A Return On Investment is realized, by definition, as soon as your investment makes a net profit.  In the case of the HaoBTC basic 6% investment account, that profit occurs as soon as the interest you earn on your deposit is more than the tx fee to transfer the btc to your investment account.  For me that ROI only took a few days.

If you're asking how long to double your investment, well then a simple compounding interest calculation will tell you what you're after; economics 101, my friend.

I realize, but my goal is not to roi the sticks.  I have other sticks and miners solo mining, but these two with 0 operating cost provide me a "free" trickle of satoshi.  If I hold on to it long enough it may be worth something some day...

I sincerely hope that you do!  I love my sticks and would love a replacement for the U3 just as much.

I think you misunderstood, I'm pretty sure he meant the lack of support for p2pool from miners, i.e. the hash rate pointed at the pool.  I read it as a complaint that not enough people point hash to p2pool.

I'll sell you one for 0.15 btc shipped, factory box, factory psu, new usb cable.  PM if interested, price negotiable.  Check my trust for a + review from a previous U3 sale.

That's not quite the same thing, it involve extra steps in purchasing the card and funding it, and in the end you have all the same security concerns as you do using any other card based transaction.

I want to be able to pay my bills with btc, too, but I want to pay directly from my core wallet to the purveyor's address.  This would allow me to collect rent from out of town renters via bitcoin, removing the time delay of mailed payments, and turn those rent payment right around to the bill collectors.  No middle steps, no cards, just bitcoin.

So you have "thing A" that does the exact same thing as "thing B", except "thing A" costs more to purchase, and costs more to operate (because of the ASIC), and both "things" have basically the same chance of solving a solo block (0 for "thing B", essentially 0 for "thing A" and getting closer to 0 with every + diff adjustment)?

I am failing to see where I overreached here.  You probably thought the bitfury lightbulb had merit, too.

Incorrect.  With the current size of the Kano ckpool you need about 13-14GH/s or so at the full 5Nd to receive a payment greater than the pool dust threshold (10,000 satoshi).  This is easily achievable with a single stick.  I currently have 2 compacs @ 225 freq pointed at kano.is for about 20-24GH average and I'm seeing almost 30,000 satoshi per block (these two compacs run on a computer that's on all the time and I don't pay electricity, so I look at it as free microearnings).

Wait, you're worried a mining company might go belly up and run off with all the invested funds?  Pff, that kind of stuff never happens in the bitcoin world... 

From what we've seen so far there is every indication that HaoBTC won't do this, they (Eric) have said as much, but you never know.  Never invest more than you are willing to lose!

Hmm, well that's disheartening to hear.  I had one die on me months and months ago, but I had it OC'd and was just asking to burn it out.  These 6 have been champs since that one burned out, I've run them at stock setting with a fan the entire time.

The screen cap above shows errors only on one stick, maybe I've got one bad apple in the group, I'll mess with them tonight and see.

Does the fact that they come back just fine for a while (hours at this point) when unplugged/replugged not mean anything?  Just another symptom of their inevitable demise?  If so then I just got room for a few more compacs.

I certainly hope so, otherwise this thing is totally useless and a gimmick.

And knowing Bitmain their fork of cgminer on the R1 will have crap messed up in it and it won't be efficient as it could be and Kano will have to write an updated R1 version...

I think Bitmain should already have all of their S7s deployed, right?  So I expect the next diff jumps to include all of the S7s that have been shipped out around the world.  I though we'd see a big jump this time, but we took a negative dive right at the beginning, then climbed back to +2.5%.  If we didn't start this adjustment negative then the + adjustment would have been much greater, but still not much more than 5%.  Of course 5% adjustment today is a much larger number than a 5% adjustment a year ago.  I've been mining only a couple months but the diff has grown 50% in the time I've been active, ~40G to 60G today, wow!

Had a power outage yesterday, since then I've been getting weird errors with my nanofury usb sticks.  They'll run fine for a while, then this starts:


The only cure is to quit cgminer, physically unplug and replug each stick (some of them the mining light stays on even after quitting cgminer), then restart cgminer.

Any ideas what is causing this?  Thanks.

If you had it pointed there for long enough to max out the 5Nd that hash would have been rewarded about 30,000 satoshi; for only 6 hours it probably didn't generate enough shares to make it over the dust payout threshold.

Using 5.3.0 to run a couple gekko compac sticks and no matter what value I input for --set compac:clock= the sticks hash as if they were set to 225 (x0882), so at about 11GH/s each.  Any idea why the sticks are not taking the frequency setting?

Well from my experience the U3 sometimes just freaks out and gives you HW errors out the wazoo.

I fire one of mine up every now and then, and just recently I had one running fine for a few days at 785/237.5 for about 51GH/s.  It would zombie out, like they do, but otherwise ran ok with HW error about 2%.  Then, for no reason, yesterday it started going crazy on the HW error and no matter what settings I run it gives me 20% HW error.  So I tried another U3 and get the same thing, so I unplugged them and put them away.  When I get bored I'll try plugging one in again and maybe I'll get lucky and it'll run, or maybe not.

Depends how configurable they end up becoming once people get their own firmware onto them.  I wouldn't buy one new right now, but in 6 months when some people are bored and others have them figured out I'd grab one at a fair used price just to mess with.

And if somehow it makes a U3 actually work, well that would be worth the price right there and we'll call it R1 zombie killer, but we'll see if the R1 + U3 combo is any different than U3 + anything else.

I play a dollar or two a week on the State lottery, I have for years.  For $100 a year it's worth it to me to have any shot, no matter how long, at a big prize like that.  Most people spend 5x more in a day on coffee alone than I do on the lottery in a week, and I think the lottery has a better payoff.

Yea, I need to grab a couple of those for sure.  I've only pushed a couple of my sticks to 250, at that freq they draw about 0.9A from the hub I use (which claims 1A at each port).  I'll need those Y cables to start playing in the 300 freq range.  

I check this thread from time to time and am amazed at how many complaints I see!  People, point your machines somewhere else.  The only reason people continue to mine at this pool is greed and self delusion.  They like to see daily payments and they like to be part of "one of the biggest pools", but this pool is bad for bitcoin and ultimately bad for all of its users that are not Bitmain.  Yet people continue to point hash here when there are numerous options that are better for the network (and ultimately better for all of us), and still get you paid.