Bitcoin Forum

I'm just curious to see who's gonna get the https://bitmaintech.com/productDetail.htm?pid=0002014081313175081722f1GeUO063F
upgrade kit  ???

The difficulty is going up so fast.... might just underclock my S1.....  Opinions?

I already sold off my S1s and upgraded with S3s directly, so I won't be purchasing the upgrade kits.  I'm glad I did, 9/20 is a long ways off.

One thing I'd like to add here is that the upgrade kit really doesn't make sense.  Here's why:

Your S1 is already getting you 180GH/s (or 200GH/s if you've over clocked it).  The upgrade kit effectively turns your S1 into an S3.  You gain 273GH/s - 304GH/s (base clocks to both over clocked).  So, is ~275GH/s worth 0.46BTC (by the way, the MOQ on the upgrade kits is 2, so you're looking at 0.92BTC).

None of Bitmain product offerings make sense considering the difficulty will be up 50% (1.25x1.25?) by Sept 20 ship date.  The S3 upgrade is basically saving you a little money by reusing the shell from the S1.  It would make more sense to sell the S1 and just buy a S3+ but even that is way overpriced for Sept 20 ship date.

Bitmain doing preorders Oh God

September 20 is so long away and difficulty is going up exponentially....I agree.  Not worth it

It is much more efficient per watt too.......

That goes without saying... the S1 is 2W per GH/s, the S3 (and the upgraded S1) are 0.78W per GH/s.  I think my main point was that with a ship date of 9/20, neither the S1 or the S3 make a lot of sense.  I got in with the early batches (1, 4, 5), so by the time the S3+ comes out, my S3s will have been mining for a couple months.

Yeah....the early adopters won out, and the later batches have too small of a discount to win.

not worth it.

They state that the kit is NONREFUNDABLE AFTER PURCHASE.  Why?  What are they hiding?  The fact they they are a nonreputable company who only wants your money?  They take your money, and say thank you and screw off now and never call us again?

DO NOT BUY AN ASIC!  I keep telling you idiots and you never learn!!!

Lol yeah....but GPUs are not making anything right now right?

Bitmaintech have always delivered. This upgrade kit is hash boards and fixings to diy your S1 chassis to S3 like performance. Probably non refundable because potential for damage quite high when diy'ing the bits and bobs together.

GPUs have a life beyond mining.  Even 7950's are still very good GPUs.  ASICs become useless.

The upgrade kit is only good if it can deliver immediately or soon. 1 month is really too long. Better to just buy S3..

S3 is now overpriced because of the 1 month delay. Better to buy some S1s secondhand from somebody who has expensive power rates and undervolt them (of course this is for people with cheap power as nobody can run them profitably at stock in about 4 days).

That's a decent price for the GH/s/$ but the power usage is double that of an S3.  That means it will make money up front for the first 3 -4 months and then have an early retirement compared to something that is a lot more efficient.  Bitfury gear is still able to run due to it's great efficiency.

Unless you have really cheap power always go for higher efficiency, especially when it's double as in this case.

It was almost never profitable to mine bitcoins when compared to electricity costs.
When we were mining with CPU, the electricity bill was 100x more expensive that the coins we won.
Same when the GPU mining started, 100x more expensive.
Of course afterwards when the bitcoin price rose many many times, it was profitable :)

Same as now, it you calculate your mining costs with a bitcoin price of 500, you're not going to have a positive ROI.
But if you hope for bitcoin price of 3, 5 or 15 thousand, the numbers look really different.

As for the kits, no i'm undervolting (10k pot mod) my S1's to add to their lifespan.
If you can get defective S1's for free, that would be a good option.

First of all that is outright false.  If you were CPU mining with electricity 100x the profit, maybe you should have upgraded that 486-DX2  :D.  Same with GPU mining.  Unless you were paying on the order of $30 per KWH (and this is coming from somebody paying $0.35/KWH at home).

If electricity costs more than you earn, IT ALWAYS MAKES MORE SENSE TO BUY the coin outright.  ALWAYS.  The only reason to mine at that point is to support the network or get newly minted coins by solo mining.

Can the old boards be utilized as well?

The old boards are the part that is being replaced because they are inefficient.  You can undervolt them to get a little more life out of them and that's why the upgrade kit is considered a bad idea.

I was just asking since I have 4 S1's and wondered if I could repurpose them.  I'm really not worried about the cost of power... Solar on the house.

If power is irrelevant then just continue to keep mining with the S1.  The only reason to drop the S1 then would be the noise issue.

you can buy an S3 for that price (at least when btc was at 450$ in the last 24 hours)

The S1 upgrade kit to S3 is not worth it, its like throwing away S1 and buying a new S3... unless its dirt cheap and can ship now..

S1s were getting about $120 or less last week.  Now with the difficulty increase they should be sub $100 easily.

I sold off my S1's but kept two that I didn't feel comfortable selling (x's).  I was looking forward to the upgrade kit but now that it has been announced there is no chance I will be buying it.
Too far away.
Too much BTC.

My S1's are hashing away at ~185Ghs.  Why on earth would I want to buy 220Ghs for $230 at a time when the difficulty will probably be somewhere around 32b and could be as high as 38b?

There is zero chance of making back that money.

Sorry Bitmain...gotta pass on that one.

Sad is that bitmain become another pre-order company. 20/9 is still far. For me pass. In the past i ordered 20 s1 with sushi and bitmain. Now this game seems good for big players with big balls. Asics are so overpriced.

i don't think so ,

I don't expect hat it's trivial to use the old S1 boards, but they still have value. Poke around here, and see what folks try, after all once you have new S3 boards hashing, what's the downside to experimenting with the leftover S1 boards. You cold also sell the S1 boards, they still have value to somebody. Don't just discard them in the trash, they still have value, even if not toyou.

I found a friend who doesn't pay for his power to host my S1  ;D

I don't know if the upgrade kit is worth it, being only marginally cheaper than the full deal.

Depends on how many you'd need I guess is the question.  When talking about 1, 2, heck even 5 it's not much, but in a case like ours it was a $3k difference by buying the upgrade kits as opposed to the full units.  And, we get the benefit of having the S1's continuing to hash until they're delivered.

its been over 4 days, my s1 and normal 180ghash is still making money.

I have a couple s1s that have "problems" might be worth upgrading those ones...

A wise decision would be to donate them to charity. The upgrade price vs endurance is not worth the while.

You can donate to any charity to pay me back.