Um you should probably checkout the Beginners & Help area...
One excellent post from there is this one with a ton of useful links.

Bitcoin has not been able to be mined by CPU/GPU's since 2013...
Please read the stickied post at the top of this area...
Specifically point-3

Yep. Pretty much.
The upcoming 1/2ing will probably shake out many marginal-profit operations but I also expect that much of their newer hardware will be resold to the survivors....

Simple - 1st find areas that can provide massive amounts of cheap power and make long-term contracts with the power companies. Then  use investors money to constantly upgrade equipment and expand their operations. Of course it is a vicious cycle as their ever increasing hash rate just makes diff go higher...

The renewables are the problem. Just *how* do you think being renewable would help matters???

And what does that have to do with power shortages? Answer: Wind & solar power is highly variable and bad weather causes numerable problems such as what Texas is currently experiencing https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/01/16/green-wind-solar-energy-freezing-texas-power-grid-blackout/  Only Nuclear and fossil-fueled (gas of course - not coal) power plants are able to run regardless of weather (and at night). Sorry Greenies but your unrealistic goals of zero-emissions for the world just cannot work. Reality can be a bitch eh?  

Considering the massive mining farms located mainly in Texas and a few in other areas of the US like Nebraska and Montana - all of whom have agreements with their power providers to cut back their mining when power is needed elsewhere in the state - of course the hash rate is way down.

I wholeheartedly agree!
That's why I said the same thing earlier. Now the concept of of using A decentralized public blockchain as an immutable type of cloud storage for what is otherwise ephemeral digital content is a sound one and provided DRM issues can be resolved, having the content publicly accessible would be great so We The Public can read/view/play, etc it.

Just as with out of print books, there is a shitton of games, movies, software etc. that is no longer distributed by the copyright holders that users would LOVE to have access to and be willing to still pay the copyright holders for the rights to access it. Again, that said - using the BTC for it is NOT the way to do it.

re: In the US at least, legality of storing/archiving copyrighted content, in this case vintage Nintendo games, per established case law and quoted from the decrypt article:The catch there is what constitutes a 'backup copy stored by legal owners of the original (and previously purchased) content" and the legality of said 'backup copy' being viewable and/or playable by anyone - not just the legal owner of said previously purchased content?

For those interested in how this interactive variant of Ordinals works using the SNES emulator here is the process used by pizzaninjas

While I applaud the archiving of otherwise ephemeral digital content and acknowledge the need for it (just talk to folks that purchased movies from several streaming sites that later shut down), using the BTC blockchain to do it is just wrong. There has to be another way to create immutable & public digital content libraries that use tokens for DRM control and a widely distributed blockchain...

All that said, as a miner do I like the fees being generated? Hell yes and come the 1/2ing those fees will probably often be close to or exceeding the block rewards.

As an occasional user of BTC so far when transferring coin I have yet to pay what I would consider an excessive fee to have a tx confirmed in less than 1 day. The catch there is, 'excessive fee' compared to what? Late summer of last year I moved several BTC from an online exchange to my hardware wallet for less than $100 and 1st confirmation was within a couple hours. For the last payout from Kanopool 7 days ago to the PPLNS users of the pool Kano used a near-zero fee to distribute the rewards from the pool wallet and it still was confirmed within a few hours. Go fig.

Ja using BTC for lots of <$50 tx's is no longer viable but when the ocassional tx is worth several $k and more - still cheaper and faster than a wire transfer.

No. It does not matter what the load is. Could be a single massive arc light, a data center full of servers or in this case, miners - all that matters is the rated power they pull.

Um.. 250,000*80% load gives 200kw/3500w=57 miners total. The 80% loading is standard safety margin for pulling power 24x7

Ja, on the technical end of it, for 1, currently it is targeting the low data space vintage Nintendo games, specifically the SNES. From the article:
What would be awesome would be porting Castle Wolfenstein and its later progeny such as Doom to a blockchain. Just not the BTC one...

A more detailed article about it is here

edit - it seems that they already did it with Doom!
Link to the preview version here.  

One huge concern I have is using recursive inscriptions to hold code that can be assembled into an executable - in this case the SNES emulator... What is to stop using the chain to distribute malware or C&C code for it?

The ordinal game is literally gonna get bigger - plans in progress to archive vintage Nintendo console games in them.
I started a thread here in the technical area about it.
fun fun... At least it beats the hell out of the inane pics being sold to idjits.

Now there are plans in progress to archive vintage Nintendo console games in them.
One fun bit is that the code for playing them through a Web-3 based emulator is stored there as well.

Thoughts?

as replied in Discord, for cooling heatsinks always use push. additional fans that are pulling are just to assist the pushers.

The ONLY way a BTC block can be mined by CPU/GPU or toys like the nerdminer is if difficulty plummets back to where it was around 2013. That ain't gonna happen unless the value of BTC collapses.

To have even a remote chance of finding a block means the miner must process at least 1 share before someone else finds a block. In other words it has to be faster than 1 share every 10 min (on average). At current diff that just   is  not  going  to  happen. Period.

My 1st guess is that the FW is Canaan's FMS which is what they've used from the A10xx on up.
So far I've not seen anything in the specs stating it uses the Braiins pool. Where is that said?

edit: Found it, it is on the indiegogo site
That blows.
 A. I hate the idea of using QR codes as it largely requires using a 'smartphone'.
 B. there damn well better be a way to access the miner gui via a browser vs a smartphone.

To keep from going off topic here, refer to post #1 in the Kanopool thread You can post your questions there and he will be sure to reply. Also has a Discord channel. See https://kano.is/ for the Discord invite for better access to the channel.

In short - it has several nodes spread around the world and fastest possible connections to the BTC network.

The number of machines used is irrelevant, it could be 1 miner or thousands of them. Solo mining is mining a block without having to share the reward with other miners vs pools where the block rewards are split amongst all of the the miners in the pool.

To solo mine you just point your machine(s) at your own node (bad idea) or point them at a provider like the Kano or -ck solo mining sites.

See my reply in the Ocean thread regarding this
Summary: pools have prebuilt blocks cached to be used as soon as they get a New Block Found msg on the network. If the pool is the one that found the previous block after broadcasting the New Block found msg to the network they will immediately begin working on their cached new block.

Yes, it is *possible* that the new block work may be superseded if a different previous block gets more confirmations before the one used in the new work but that is the very reason why it is a very bad idea to view a tx as 'confirmed' before it gets at least 3 additional confirmations and why it takes 101 confirmations to be considered irrevocably confirmed. Competing blocks are AKA as Orphan races which are soon resolved as more pools hop onto one or the other competing blocks.

I'm sure that Kano who was a primary dev (but not lead - that was Con Klovias) for the ckpool software can explain the process better but the OP seems to take great umbrage when reading what Kano has to say about pool operations...

Humorous analogy but not right.
Mining empty blocks has *always* been allowed for 1 main reason: to maintain the 10min avg time between blocks for the (now) rare occasions that the mempool is empty meaning there are literally no transactions to process for too long of a time. In the very early days that was almost common, but these days is VERY rare but still does happen.

Speaking of mempool...
If you checkout https://mempool.space/ you will see *all* of the upcoming tx's in the que and what the expected composition of the block should be based on its profitability (fees paid). Note that while there is no one global mempool: every node on the network maintains its own mempool, so different nodes may hold different transactions in their mempools, ALL pools can also see that information and at least in the case of Kanopool have already selected what tx's they will use and have that data cached for use when a new block-found msg is broadcast to the network. The 1st cached data includes (or should include) the id of the previous block found to propagate the chain. It's how Ocean pre-scans ((or should be pre-scanning) the tx's that they will use in the change of work sent when they see a new block.

Difference is Ocean chooses to not include any tx's related to ordinals whereas Kanopool and all the others accept all of them so scheduling the tx's is easy

@alani123, you said and use that as a reason to mine an empty block. Kano has repeatedly said here that the time for his pool to generate and broadcast new work to all the miners is under 100ms + time needed for the data packets to reach the miners (ping time). I'd think that for most other pools it should be about the same.

Um, for whatever reason(s) Luke's original Eligius pool software was exceeding slow at processing new work and because of that yes even back then he was doing empty blocks. As he has always been censoring tx's (back then casinos) methinks that possibly Ocean has the same issues for the same reason(s)?

@everyone PPLNS BLOCK!!! kano.is 824284