Quote from: rastiks on May 01, 2018, 05:14:58 PM

I actually talked about BBP to some friends that were interested in mining it. I did a calculation according to my data for them - the fact that they would need to buy BBP for 1000 USD in order to be able to mine with the daily profit of ~8 USD minus electricity & HW costs discouraged all of them. Part of them couldn't even afford that, another part said that it would be too risky for them (given the market cap) :-(

I was thinking about a way how we could make mining less easy for big whales, where (I'm guessing) a single person controls large amount of some spare datacenter servers. I like the idea of writing letters to orphans and having this manual work needed in order to get mining rewards, but it brings challenges for non-native English speakers. But if there were also some other ways of supporting orphans, so that people could actually choose from multiple of them an get some points for that that would count in the reward formula, it could help the "average" miners.

Also, it seems that the big whales still use temporary servers (e.g. a server that is mining for few hours and then vanishes). As we saw when we run out of Rosetta tasks, it brings challenges to BOINC infrastructure, so perhaps we could penalize miners with many cancelled/unfinished tasks or with servers with "small age"?

I'll tell you exactly what I did to get 200k RAC. I went out and bought 26 refurbished servers from ebay for about $200 a piece all in when you count making the cable, the switches and the time involved (you can buy them off ebay for about 160-180 delivered depending on RAM). Here is the link to the actual server I bought https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Proliant-DL380-G6-Server-Dual-Xeon-X5650-Hex-Core-2-66GHz-16GB-2x-146GB-RPS/191708994893?_trkparms=aid%3D111001%26algo%3DREC.SEED%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D51376%26meid%3D5eab104b656844b2a20211b7304e811e%26pid%3D100675%26rk%3D2%26rkt%3D15%26sd%3D132527129798%26itm%3D191708994893&_trksid=p2481888.c100675.m4236&_trkparms=pageci%3Ad1adda33-4d64-11e8-8af1-74dbd180dc97%7Cparentrq%3A1cbe01bd1630a9c510e52233ffff0b04%7Ciid%3A1

They include Windows Server Evaluation in the install, which I left on for the sake of time. You can install Ubuntu with a few more minutes. They will take $175.05 to agree to a purchase. Right now at 100% staking requirement I get just under 30,000 bbp which is approximately 30,000*.00000040*9,000 which is about $108 per day. At that run rate, I pay off my servers in 48 days, which is phenomenal. My staking requirement is $12,960 or about $500 per server, which I think is totally fair considering what I'm getting.