I'm moving the discussion quoted above on Bitmain's warranty policy here since it was getting off-topic as per the OP, but I think it warrants some more discussion. I also had my own comment, which is that Bitmain should make its warranty clear and conspicuous. Some people may be misled by the fact that Bitmain advertises the overclock potential of its miners when overclocking voids the warranty. I don't think something should be advertised as a feature if it also voids the warranty, unless that fact is made clear to the buyer. Just my two cents.

Another question on the warranty - any warranty issue will obviously cause some downtime, which is a loss to the buyer. Does Bitmain allocate an equivalent amount of hashing power from its cloud mining service during the downtime? 

I have 4 SP20s and none of them have this problem. I generally use the latest test firmware, so I can say that this isn't a problem, at least for me, over several versions of SP20 firmware. I also can't speak for the SP30 series.

If Bitmain doesn't make it clear, then why should he?

If overclocking voids the warranty, Bitmain should say so, clearly and conspicuously.

If it's fun, and it works for you, great. But the mod you suggested is risky, you do acknowledge that? If so, it can't hurt to point that out so that others know what risk they're taking by running at higher temps.

My concern is that in the long run the pool is operating at a loss by paying out the extra 1% on 2.7 PH/s right now (about BTC0.32 per day). It seems like the pool is just one part of their business, so maybe they intend to run it at a loss to promote the other ends of their business. If so that's great for the pools miners, so long as the pool has enough to consistently payout even if it hits a string of bad luck. Otherwise there could be a vicious cycle where payouts are delayed, hashrate drops, and the pool can never catch up.

That said, I've been paid out everything, even if it was delayed a couple times by one or two days. But I'd like to see whether the pool is able to handle a bad string of luck, say 4-5 days without a block while the hashrate stays roughly the same. It's easy enough to do the calculations to see what they have to payout everyday. If miners are confident the pool can payout despite bad luck, it might increase the hashrate and lower variance as well.

It may run at those temps fine now, but higher temps will likely degrade performance over time. That might not have been a big deal before when we were seeing double digit difficulty increases, but difficulty has been relatively flat for a couple months now. I'd underclock like others have suggested ... taking off 100-150Ghs seems worth it to keep it running longer.

Has anyone received a payout from this pool in the last 24 hours? It looks like it ran into a string of bad luck... I guess it can't pay 101% forever.

Stay away from it, it is almost certainly a scam.  GAW appears to be running quite the Ponzi scheme.

I think the answer to your question in bold is no, here the anonymity and encryption are not two different things.

Just guessing here, but I read that to mean that if the purported exploit is not a "break down in the encryption but in how it is implemented," then it can be fixed without giving up on anonymity.  

Assuming that is correct, then the primary source of value in CN would be preserved once the purported exploit is fixed.

Thanks, looks like its a dead board, it never came alive so rebooting doesn't help, and I get the same result no matter where it is powered (1 or 2 PCI-E).  There's no obvious physical damage.  Is there any reason why I couldn't run 3 together and try to RMA the single board?  Seems like it should work, and I'd rather have 3 going than nothing at all.  And it should be easier to OC 3 with a 1000W power supply.

Has anyone had a problem where one board shows all "-" dashes in the Test Status page, and doesn't hash at all, while the other three are all working?  I've tried putting it in all four possible positions in the chain, and it seems one board (the same one) always comes up like this:  "Board 04: |---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---| - V:1.41"  

Since it is coming up I assume it is not an issue with how it is assembled (and I even plugged the fan into that board to see if it works, and it did) - could this just be a bad board, or am I missing something?  

The problem with your assumption is that there are far fewer available G2 instances than there are available 32 core CPU instances.  And it ignores 16 core, 8 core, etc, all of which were available at a similar price per core.   Your hypothetical miner could never have run 4-5x as many GPU instances and maintained the same price of the G2 instances. 

The early mining from large miners is consistent with a miner using a large number of Amazon EC2 instances for CPU mining.   

Hard to tell from the pic, but airflow in the back of the foot shouldn't be an issue, and the holes toward the front of the foot should help keep it cool. 

(1) I agree that electricity cost will be far more important, but that does not mean that the hardware cost will be trivial.  And that hardware has to get to the cheap electricity somehow.  That means that there are transportation costs, fuel costs, costs to lease space, costs to move personnel, and that's just a few off the top of my head.  To the extent that hardware moves to cheap electricity, there will still be a cost to move that hardware away.  And this cuts both ways - if the transfer costs are low, that just means that more hardware will move to low cost areas, further driving up demand and thus price.  The real question is the supply of cheap electricity - Bitcoin mining may not have enough of an impact to increase the price of electricity in most areas where price is higher, but, if concentrated, it may impact the price in areas where the price is lower.  

(2) That may be true, but aren't you doing a longer term analysis?

(3)  That's interesting - I did not know that about Iceland - how much electricity will they guarantee for low rates at 20 years?  Are there any restrictions?  

Again, my only point is that, to the extent that bitcoin mining increases to the point where ASICs are a commodity, it is unlikely to benefit from significantly below market electricity prices.  I may very well be wrong - maybe there's a bunch of places with stable internet connections and 1.21 gigawatts of continuous electricity available at $0.02 per kwh.  If that's the case, I'm wrong, I just haven't seen that yet.

I'm happy for you that you got your money back, but I agree with other posters that it looks like it was your bank that refunded the money, and that the money never really got to Mt. Gox before they ceased operations.  Accordingly, your bank refunded it.  Maybe Gox stopped accepting deposits a few days before, who knows.  I know nothing about Japanese bankruptcy law, but it looks like you were speculating and knew there was a chance you'd lose some or all of the money, so I'm guessing you would not be first in line to collect should they eventually be able to pay out anything (but again I don't know how the law works there), so it looks like you got really lucky  

To the extent that difficulty has an impact on price, and that is far from certain, it will become less of a factor as the number of mined coins becomes a smaller percentage of total coins.  Plus, my understanding is that most of those who received the first batches of ASICs last summer/fall easily made a return on their investment.  I don't think there is any good evidence that the price rose in November because miners pulled their supply from the market. 

In fact, I think that the first miners that received ASICs that failed to return on the initial investment (or will almost certainly fail to ROI) received them in the past few months - a period where the price has been generally declining (due to external factors, but that's my point).  There's no reason to think that those miners are holding their supply - maybe some are, but others may be selling, reasoning that getting 70% of their investment back is better than risking getting less back if the price continues to decline.  The cost of the equipment is a sunk cost in any event - a rational miner will decide whether to hold or sell their coins for the same reasons as anyone else.

It seems like all of these, to the extent that they take difficulty increases into account, assume that the rate at which difficulty increases will remain static.  For example, on bitcoinwisdom, I can change the difficulty increase as I see fit, but it applies to all future difficulty increases.  The next increase it set to be around 12.5% according to bitcoinwisdom, but I don't think it is realistic to assume that rate will continue.  Is there any calculator available that allows you to adjust individual difficulty increases? 

Other than another email or a PM here, I wouldn't have any suggestions ... but from my experience and others I doubt you have anything to worry about.  Bitmain has a great reputation, and from my personal experience they deserve it.