Quote from: ivroer on December 20, 2013, 04:02:16 AM

Quote from: seongyupyoo on December 20, 2013, 12:51:10 AM

I'm curious how much it would cost to buy a mining pool, or have one built. Can anyone shed some light on the subject? Thanks.

Buy Existing Pool:
You could theorize how much one would cost based on their current hashing power, profit taken, and factor in some risk and general interest/return rates for similar types of investments.

Disclaimer: most of these figures are very rough ball-park numbers, I'm not attempting to accurately appraise any specific Bitcoin mining pool.

For example let's say ACME Mining Pool has around 325 TH/s power, and at current difficulty they are mining about 7 blocks a day. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that ACME has been around awhile and has some loyal miners who are actively expanding their operations and the pool will retain it's percentage of the global hashing power even with the difficulty increasing.

25 coins * 7 blocks * 365 days = 63,875 bitcoin revenue per year.

Now remember the mining pool industry is very competitive, only a small percentage is left after paying the employees (miners).
Let's say ACME pays miners 98% of revenue, running costs are 0.25% of total revenue, leaving 1.75% for profit.

1.75% * 63,875 = 1,117.8125 annual bitcoin profit

There are many different ways to value a business. But one simple way of looking at it would be to look at interest rates where a potential buyer or the current business owner (let's say they're retiring) can earn interest on investment.

Let's say with a large investment they can net 10% annual ROI with a medium risk portfolio.

To make the same amount of bitcoin a year, by using the other investment -- they would have to invest 11,178.125 bitcoin!

I'd be interested to see what other people think of this. Criticisms welcomed.

That sounds about right. I doubt any established pool operator would want to retire/sell the business. What about just having someone setup a brand new mining pool? How much would that cost?