While I am NOT sidehack, I would be well and truly surprised if he send out a "kit" of parts that need to be soldered in any way shape or form. As I understand it, the BM1384 ASIC is VERY tricky part to get correctly soldered down. Read up on "Ball Grid Array" for more details. I expect your work will be associated with astuff mostly external to what he supplies (USB hub, some kind of PC, etc).

So the short summary is:

"In theory there is no difference between 10PH/day or 10x 1PH/day"

"In practice there may be a discernible difference based on a bunch of other factors beside Bitcoin probabilities"

My recollection is that when we got down to 1000 blocks remaining, the contest would close to further picks for this round. Do I have that right Phillip? If so, you might want to adjust the title to reflect that further picks are closed.

I can't recall a time when difficulty has just been "bumping along" at a more or less constant value, but I didn't join the mining party until the summer of 2013. Any others recall such a "calm" period?

I just can't make any of this discussion mesh with the realities I see from my electric company here in the US (MN in particular). They are working hard to get people to REDUCE their electric usage. I regularly am told that I can get a rebate from the electric company for every CFL or LED light bulb I buy. As I read things here, they are pushing every thing they can in order to avoid building another power plant and get it approved by their various regulatory bodies? How many power plants are required for that 2500 megawatts that was mentioned? Natural Gas or Coal, since Nuclear is essentially dead in the USA.

In general Bitcoin mining is the complete antithesis of what electric companies are doing these days.

I don't really understand the "wasting 16A on each rail". The current used  is what the miner requires, not what the PSU can supply, If the 12V load on the rail is say 15A, then that's what it gets. If you are trying to find a way to connect more mining hardware to the one power supply, then it matters. As long as a rail can supply what's need, with some margin, then you should be good to go.

Once the OP finds out if his miner will run for days at a time, without the "2-day stop" issue, then he can figure out what might be better and if he wants to spend the money. Until it's working well, it makes little sense to try and optimize the situation.

One other comment. It became obvious to me that it's usually a good idea to get a better PSU that might absolutely be required. A good PSU will likely be usable on a new generation miner. I now understand that a good PSU is a longer term investment than the actual mining hardware.

Do you the FT guys has any concept of what a "reasonable" mining rig looks like these days?

Is my toaster oven now going to be "on" a lot of the time when I am NOT making toast (i.e. about 23.9 hrs/day)?

I generally think of Financial Times as being pretty good, but the general concept makes almost no sense. While this "mining for free" stuff sounds great the reality will almost certainly fall massively short of anything useful for anybody except possibly the ASIC toaster manufacturer selling $300 toaster ovens.

Anything which tries to hide it's electrical consumption is likely to be an utter failure. It's almost an impossibility that the electric company in any US locale will try and promote any such thing. If anything they want to reduce electrical consumption, particularly during peak times, to avoid having to make the needed infrastructure investment in terms of plants and distribution. I can almost buy into Phillip's idea of an "ASIC portable heater", but beyond that there really isn't anything that makes sense. Look at all the promotions for switching lighting to CFL's or LED bulbs. That's intended to REDUCE consumption, not increase it. Here in MN most companies have one form or another of "load shedding" which allows them to turn things off remotely during peak power demand times. For that you get some kind of credit or reduced rate for the specific kind of load they can shed (e.g. Air Conditioning on the hottest days, Irrigation on farms).

Is the "nice hardware guy" named tophack maybe?   

Thanks for your efforts to describe and be transparent about what you are doing, including your less than successful stops along the way. It's quite refreshing.

The S3 has only 12V inputs, the controller (a Beaglebone?) must be powered from that. Does anybody know which 12V connector actually supplies the current for the controller? I expect that the Ethernet lights mentioned require good power to the controller, but I don't know where the "red light" comes from. Also the controller?

While I can see some small advantages to a large and diverse mining base, it doesn't seem to be REQUIRED by any stretch of the imagination. Why would 10,000 30TH miners be better than 30 10PH mining farms for an aggregate of 300 PH let's say of hashrate? What's the threshold for "decentralized" and why must Bitcoin be decentralized to survive? It seems to me that in 50 years, long after I care, we'll want the most efficient "mining" (really transaction processing) setup to get by on the slender fees provided by transactions and the fraction of a new BTC in every block.

I understand the visceral reaction to a few large mining farms, but I haven't seen a compelling argument beyond the 51% attack scenario. It feels like the desire for a "miner in every home" is more driven by nostalgia of a few years ago than anything else.

Please put me down for +2.51 to +2.75

While positive, I don't think this is much more than variance/luck.

At a gross level it sounds like a thermal/temperature issue, though a "cooling off" time of days seems excessive. I assume it's possible to check S3 temps, but I've never owned one. The other possibility could a thermal issue with the power supply. What kind of PSU?

Have your tried a different pool?

We clearly don't need a winner. I wonder though if the price of Bitcoin won't keep ALL the ASIC vendors in check. By that I mean a  low BTC/USD price keeps them from trying to kill each other. A high BTC price may encourage a "winner take all" strategy, which may not benefit any miner long term (past a couple of difficulty adjustments).

A little competition is probably good, but not a WAR

I think the guy that is "pulling BTC price lower" is named Adam Smith.

Look him up on Google.... 

With all due respect, I think it's silly to merge a miner/router/water-heater into a single entity. Consider:

- Water heaters don't actually run full tilt in terms of their power draw. The better the water heater, the less often it actually draws power. It can't run full power, lest the pressure relief valve will pop. The mining hardware will have to be very high power to meet hot water demands, and then cycle down and up. At 4AM local time it will essentially be idle.

- The time scales on equipment turnover don't mesh at all. My current water heater was installed 5 YEARS before I ever heard of Bitcoin. Let's assume I installed this massively priced gadget tomorrow. One year from now the mining function will be a way overpriced heating element that if it needed to be replaced, would be silly compared to a $40 heating element.

- My current water heater  can really only fit in one place in my house. Not surprisingly, I have no networking infrastructure anywhere near it, nor would I be interested in running Ethernet and cable to my water heater, and hope the WiFi works well from the utility room.

- When any aspect of this combined gadget fails, what do you do?

I completely understand the desire to capitalize on the waste heat from a miner. It needs to be some kind of "add on" not a replacement for the water hear.

Oh, and I am one of those Natural Gas for household heat and hot water, so I am not a customer.

I actually think we have seen a "pause" in the last few months. Not an actual stoppage of mining, but rather a pause in the crazy pace of hashrate expansion. The introduction rate of new mining hardware has slowed. It's not clear if the "Arms Race: mentality is just a temporary hold, or a long term trend.

When you think about it, what should a big farm do when they the option to buy a newer and more efficient miner? Should they just replace the gear with an equivalent number of Watts (more or less), and enjoy the increased hash rate? Or perhaps they should consider replacing their gear on a "Gigahash equivalent" basis and enjoy a lower electric bill. The downside to "More Gigahash same power" plan is that a couple of weeks later the difficulty adjustment may well dissipate a great deal of their gain they expected to acquire. If you kinda look at the whole Bitcoin mining universe, it would likely make more sense to reduce the total electric bill, and not push up the difficulty.

That's kind of a simplistic view, and not every miner will follow that plan, but it's becoming more obvious to me that efficiency is starting to become King, and in many cases not just who's got more hash.

The fact that the block reward is cut in half does nothing to the existing coins. Think of it as a reduction in the rate the dolar bill notes are printed. There are a wide variety of opinions (speculation) as to what will happen at the next halving. My understanding is that we have only had one previous halving, and it's difficult to draw any conclusions from that experience. I would argue that entire Bitcoin mining infrastructure is massively different than back in 2012, and any conclusions would be highly suspect. I also expect that there will be a great deal of "adjustment" that happens within farms and such as the time draws near. I have no idea how that will affect Bitcoin price though.

OP obviously must have a cost/KWH in mind for electricity. You might be able to figure out what he used based on the "Cost per Month" figure in the table.

I expect that Bitcoin will be a niche currency in 50 years. It won't have replaced any existing large scale currencies, nor will it have evaporated.

It seems unlikely to me that Bitcoin's long term future is secured by being a safe haven haven for tax evasion. Won't you have to un-hide some of it if you want to purchase something?

I want to put the quote:

"I am sure that bitcoin will going up" (2015)

right next to a previous:

"Housing prices will always go up" (2007)