How much traction has the mining pool gotten with the two 100% delegates you had in the top 101 for a while? What are the numbers there (costs and new users introduced)?
What are the reasons that this will scale more than linearly now that you have trippled the amount delegates?
My (critical) thinking is that miners are professional companies that are very specialized in mining and do not look into investing (in crypto projects) or using them. This would be different if we had many home miners still... If that is so then it is just subsidizing mining for nothing.
My overall take on marketing atm is that we shouldnt waste any ressources on it until 2.0 is out. If you think about it the 6 100% btsmining delegates that are in atm could afford a new developer that works half time in the US or two full time devs in Eastern Europe....
Good questions.. it's difficult to keep up with thing the way the forum is and with reports in Nullstreet.
The traction on the pool has been nearly the same if not lower since we got took over for a variety of reasons:
- The bonus that initially gained the pool popularity went down by over 80%
- Profitability remained the same due to pool needing updating to newer methods of mining, so other pools offered better payouts.
- We haven't promoted minebitshares because any miners we attract in our current state would just turn and burn and move on without a competitive value add.
So with all that comes the updates needed. The bonuses we have been paying out are far less than what used to be that drove the pool to 3 times the size it is today.. along with other factors I mentioned. We do have some good days, but not as consistently as any miner would like.
We had to abandon the current platform because it is dated and so had to rebuild a whole new platform for the pool. We got as far as configuring over 18 of the most profitable coins along with additional protocol support. I had enough to pay that far and then no further due to lack of funds. I actually got the worker to agree to hold off on the remaining balance due to our market cap being so bad so that I could make the BTS go further. Now we have several more features that require some custom programming work in order to make the pool production functional.
I actually have two different programming teams I can utilize...they just don't work for nearly free. I have my own group of programmers that do work related to typical serve operations, but that is a very different beast from crypto. I attempted earlier on to push them towards getting some of this work done but that didn't work out well.
Akado is right.. crypto space programmers who know what they are doing are not easy to find and the ones you do find are so busy, they are not interested unless you got a good chunk of money for them. I lost count of how many I interviewed. I thought it would be like other programmers initially, which you can find everywhere.. but not this variety.
Otherwise all the BTS has been converting to bitUSD everyday driving combining with the mining about $100 on average and $300 bitUSD on the high days. This is nothing compared to where I know we can take it with the dev plans. I have stated several times we can see $100k a day in volume in the final stages of operation.
Some of your assumptions on mining however are a bit off from what we do. They seem based on bitcoin mining only. We are currently only doing altcoins. Future plans were to include bitcoin as part of the pool but only if it is more profitable.
The target for us is GPU miners.. it's not a zero sum game for them as you said. There are GPU miners making money.. otherwise they wouldn't continue to do it.
I don't see as much of a future in the big rig mining operations with everything going on.. the GPU space however has a great deal of opportunity that is only going to continue to grow. Those that are only focused on bitcoin though wouldn't recognize it. Perhaps now with ETH launching there is a renewed interest. I made a mention elsewhere about us supporting ETH mining in the future. Mine ETH for bitUSD? Yes Please.
Just because we got voted in yesterday doesn't mean we suddenly have stockpiles of cash to payout to everyone. Note our market cap still makes what BTS we get terribly terribly weak. We pledged earlier on that we would put it towards increased bonus/payouts and towards dev so that we can get to a point where we no longer need the delegates.
If you look back you can see my view of delegates (at least in 1.0.. goes for workers in 2.0) is that they are a temporary vehicle only.. not something to be used in perpetuity. So as it stands now that we got more delegate support, I can boost payouts and now start to save up towards moving on in the development of the pool to be competitive and self sustaining. At that point you can expect an announcement from us about all that.
This is all very short lived however. As I recall, all delegates beyond 3% come 2.0 will have worker + witnesses.. however they will need to get revoted for as I understand. It would make sense for us to wind up the multiples we have and just push out the # we need to get the job done with one. DPOSHub is going to make that whole process much easier. I been saying this since the beginning. Either way, I remain committed to the project despite the heavy cost it has imposed on me personally because I know there is a pathway to turning it all around and know it can be a major contributor to bitshares dominating the crypto space as far as mining goes.
Anyhow.. hangout is coming up and I still have other work to do.. hope this managed to answer your questions... be happy to answer any others later today.