One sceptical note, how do we make sure the machines are actually delivered, or are there sufficient community members who can vet for IPOLLO, I only know Gary so far who has experience dealing with them?
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I’m not sure I’m in favor of funding a mining operation out of the Grin fund; if anything goes wrong (and a lot could go wrong) it would hurt the credibility of the entire project.
I’d much rather we organize a capital pool directly from members, where each will be entitled to a portion of the revenue in proportion to his contribution, making this a for-profit co-operation, but still leaving more graph power and grins in the hands of the real community. The person in-charge of the actual operation (a very trusted individual) would be entitled to some sort of fee.
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Note that we’re already doing something like that. We’re renting a 1080Ti equipped cloud server to ensure proper progress of testnet for several months, at a cost of $100-$150 per month.
Of course, mining on mainnet is a little different, and I don’t think we should spend a large fraction of the Fund on this. But a smaller fraction should be open to discussion.
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I would be willing to donate the electricity cost of a mini and have 100% of rewards go to the mining fund. I can stomach that out of pocket cost as the expense for 100W is quite small. I cannot stomach the out of pocket cost of buying expensive hardware and still donate all of the rewards to the grin fund as I do not have that kind of excess income.
I consider it a sound capital investment of the fund and a strong sign for support of the longevity of grin. I cant actually think of any major failure options other than ipollo not delivering the machines or recipients going M.I.A., the latter of which would be unfortunate but not the end of the world.
I forgot to upload the two images of the english descriptions of the miners provided to me by ipollo
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I love the idea of a grin mining pool funding the grin fund. It could be a huge positive attribute for the project. Future funding secured!
I see there is concern that it could fail. We would obviously need to QC the product before shipping a big order and that should resolve this concern.
The potential reward is massive compared to the risk if we properly vet and QC. This doesn’t get done with private money because investors want their returns, and we’ve had huge investment donations that can essentially now compound while solving security, and increase network strength. Investors can pad the buy order and receive a percent if that is their cup of tea.
No one is talking about what this would mean for the project in terms of future adoption, and strengthening the GRIN project.
Never the less. It is an exciting proposition imo. Pull this off and grin is top 10 coin
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Dont everyone jump forward to volunteer to participate as a recipient/custodian of one of these bad boys 
Still need feedback and help with logistics!
UPDATE
It appears as if ipollo will sell out of their first batch of miners before this proposal will be in a condition that justifies consideration for funding by the grin council. This is totally ok, in fact it is a great sign! There is plenty of time to make this idea come to life.
WHAT NOW?
The offer to the community still stands. If you would like to order a G1 or G1 mini from the community quote please let us know ASAP and have your grin or USDT ready for depositing into ipollo wallets. Full disclosure- This price agreement only covers the cost of the miner. The transportation logistics will have to be taken care of by individual buyers, but ipollo can recommend logistic companies.
Edit
See this thread below
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I really like your idea!
I know you mentioned resurrecting the only open-sourced grin mining pool, I am not an expert but I think if we want to improve the network security the funded miners would have to mine solo or at least in small pools.
I’m curious if there exists some formal and trustless way to prove of not being part of a pool or being part of the pool of at most N participants.
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To follow up this idea:
Now that more G1 minis are for sale: What if the community council purchases a batch of G1 minis( 60x) which are split 6x ways between each CC member. That way we are not bootstrapping random community miners/ or relying on a single entity to manage them in a mining facility. Instead, we’d be allocating them to people who are already trusted to control Grin dev funds. It also mitigates centralization risk if miners are going to 6x different people, in different locations/ countries.
-Each CC member would be responsible for maintaining the G1 minis they were allocated.
-All G1 mini’s would be pointed at a pool the community selected and all mining rewards would be sent to a new CC Grin wallet( i.e a New Community $grin fund)
-Each CC member could request to be reimbursed each month from the $grin fund for their power cost if they elect to. However, there would be no financial incentive in it for CC members.
Additional Pros:
-This would give us the ability to grant lots of smaller $grin funding requests, making rewards more aligned with Grin’s success( Many in the community seem to have an issue with contributors being paid in $btc and not $grin). It’s also a good way to dollar cost average a portion of funds into $grin and supports the network/ eco sysetm at the same time.
Additional considerations:
-CC members might be in locations where electricity costs are high and mining might become a cash bleeder
-Instead of pointing them to a pool, solo mining is another option.
-G1 minis are quite loud, so might not be suitable for CC members to be running 10x from home
-Other trusted community members could be considered to fill the role of CC members who can’t participate in this. eg @johndavies24 who created this thread.
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This would enable us to hold much more community ceremonies for things such as best memes, social collaboration, and so on.
I totally agree with this.
I suggest to rent hashrate on cloud (maybe nicehash) instead of buying physical miners due to some reasons:
- Current mining machines/GPU price is too high
- Dedicated time to troubleshoot issues (network/cooling/electric…)
- What if machines die suddenly? and recycling the hardwares when it’s outdated…
- And easier to consolidate P&L in finance quarterly/yearly.
I used to have just 5 mining rigs in 2017 and it really took time in case of issue.
I have a couple of concerns around the idea:
- It takes quite some time to both setup and maintain a rig of 6 ASICs - the CC members did not sign up for these time costs imo (though they could dedinitely do that if they want)
- Please correct me if the math is wrong. The network graphrate is 7k GPs. If we add 80 GPs from 60 g1 minis, that’s barely above 1% in the current network state and probably less once the batches are sold.
Any profit that would be made from these miners (block rewards) would go directly from the pockets of CC, so imo they should definitely be covered for electricity costs.
I’m not against the idea, but it seems to introduce a lot of logistic unknowns and little security for the network. The way I understand it is that the only way to increase the CC fund holding through this is if we assume the price will eventually rise, which is similar to buying Grin with the current holdings and hodling it, except that here we provide also a bit of security to the network from trusted members which is better - it’s unfortunately a very small fraction which won’t significantly increase the network security unless the mining operation in CC would scale way beyond 60 g1 minis.
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A CC member can just disappear with all the G1’s he gets for free so i would not do that. I get that we would be getting money but imo it’s not worth the risk. I realize that maybe we could trust CC members but i don’t like the idea of having to do that (note that now (or in the near future) we are trusting the majority of CC members with the funds but here we would need to trust each individual)
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I don’t have a G1 mini, but in general, ASICs are much easier to manage than GPU rigs. They are like plug-in-play devices once set up. I think 2 or 3 CC members are already running G1 minis and I also have experience running mining hardware, so wouldn’t necessarily be a huge time cost setting up.
I wasn’t really thinking of this as a way to decentralize the network. But it’s still a net positive, that supports the network.
As mentioned CC members would beable to claim back elec costs.
I agree, it does introduce logistic unknowns, especially if CC members lose interest and leave the project.
If the CC did want to hold a small portion of the BTC fund in $Grin ( which is not even something that’s been discussed yet, however, I believe it’s something that the majority of the community would support) then you could argue there’s less risk in mining Grin vs buying Grin on market today( risk in terms of capital loss). If we started mining Grin then we don’t necessarily need the price to rise to increase CC fund holdings, in fact, we’d prefer it to slowly trend down- Miners who make the most profit are the ones who mine through a bear market, and collect all the lower diff rewards. So there would be a possibility to increase CC fund holdings even if the price was only a few cents. Of course, we’d want the price to eventually rise, however, if price doesn’t eventually rise then Grin is a dead project anyway…
Mining grin would be quite a different strategy to buying on market. For example, If we bought on market today at eg 0.23USD, then we’d want the price of Grin to immediately rise, however, all Grin’s price has ever done is trend down, so in eg12 months time price could be $0.05-10 and we could be down circa -75%. However, if we started mining grin today and the price keeps trending down to those same levels, the network diff is going to drop off and we’re going to end up with a larger net $grin position vs if we bought on market today( although still down in USD terms), however, The G1 minis could potentially be mining for years to come, so the net $grin position could end up significantly larger vs buying grin on market today. Owning the G1’s also means we have a source of income as opposed to only having a dwindling fund.
Ironically, the biggest capital risk to purchasing the G1’s could be Grin’s price going up in the short term. Although that would lead to a faster ROI, it would have been a bad strategy vs buying Grin on market today/ or holding BTC.
At the end of the day, mining on the G1 minis would be a good way to dollar cost average some funds into $grin, would be a net positive for the network, gives us a source of $grin income so we can fund people in $grin, and sets a good precedent that we’re prepared to support our own ecosystem. It’s way cooler than just buying some $grin.
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I currently work on building a 40KW (or more) solar panel warehouse on my farm land to set up a mining farm. Will such project be eligible ?
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