Ja, insanity ^^ all around!
In other news, just sent a wire transfer to my mortgage company to pay off my house using coin I cashed out at $25k late December
And no I do not regret selling at that price. Even though would have been nice to exchange at higher pricing, whoda ever thunk it would continue to skyrocket like it has! When I setup the trade in early Dec with BTC banging around $15-16k, $25k seemed like a good *maybe* target to trigger the sale at.

I would have loved to sell higher but it is what it is and I can live with that. No matter what I still have a tidy sum of BTC left for a retirement nest egg plus no more mortgage to pay off

Please do! I was going to ask if anyone could do that as a quick & dirty way to find out. If you have access to nitric acid and proper PPE a good breakdown of non-destructive decapping of IC's is here. There are others as well, just do a search using "Decapping IC's".

Cost to make a wafer is a lot harder to pin down.
For us outsiders who are not TSMC customers I doubt we can get any hard numbers, just (wildly) guess. The only 'real' numbers that I've seen bandied about is that the photolithography masks for 5nm node cost around 1.5 million USD each and typical lifetime for them is maybe 50k wafers - probably less - and that is hoping/praying that nothing happens to them before expected EOL.

Chips have several layers to them, anywhere from 3 to 7 or more and each uses a different mask. Since mining ASIC's are very simple circuits there should be only a few layers to them. Then there is the cost of the EUV lightsource from ASML/Cymer, which in 2017 was around 500 million each (I'll look up where I got that from to verify). Speaking of which - good article about that from 2017 here. That article also pegs throughput at 100 wafers/hr but again that was from 2017. Though it is from 2016, another good one is here. I know there has been a few significant improvements since then so for current rates I'll stick to the 150 wafers/hr I gave earlier.

No matter what, all I come up with is that it is an insanely high cost process that is not really suited for making what needs to be 'cheap' chips...

Using the wafer yield calculator here and using 12" wafer, a 10mm chip size with die size of 8x8mm and zero defects it comes up with a max of 904 chips per wafer. With default values for defects, 848 good dies per wafer.

That is not very many for using such a high cost node size... AND that is assuming 93.83% yield which I highly doubt is being achieved.

No, the Coindesk article said they will have a total of 100k miners when they are delivered so the 100k includes older miners (s17's?) they already have. The sidebar link about Marathon group states that they have 'only' 21.5k of the S19 Pro's on order. Still one frickin' huge number of chips though.


For a start, how many chips are in the S19 and what are the dimension of the chip package itself?

We can safely assume the 7-5nm nodes are being produced on 12" wafers and the actual dimensions of Silicon inside a chip is usually around 50 to 80% of final package size. How many mm square are the chips they use? There are stitching losses when fitting square patterns on a round wafer plus each wafer also contains alignment and witness areas so those have to be accounted for as well. Playing with those numbers will give a good idea of how many chips are on a wafer.

Final factor is a rule of thumb value: It takes around 30 days for wafers to go through the production systems. Once the production pipeline is full with any one device, no idea how many wafers/hr are ran though I seem to recall discussions of an EUV lithography throughput of 150 wafers/hr per-stepper as a target mid last year.

edit: found a wafer yield calculator There are others, just Google "Wafer yield calculator". Typical street width (scribe lines) to use is 10 mil (0.254mm) and use a wafer diameter of 12" (300mm). Beyond that we need the chip size so anyone have the dimensions of a S17 chip? Odds are the s19's will be same physical chip size.

Well now - was at the Canaan.io site looking for info on chips used in the A12xx series and came across their new offering of a miner designed for flowing tank immersion. https://canaan.io/product/avalon-immersion-cooling-miner

Info on the A12 chips has been removed but late last year I recall seeing them being on TSMC's 14/12nm node. Certainly not cutting edge but the plus side is that there is a lot of Foundry production capacity for chips above 10nm so Canaan should have no chip sourcing problems.

Bitmain on the other hand - because all new chips used for the latest phones and such have moved to the <7nm nodes they are hurting. Apple & other phone makers, AMD, NVIDIA, Cisco and other firms have bought up all of 2021 production capacity. If BM did not reserve enough capacity they are screwed...

Back to that Canaan tank miner: I really like that idea vs using cooling plates like BM chose to do. Perhaps not as elegant but far fewer cooling connections to worry about. Cannan has a video on it here

@Phil, Ja. That is the biggest killer about BM pushing delivery out to 6+ months and may partly be why they are currently only accepting payment in fiat: If folks were able to pay in BTC right now, just like you when gear is finally delivered that coin may be worth 2x or more the value when you paid. People would bitch up a storm about that so forcing payment in fiat eliminates that complaint point.

Done. Added local rules to OP for this thread.
Damn! +10% projected diff increase, wonder why it took so long?

Hopefully you meant to say thermally conductive glue (epoxy) such as Arctic Alumina or Arctic Silver. Regular thermal paste will not hold the heatsinks in place.

Could it be the cause of the problem - yes. Would replacing the heatsinks fix it - unknown.

When it hit $25k I sold enough BTC to pay off the mortgage on my house + all taxes due from the sale
That was about 1/3rd of my holdings earned by mining and I'm keeping the rest as a retirement nest egg.

Check the Braiins thread in the Bitcoin Mining Software area Pretty sure this has been answered there.
Also search the Hardware area for "Halong T1" or "Dragonmint"
Considering the 'mints were made for Halong by Innosilicon you may want to look at threads about that as well as it seems Inno's share much the same design & code.

Since Phil has not started one yet for this year guess I will
Damn 2021 has started with a bang!
=
For a while, skyrocketing exchange rate despite falling diff. Whoda thunk it?
Finally looks like hash rate is picking up as older miners go back online and newer gear is throttled up to full speed along with newest gear finally starting to come online.

One very interesting development is the US gov looking into restrictions on private wallets. Well not restrictions per se, more like tagging tx's to/from them for further scrutiny. Couple that with at least 1 huge mining group throwing their hash behind censored transactions and miners in the USA will be more monitored than ever.

Methinks 2021 is going to be very interesting  
Now in true Blockchain fashion, time to see if this gets 'validated' or orphaned..
For completeness:
here is Phil's 2020 thread
and his 2019 thread

Edit: local rules - no trolling, no cloud mining ads, no unicorn 500TH mining gears buy links, no off-topic (non-BTC) clickbait, etc. Such posts WILL be deleted by me!

  While I'm allowing a wide range of discussion here it must at least be related to things that affect Bitcoin mining difficulty such as new hardware, current events, phase of the moon, etc. While *some* discussion of alts in relation to their effect on BTC diff will be allowed, crap coin discussion must be kept to a minimum. Continued hammering on alts vs BTC is right-out.

  Unaccompanied children found here will be given a large 'duba' of espresso, candy and a puppy before being returned to their parents.

I have had zero issues with Coinbase (Pro) and have used them as an exchange for years.
If someone is banned there is generally a damn good reason for it - mainly seems to be from them using shady gambling sites or other TOS violations.
And your proof of that is?
Considering Coinbase is bending over backwards to comply with regulations set down by various governments I highly doubt that. Any exchange that does not follow AML/KYC protocols is going to be the exchange of choice for folks engaging in nefarious activities.

I suggest you read through this thread started by Kano regarding this exact subject...

NOTE: I am not a tax advisor
In the US, if you can establish value of the coins when mined you can then take the capital gains route for taxes due when selling them. Other than that it can also just be "Other Income" same as from lottery or gambling winnings that could be taxed up to 35-40% of value.

Talk to a tax advisor/CPA if you have a substantial income from selling the coins...

Hopefully you reported the ad and site to Google right? They usually act VERY fast on shutting them down.
https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/?hl=en

That said, Here Blocky! Here Blocky!

I have to agree with 22bits: Pure pump-dump of Tokens that mainly benefited those running the company.

Yes they created an open market for others to buy & sell the Tokens (after pre-mining a shitton of coins to stockpile before going public with their ICO) but, as with most altcoins aka Tokens, one company created and controls the tokens and executives behind the company directly profit from the sale of said Tokens and use some of the funds to finance the company. That makes their Tokens the same as stock shares. Ripple execs chose to ignore legal advice to register their offering as a security and now they have to pay the piper.

The fact that companies are creating new coins with the sole purpose of financing said companies is why the US, China, and other countries have cracked down on ICO's. They are essentially issuing unregulated stocks without the legal restrictions/protections true stock offerings must have.

As far as Bitcoin goes, I have to agree with the IRS and SEC input on it: It is treated as property same as gold, diamonds and other things that have high value and because there is no central issuing agency/country behind it, cannot be legally called 'currency'. However - companies doing business involved in the sale/exchange of said property DO have to meet certain regulatory criteria aimed at insuring all financial operations are open to audit and properly subject to gov regulators oversight.

In that very remote scenario, with no miners solving blocks no Bitcoin production can happen because nothing is working on a block to be solved to earn the reward.... The rewards do not build up by themselves.

Copy the log and when replying here use the code function # on the reply toolbar then paste the log into it.

FYI this is a common problem. Just look through the various posts here about it...
A good place to start is this one

Er?
The amount of BTC being mined has nothing to do with how much is available for trade. And ya do know that it will be over 100 years before the last Bitcoin is mined, right?