I asked this same question to @5a1t on Slack.
I believe the price displayed is 20% off full price for 3 month contract (early adopter). But because they are giving 50% off for first month, the Total price for first 3 months is 2.5x displayed price.
So the price for 3 months is 0.015625 BTC/month * 2.5 = 0.0390625 BTC, correct?
And it will become 0.0562 after the blockchain launch?
That looks to be correct.
Thatās my computation: 0.01562531.2=0.0562
@tim_olson I think your site has a typo:
Genesis Block contracts begin on Genesis Block (currently October 28th) and run for 90 days. Regular contracts begin December 1st, 2017 and run until February 28th, 2017.
just saying
Everyone please be extremely cautious . ātim_olsonā account is still not sufficiently proven identity. Please note a suspicious behaviour of this same account at bitcointalk.org thread:
Namely, the account owner takes a position that someone else has to make effort in order to prove his identity instead of himself approaching first.
Furthermore, his account has a suspicious activity pattern.
The only valid proof is for zooko to vouch for his identity.
CAVEAT EMPTOR.
Is this likely to be very profitable? I know from previous cloud mining contracts that I have that a lot of them are not. Do we know roughly how much zcash the 50 cpus contract would earn per day?
As far as Iām aware I cannot mine using my own desktop as I am using windows.
Linux virtual machine maybe?
I did consider that, but Iām pretty sure that I read somewhere that It wouldnāt be as effective. Iām quite new to crypto mining, so Iām not too sure how I go about setting these things up.
With Hyper-V at least, host OS and virtual machines are on equal footing with regard to memory and CPU. I think it will be close to native Linux.
Great to hear, thank you.
OK, Iāll look into that. Thank You. 
I can verify that @tim_olson login IP address and Registration IP addresses match Tim Olsonās correct location.
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@daira Actually we never hit the hyperthreading in our test. That machine has 2 CPUās and 24 true cores (48 with hyperthreading).
@Nahual @Shawn @zcash1 The price is listed per-month but the first month is 50% off due to Slow Start so yes, the contract total will be the cost per month times 2.5. We are trying to simplify the pricing as much as possible but we need to also deal with Slow Start and make it easy to understand how much compute power the hashrate compares to. Weāre open to any suggestions how to make this easier to understand.
@flowki Thatās not a typo. Genesis contracts will start on October 28 or whenever the dev team releases the Genesis Block. The next available contract will start December 1st.
@whoispumpin Iāve made quite an effort on Bitcointalk to verify that account. For example, I changed my LinkedIn profile on request to verify that I own my LinkedIn account. Here in the Zcash community, I am meeting people face-to-face in the Bay Area, and anyone is welcome to come see and inspect our operation. Iāll even invite you to my house. Just contact tim@zeropond.com. Just today I met @farallon for lunch and heāll be posting about it soon. Look for a selfie soon on our blog zeropond.tumblr.com.
@endaksi1 Itās important for everyone to understand that no-one knows how profitable (or not) this contract will be, because it depends on the Global Hash Rate. We CAN guarantee that we give you a better price/performance ratio than setting up your own CPU miner, but we cannot guarantee the amount of Zcash you will receive.
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Iād like to suggest that zeropond add a PGP / GPG public key to the contact page. 
Great idea, yes we need to do that.
[quote=āendaksi1, post:109, topic:1723ā]I did consider that, but Iām pretty sure that I read somewhere that It wouldnāt be as effective.[/quote]It works fine, with about 10% reduction in performance.
Is ould agree that the āCPUā core number in the contract description probably should be modified or at least amended to make a comparison to something like list āequivalent in high end desktop CPUā.
Which would split the CPU core numbers by 4-6 or so.
Just go by the hash per second - thatās what their customers will actually be paying for.
Just got back from lunch with Tim for a meet and greet session at the Precita Park CafƩ just south of the San Francisco Mission District. Tim spent a very generous hour and a half with me answering my question and discussing this wonderful opportunity we have in front of us. He showed me his apartment nearby but none of the hardware previously purchased since it was located in San Jose. My goal was to meet the man face to face to see for myself if he was real and to do a gut check before I hand over my hard earned money to by some Virtual Miners.
My personal impression of Tim is that he is as open and forth coming as he presents himself in the forum. Zeropond is a small company made up of close personal friends who he can trust which he feels is critical to maintain security and integrity during this buildout phase. I asked a bunch of questions, some of which have already been covered in the forum discussion in one way or another. Iāll list some questions we talked about at I think were unique or, at least, I did not see covered previously on the forum.
The following questions and answers are paraphrased greatly. Tim, feel free to correct me if I misunderstood any of your answers. Wow I feel like a new reporter
-
Me: Can you also take USD for payment?
Tim: Ideally, people will go through the website and pay in BTC (or another altcoin) but if there is a large enough purchase for thousands of dollars and if there was a particular need then send an email to possibly arrange something. (Edit: now we know US citizens are blocked unless they are accredited investors) -
Me: Will the Genesis purchasers have priority when renewing contracts?
Tim: We plan to build out the Data Center buy purchasing new hardware for the Regular Contracts starting Dec. 1st. (Me: I suppose this means that it the Genesis purchasers can easily extent their use of their virtual miners (vmās) before their contact is up.) -
Me: What protects me from you going under before my contract is up?
Tim: We are pricing the contract so the money received is enough to cover the expenses for (at least) your contact duration. Related to this is that we turned down requests for yearly contracts because we felt things would be too volatile at the beginning and that shorter contacts is safer for all involved. -
Me: Iād like to see the VM GPU miner test case live that Austin-Williams has suggested.
Tim: Sure, potentially Tuesday night 9/20. We can stream it live and work with live with Austin if we can arrange it. -
Me: Iād like to see the physical equipment.
Tim: We will be signing Data Center contracts soon and, we can work something out when we start building it out. We worked out the math and building out at 1000 GPU system can be done in 3 days (if pushed hard), note that 1 GPU does not mean one card.
Other things:
- They are yet to form a legal business entity (should happen on Wednesday).
- Tim acknowledges that there is risk involved and we really donāt know what will happen on Day 1. A really big miner could come online and we end-up being small potatoes.
- Also, be aware that no one knows if ZEC will thrive or survives.
In the end, I have a favorable impression of Tim and Iām looking forward to the live demo and seeing the hardware. But, as always, caveat emptor. This is the wild west.
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