Is there a difference? As far as customer support goes. With the amount of money they're rolling over, hiring one guy that can speak English and do tech support full time is not actually that much to ask.

Well, where are you? North America -> Coinbase. Elsewhere you can check for Cex.IO thats where my friend from south america gets his.

Its not free if you had to invest money in order to get it. To get free electricity, you need to find a deal where you pay a flat access to your electricity(Included in rent that you need anyways) and then consuming more electricity does not cost more money.

Here;
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=596178.0

Tho M dude is discontinuing development last i saw.

These things should be stored in safes and a paper wallet does not need to be made out of paper. Its just a concept. Personally i'd put it as a digital QR picture and slap it on a couple of CDs and store them safely.

I'm not sure what you imagine by being swamped by a mass of miners, its not like you're prevented from trying to mine a block. The difficulty is the difficulty, the target share your miner need to find to be a valid block.

You can reduce your performance and complicate your setup by setting up your own pool and try to solo mine. Because of the network hashrate is so high, your miner won't return any valid work (most likely). Its better to join a solo pool, that way you will have share tracking to make sure your miner is performing as it should.

But no the only thing that the existant network hashrate create against you is the target difficulty. Your miner won't explode or anything.

I just think setting up your own pool and "learning to setup a miner" are two completely different endeavor.

Nice pack of miners. Why are they named S5:#.###? They are S7's not S5's. xD *Not OCD at all*

Will a controller from a different batch work for a him? I'm guessing the hiccup happens because hardware wise the S7 are different (daughterboard) but the controller(BBB) should be the same?

Sorry to hear that. Some people in Batch 1 got different batch miners. Might be the hiccup. I don't know if the S7 controller has a SD card slot that it is configured to boot from if slotted in. You could check that but if not i don't know how you could unbrick it.

Since the reset button does not work, i think philipma1957's verdict is exact.

Yeah there are quite a few people that have issue with flashing, because there are different version for different batch of S7. So people recommend not to flash it. But did you try a factory reset, with the on board reset button?

The earlier batches probably have more, undervolted chips. While the later batches have less, overvolted chips. So i'm guessing the earlier batches with the most chips would be able to get the most out of overvolting.

Assuming nothing else fry when you try it.

Well it says 2500w, so running a single S7 might be doable, but in the best case scenario, you're raising your costs for nothing. I don't see a gain on using this and you're just adding one more iffy Chinese thing that can burst into flame.

I don't know, do you stand to win 25BTC at one in a millions odd every day all year?

I kind of doubt some faucet operator would make enough money to come up with such a big prize, and if there is indeed such a prize that get accumulated, i would doubt it get handed off often.

That would also not teach you how mining BTC work. I think a USB stick is great to get the hang of it, since when you're getting your tiny payouts on the stick, going to real miners is actually a easier endeavor.

Depending on what it cost you the recharge the car battery, you might be able to make up your loss. Why would you not be able to mine at a pool? You don't have internet or you plan on powering the miner on your mobile car?

I don't see why you want to do it this way, i'd think you'd have some issue with the varying voltage of the car battery. You'd need to actually mine at a pool to get any reading on if you succeeded or not.

Its much cheaper to just use a good 120v PSU, there's both ATX and server solution here. You're adding costs at no gain, you're adding a point of failure and i bet these things are prone to catching fire.

You'll be losing efficiency, which you won't really gain back from using 240v PSU.
If you have this much money to throw around, just get a P/T rated PSU for cheaper than this thing and you'll have more efficiency than 240v gold.

You might find that 12v @ 110-500amp is going to drain looots of fuel. That sound like a pretty bad way to go about it. Though if your job does not notice your gaz consumption get suddenly multiplied by 20, they deserve to lose the money.

Dunno, they make amazing lottery miners. They have a different purpose than let say a S5. They fill a different niche and just like any other hardware, some sticks are great (sidehack stick 8-23GH/s+) some sticks are horrible choices (nano, 400MH/s, etc whatever).

Values of miners eventually kind of bottoms out. New miners always devalue very quickly.

The S7 was 1800-1900 at first and now its 1000-1350 in very little time. Eventually it will stabilize, since soon after a new generation enter, the difficulty goes mad. Value of hardware depend on profitability, so with new hardware entering the market automatically = to a devaluation of every miners.

The S3 are very nice and pretty cheap, you can probably get some for 80$USD~ But its useful for others, while probably not useful for you, because of your electricity cost.

However, if you need heating during the winter, then buying some miners to heat with ASIC instead of normal heating mean you make a bit of money instead of having to pay for heating.

Thats true, but most people run USB sticks off a RasPI or other devices that are already running 24/7. philipma1957 has a very nice setup with big USB hubs. Its very fun stuff to play with, though at some point you may want to look into something like a S5 if what you want is raising your hashrate.

Several location in the world has free electricity, few cents per Month per kWh. And there are quite a few "electricity included in rent" deals in places where electricity is cheap. And here, if electricity is included but you take too much, the landlord does not have ground to kick you out.

If you abuse, he has legal right to request you to tone it down, but unless you run a 20kW mine in your living room, i think you'll be just fine.