(continued from
https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/11038/anyone-interested-in-partnering-up-a-mining-farm-in-vietnam-for-usd-0-07-p-kwh ...)
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Introduction
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My name is Kairos, and I'm a Singaporean living in Singapore, and am returning to DaNang Vietnam where I had a staycation for 2 years running a mini bar/restaurant.
I wanted to set up a Gaming Cafe while there, but got lazy and just continued the bar/restaurant as it was, instead of following the original idea of upgrading it into a Gaming Cafe.
Partially, it wasn't just because I was "lazy", I also kinda got cold feet wondering if the investment I'd be making can really realize returns from Gaming alone, in a foreign land, being all alone.
I returned to Singapore where I went back into the workforce, when I discovered Bitcoin and Mining, and ran a 20+ GPU farm mining Scrypt. Mt Gox happened so I liquidated + donated to charities and carried on with my Senior BDM job.
I facepalmed when I realized I could've set up the Gaming Cafe while realizing returns through Mining 100% of the downtime where the PCs are not being rented for Gaming.
I have finally refined my business plan and believe I have a compelling case to make.
I am currently in talks with a 24x GPU setup, so I might as well ask around a second time.
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Who am I talking to
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If you have a bunch of GPUs that are near, or past their warranties, and find that Mining just simply isn't profitable enough anymore for such a headache (believe me, we all know the anxiety), I invite you to consider partnering up with me to set up the abovementioned project.
I am currently in talks with a 24x GPU project, and don't see why I shouldn't ask if any of you too, are interested.
We'll set up a Singaporean company, and do it by the book, with Equity and Legal all in place, etc, and the Company will own the Danang company which houses and operates the "GaMining" Cafe.
This is also why I'm looking at GPUs which are near, or past warranty, because that's then one less headache to consider. DaNang houses a whole array of computer component factories for Acer, Dell, etc, and there are many street-shops actually doing DEEP-REPAIR of computer components - amazing sight to behold, since they look like (what I call) Dirt-Pits.
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Why DaNang?
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- I have an existing and reliable social and support network there
- Cheap labor (USD 400 per month for general/ service workers)
- Cheap real estate (USD 400 per month for a 3-storeyed, 3BR house. I used the first floor to run my mini bar/restaurant. Each floor can house >10 terminals.)
- Computer components deep-repair availability
- DaNangers are rich enough to afford entertainment, esp this Gaming Cafe, but still too poor to make sense of purchasing Gaming PCs, or fiber-optics internet
- Cheap, reliable fiber-optics internet
- Cheap, reliable electricity at USD$ 0.07 pkWh (no outages since 2 years, plus they just upgraded the local power plant)
- No competition. the current Dirt-Pits there house Pentium-era computers capable of playing only ancient games such as DOTA1, Counterstrike. The best part? They're almost always 100% full occupancy. I actually forced myself to try them out at 3 different venues. The current charges for these dirt pits are 1/2 the price of a standard meal. I plan to charge 1/1 a standard meal for the first 6 months "promotion".
- Friendlly to Foreign(er) Business. The DaNang administration council have geared the state for a very business friendly environment, whether local or foreign owned. e.g. I didn't even bother registering my bar/restaurant and there was ZERO problems for that 2 years. However, with this GaMining Cafe with tens of Ks worth of equipment, I definitely will go by the book, and know how to.
- It's a nice city with Forbes Top5 most luxurious beaches in the world, but there's really jack-shit to do in DaNang, whether you're local, tourist or expat. It bored the hell out of me, and everyone, I'm sure. Time to poison all these guys into being hardcore gamers and vibe up the place with tournaments, competitions, leaderboards, and so on. Also, check out
https://www.vetv.com .
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The Math
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SERIOUS ENQUIRIES ONLY PLEASE, I'm busy enough as it is, if you will excuse me.
We're looking at a minimum of USD$ 12k if we're starting off from scratch to acquire assets for a 24x terminals set up.
USD$ 75k for a 100x terminals set up.
24x Setup
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Cost Per PC
Component Newegg Qty Total
XFX Radeon RX 480 $239.99 24 $5,759.76
Routers $49.99 4 $199.96
MSI H110I Pro $97.98 24 $2,351.52
incl. 8GB Kingston HyperX Fury DDR4-2133 $0.00 24 $0.00
Intel Core i3-6100 $119.99 24 $2,879.76
2x Western Digital WD3200AAJS 320GB $43.98 24 $1,055.52
Antec VP-450W $45.84 24 $1,100.16
Cases $50.00 24 $1,200.00
Keyboards $10.00 24 $240.00
Mice $10.00 24 $240.00
Headsets $20.00 24 $480.00
Desks $50.00 27 $1,350.00
Chairs $50.00 27 $1,350.00
Total $787.77 x $18,206.68
100x Setup
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Cost Per PC
Component Newegg Qty Total
XFX Radeon RX 480 $239.99 100 $23,999.00
Routers $49.99 16 $799.84
MSI H110I Pro $97.98 100 $9,798.00
incl. 8GB Kingston HyperX Fury DDR4-2133 $0.00 100 $0.00
Intel Core i3-6100 $119.99 100 $11,999.00
2x Western Digital WD3200AAJS 320GB $43.98 100 $4,398.00
Antec VP-450W $45.84 100 $4,584.00
Cases $50.00 100 $5,000.00
Keyboards $10.00 100 $1,000.00
Mice $10.00 100 $1,000.00
Headsets $20.00 100 $2,000.00
Desks $50.00 100 $5,000.00
Chairs $50.00 100 $5,000.00
Total $787.77 x $74,577.84
If you already have the GPUs, obviously it'll be less.
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For a 24x setup, at the price of a standard meal, per hour, and AT ONLY 3 HOURS OF GAMING PER DAY PER PC, 100% downtime mining of ETH at USD$ 9.00, the expected ROI is about 7-8 months. Better, if GPUs are already in hand. Better, if each terminal experiences more than 3 hours of gameplay per day.
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I am NOT willing to entertain anything above 100x, because I have a feeling that 100x would be approaching the tipping point of being too risky to ascertain commercial viability/ feasibilty. However, I have zero precedence nor math to back this up.
Meaning, that once I have enough confirmed investments, I will no longer be accepting interested offers.
I will go in tranches of 100x per 6 months, until we reach saturation point, where there will be almost too many Gaming PCs for the given market. (I have a feeling that 300x is the saturation point? /shrugs? no math or precedence to back this up.)
If talks with my first interested party of 24x follows through, in this 6 months, I will be looking for a max additional of (100 - 24= ) 76x terminals.
Current Open slots:
2017 Jan - Jun: (24x pending) + 76x
2017 Jul - Dec: 100x
2018 Jan - Jun: 100x
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Cafe Terms
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- I will be age-regulating the business - I will not allow under-16s to patronize the business. I won't be able to forgive myself if I get poor kids addicted to video games. (Optionally, I may give them 1-hour free slots for them to use and learn graphics and video processing, educationals, etc).
- Thus, target demographics will be 16 - 40 year olds, and expats, foreigners and tourists.
- Users are expected to wear cotton gloves at all times, to keep the equipment pristine.
- Cafe will be air-conditioned for comfort. We will also be vending energy drinks and snacks.
- Starting promotion price charges of 1x standard meal per hour for the first 3 - 6 months, depending on patronage. Will increase after the honeymoon stage. (For comparison, here in Singapore, the prices per hour is about 2.5x standard meal.)
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Interested?
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The only thing left to do is tell me what you already have, I will recombobulate splines to reflect the new parameters, and you make me an offer of equity for running the show for you in full.
Best equity offers will gain priority.
Thank you, and best of luck!
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Most Sincerely, Kairos.
add me:
https://linkedin.com/in/ (nospam) kskaizen
add me:
https://facebook.com/ (nospam) ks.kaizen
email me: ks.kaizen (nospam)
@gmail.com
Comments
Your primary goal should be the internet gaming cafe business. While on idle you can make the machines mine for you. However any day now ETH can go POS and ZEC can go to $0 and then there is no more mining.
I don't know what you are asking? You want donations? investors?
My advice is simply to just get a loan at a bank for this business venture. You also need to get some i5 or i7 since its for gaming and you need to include the gaming licenses which will probably cost the most. Since each game is around $50 * 12 games or so per computer. Highly doubt you will get away with pirating.
However, that is if we're that lucky to get 14 hours of rent per day per PC. As a businessman myself, however, I like to make worst-case scenario plans to see if a business is commercially viable, and have based my calculations on only 3 hours of gaming rent per pc per day, of which "downtime" will be spent mining the likes of ETH, ZCash, etc.
At only 3 hours of Gaming, and about 20 hours of mining, this will allow us to achieve a 100% ROI of less than 6 - 12 months, if operating in the city of DaNang.
@adaseb only noob entrepreneurs take on 100% of the risk of a venture. sometimes it does pay off, yes, but I already have a few things on my plate, and would rather have not such a headache like that if things go a little too slow for my liking.
for example, the interest that I will be bearing from an unsecured business loan will be in the range of 12% - 24%. This business has costs and expenses. If the business does not keep up with the interest (rate), that only means that it will be making a loss. and you know what happens? I would have to rebalance my entire portfolio and range of operations.
but if we already had the GPUs and a top-up of extra desks and chairs and computer components, there is no loans, interest, to be paid back involved, and the risk of running at a loss is immensely reduced, or almost eliminated - US fed interest rates is below 2% last time I checked, so it wouldn't matter even if you parked your money in a bank - it will be doing nothing but suffer inflation.
The whole point here is to address a pain point experienced by a lot of miners today, in that their GPUs are no longer making enough (higher electricity prices, lower returns) to justify continuing operations. I'm here to tell you that maybe there's a better alternative than making a horrible loss liquidating your GPUs at sub-par prices... if you can even get them sold in the first place.
ZCash and Ethereum aren't the only players, and Ethereum POS is a long ways away. to say that ZCash can drop to $0 soon, is akin to saying Bitcoin can drop to $0 soon. Can one argue with that? No. Should such an argument be made? Depends on the circus you come from, if you will excuse my dry wit.
--
@theneogeo1982 If you feel that you want to start asking deeper questions, and/or begin negotiations, let's do it in private via your preferred IM: email, FB Messenger, Linkedin Messenger.
Yes I do have the full business plan, but I need an NDA.
God Bless, and Good Luck!
@adaseb let me clarify..
a) correct, mining is a tough game. that is why we're onboarding this additional revenue stream through LAN Gaming. 100% of the downtime will be mining the most profitable coins through the various pools.
b) yes, the primary goal is indeed converting a mining farm into a gaming cafe business, with downtime automatically mining coins.
c) im asking for this: if you already have a significant number of GPUs and are considering liquidating, i offer a profitable alternative. we open up a Singaporean company, registering those GPUs as company assets, and also additional components and furniture, and I'll run the "GaMining" Cafe, at a price we negotiate. I prefer equity.
d) i can get a loan, but why bother, when there's possibly many of you that already have GPUs and can come into a partnership?
e) "gaming licenses" in vietnam is for casinos and gambling.
f) we don't need to consider pirating - there are tonnes of F2P games out there. after all, my favoriet game is still world of tanks.
g) i wanna do this by the book, because as an entrepreneur, it is very strategic for me to be able to legally and officially prove my past business successes in a given vertical. your collateral is share-ownership of the Singaporean company (Private Limited) we will be opening, and full-on software-managed auto-accounting and financials. because after the first two or three tranches, i hope to be able to franchise this system into neighboring cities and countries with similar parameters which hold a high chance of profitability and business continuity. in deeper discussions, i will tell you more about "HYDRRA", but not publically, and only with an NDA. i.e. you will be able to sue me as a Director if you can prove that I have been negligent or malicious in my business dealings with you, and that's a very, very bad thing in Singapore, because I will risk to be banned from holding Directorships for a period of 5 years, plus all convicted offenders and their cases are fully public and online *FOREVER*.
h) i might be open to reasonable clause and terms allowing you to demand your GPUs back, but never at the expense of hurting operations. this is why it's preferable to operate based on equity, and all assets are under the ownership of the company. simpler, and much more liquid and open to additional external investors, or additional internal investments.
i) "HYDRRA" qualifies for a singaporean business grant by the Economic Development Board of Singapore (google SPRING TECS, by EDB Singapore). free money is a good thing. HYDRRA will automate all facets of the business including triggering mining whenever it detects a low GPU-load, plus no identified (game) .exe's loaded. and more. especially the revenue tracking part.
happy to answer more, but do excuse me if im a little slow at times - busy busy!
A few tips if you pursue this:
With well designed mining software and high-end GPUs, you can mine 24/7 while barely reducing hashrate with many popular games.
Example: League of Legends will only bring a fiji or hawaii chip down to 23MH/s from 30MH/s and still have >100fps at maximum graphics quality settings. More intensive games will reduce hashrate more, but
Beware people trying to mine for themselves... If you go ahead with a gaming cafe, use something like deepfreeze to freeze the computer's state and restore on every reboot. First thing many in-the-know will do is try to redirect your mining efforts into their pockets - make sure they stay in your own.
Concentrate on the business, not the mining. Tend to mining when you have extra time and everything else is done.
Buy reference cards. The fans will almost certainly last longer, at least if hawaii cards are any indication of later chipset cards anyway (never seen a dead reference R9 290 fan even when completely clogged with dust, but I've seen lots of custom cooled R9 290 cards with completely dead fans and little dust). The little bit of extra noise you can drown out with music (and/or headphones - maybe for an additional cost) at your cafe.
Build 2 areas, with a significant wall inbetween - one will have your bar, customers, monitors, keyboards, mice. The other will have your GPUs.
You need real CPUs for gaming machines. People with existing hardware for mining will only have half of what you need.
yes, the business plan does include a few more of those technicalities that you have mentioned, but you have added a few things i missed out, cheers mate!
very interesting idea about separating the GPUs from the customer area. im not sure what to make of it at this point, other than that it would be a boon to cooling if done right. massive amounts of cabling though; HDMI ain't cheap at all!
about the additional components, exactly. which is why i mentioned it would be around $12k for a 24x PC setup if starting from scratch, or minus the GPU costs if the GPUs are already in hand (plus spare mobos, ram, and HDDs).
also, im pretty sure the i3 is WAY more than enough to run any game as a single application. hyperthreading and multicores are useful for multitasking, multiple programs and windows and apps, etc.
Also if you do go reference cards... They are LOUD
the reason why i posted here, is to see if there were folks out there with a whole bunch of GPUs which have become too expensive to runm due to either increasing electricity prices, or eth being too low prices.
i've heard and seen quite many liquidating their GPUs at horrible prices, and im here to offer an alternative!
additionally, the banks here in singapore do not operate as they do elsewhere - you'd need to have ran a profitable operation for at least 2 years, plus the assets are highly scrutinized. gaming PCs? doubt it'd qualify as "collaterable assets" in their eyes. finally, there's no way that they will fund me for "assets" which will operate ex-singapore.
it's extremely stifling to be an entrepreneur here in singapore, and the ministers keep wondering why our entrepreneurs aren't "up to par". the financial ecosystem for the non-elites here is a joke, just as the majority of our ministers are.
the economy here has been in recession for almost a year, and our ministers have the cheek to deny, and call it "some quarters of negative growth".
recession
rɪˈsɛʃ(ə)n/
noun
1. a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters.
Exactly, I'm planning so that all funds are sent only through ESCROW, and only released upon purchase of assets, with receipts.
If I had to purchase component by component, as the escrow keeps releasing.........
Here, I replied to one interested guy like this, does it make sense? Any suggestions would be welcome!
otherwise, shoot away!
sorry been away-ish, it was, and still is, a humongously busy time for me.
im already running a separate Ethereum Dapp business as my main business, which has led me to think its even better if i moved to DaNang, Vietnam, due to a few factors like i listed in the original post.
in case you missed it, here's me: https://linkedin.com/in/kskaizen
i've secured yet another committed staff member in danang for marketing purposes (for free, he just wants revenue sharing), so i have 4 in total now.
to keep it simple, i recommend that the PCs will always be 100% your legal property, and that I am just administrating their operations, and I gain from revenue sharing. 50% of revenue, to be exact. 50+ GPUs, i'd say minimum engagement period should be 12 months, before youre allowed to demand your equipment back (logistics at your cost). needless to say, if things are going great, if you wanted to pull out, i'd just offer to simply buy them from you to keep things going as it were.
to make it a forward looking thing, as i'd described, we'd be incorporating a singaporean private limited, but i DO expect you to put in a hand into turning this project (we call it Project Hydrra) into a franchisable, regionally expandable company, incorporating not only mining, but cloud gaming as well, at a later stage, through Nvidia Grid and Radeon Sky. Also, look up the GOLEM network. These kinds of things.
talk to me soon.
my first investor and me are trying to figure out the final hurdles, so i expect to land in DaNang only in 2 or 3 months time.
Merry Everything, and a Happy Always.
May peace be upon us all .