Host your Witness or Miner with l0k1 - Seed Capital Sought
Are you looking for someone who knows what they are doing with crypto-mining and linux, who has experience with building and running both hardware and software for cryptocurrency mining, but who can offer a better price than cloud services can?
I have been working with Linux since Red Hat 5.1, I know my way around several different distributions, I know how to build from source, applying patches or compilation tweaks, I can build hardware from components, I know all the parts involved in a server farm, the switches, routers, UPS devices, racks, or even just more low tech things like cooling systems and the like.
Advantages of my location:
I am located in a part of the world where many of these costs are much lower. Rental prices are around 1/3 of elsewhere, electricity is quite cheap, and relatively reliable, but importantly also, the cost of internet connections here is very low.
Several people have already proposed to me that I set up and manage servers for them to run cryptocurrency miners, and even one idea involving just a web server. I know I can do it all at a cost that is not prohibitive, I can do most of the labor required myself, and I can pass that benefit of my experience on to you in a lower margin and total cost of ownership for you.
But I need startup funding, I need an initial location, and I need a number of people who want me to manage their systems for them. I have worked in the IT service business for much of the last 16 years, and I have a very acute interest and concern with issues of security, confidentiality, and quality of service.
What I need to get started:
To get started, I need somewhere around $1200 of capital to secure a location and network connections. I can source and procure equipment for the task, anything from a simple and basic thing like setting up Equihash-based zcash miners, or, if you have idle ASIC gear that you want to have re-tooled to run something other than bitcoin mining, I can do the research if you give me the specifications of the hardware you want me to set up and run.
The breakdown of costs goes something like this. To secure a lease on a suitable property to run this operation, I can either have some kind of assurance of ongoing income (i.e.: a job) or I can pay further in advance. 3 months sufficed on a previous occasion in this city. 1 month goes to a security deposit. I should be able to find a suitable location where I can both live and work, for between 150-250 euros, this having to deal with 4 different currencies does my head in! So, I guess being that EUR and USD are very close to parity these days - well. $168-280 USD I guess, per month. Multiply that by 4, and you get around 700-1100.
I can also probably even do some degree of customisation for you, especially if it involves scripting, for notifications, failovers, and the like. It is no problem for me to have 2 or 3 seperate providers linked into my location, with automatic failovers to ensure that uptime is optimal. The internet connectivity for one, at least, is only about $80 for 6 months unlimited 45Mbit. A secondary would be required, although the ISP that provides this, ran the connection at the cloud service support company I used to work for. We had one outage in 3 months. Of course a second connection is required. It would not be complex to set up a failover, in fact, apart from the fibre-to-ethernet adapters, I have a dual gigabit mini-pc that could easily run some control scripts that would automatically switch between the two if there was a connectivity problem.
Let me know what you are looking for, and if you can provide part of the start-up capital required to secure the location for the operation. You can post in the comments, or you can email me at [email protected]
Thank you for your interest, and I look forward to working with you.
We can't stop here! This is Whale country!
have you thought of ways to provide assurance? maybe a kickstarter page or something similar
what is 'assurance'?
a way to guarantee as much as possible any funds will be spent in the way you claim. for example direct payment to rental of apartment or whatever you need
This was exactly part of the reason why I never was able to get off the ground with what I was doing before. The person paid directly, way too high prices, for everything he helped me out with, and he spent more money than would have seen me in an apartment for 3 months, before I even had responses back from job applications.
I am more than happy to produce documentary evidence of how things are being applied, photos of receipts, the assembled hardware, running in configuration, direct ability to monitor them remotely.
I haven't the foggiest idea how to do what you are saying. My experience at entrepreneurship has not in the past ever had any investors involved. I am terrible at keeping books though I execute instructions faithfully and enthusiastically. I have always previously done all my own marketing, worked from the meagre funds I was able to apply, and because always it was never enough to get enough to make a living off...
I don't know what to do and what you talk about I find very intimidating. I am not a salesperson, or a hustler. I have very high personal standards of integrity, and I don't even trumpet them because humility is also a part of this. I see so many cases of people defrauding others, and some suspicious cases where I smell ripe fish, and I have been personally ripped off many times by this kind of bullshit.
Of course, the rent could be directly paid by the person who wants it done. I don't think I have specified how anything would be arranged, that is why I asked for comments.
So, in answer to that, of course. I go out, I find the property, I inspect it, ensure it is in a suitable location, maybe I check several out in a day (though most likely I am going to need a retainer to cover taxi fares, not expensive here, but still, a necessity), I then enquire with a few ISP's I could use, get certainty that at least two can provide connectivity to the chosen locations...
Whatever the requirements are. Investment money does not, in principle, change hands, this is a contract thing, and as I said, I am very big on faithfulness in these matters. I won and kept a lot of my technical support clients by being discrete and disinterested and confidential.
It also just occurs to me, that this escrow system could be used to provide such assurances. But I do need a bare minimum to be able to do the scouting work, research, phonecalls, and such.
Well, anyway, so this is all clear at least anyway. I just will reiterate that since I am new to this, I find this intimidating, very intimidating. I am more scared of not getting anyone to get it going, than of failing to handle their money properly.
It's totally scary, and if you don't have the hustler mindset, it's very hard to find the way to persuade people to open their wallets. Luckily you have smart people like @radioactivities and @faddat to give you advice along the way.
You just brought up an opportunity to help fundraise. Go do those activities you were talking about, write up the results, and post them to Steemit as updates. That way, you can show people that you're actively working on the problem, and hopefully pick up some post rewards to help bootstrap you further.
The more you communicate and show that you're actively working on the problem, the more willing people will be to support you.
I don't mean to be negative about this, but I have no resources to do even that right now. I can never understand I see people, they get 50, 100, 200 rewards on things, and I'm lucky if I get a total of 200 in a whole month. I am up against absolutely zero money right now. Faddat was very glib in saying that I should not be 'planning for poverty' when in fact, right now I literally have no cash, and I am going to have to pawn a much better computer than the laptop I am now using, just to be able to eat.
Thank you for your encouragement, but I am not optimistic here. Maybe people would vote for me more if I really was on the street, instead of trying to ward off this seeming inevitability so much. Just telling my stories, rambling on with my dreams. These are the things that people have paid me for most so far in all my posts, you can see this clearly in my retrospective post from a few days ago.
I'm not going to push myself with the tiny, small amount of resources that I can get from having to part with yet another of my possessions, and not to have more assurance that I am not going to wind up stuck on the street and with not having prepared myself to dress for the cold weather.
It seems to me that, all my supporters, with a few small exceptions, are all nearly as poor as me, and their vote power is never going to amount to enough basic income to even support me to try and start this. And even, maybe you don't realise, but it's partly simply because, if I had a slightly better living arrangement, I could run people's servers for them, sitting on shelves in my living room, or bedroom...
Maybe having been stuck on the street or not far off it, for 3 years, has destroyed my ambition.
Try to get food for free. Use food bank if you have it where you are. Steal food (from the conglomerate chain stores not the everyday folks). Yeah shitbag advice maybe, but if you are close to starving you need money for shit you can't obtain via any alternative means.
Thankfully, I have Steem, and people chipped in some 35SD to help me out. I was not worried about food, just more the inconvenience of having to change my living situation involuntarily. I am now, after some good articles, about to pay my rent ahead by 6 days, giving me time to get more good stuff going.
In any case, food is very cheap here, see my post about my usual eggs-and-veggies dish that I make. More than 5 euros a day spent on food is fancy food in Bulgaria.
That reminds me, the nearby supermarket finally just rolled out their fruit and veg stall. I'm looking forward to being able to easily get my hands on fresh fruit and veg, the nearest location to buy them before this was about 1.5km away, now it's next door :)
glad to hear you're on a come up
Yeah you're not getting it.
Totally not getting it. Faddat isn't glibly saying jack shit. Faddat has lived through just as bad or worse, and faddat's telling you not to plan for poverty, because if you do, that is all you will ever experience. I know you are broke, maybe hungry, and that shit is all fucked up. This happens. It is unplesant.
What you need to do is create a path that is different than the one that you are on for yourself. I do not know what that path is yet. You should choose that path based on what you think will make you happiest. I don't think that intermittent homelessness will make you happiest, so I am advising against it.
Running servers out of your home is fine, but not a viable long-term option really, since you will be using a residential internet connection and will likely be limited to a single public IP address. So what I am strongly advising you to do is come up with a long-term game plan, and then begin executing its steps-- and adjusting it-- in a serial fashion. What I think it is best you remember is that the most important thing is to simply never, ever give up.
Never, fuck that shit. Of course, living on the street could sap your ambition. But fuck that. Let living on the street be the thing you came back from. and this isn't about worshiping money or wealth or "trying to get rich" or "selling out" its about maximizing your own personal happiness.
We're all rooting for you.
Life will keep smacking you down. It just does that, I don't know why, but it does. The thing to keep in mind is that nothing is over till you stop getting back up.
Well, the proposal as it stands covers my housing situation, it lets me start with some small jobs, I mean, I really have not done even managing one rack full of servers, let alone a server farm. You can't just jump in the deep end. I am adventurous but I am also a little conservative about how far I can push myself and I am usually pretty good at assessing that.
Also, I can get one IP address for every cable that comes into my place. I think I'll actually have the problem of how to work the inbound side... Do I divide up the addresses per connection, do I run a main one and a lesser one that does back-up duty.
I look at it this way. Someone helps me get into an apartment. I run a server or two for them, I set up fairly high-grade availability and reliability things, they pay for their actual server box, maybe UPS, and I cover the network infrastructure side. I take 10% of their miner's yields. I would be depending on them having done their calculations and some idea of when to expect they will cover their costs.
In the meantime, I can take on a part-time job. After working two jobs that are pretty much paid a salary rather than hourly rate, I don't see why I need to work a 40 hour week, when according to my last job and others I have seen, I need about 600BGN/month to cover my bills, with a little left over, and I can start at 1200/month for a 40 hour work week, at absolute entry level. I mean, I was working with colleagues who had far less experience at tech support than me, and they were being paid this much.
Besides all this, I really need to prove I can do it on a small scale before people have that most basic assurance of 'Have you done this before?'.
I know I need to push myself with things, but I also know that my existing record of rewarded posts here has been mostly with things that I can do no less capably living on the street with no rent or utilities costs. I was just hoping that I could live in a house, and do something more interesting than just writing. I like building computers, software, running, setting up scripts and events and sensors. I am just not experienced enough for anyone to take me seriously about setting up a whole server farm. I want to start with a small number of servers, and then, if it is doing well, I can point people at it and say 'Well I got these all running pretty good'...
Hi , I would like to ask you one thing about mining. I do not have any experience in this field so be patient with me please.
All I know about mining of BTC and LTC is that profitability is very problematic . I did try to calculate profitability per month (from public calculators) and it seems that for my is not an option. Even if profitability is 3-4 times higher I wouldn't be interested. What I am interested in is steem mining. I know there is some guides how to mine steem but frankly, I do not understand that at all. Could you please explain where is the difference between mining of steem and bitcoin. Is there any way how to calculate profitability. Lets say I have 1200$ for start. What amount of steem I can get per month. Is it even possible to predict this earnings?
thank you.
I have not done the math on Steem mining. For the reason that I have not got the opportunity until I have regular income, to even consider it. Building and running a node, however, does not require me to be able to answer these questions. I suppose I should know, roughly speaking... I will have to look into it.
You know, there is a bazillion and one things you can mine, one has to have a motivation to research them. The only cryptocurrency that interests me is the zcash, because it does not require, and gives no advantage, to either GPU or ASIC hardware, in as much as it really is bound to memory bandwidth, which makes it a very good candidate for starting out in mining. Supposedly Litecoin was going to eliminate the ASIC advantage, and that never eventuated... In fact, the promise of truly memory hard mining has always been a thing.
But Steem is not just about mining. Simply, reliably, and accurately, with a minimum of downtime, relaying transactions and storing the blockchain reliably, so called 'Witness' nodes, that are not mining, just verifying and storing, can be profitable too, if your uptime is good, and you build a network of supporters who vote your node up. I figure, a selling point on a witness could even be geography, since the more distributed the big Witness nodes are, the better for everyone, right?
@l0ki,
Hrm. You should maybe reconsider your stance on zcash, then. AFAIK there are two cloud mining concerns who both have developed GPU mining code that puts them well ahead of the CPU-based competition. That said, I am also interested in zcash.
However I think that it's going to be quite the battle to "get in" in the initial mining pool. Worth a shot anyway, though.
I have heard this scuttlebutt too, some months back. But, Code or it Never Happened. Right?
The figures that I have seen from these tricksters is highly dubious also. I think I saw one concrete example, and it pretty much confirmed: Yes, GPUs often have faster RAM than CPUs. BFD. But the claimed performance improvements have not been substantiated by any of these people.
I would be happy to be corrected about this, but I have a friend who has been following Dash and zCash very closely, and I am sure that if he'd seen anything substantial he would have told me about it, although he has been quite incommunicado this last month or so.
It's not really a code or it never happened situation: Look at STEEM: There's no code, but certainly folks are gpu mining.
How does anyone substantiate this claim? I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying, if it's true, why is there no code, because anyone can take photos of rigs bristling with video cards, and showing figures, that could just as easily be generated by a cluster of cpu miners and maybe they wrote some syncing program that lets them present what looks like more than a CPU miner, when in fact it's just a pair of 16 core xeons, with some cheap commodity hardware running the sync stuff that is required with Witnesses.
In my opinion this is a more likely situation, than someone porting the code to OpenCL, yet not wanting to share it? Really, why do you trust these wild claims?
For mining to work out well, what you're going to want is a GPU miner. But only a couple of people have them. I'm willing to do research work towards one, but it's totally not a sure thing, so I'd be asking cash upfront, as opposed to a bounty. My intended implementation would be in golang, based loosely on Sia's "gominer". I've done enough research to show that it's possible, not enough to know the exact timeframe or full scope of the challenges.
Mining steem the plain old fashioned way on a fairly powerful bare metal server gets me about $.50/day.... basically just enough to show that yes, a GPU miner would be needed.
steemd.com/@kloudery
Well, the thing I am offering is not the knowledge about the technical details, but I can build, configure, and so on, I can do it with a low rental cost, and a very low connectivity cost.
People have advised users to post comment about Steem functionality in Github. Maybe there is also somewhere appropriate to link to your post. Aslo check out cryptocurrency forums on Reddit to cross post. I will Tweet this.
See, the same old... Where to market it, how to pitch it... I haven't the foggiest idea. This was the best, most directly applicable project that I could present, and I tried to be as slick and markety as I could. Maybe it will still help me, because maybe people didn't realise that I am an experienced systems integrator, administrator and support worker.
Apart from big, speculative software development projects, and a scientific research project, this is about as simple, direct and concrete as I have any idea of at the moment. I don't have the lizard-skin to deal with often very fraught and nasty social networks, and I read things sometimes that make me quite sickened when I hear about it. And as I said, right now I am right up against it without even a place where I can actually do any kind of technical work that I am capable of doing. Dealing with people is not my thing.
In fact, I sorta thought, this was part of the reason, underlying almost everything else, apart perhaps from the integral corporate financial infrastructure, that Steem was for. To be honest, I don't want to venture too far outside this place, it's a place I feel safe.
@l0k1, this is a great start! It sounds like you're well positioned to support a new mining service.
I don't have the means to invest right now, but maybe I can help you structure your pitch a little.
Feedback
The first thing that jumps out at me is how you'll be spending the seed capital and why you need that much. Maybe show a breakdown of how you'll spend those funds and what exactly you'll have available to you after the investment.
Also, if I were an investor, I'd want to know what your cost structure is, how much you'll be charging for your services (and what value your customers will get out of it), and how many customers you would need to make it sustainable and profitable.
Additionally, what's the value proposition for someone interested in helping you with funding your project? @radioactivities mentioned Kickstarter, and while that might not be the right venue, there's a lot to learn from successful kickstarters.
For example, you may want to promise explicit (clearly defined) services, at a reduced price, in exchange for the risk your backers are taking on by supporting you without the service in place. Maybe something like, "For every $50 you donate, you'll get 3 months of XYZ service/hosting."
There's still a lot to think through, and even though you don't have to show all your work, you want to show that you have thought it through, and you're prepared to go into detail if anyone's interested.
Pitching
Even though it's a more rigid structure than you need, I find that looking at pitch decks is helpful for understanding what a potential investor might be looking for. I imagine that each slide of a pitch deck is like a pillar of your business, when you look at it from the top down, it's a single slide, but if you look at it from an angle, you see that there's a whole lot of depth to it. Hope that makes sense.
Here are a couple pitch deck resources that you might find helpful. The first is from Guy Kawasaki, early Apple evangelist and long-time tech investor. The second isn't from anyone particularly important, but I think it's good structure.
Every project has a different story to tell, so don't get too bogged down in the structure. But if you can speak to those topics persuasively, intelligently, and concisely, you'll have to world in the palm of your hand.
I'm sure you just want to be done with it and for people to support your awesome vision, but it takes lots of consideration, communication, and iteration to get funding. I hope you keep at it, and I wish you the best of luck!
Wow, really, $1200 seems like a lot to get the infrastructure of real estate and connectivity in place? Oh, maybe I need to clarify that. That covers 3 months rental. I have to pay in advance because I have no formal employment contract as assurance.
I don't actually want 'donations' at all, I want some kind of expectation of performance and share of yields. I think I said 10%? or maybe that was in my previous idea.
Being that right now, I have one meal left in the fridge, my rent is not paid up after 1 October, I am getting jitters from not having any cigarettes, and so on, I just want to say that >_< arggh!!
No he is saying your ask is too small.
I have never run more than one or two servers at a time before. Biggest switch/router scenarios I've dealt with had like 16 ports, I set up an office with 7 workstations and a file server. I am asking small because I know I can do it, because I have done it. Between running 10-20 miner boxes, continuing to write for Steem, and getting a part time job, I stay off the street, and I get to prove myself.
I have put myself into situations in the past where I was reaching too far beyond my capabilities, and I ended up worse off than before. Baby steps, one thing at a time. How am I going to give anyone assurance for big things worth tens of thousands, when I can't even say 'Well, I managed a few thousand worth of gear before'?