[Arm-netbook] EOMA68 / Libre RISC-V team financing

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

rrrright, i've got enough information from the payouts and commissions
to be able to reverse-engineer their operation with a reasonable
degree of confidence.

key mistake: i initially *misinterpreted* the MLM commissions
structure as paying out $200/day *guaranteed*.

what they *actually* do is, for each person who also buys a share,
they distribute a percentage of that *upstream* to the previous
backers.  from the mining generated, and taking e.g. AntMiner S9 as a
"baseline" i was able to calculate that the ratio of "equipment
purchased that's definitely yours" to "money that's put towards
rewarding people who encourage other people to buy equipment but also
covering operational costs etc. etc." is around 62:38 give-or-take
several percentage points... i'm really fuzzy on this maths stuff,
that was last night, i'm now coming up with 25:75.... *sigh* someone
please double-check this!!

the figures went like this:

* $3500 is a full share.
* daily mining payout is around $13/day @ current exchange rates and difficulty
* Antminer S9s cost around $2500 (if you can get them) and @ 13TH/s
earns about USD $26/day
* scale that up to $3500 and it's $37/day for an antminer-s9-scaled-up's-worth

so 37 + 13 = 50.  13 / 50 = a 26 : 74 ratio.

which seems to be awfully low, i must have made a mistake somewhere.

so this percentage (of what each person puts into equipment) which
goes up-tree in commission would explain how they can stay afloat [AND
NOT BE A PONZI SCHEME].

if someone can check the maths that would be great.

l.