Greetings,

About a month ago I introduced myself at the Newbies-board in this topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=264550. Here I told about a new mining-contract provider which Kevin Kannegieter and I, Bjorn de Graaf, are currently setting up.
In the meanwhile we’ve made a lot of progress and ‘MercuryBTC’ is now almost ready to go officially live. We’ve already soft-launched our website www.mercurybtc.com about two weeks ago and gathered some feedback in the Dutch Bitcoin community. However, we’re also wondering what you, the international community, think about our mining-contracts and our website. We will implement any useful feedback given here at our website and/or in our contracts these next days before we’ll go official.

About MercuryBTC, the mining-contract provider.

MercuryBTC has come to existence to provide an alternative to the few official mining-contract providers available. We want to distinguish ourselves from our competitors by offering cost-effective contracts and doing this in a transparent and innovative way.
Some examples of our unique benefits and options are:

• No maintenance fees; only a pool fee of 1% which goes directly to Bitminter.
• Free Namecoin; if you provide us with a namecoin-address, you’ll earn namecoins too on top of your Bitcoin earnings.
• Optional donations; You can set a chosen percentage of your earnings to be transferred to a cause of your choice automatically each payment. Of course this is entirely voluntary.
• Set your own reinvestment percentage; you can choose your own reinvestment percentage and change this at any time during the contract or you can choose to disable this entirely.

Of course you’ll get the regular benefits from mining-contracts too:

• One time only, all inclusive price; all costs (hardware, power, infrastructure, cooling etc.) and taxes (VAT) are included in the contract price.
• Additional earnings from transaction fees; next to a share of the regular block rewards (the actual mining) you’ll get a share of earnings from transaction fees on top of that.

Prices for 1 year contracts (VAT included):

• 1 gigahash: $48.00 per gigahash; total $48.00 (~€35.86)
• 5 gigahash: $47.20 per gigahash; total: $236.00 (~€176.30)
• 15 gigahash: $46.40 per gigahash; total $696.00 (~€519.60)
• 30 gigahash: $45.60 per gigahash; total $1368.00 (~€1021.95)

Payments in Bitcoin will be possible too, these will be handled by Bitpay.
Orders for more than 30 gigahashes are also an option, you can contact us directly for this.

We’ve ordered our miners, 28nm ASICs, from KnCMiner and we’ve done this early. Our first batch will be send to us on the first day of shipping, before the end of September. This way we can assure an early start when mining is most profitable. Unlike other manufacturers in the past, KnCMiner is completely on schedule and there are no delays expected. In fact we’ve visited them past week in Stockholm and we can ensure that the miners are almost finished. We’ll hope to present some pictures we've made of the almost completed miners in the next few days when we’ll go officially live.

The miners will be hosted in a room specifically equipped to host Bitcoin miners. To ensure that we stay online we’ve took various precautions including multiple backup internet connections and a standby diesel generator. In our business model we don’t impose maintenance fees on your hashing power, instead we allocate a reserved part of hashing power of the miners to fund our maintenance costs and later expansion. So you can be sure that we are highly motivated to keep the miners running.

Soft Launch

At the moment we are still in a soft-launch phase. So this isn’t the official announcement yet, but a request for feedback on our model, website and contracts. Purchases and payments aren’t enabled yet too.

Some aspects which will be completed before we’ll go official:
* Terms and conditions; although the general model is clear, we’re currently looking at how to exactly verbalize all the details and guarantees in a clear and transparent manner.
* Pictures; at some pages there will be some pictures added.

Look around on our website www.mercurybtc.com and let us know what you think.
For example: What is the general impression? What do you think about our prices? Can you find all the information you’re looking for? Do you have any general tips or suggestions for us?

If you have any general questions about MercuryBTC, don’t hesitate and ask them here. We’re looking forward to your feedback and posts.

with kind regards,

Bjorn de Graaf
MercuryBTC
www.mercurybtc.com