My point is that you're making a thread talking about giant swings in hash rate and claiming something that simply isn't true.  The network has not added 100PH/s of gear.  Look, I can take an incredibly small point in time (say between two blocks) that are found seconds apart and claim the network jumped to 3EH/s.  Nobody in their right mind is going to believe that for a second.  All you've done is try to make it seem a bit more plausible by using a "relatively" innocuous number... enough to be scary, but not enough to be unbelievable.  I simply showed with actual numbers that your facts are misleading.

Is the network adding hash rate?  Trends say it is.  Are we going to see a 25% increase this adjustment?  Not a chance.

What do you mean "why not?" Are you truly that daft?  Here's an idea: if you want 25 newly minted coins, and you're willing to pay a premium, why not just spend the coin renting enough hash power from somewhere like nicehash or MRR and point that power to ck.'s solo pool?  Spend enough coin and you'll eventually find a block that is all yours.

It's all about how the mining process works.  At the most basic level you're brute force attacking the problem, trying millions, billions, trillions of times a second to find a solution that works.  If you happen across one that does work, congratulations, you've solved the block.  The formulas for expected time are based on statistics and probabilities.  Given a hash rate and difficulty, you can calculate how long you would expect it to take for you to find a block.  Here's the formula:

So, if we plug in the numbers for the upcoming S7 from Bitmain:
In other words, at the current network difficulty, you'd expect an S7 to take 1.6 years to find a block.

What do you mean "own a block"?  I'm assuming you want to throw some message into the coinbase signature to tell the world that this block is yours?  I swear one of the Chinese pools lets you bid on whats in the coinbase signature...

EDIT: I re-read your ask from the OP.  Yeah... good luck with that.  No pool is going to change their payout address to be yours.  The best you could hope for is what I wrote - the pool altering their coinbase signature for a block.

Sit back, relax and take a deep breath.  Since the last difficulty adjustment, there have been 1547 blocks found.  It has taken 889775 seconds between those blocks.  This means an average of 575.16 seconds per block.  The bitcoin network states it should be 600 seconds per block.

If we do some math, we can see that the average hash rate of the network is as follows (using the shortened formula, which is accurate enough for this exercise):

Worrying as you are over 100PH/s swings is causing you too much stress.

That's a heck of a USB hub those things are attached to... talk about industrial strength .  How much power can it feed to each port?  You've got that bridge connector, so I'm assuming the sidehack stick draws more than one port can provide when you're running it at those speeds?

You can run your own p2pool node and merge mine a ton of other coins if you want.  NMC, DVC, IXC, HUC, WLC, etc.  You can check out the p2pool merge-mining thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=651819.0

It's been a few weeks since I've updated this post.  Unfortunately work has kept me too busy to keep up here.  P2Pool had a couple unlucky weeks and a lucky week.  Network difficulty has continued to increase, and new hardware has been introduced, making my S3s that much closer to being obsolete.  Quite honestly, I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to keep them plugged in and mining.  The new S7 certainly looks to be an interesting piece of hardware, bringing levels of efficiency never seen before in a 28nm process ASIC.  However, its price point is a bitter pill to swallow.

Anyway, let's take a look at the numbers for the past few weeks:

8/21 - 8/28
NastyPoP: 0.01170063BTC
NastyP2P: 0.02753223BTC
Expected: 0.02857788BTC
Luck - 54.07%

8/28 - 9/4
NastyPoP: 0.0455039BTC
NastyP2P: 0.04888988BTC
Expected: 0.02846873BTC
Luck - 180.68%

9/4 - 9/11
NastyPoP: 0.01466154BTC
NastyP2P: 0.00815205BTC
Expected: 0.02719480BTC
Luck - 63.24%

OP Updated

I don't own a sidehack stick, but I can certainly vouch for Phil's trustworthiness.  I've been part of a number of groups with him where a pretty decent sum of BTC was in play.  Phil not only took care of all of the details, but he spent - at least in my mind - far more time and effort to ensure we all got the best bang for our hashing dollar than was required for the group.  He constantly adjusted orders to ensure things were playing out to our advantage as best as possible.  Once we found blocks, payments were sent without delay.

Best of luck to everyone who joins this adventure.  If I ever get my hands on one of those sticks, I'll jump onboard this train, too.

What a great way to do a startup.  Heck, you could franchise the things... buy your own turnkey bitcoin mining operation.  Capital expenses are relatively cheap (converting some old buildings - in the case of the article an automotive repair shop).  1.2MW... that's a decent amount of hardware you can power with that... think 1000 S7s - nearly 5PH/s.

Could they take the entire block reward for themselves?  Sure... at least in a traditional pool.  In a pool like p2pool, no.  In p2pool the block's coinbase transaction contains the payouts of the block reward to all the miners.  In a traditional pool, the entire reward is paid to the pool's address.  That's why when you get rewarded from p2pool, it shows up as an immature transaction and you must wait for the 101 block confirmations before you can use that coin.  When you get a payout from a traditional pool, it's just like getting sent BTC from anyone else - it becomes spendable coin after a single confirmation.

Now, just because it's easy doesn't mean it's done.  Who's going to mine on a pool where the operator keeps everything for himself?  Skimming of the top would be considerably easier to conceal.  Not too many people are going to notice that small percentage missing.

I would certainly not trust the stats reported there... especially since no other site I've seen reports anything near the 100PH/s jump you're stating.  For example, bitcoinwisdom.com shows us still around 420PH/s.  Blockchain.info shows 460PH/s.

Remember, the network hash rate is estimated by looking at the time between blocks and current network difficulty.  Seeing spikes is certainly normal and expected variance.

+2.76 to +3.00 for me if you please.

There are indeed; however, when this thread was started, the S7 was nothing more than rumors.  Try here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1165628.0 for the hardware thread.

So... the first thing I bolded.  If you're trying to hide this from your IT department, you're probably not in the position of making this decision in the first place.

The second thing I bolded.  It isn't borderline worth it.  It is completely worthless.  You will not make any profit.  At all.  None.

Those two things aside, if you just want to play around with mining, buy yourself a stick miner and plug it in to your desktop.  Far less power consumption for a far greater hash rate.

Hahahahahaha!  This made my morning .

The attention to detail in this miner is fantastic, and the easy access flap to the internals is ingenious!

It's a marketing gimmick, but it also represents a step in the direction of commoditizing bitcoin mining.  Right now you've basically got a few players in the game: KnC, BitFury, Bitmain.  These are the folks who are producing chips in massive numbers and their sole market is the dedicated mining business where they fill datacenters with gear.  Yes, Bitmain sells to the public still, but that segment of the market continues to shrink.  Not too many folks are throwing dedicated mining hardware in their homes any more.

So what can you do to try and capture more market share?  You throw your chips into items everyday consumers purchase: routers, coffee makers, toasters, refrigerators, cable boxes, gaming systems, etc.  Now you're potentially making deals with big brand names like Samsung, LG, GE, Whirlpool, etc.

Bitmain's controller boards in their miners already run OpenWRT, so it's not too much of a stretch to produce their own router hardware.

Since the diff changed, we've seen 171 blocks.  It's been 28 hours, 3 minutes since the diff change.  This means we're averaging 9.842 minutes per block since the adjustment.  Following that through, it means we're averaging 146.3 blocks every 24 hours... so just a tad over the expected 144.

It also certainly seems like they're taking the fight directly to 21 Inc and their Bitcoin of Things initiative.  Other than space heaters, miners have served no other purpose besides the mining of coins.  Seems like a good first step into the fray - everyone needs a router

Oh, this is just too good to be true.  It must be my birthday today.  Oh wait... it is!

OP - I commend you on providing me with such a wonderful present.