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I run a small fleet on Ocean and I'm trying to figure out whether a product I'd want myself is something anyone else wants.

My idea is that you pay a fixed price up front (thinking ~$1,000 in BTC for electricity) for a defined amount of hashrate for a mining period, then Ocean pays the coinbase rewards directly to your address.

I think this is better than existing options since:

  • it's fully non-custodial (well the pool is the "custodian") the payouts to your address
  • growing historical data can't be faked (use ocean's dashboards as proof)
  • no-KYC
  • fully pseudonymous
  • fully BTC denominated
Yea, but $1k is too much40.0%
Yea, but pay-as-you-go is better0.0%
No, don't trust cloud mining40.0%
No, buying sats at spot is better20.0%
No, never spending my sats0.0%
5 votes \ poll ended

2 questions:

what is in it for you as the provider?

If I look at your screenshot, that math means that:

  1. You got 1.3M sats, but
  2. You could have gotten more (because break-even for your client is about 65% into the contract period), so that
  3. Technically you're losing sats. And not just any sats, but clean untraceable non-KYC coinbase sats paid directly from Ocean

Since the lead time for prepayment-to-payout seems a bit low, all you're getting is a guaranteed payout. I guess that this means that you are simply getting FPPS-like payments for yourself where your client is taking the PPLNS risk? Is that the thing? You're basically repackaging (selling) a risk derivative?

are outages part of the risk package you sell?

How are you going to ensure for your client that you're going to be able to deliver? What kind of uptime SLA are we talking? Since the rent period is bound to a retarget period, it's not like you can just run it longer as the retarget may break profitability calculations. Refund downtime? Tough outcome in PPLNS.

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Awesome questions! long reply ahead...

what is in it for you as the provider?

Risk and variance.

I have to pay for hosting costs monthly in USD, these contracts sell for slightly more than that for consistent rev. But i wouldn't call the contracts a risk derivative.

Technically you're losing sats

By end of contract in a week, yes.
But as of today, no.

Actually, still haven't ROI'd since the contract started.

clean untraceable

The downside of making this all transparent / open source is that connection could be made viewing the public contracts and the blockchain.

non-KYC coinbase sats paid directly from Ocean

The upside making this all transparent / open source :)

your client is taking the PPLNS risk

Yes, ocean uses TIDES though.

are outages part of the risk package you sell?

What kind of uptime SLA are we talking?

Yes! 95%, that's a buffer from my own miner hosting provider SLA. ~1900 blocks min-up time, and aiming for 2000 blocks.

How are you going to ensure for your client that you're going to be able to deliver?

I hold X in escrow (maybe a tx with nlockheight after mining period?) for unpaid blocks. It's calculated and agreed to at start of contract, to be paid out at end of contract if below SLA.

An upside making this all transparent / open source, this can be used to determine a reputation for the miner over time

Since the rent period is bound to a retarget period, it's not like you can just run it longer as the retarget may break profitability calculations. Refund downtime?

I think this is an advantage actually :)

It's more accurate since bitcoin doesn't actually know the time. The network only pays out when a block is mined, so even if it took an hour to mine (rare, but happens) the payout would be 3.125 btc for the whole network for that hour, not the expected 18.75 btc per hour. For example, as of 966584, mempool.space says the mining period is 31 blocks ahead of schedule.

I like to think of it as renting hashrate for a fixed difficulty target, even tho the network hashrate is still variable.

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29 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 10 Sep

This sounds interesting! Some questions:

My idea is that you pay a fixed price up front (thinking ~$1,000 in BTC for electricity) for a defined amount of hashrate for a mining period, then Ocean pays the coinbase rewards directly to your address.
  1. How do I know you are actually running miners with my address in the block template and not renting them out to multiple customers?
  2. How can I verify that previous customers have been paid correctly using Ocean's dashboard?

I assume I don't know enough about Ocean to already know the answers to these questions.

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  1. How do I know you are actually running miners with my address in the block template?

All your mining details can be found at: https://www.ocean.xyz/stats/<your_address>

  1. How can I verify that previous customers have been paid correctly with Ocean's dashboard?

You can verify that the source address of the on-chain payment matches Ocean's open source mining dashboard. That should cover the duration of the difficulty adjustment period and it reaches the expected hashrate & uptime.

I'm thinking that eventually you could go to this-idea.com/<payment-tx-hash> and be redirect to or shown the Ocean dashboard, mempool address and digital signature approving the mining.

Open to hearing other ways to boost transparency

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Isn't this how most hashrate leasing works minus the Ocean specificity?

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104 sats \ 3 replies \ @jasonb 10 Sep
  • growing historical data can't be faked (use ocean's dashboards as proof)
  • no-KYC
  • fully pseudonymous

Maybe the first one, but definitely the bottom two points quotes that he or she mentioned would be different than Braiins when I was exploring their version. If he or she offers an option at a smaller denomination, I'd almost certainly be interested in giving it a try.

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  • growing historical data can't be faked (use ocean's dashboards as proof)

You're right that these are the same. but I can offer a realtime (every 5mins) updated CSV that has all the numbers to analyze things more yourself

  • no-KYC
  • fully pseudonymous

I know, this can be achieved this using digital sigs and PSBTs

offers an option at a smaller denomination

Coming soon! But want to ensure a large enough fleet to have multiple onchain txs avoiding minimum threshold issues

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Well, I'm following you here now. This sounds really cool.

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Awesome, any thoughts on useful realtime metrics which make mining easier to understand? Here's what i've got so far

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2 differences I see are bounding the contracts within a mining period, which keeps a pre-set difficulty for the duration. From what I've seen, nicehash, Braiins, etc. require kyc for withdrawl. Others are smaller denominations or durations, so usually use an L2.

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3 sats \ 4 replies \ @SkyLords 10 Sep -30 sats

I would choose “NO, DON'T TRUST CLOUD MINING.” I understand why this model is more transparent than many cloud mining services, but I have never really liked the idea of paying someone else in advance for hashrate. For me, mining is much more interesting when I can actually run the hardware myself and know exactly what I am dealing with.