It's more profitable because you set the price.  You can set it higher than expectations.  The renter might be mining some alt coin in hopes of a pump and dump.  The renter might be using your gear to solo mine and hoping for a 25BTC hit.  Who knows what prompts their behavior...

Such a discussion is raised because just like every other scam out there, the people promoting it do everything in their power to convince you it's real.  Unless you have some counterpoints to the scammers, then people would have no other information and would believe the scammer's claims.  Even with the clear evidence that such things are as fake as the picture LiteCoinGuy posted, people will still click on them, download them, go through all the steps, etc.  Why?  Because greed is a powerful force.

You forgot the magic gun-wielding cats riding fire-breathing, rainbow-surfing unicorns 7nm chips!  IBM did it, and they must have produced miners from those chips!

(Thanks to LiteCoinGuy for that image)

They don't have to be fake transactions.  You can put as many real transactions as your heart desires, including transactions you make on your own to fill in the block, which every intelligent miner in your system would do.  They'd fill their blocks to the size limit with whatever transactions they could.  Since the person who finds the block also receives the transaction fees, the net result of a miner filling a block with "made up" transactions is that he gets the fees he spent to send the transactions right back into his wallet for producing the block.

That's exactly why they're selling off the old S5 stock: it's been replaced by newer gear.  There's no way Bitmain is just emptying out their datacenters to just "get ready" for the new gear.  It's already there, or those S5s would still be mining away and not for sale.

That's exactly what I was stating above.  There's no way they are going to leave empty space in a datacenter.  If they're selling second hand S5s, it's because they're replacing them with newer stuff.  The only people mining with Bitmain's newest gear is Bitmain.  Once they've sold off enough of those old S5s, they'll announce the newest miner to the public.

I solo mine on ck.'s solo pool.  I've got 5 U2s constantly pointing there.  I point my S3s there every now and then.  I was part of a few groups that pooled our resources together to rent some decent hash power and point it there.  I've never found anything on my own, but the group I was with found a couple blocks and with my share, made back what I invested in the rentals.

Good luck with your new pool.  By the way, generated coins mature after 100 confirmations, not 120.

If you have a main account here, I'd suggest posting with it as you're likely to run into some trust issues as a brand new poster opening up a pool.

Hahahahaha!  I guess you really can find everything on the internet

Of course Bitmain is filling its datacenter with newer gear.  You don't think they're just going to sell that new stuff to the general public before they get a chance to milk it themselves, do you? .  It's absurd that they are selling those secondhand S5s at new retail prices.  What's even more absurd is that people are buying them.  Talk about rolling in profits... let's mine with this gear (which we already charged our customers for their contracts) and now let's sell it again!  Brilliant!  Even if those S5s were not part of some hash rate contracts, they were still mining for Bitmain during the entire time.  Just food for thought:

Retail price at launch was about $450.
Orders opened around Christmas, 2014 (or thereabouts).
Assuming today's difficulty, that S5 would have mined you 2.17BTC from 1/12 until today.  Obviously, the difficulty was lower in January, but since retrocalc is still FUBAR, and I don't want to write my own code to calculate it, I'm lazily putting that number up .
Bitmain sells that S5 now for $400.

So, assuming it's been mining for the past 195 days (probably longer) and today's difficulty was constant that entire time (absolutely not true), and is sold to you today for $400, that single S5 has made Bitmain over $1000.  Since my numbers are skewed to a higher difficulty, that S5 has actually made considerably more than this.

If I get motivated enough, I'll write my own code to calculate expected payouts between two dates given a hash rate.  I wish retrocalc was working properly so I wouldn't have to.

Thanks for the detailed reply, forrestv!  I appreciate that you've become more active in this thread again.  It's always nice to have the guy who wrote the code explaining it, rather than the rest of us trying to reverse engineer it in an effort to provide an explanation.

You either didn't bother to read a single response to this thread, are unable to comprehend the responses you did read or are simply trolling.  Let me spell it out nice and clearly for you: it is a fucking myth, just like rainbow riding unicorns.

Your power costs are exceedingly cheap, so mining could certainly be profitable for you.  A budget of $500 will not get you a lot of hardware, though.  For that money you're looking at an S5, which will hash at about 1155 GH/s.

Your profit entirely depends on the network difficulty and the exchange rate.  As of right now, that S5 would expect to mine 0.01111BTC a day... Or about $3.19.  The S5 draws 590W, so given your rate, will run you $0.354 a day.  Therefore if you were mining right now you'd net about $2.83.

Bidding on that is up to over $3000... wow.  Seller is going to make a killing.  5 S5s will get you the same hash rate and cost quite a bit less... even with the inflated prices Bitmain is charging for them.  The benefit the SP35 has is that it's a single self-contained unit that'll fit nicely into a cabinet at a datacenter.

Yeah, it's definitely got to be a "lost in translation" thing... nobody pays the prices he quoted.  Anywhere.  Realize, he said that he stated his costs were $1.40 per Watt... which is why I posted the absurd numbers I did above... clearly nobody is paying that kind of money for electricity.

I really hope your conversion is wrong, otherwise absolutely forget about mining.  If accurate, your numbers indicate that a single S5 would cost you $19824 a day to operate.  I'd suggest buying some solar panels and selling the generated electricity back to the grid if you can get those kinds of outrageous prices.  Now, if what you really meant to write is that your power costs about $0.14 per kWh, then that S5 would cost you $1.98 a day to operate.  At current exchange prices and difficulty levels, that S5 would expect to earn you $3.16 a day... netting you $1.18 in profit a day.

That's exactly how it's calculated.  The network itself has no concept of hash rate - it extrapolates the data based on block solves and current difficulty.  It's also why the network waits 2016 blocks to adjust difficulty in order to give itself a relatively accurate representation of hash.

Well... The miners would have done better than on any other PPS pool, but not better than any pool.  I showed that p2pool did better than BAN during the timeframe when things were all working as expected.  Anyway, time marches on and hopefully people learn from their mistakes

The S2, just like any other piece of mining hardware, is affected by the same set of factors: how much it costs to run it, how much coin it generates, how much the coin is worth.  If the circumstances at the time of the halving are such that the profit made from the mined coin is higher than the expenses for mining them, then it'll still be profitable.  Nobody can predict the future, so nobody can really answer your question.

However, at the current levels... that S2 expects to make 0.009846BTC or ~$2.80 a day.  It pulls 1100W from the wall.  At $0.10 per kWh, the S2 is costing you $2.64 to run... so you're still squeaking out a profit .

No clue why the limit... maybe it made sense when forrestv wrote the code... bandwidth limitations and transaction/share propagation speed... would be nice to hear forrest's view.  Can it be changed?  Absolutely... just add a zero to the end of it and make it 500,000.  Not sure how well the rest of the p2pool network would react to you doing that, though .