Looks to me like the next change will be a definite decrease in difficulty. May essentially reset back to roughly the same difficulty as the end of July. This of course is all in the context of a big drop in BTC price (now roughly $3772).

For what it's worth, another step down in BTC price. Last quote from coinbase: $3757.

For quite a while, prior to the last "halving", bitcoinwisdom was my go to website to get a good summary of the state of Bitcoin mining, difficulty, profitability and so forth. It seemed to "leave the rails" and I stopped visiting it.

Just in the last 10 days, I have visited it again, and it appears to be pretty well straightened out. The figure look to be be pretty accurate and quite useful again.

Am I missing some massive flaw in it's reporting? What the consensus amongst other folks on the current usefulness of bitcoinwisdom at this time? Any back story on it's apparent "return"?

Until here is more complete info coming from Phil, or Canaan, I thought I would suggest an additional method for tweaking the A841 configuration. I am betting that it's possible to combine the avalon8-voltage-level value along with the avalon8-voltage-level-offset value. In other words, use the voltage-level value to make larger adjustments, and then use the voltage-level-offset value to bias it slightly from the value set by voltage-level. I have just set my A841 to voltage-level -1 and a voltage-level-offset of +1. This clearly works in that the miner starts and runs for me, and with only 15 minutes of run time, it seems a smidge warmer and faster than the voltage-level -1 alone, but clearly slower and cooler than voltage-level-offset -2 alone.

I don't have a good way to measure power at this time, so may not really be able to flesh out this experiment fully. It would be really attractive for Canaan to elaborate on the way in which voltage-level and voltage-level-offset interact with each other, and how that translates into power/hear/speed.

I am currently running the March 5th Pi software that was available when I got my A841. The MM firmware is what was installed when I received the box ( 8411802-1e73b80).

Thanks to all the folks here that got me past the "placebo" GUI option for Voltage Offset that didn't seem to have an effect at all.

Color me skeptical.

A couple of years ago, a company called 21 Inc (became 21.co --> earn.com) got a great deal of press in terms of Venture capital from big names. They also supposedly had some kind of "in" with Intel for chip fabrication. If the buzz from them had panned out, they would be a major player in terms of Bitcoin mining hardware.

Instead their one hardware product has been completely orphaned, and their current business model has no mention of Bitcoin mining chips nor Intel. Maybe all that they claimed was real, but Intel is a huge company and can "squander" tens of millions of dollars, and think very little of it. The last big thing with them could completely evaporate in a year. Intel knows where their bread and butter comes from, and as long as these little side adventures don't imperil the X86 business, they can make these "odd" investments without seriously impacting their business. Not so much with the companies Intel "partners" with.

Just my $.02 on where this might be going (or not).

My experience with the Avalon 6 was that when the Pi couldn't see the miner, it is either:

1) The micro USB from the Pi to the AUC2 (for the A6).

2) The AUC itself.

3) The 5 pin cable from the AUC to the A6 miner.

On my A6, the AUC has a blue light with just a bit of flicker during normal run.

I know there is a way tell if the Pi can talk to the AUC, but I don't recall which log on the Pi tells you that. The GUI won't help, I needed to ssh into the Pi and look in /var/log/messages (maybe?). If/when I can look at this, I'll post additional debug steps. I don't know how a AUC behaves if it isn't flashed correctly.

Depending on the specific miner, you MIGHT find an option to "rotate" between 2 or more pools. What that might mean is to mine at one pool for N hours, and then switch to a different pool for N more hours.

Depending on the pools and their payout scheme(s), this might not work well at all. Some pools try to discourage "pool hopping" which is how this behavior would appear. This would be reflected in the payout scheme of thew pool(s).

At onew time I had my SP20 rigged so that it would switch to nicehash if there was a "very high" payment rate present for my 1Th of SHA-256 hashing. That was a long time ago. Long term, the market for SHA-256 hash rate is pretty open which keeps odd disparities from lasting too long.

I think BTC.com has a mechanism for switching between BTC and BCH mining. This is a pooll option, and mot related to the mining hardware and it's associated software.

While it's a very stylish PC, it's just that. It's utterly useless as a Bitcoin miner. If your actual goal is to mine Bitcoins, you would have been far better off with a Raspberry Pi and one or more stick miners.

Sorry to be so harsh, but this is the wrong forum on getting help on booting a Windows 10 PC.

While I can't really help on your question, I can suggest that you "improve" your title to include that's related to an Antminer S4. As currently phrased, folks might ignore it thinking you are trying to boot a PC....

Fed Ex is saying Tuesday, for Minnesota.....

Will you start a new thread for your A841 review and testing? Do you have an estimated ship date for your A841? Are you in the April 15th-April 30th batch that I see mentioned on the BlokForge website, or perhaps something sooner?

I am very interested in how this plays out, as you can probably tell by my questions....

What is the 20% that you are referring to? It's important to understand that there isn't some kind of "global hash rate meter".  Any website that provides an ESTIMATE of the current  hash rate is doing that based on recent block solve rate. In other words how quickly are blocks being solved. From that, the estimated hash rate is calculated. How many blocks to you use in that calculation? One, Ten, One Hundred? The difficulty adjustment is based on how long it took to solve 2016 blocks. During that interval, there can be wild swings, even if the final adjustment after 2016 blocks is quite small (even zero).

Of course there is new gear being switched on all the time. Stuff that was sold and just arrived (from Bitmain, Ebay, Bitfury, where ever) is going to get turned on. Nobody buys a miner and then doesn't switch it on for at least a while. It takes quite a while for miners, large or small, to turn off mining gear they have already paid for based strictly on BTC price.

Don't want to rain on anybody's parade, by the Xilinx SoC (System on Chip) is the controller for the S9, not anything related to the SHA-256 hashing chips. They could readily replace the Xylinx with something compatible and still retain the rest of S9 frame and hashing boards.

I don't think this says anything about a possible S11 miner.

While I can't comment on the S9 price, I feel qualified to comment on difficulty.

I expect difficulty will continue to rise, until it "catches up" with BTC price. I think the best you can hope for is a slowing in the rate of increase, as long as the price stays in the $11,000 range. Since 2013, I haven't seen a sustained decline in difficulty that lasted more than 2-3 cycles. I have a seen it "plateau" for a few months, but that didn't last more than 6 months or so. Now that folks have seen that BTC can spike to $20,000 I think it will be a while before folks give up on the dream of "getting rich". I expect that mining hardware will command a good price for a while. FOMO will take months  to dissipate in my opinion.

Keep in mind the name of this sub-forum: Miner Speculation

So, what's the Internet component for this solution? The intro suggests that it could be in remote locations where Natural Gas is readily available, and presumably inexpensive.

Perhaps Internet access is left to the purchaser? Seems to diminish the "Plug and Play" a bit.

Looks like the March batch of A821's is now sold out. For the very first time, I saw a quantity of 3 available for one refresh, and then my attempt to add to the card and it was sold out again. I wonder how many they actually had for sale?

@timk225: Did you actually get one into your cart?

Latest posted price is $2899 for a single A821 on the Blokforge website. Is somebody expecting that to actually come down within a week? This is down from the earlier $3600 price, but I don't see anything to suggest $2000 at all.

Could you describe in what way this relates to the topic at hand (i.e. the KryptMiner)?

Yes, FPGA's are wonderful for what they do (i.e. allow rapid changing and prototyping). For something that is well understood (i.e.the SHA-256 algorithm), they have no compelling reason to be used in Bitcoin mining. They lose on speed, and efficiency. To suggest otherwise makes you look foolish (IMHO).

If on the other hand you want to a "generic miner" that can be programmed to do SHA-256 for the morning and re-programmed to do X11 in the afternoon, then that's a different story. There just isn't much of a market for such a device.

Obviously it wasn't difficult to "get into mining" at the outset. Originally folks were mining with CPU's. While I joined "late" (i.e. middle of 2013), CPU's weren't viable at that time. it's not hard to find the anecdote of someone buying a pizza for several Bitcoins (18 as I recall?).

I wonder whatever happened to those Bitcoins?