I'll take 1.76-2% if it is available.

Live tracker remains up. Hopefully some new data and analysis as well during this period. The data was a bit screwed up on the last day of the last difficulty period as I hadn't set things up to handle a negative difficulty adjustment properly. So I'm 0-2, first time I missed the daylight saving change, this time wasn't prepared for negative adjustment. Hopefully third time is a charm.

If there's anything you'd like to see let me know. I'm constantly tinkering with it and try to leave notes as to what I'm doing.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qmF2knc5rSrJLESgQJYBz8mPzpKihmSzPPQUGH7pT8g

Per my pool, my miners have been down 11 hours, 38 minutes. This pretty much lines up with yours give or take a few minutes, so we can say they've been down since roughly 5 AM EDT, which I think is 5 PM in China (which has one time zone, as I understand it)

Edit:

My offline status is below. I have 7 miners down, so it is showing under 8 hours per miner. My guess is they went down before the Miner Monitor started counting hours that they were down.

NeiMeng-1   2015   3   24   37
NeiMeng-1   2015   3   23   18

I agree, and in fact difficulty began to plateau even before the dramatic price drops in October and January. It really started in July, when double-digit increases stopped being the norm. There were exceptions when SP, Bitmain, or AM made some big deliveries, but other than that we've been pretty much flat.

And I doubt that there's much in the pipeline right now. SP has hinted at a new gen of chips, but their mantra is to be patient. It looks like Bitmain won't release a new chip until 3Q at the earliest, and AM from what I can tell is done or close to it. Unless there's a dramatic price increase, the days of double-digit difficulty increases are pretty much over. It would take over 33 Ph/s to be added to the network during the next difficulty period for a 10% increase.

Moreover, and I've been saying this for a while now, there's a finite supply of "cheap" electricity. There's a reason electricity costs what it does in most populated places. There's demand for it. As big farms move to remote locations for cheap power, the demand and cost will eventually go up as well. That's how markets tend to work.

That said, it's a good time for smaller miners, especially if the price recovers near-term. If we move back up to $500 by the summer, difficulty will be slow to catch up. It takes time to manufacture, and right now I don't think there's all that much in the pipeline. So if the price increases, difficulty will lag by at least a month or two.

I agree that there's no reason to think it is a scam - if it were it would be a pretty bad scam. The problem is the payout method is unsustainable. The pool will (due to orphans and the 1% bonus) get further and further in debt to miners to the point where unrealistic "good luck" or implementation of a fee will be necessary to pay off miners.

I've mined here in the past because the pool is transparent about how it operates. But I (quite selfishly I suppose) only mine when the pool has had a run of "good luck" and isn't in debt to miners.

The bottom line is that the way the pool is run, by itself, is unsustainable. If I saw proof of reserves from other business ventures that may be helped by having a large number of miners in the pool that would ensure regular payouts, I'd jump back to this pool in a heartbeat. 101% PPS that is paid out regularly is hard (impossible?) to beat.

Well, earlier in the thread I explained that I purchased from them, you can read about my experience, fwiw.

It ranges from 1.38 Ths to 1.42 Ths at the pool, just about what I expected.

I purchased an SP20 from OregonMines over the weekend. I have to say that everything has gone smoothly so far, except for the outage that Oregonmines announced in this thread. Even that one hiccup was handled professionally, as they quickly got back to me once I noticed that it was down, gave me an estimate as to when it would be back up, and got it back up within that estimate. They also agreed to credit me for a full day, even though I lost less than a full day.

After expressing interest in purchasing the SP20, I received an invoice generated by Quickbooks from DG Rollins Mining, LLC. The invoice was for the cost of the unit, plus a month's hosting costs. OM agreed to run the unit underclocked, and charged me accordingly. I paid the invoice using bitcoin. I checked my pool about 10 minutes later, and the miner was already running. Other than the downtime mentioned above, the miner has run consistently and at the expected speed.

The one service I wish they offered is the ability to change pools myself through a web interface or something similar. Hopefully this is something that can be added in the future. That said, I haven't had a need to change pools yet, and OM has said that they will change pools upon request. However, especially with hosted services, I like to test out how the miner responds at different pools, so this would be a helpful added feature. I should add that Lee, who I suppose is their competitor, also does not offer this service.

Overall, I'm happy with my experience with OM. It appears to be a professionally run operation.

Does anyone know how the Offline History works? I've had 2 miners down for just over 8 hours now, but the offline history has a total of 8 for the day (when it should be 16...) Is that normal?

I think it's about the same at 0.10/kwh. But Lee said that once he sells a few more units, he will drop 10%. If you guys are able to get the rate down to $0.09/kwh this will be a much more attractive deal, I'd certainly be interested.

I don't recall seeing free shipping when the price was $419 - in fact I initially thought that may have been the reason for the price increase, but when I added one to my cart, there was still a shipping charge once I selected my shipping company. Is there a link saying otherwise?

Eh, for the most part you're right, the future exchange rate of bitcoin should not play a role in deciding whether to purchase mining equipment. But it does have a marginal effect in two ways.

The first is the cost of electricity, which is priced in a different currency. Using USD as an example and a $0.10/Kwh rate of electricity, a 1 KW miner costs about BTC0.008 per day to run at an exchange rate of $300. If that miner is current-gen and running at 2Ths (0.5 w/gh - using easy-to-math numbers), it makes about BTC0.02 per day, for an operating profit of BTC0.012 per day. Skip ahead to when difficulty doubles, and that profit is down to a mere BTC0.002 per day. A couple more difficulty increases, and it costs more than it makes, and its bitcoin earning days are over.

Unless the exchange rate changes, and bitcoins increase against the dollar. At an exchange rate of $600, all things equal the cost of electricity per day is now BTC0.004, which means the same miner is earning a profit of BTC0.006 per day. The difficulty would have to rise much more for the miner's operating profit to disappear, which means that it will earn more bitcoins overall.

The second is that exchange rate affects difficulty, though to what extent is unclear. This should be obvious from the first point, as the hypothetical miner discussed there would turn off shortly after difficulty doubled if price were stable, but keep running if the price increased. This counters the first effect, though. However, I'd expect (but this is speculation) that difficulty increases would lag price increases to some extent, as some of the difficulty increase would come from new hardware, and that takes time to manufacture. This is particularly true if the price increases after a long decrease or a period of stagnation (kind of like now).

So based on the above, right now, if you think the price will increase, it may not be a bad idea to grab some inexpensive used hardware. Actually, about a month ago would have been the best time to do that, as there isn't much of that on the market right now.

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense... there's a number of assumptions in here on the relation between bitcoin price and projected difficulty rise. I'd ask for you to provide the basis for these assumptions, but this has gotten far astray from the point of my post (to the extent that it was all responsive to begin with).

I'm surprised I'm adamant that they got it wrong as well, that doesn't sound like the message I was trying to convey.

I don't know how I'd react to market intelligence or how much weight I would give it if I were Bitmain. That's their judgment call, not mine. But Bitmain decided to disclose, at least in part, some aspects of their pricing methodology. And it seems that they put quite a bit of weight on market intelligence. Given its unreliability, I simply questioned whether they are putting too much weight. Sure, it's their money invested, not mine, but that doesn't mean that their decision-making process is infallible. The issue is weight, not reliability (though they are related), I never suggested (nor would I) that I can properly distinguish between reliable and unreliable market intelligence, certainly not in this case, given the limited amount of vague* information we received about that intelligence.

*I don't mean vague as a complaint - I'm sure it was vague for a reason.

Risk.

I think we're on the same page, though I didn't forget (conveniently or otherwise... if I forget, it is almost always inconvenient) that they take into consideration their competitors, let alone any single competitor. My point is that competitor intelligence is often incomplete and unreliable, as was shown to be the case with this specific competitor. Their pricing model may be (and this is pure speculation, I have no idea how they model their pricing other than what I've gleaned from the forums) putting too much weight on competitor intelligence.

To be clear, my point was that purchasers are saving on the shipping costs, which can be quite substantial (to the US, anyway), and these are benefits he provides to the buyer (in exchange for hosting costs, of course). Also, I assume his shipping costs are considerably lower, as he's local.

I'm a little fuzzy on this - is this a separate investment fund that you set up, distinct from the mining operation?

And the question we are all aching to know, how close are we to a decrease in hosting costs? That is, how many more miners to sell?

My hope is that by selling the remaining units at $380, they would still quickly, and allow you to reduce the hosting costs.

Then you can sell new units at $420 (or even at a slight premium, because as you say they come with free PSU rental, no shipping costs, no maintenance, no in-home annoyance (for home miners) and even lower hosting costs.)

btw, please confirm that the PSU is a rental. If we own the PSUs (meaning we can have them shipped along with the miner), that changes things.

I'm also curious as to whether Bitmain considered the news that 21 Co. (formerly 21e6) is backed by well over $100 million in funding? As I understand it, this company is primarily a mining company, though they have ambitions beyond that. They are employing datacenters and obtaining equipment from somewhere.

I understand that Bitmain tries to include projected future difficulty in their pricing model. I don't expect them to share their methodology, but I'm curious as to how reliable it is.

For example, and this is great for purchasers of Bitmain's products - anyone who bought an S5 in late Dec. or January did pretty well for themselves. They already have what they mined, which is more than electricity costs in almost all cases, and the S5 they purchased has appreciated in value. This is great for the consumer, but tells me that Bitmain's pricing model was not that accurate with respect to the S5.

I've been considering (and working in my spare time) on using past data (I've shared some of this work in the speculation forum), industry announcements, past industry announcements and their effect on hashrate increase, and other information to build a model that will estimate the range of future difficulty increases in the short to medium term (1-4 months). The purpose is to inform the miner on equipment purchases, but it can easily translate to a pricing model for manufacturers. I can tell you that it is not an easy task.