Nor is it forbidden in Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism nor any other major religions 'Good Book's as far as I know. That is a cultural taboo - not a religious one.

I look at it on the one Bright Side of the situation: For the 1st time in hundreds of years, Afghanistan has a chance to run their own country (almost) anyway the Afghani's want to. For centuries Afghanistan has been called 'The Graveyard of Empires' because of so many other countries trying to either rule it or change it to suit their needs & ideology -- and every single country that has tried all met the same fate. Utter failure.

As for For most of the world those ideas are a fairly recent thing in Human history. In theory, ja they are a good thing. In practice, when a culture has historically never lived like that it often leads to chaos.

As long as the Taliban realize that they should not and cannot allow terrorists to use their country as a home base, works for me.

Sweeet: BTC is still over $50k, and diff is looking good. Love it!
Now just need KanoPool to finally crack a damn block! I know we're small but it's been 404d 4h 23m since the last one... 

Was not referring to scam busters et al. Ja, they are actually a rather vital group of folks needed here to keep some semblance of sanity in the Forum.  
I was referring to a few folks who I've come across that seem to think it is their mission in life to hunt down newbs and ridicule them vs trying to teach them the errors of their ways.

Ja. It is a sad reflection of today's culture. Folks today have easy access to technologies that were undreamed of just a few decades ago yet have no interest at all in what led to them nor even the basics of how they actually work...  

Aside from some bad apples who get their jollies by hunting down rule breakers, the Forum culture is NOT to kill all newbies - it is to educate them.

Unfortunately far too often the 1st thing that has to be taught is how to use this forum - or for that matter any forum.

To me it seems that far too many folks think this place is like Facebook, Quora, redit, etc where people post their random thoughts anyplace and anyway they like. I put that to a generational thing where today's generations are so used to having smartphones and texting about everything under the sun that it simply never occurs to them that this place is a TECHNICAL message board and that means there are guidelines on using it. As such they never bother to even look at what the rules are much less take a little time to scan through the forum to see if their question(s) have already been answered.

As my forum name implies I will be among the 1st to point out mistakes they make but follow that with the reason they are a mistake and, what to do about it. I am also very quick to notify mods if a post is in the wrong area (or is utter trash) so it can be moved to where it belongs. For those who refuse to learn and continually violate the Forum Rules then yes, I say ban them.

The other side of the coin applies: I have given many newbies their 1st merit. All it takes is that it be a valid question that has not been asked before and seems to come from an educated individual vs someone who is oblivious to properly learning on their own. My main goal here is to provide useful information where I can. Having been an EE since the mid-1970's I have gained a vast pool of knowledge that ranges from circuit design, power systems design and construction including building infra, computers and at least basic programming, etc. which I share whenever possible.

New here? Well then spend a few days browsing the various sections before posting. Ya just *might* find answers to the initial question(s) you have and even more importantly, along with starting the process of learning and gaining insights into what mining as all about you will probably develop more questions that can be properly targeted..

The answer to "Can I make money mining Bitcoin?" is a qualified - yes.
IF:
1. Most important, you have access to very low cost electricity
2. You have a place to run the very hot and very loud miners
3. You can find gear without having to wait several month to get

If all 3 are true then no problem.

I wouldn't say that, even today there are scads of 32-bit (and lower) CPU's available for the Maker community. Case in point the Arduino which is 32-bit. But ja, they are a lot cheaper. The Arduini Uno from the official site store is only $23 and has a ton of different shields for tinkering.

 ^^ ja, but if you just want a simple networked controller for say, remotely turning on/off contactors or relays to control miner power then 32-bit is more than enough. Same for use with a weather station for monitoring temps, humidity, other sensors, making a clock etc. Gazillions of uses for it most of which work fine even with 8 or 16-bit CPU's.

Be aware that the heatsinks on T17's are soldered on - NOT glued. Using solder gives almost 1/2 the thermal resistance that any glue can provide. In short - using glue will result in the chip running much hotter but at least the heatsink will stay in-place. Using paste is right out as it will not hold the heatsink in position and the 'sink will soon fall off.

So that all happened in Madagascar in 1 day eh? Sucks to be there I guess, hopefully tomorrow will go better for them...

Our take is that you need to provide links to the 'news' you are posting about otherwise it is meaningless babbling. Links are needed so folks can get the details and understand the context of what you post.

Take your pick from any of the hundreds if not thousands of sci-fi/fantasy stories written about things along those lines. Hell I have a collection of stories from the 1920's that do a fair job of it. Wanna go pretty far out there, the movie Metropolis is a good place to start. Looking at the societal portions of it, the book Stranger in a Strange Land is another.

All attempts to change from PoW to Piece of Shit would break the entire Bitcoin ecosystem. Not only would the Rewards process have to change but so would the millions of miners being used.

In short - it ain't gonna happen!

They used 32-bit CPU's because the board is targeted at small light weight applications that have no need for 64 bit operations...

Finding a reliable and trustworthy pool is easy with several that are well known and trusted so that part is not a problem. Finding low cost power is the hardest part of the equation.

And during that '6 years' you are paying for over 3,200w of electricity being used 24x7x365x6. That is 196,224 kW/h per year or 1,177,344 kW/h over the 6 year period. That makes for one helluva electric bill to be paid each month with zero income unless you are very very lucky...

Considering you are paying out-of-pocket for that electricity - just like feeding a slot machine - yeah, definitely like a casino and a very high-stakes one at that. Either way you are playing the odds hoping to be winning more than you spend.

Figured they would carry some sort of limited warranty. That said, considering Inno was made aware of the Fixed Address issue on at least some miners and quickly responded by putting out a fix for it one can't fault them for their response on that part. They also said they were going to issue a mass email to all customers who bought one of the refurbed miners to notify of them of the possible problem and fix for it if they received a miner that was locked. Hopefully the OP just got a miner that had already been shipped just before Inno became aware of the problem and the miner had yet yet been updated to OEM firmware

My take on things is that the miners are of course from some of the farms in China that got shut down. It makes sense that a farm would use locked firmware to make sure there is (near) zero chance of miners being hijacked either through hacking or actual theft. If stolen, as soon as the miner goes on line Inno will know which miner and what the ip address is.

Biggest problem is Inno dropping the ball on making sure the miners are at least cleaned up and along with that definitely reset back to the normal OEM firmware. It sounds like at least some of the miners were just packed up at the farm and shipped as-is with the Inno factory techs never even touching them.  

If you are solo mining and against the massively sizable odds against finding a block, you get one - yes you get the full reward + all tx fees in it and - whatever fee the service (pool) you use charges. Key point is that as I said depending on your hash rate and above all - Luck - you might find the block within an hour or more likely years or possibly NEVER.

Using PPLNS with the much higher hash rate a pool provides you will get paid far sooner and certainly more often. Sure you split the rewards. So what - you are at least making something and on a much more regular basis.

edit: I might add that the only way to have a pretty predictable income from a miner is use a PPS pool that pays a fixed daily income depending on your hash rate. Of course they charge a hefty several % of your raw income for using their services.
That's all the choices a miner has. Period.

As said earlier, some links to early development projects
The Wasp 'Universal miner' project which was going to be able to use several different ASIC chips from different makers.

The start of Zefir's A1 chip development for Bitmine.ch/Innosilicon
A nice list of design pointers from Zefir who did most of the dev work for the ill-fated A1 chip from Bitmine.ch/Innosilicon.
Note: The chip itself was not bad nor was the code for it. Bitmine.ch REPEATEDLY blew it on the hardware layout, power layout and <drumroll please> thermal design. The one company that got it right was the folks that made the famous A1-powerd Dragon miners. (and no - NOT to be confused with the Dragonmints which came many years later)

In both threads note the emphasis on thermals and power plane considerations. Some good info regarding those found in
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/the-workbench/4421218/PCB-layout-tips-for-thermal-vias
http://circuitcalculator.com/wordpress/2006/03/12/pcb-via-calculator/

Probably more to follow...

Thanks!
No idea why jstefanop is so secretive about info like that but hey - his project, his rules. I do know that BitFury is pretty tight about releasing their datasheets so that may be part of his  

Not a chance in hell. It cost millions of $$$ to design and produce a mining ASIC chip.
That said it *would* be interesting to know just who's chip you use. eg are they from BM, MicroBt, Canaan, Bitfury, Inosilicon et al?