Quote from: contactmike1 on April 25, 2014, 09:31:32 PM

I thought the whole point of the "bonus" was so he could pay out the new equipment? Huh

Yes, that is how I interpreted it, but that relies on placing trust in a benevolent Lab_Rat who will do what will most benefit the contract holders. The new contract is a huge step backward from what little transparency we did have. I personally think Lab_Rat is more likely than a lot of people to willingly pay out a very large portion of mined bitcoin over and above the contracted rate, however, I do not like the lack of guarantees. The new contract basically reads "100MH/s plus bonus at LR's discretion". I personally think it is likely the "bonus" will consistently be nice and significantly higher than 100MH/s, but there is nothing to prevent LR from having a bad week, going on a coke binge using what would otherwise be bonus bitcoin, waking up on a beach in a singlet somewhere, and paying out just 100MH/s per contract, and we would have zero recourse and zero knowledge there ever was a pool of bitcoins that could have been used as a bonus. This seems like a huge departure from the spirit of the original contract. Worse, LR can't even say what he really intends to do because of legal liabilities. Maybe he intends to payout a bonus regularly every week based on actual mined bitcoin, but he can't say that is what he intends to do one way or the other because of legal concerns.

I would have much rather seen contracts that split to accommodate increased hashrate rather than relying on fixed + bonus.

Will have to think on this more and read what others are thinking.