Thanks sidehack.

I certainly didn't mean to criticize any specific hub and power supply setup. It's just easy for folks to start multiplying a stick miner rate, and think it's trivial to just run a dozen or more. The first one is easy. The 12th stick miner is much harder to get working well.

Isn't it pretty loud over there on the dark side?   

I haven't seen a server power supply that even pretends to be quiet. The ATX EVGA supplies seem pretty quiet to me. That's only based on a sample size of one. My bet is that by now, all the server PSU designers are hearing impaired from the noise.

I am not understanding the above, nor do I understand why Bitcoin is more of currency and less of a commodity. While I have a pretty myopic view, it doesn't seem any more of a currency now than it was 12-months ago. While it's been less volatile in some ways, it seems to have settled in at $220-280 range in terms of price.

I also don't get the hobbyist miner connection either.

Care to elaborate on your theory here?

With that kind of luck, maybe you go out and buy a few thousand lotter tickets!!!!

Still not quite the kinda win that allows you to walk into your bosses office, and say "Take this Job and Shove it". 

The title of this thread includes "Hop-Proof". While I expect that is really just hyperbole, I wondered what it would mean to be "Hop Proof"? Contracts with the pool members to never use another pool? Kind of like getting married? 

I didn't actually expect anything instantaneous. On Slush, there's a "100 confirmation" delay built into the actual payout. That's at least hours, though usually less than a day, in duration.

Thanks for a cogent, clear, and calm response to my inquiry. When I started back in 2013, I was mostly concerned about pool manager fraud, and it seemed like Slush was a good choice using that metric. As I have gotten more educated, and more invested, it seems I should pay attention to some other options for a pool.

Thanks again, Kano!

It is with a high quality hub, and a robust power supply behind it. Your generic 7-port hub with a 2A power supply likely won't cut it, and certainly not for 7 ports!

Sounds like the "Electrical God''s" were smiling on you at the time. Usually a problem like that would also take out some other unrelated piece of hardware, just to drive home the point! 

I have my doubts about what I feel is a long term collision between fees supporting the current infrastructure for mining. If you just look at the current electricity costs alone, no mining hardware cost, transaction fees would have to be massive. By the time Bitcoin "processing" is supported by transaction fees alone, there will have be a huge decrease in the costs of "mining". This may not be true for many years, but it will have to happen or Bitcoin will evaporate before the "last" coin is mined.

Looks like I'll have to restart my 10PH farm if I want to win the pool again this time around. I might even have to call an emergency meeting of my friends at OBEC (Organization of Bitcoin Exporting Countries).   

In case it's not obvious, this is intended to be a humorous post!!!

Be prepared to carry a lot of digits for your calculations. While you can use floating point I expect, some of the numbers can be quite large, or very small (not negative, but less than 1).

You have the patience of a Saint. Way more than me......

Have you folks ever seen a "Take a whack at a car" for like $1. You get a baseball bat and each swing at the car costs you a $1 (or whatever). Kind of an aggression therapy deal. I'll bet there are some specific miners that could be useful. Some of the gear is pretty sturdy, and you could always charge more than $1 a swing. For example, a BFL Monarch looks pretty fragile, and wouldn't survive many whacks, but I'll bet some of the KNC gear could take a real beating. I'll also bet a BFL Single would survive a while.

You'd have to organize your own local event, since I don't see a good way to organize this over the Internet.

I'll also bet that you could charge more depending on the manufacturer. I think you could get top dollar for BFL gear in general. 

This is what I have never really understood about the "multiple pool" strategy with Westhash as the primary. Virtually all the other "normal" pools (e.g. Slush, Kano, etc), all cost me something if I am not there essentially 24x7. Yes I understand that outages happen, and I try and minimize my downtime, because then it appears to the pool as if I am "pool hopping", which in one way or another is discouraged. As I understand Kano's pool, until I have been mining pretty steadily for 2+ days, I am not really getting the "full rate" for my efforts. Once I have been there "steadily enough", then all is good. That feels like discoraging "pool hopping".

This isn't a specific complaint about Kano, or Slush for that matter. I just don't understand how it works to have Westhash as your primary, which switches on/off depending on the rate, and any other pool.

Why do people do this? It seems like you need to rig this with a pretty high bar for Westhash, so that it will only "hop away" from your "real primary" (e.g. Kano, Slush, etc), to offset the cost of the switch. That suggests that my p= would need to be way more than .0102. In other works only use Westhash if the returns are really "outsized" (e.g. the Paycoin frenzy), and not just a little bit better.

I've just in the last 3 days rigged my SP20 to use Westhash as my primary pool, and Slush as my backup pool. Prior to this, I have mined only on Slush. I currently have my password on Westhash set with p=.0104. My SP20 has spent a great deal of time on Westhash, with some short breaks back to Slush.

My general sense is that I am doing less well on Westhash. Yes, I know it's only 48 hours of experience, and Slush might be on a lucky streak. Nevertheless, I am wondering if my p= value is too low, or if I am just not understanding what to expect. My simplistic vies is that I would set p= based on the expected BTC I would earn in a day with 1TH. Based on bitcoinwisdom, that looks to be about .01017 (round up to .0102). I then chose a value such that it would only switch if it was "real deal" on Westhash.

I would appreciate any comments and insight that folks have to share.

I would suggest that you look at the USB class of miners. That would either be a "stick" type miner (i.e. a USB stick that runs kind warm, and has the SHA256 ASIC) or a small (e.g. R-box) class of device. None of these will generate too much heat, cost too much, or use too much power. None will generate much in the way of Bitcoin either. The costs won't be high, and you can decide the extent to which you want to improve your mining, or reach a state of satisfaction.

You will almost certainly see a positive ROI sooner than if you had bought $5000 of actual hardware. If BTC never gets above $250, then your mining would have a failure as well (IMHO).

While this has happened before, many current miners (my self included) did not participate. I started in July of 2013, well after the last halving. I can't gage it's impact relative to the  last halving, I think the effects will be more pronounced because the Bitcoin universe is more intense in terms of mining. I have no sense that there were multi-MW mining farms, and a Petahash was unthinkable back then.  We now have an actual mining hardware industry, that is "big business".

Just my $.02 as a relative newbie.

Here's an odd thought. Maybe the little wall wart for the Ethernet switch is damaged or failing in someway. If the Ethernet switch works fine with on N-3 ports working, maybe it's a power problem for the Ethernet switch.