Now a new problem, how to run 8600W of Avalons... thank goodness its winter!
Long, long time ago I used 6000W electric heater to successfully heat 3-room apartment in continental climate. Good luck with cooling all that equipment.
Easy, crack a window
I have also considered developing such a service, had a very similar idea like yours, but there are two problems I don't know how to solve:
1) block finding times can oscillate for serious amount of minutes, so there can not be fixed ending time of auction, feature people like and may be essential for successful auction
2) some bids may fail to be included in the current block because:
a) it depends on which nodes broadcasted individual transaction (bid),
b) it is discretionary to the mining pool which finds the block if it will include any individual transaction or not, especially the ones close to the actual block finding time.
If you have any ideas how to solve these two issues I would very much like to hear them.
1) block finding times can oscillate for serious amount of minutes, so there can not be fixed ending time of auction, feature people like and may be essential for successful auction
2) some bids may fail to be included in the current block because:
a) it depends on which nodes broadcasted individual transaction (bid),
b) it is discretionary to the mining pool which finds the block if it will include any individual transaction or not, especially the ones close to the actual block finding time.
If you have any ideas how to solve these two issues I would very much like to hear them.
I personally like the ambiguity that this system would introduce. A good auction system would produce a winning bid as close to "true market value" as possible and IMO sniping undermines that goal. This "blockchain" system would have a lot of unknowns that would be hard to game and thus encourage people to place their "max bid" well before the end of the auction.
Also, in many auctions there is no "end time". The auction continues until nobody is willing to beat the highest bid (aka "going once going twice SOLD!!!"). Perhaps another option would be to end the auction after X blocks have passed since the last highest bid?