Submissions are published on the website from October 14th, up until the final submission deadline of October 27th, so yes all submissions will be available at launch.
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Cool! I missread that. I thought maybe their names would be listed, not the actual miner. Thanks!
Slow start can be quite a bit shorter than a week depending on diff increase rate.
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When I read in the forum and slack, many programmers find that the prize money is to lowā¦
The interest in an open sorce GPU was great in the thread āCrowd Found GPUā
Would it be possible to open for donations from our users so that the prize money increases?
(Personally, I am a very very very small player but if we are many, it may be a larger amount of Moneyā¦)
/ Nimos
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The answer is, sort of. Quoting @zooko in the community Slack:
We canāt deal with the legal complications of taking money from the community to give it to the winners, but thereās nothing stopping people from pledging that theyāll donate to the winners!
and
Anyway, it would be great if contributors could pitch in, whether just out of a desire to improve the ecosystem or because they can somehow get some advantage from being contributors.
But, Zcash Co canāt handle the money around that, so just do it separately.
If some community movement does spring up around this, Iād be very interested! Let me know.
So itās entirely possible for someone in the community to act as escrow for funds that will be paid to whichever submission(s) get selected as winner(s). Or someone could e.g. write an Ethereum contract that does the same thing. But thatās up to the community to decide, organise, and get behind.
Disclosure: Iām one of the challenge judges.
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is it really dangerous for zcash?
We just had a public discussion with jtoomim on the zcash slack and he proposed this deal :
so the guideline i gave for the open source price was around 1/4 of the private bid, yes?
right now, it looks like the cloud mining market price is about $280 per H/s over a year (genesis miningās price), and we have 5,000 H/s at the moment.
letās say my auction price ends up being less than that, maybe $150 per H/s
that would mean our cloud mining revenue would be around $750k over a year if we kept this private (more or less, depending on price)
so 1/4 of that would be $175k ļæ¼
so thatās the ballpark for a price for open sourcing the code
if you are serious about this, contact OgNasty and/or @cryptogoth and start collecting money
by the way, if the crowdfund succeeds and my software gets open sourced, we will refund all of our cloud hashing customers and start the auctions over (even if we have to give up more on the cloud hashing than we get from the open sourcing)
i also may be able to offer different price levels for different things
we have old versions of our code in git, so i could release e.g. the earliest working code for one price, or the most recent code for a higher price, and the most recent code plus updates for a higher threshold yet
this might make it easier to at least get something
and our first working code was not slow
tldr : we need to collect about 280 BTC asap
bidders/donators will not get fucked because theyāll get a better miner depending on the amount they gave
I can confirm that I said the above, and that I intend to stand by it. The $175k figure is a ballpark, and I will be able to make a clear commitment to a specific figure (or figures) after the auction closes in 11.5 hours.
If the crowdfund succeeds in purchasing Toominer, I will refund all auction winners to account for the reduced value of our cloud hashing contracts. We will also offer discounts or hashrate bonuses to anybody who pledges in the crowdfund, in proportion to their pledge, regardless of whether the crowdfund reaches its goal or not.
$175K is fantasy, a non-starter. Good luck though.
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We will be sacrificing more than that in cloud mining revenue if we decide to open-source the software.
You are making a lot of assumptions and leaps with your starting point of $750K. Again, good luck - your work is definitely intriguing and of value to this community, but get a grip on that price tag. It is a non-starter (IMO).
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this whole thing is getting filled with irrational exuberanceā¦
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Open Source miners potentially available in 4 days! That would be awesome, Iāve a test rig configurable with fglrx & amdgpu-pro drivers on standby 
Yep. On principle alone @ $175k I will sit back and not take part even in the slightest.
I donāt quite understand where the idea that open sourcing the software would lead to lost income for cloud mining. The Bitcoin community has proven that there are plenty of people that would rather pay for cloud mining than run their own rigs.
Only reason you would lose out on revenue is if the offered cloud mining is magnitudes more expensive than mining privately, in which case itās the business model thatās broken not the market.
I going to comment here because the negative remarks are uncalled for.
If you disagree with the premise of the Auction or a Crowdfund/whatever then you are free to speak your mind but if you cannot express yourself in a constructive manner I will have remove you from the conversation.
Edit- Thank you for editing your comments, I understand that skepticism is a good thing to gather both points of view for a conversation I just donāt want to encourage people to pile on with āFailā and this is BS, etcā¦
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Donāt know if this comment is directed my way but I think it is reasonable to view toominās post and $175K offer with skepticism - extreme skepticism.
The current ābidā price is largely propped up by a 10 BTC bid from someone with 1 post in this forum (that postā¦ the 10 BTC bidā¦)
The $750K that he is āgivingā up is extrapolated from this number - with the assumption that a 25,000% increase in offered hash will only be met with a 40% drop in price for hash - this isnāt how markets workā¦
This assumes that nobody else will be able to recreate what he did - in four weeks. Is he this good that four weeks of work is worth $175K? So good that nobody else out there will be able to match this performance?
I doubt it, and that $175K is a non-starter. It canāt even be entertained it is so outlandish.
The counter-offer is 7 ETH.
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Your work is valuable to us all, but that price tag is outrageous. Unethical even.
Iād say the same if it was half that.
Iāll wait for @voxelot and donate to their cause.
Also keeping an eye on Claymore. Why not use that approach and do a 1% or 2% tax on the miner? At least that way weāre not paying crazy money for a miner will probably be trumped in a matter or days, weeks or monthsā¦ to a project that may not even succeed.
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I donāt see it that way at all. Itās not unethical. These arenāt medical supplies or access to clean drinking water. The prices being bandied around up until now are simply incorrect.
There is no way that any of the miners are worth significant chunks of a million dollars. The presumption that they could be worth that is based on the notion that they eclipse all competition on a (for crypto) fairly lasting basis.
There are two ways this assumption can go.
Either the assumption is incorrect, and an alternative miner is released at a lower price, invalidating a large portion of the value claimed.
Or the assumption is correct, and no alternative miner is forthcoming, invalidating most of the value of Zcash. After all - what would bitcoin be worth if only one person had 95% of it?
Have faith. Not everyone developing a miner is active on these boards right now.
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Faith and I donāt get along.
I can agree with most of what you said. We can debate whether price gouging is unethical on things that donāt fit into the ābasic needsā topic for hours Iām sureā¦
Weāll just have to wait and see how it all works out. The next 17 days are going to take so longā¦
This whole thread has gone off the rails. This should probably not be about auctions nor bids for private mining code.
Itās about an OPEN SOURCE mining contest.
If you have a miner and donāt wanāt to participate because the prize money is too low then why clutter this thread? Run your auction and leave this open thread in the original spirit of open source software within the parameters of the contest.
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