The only true answer is "it depended".

 My rigs that were already built up and running at the start of the year probably ALL earned more then the cost of the rig by now.
 My rigs that I've built up DURING this year, some were early enough in the year they are probably ALSO paid for, the ones I've built in the last 2-3 months have a ways to go.


 I do NOT figure we are going to see RX 470 cards making $10/day again ever - but I can't say it's IMPOSSIBLE, just very very unlikely.
 The only reason they DID do so for a short while was the HUGE SPIKE in altcoin pricing around March timeframe didn't give miners enough time to build rigs up fast enough to match that spike with a hashrate spike - but it took a 10X AND MORE jump in ballpark a month to get to that point.

 I like the Electrum wallet. Core also works but takes a while to sync even if you do so on a daily basis.
 Definitely pool - your chance of ever hitting a block with a single 741 is not a lot better than hitting a BIG Lottery win, while pool keeps getting you some steady income.
 My preference back when I WAS mining Bitcoin was the "slash" pool, but it's not the only one that has a good reputation.

Dusty implies very dry (Arabia or North Africa?) - where Evaporative Cooling would work very well.

 NO.

 The S9 uses a custom ASIC that only Bitmain has access to, and they do NOT sell chips.

 If you have a $million or so to wave under BitFury's nose, THEY will sell you their chips - then add a bunch more money to design a miner around them and start building miners.

 There is pretty much ZERO chance of "the market filling up with Bitcoin chips" - the current miner manufactures can't get enough chips to satisfy CURRENT demand due to limited foundry capacity available on the current 14/16nm node production lines (capasity largely already allocated under LONG TERM contracts to folks like AMD and NVidia and Samsung and Apple that go through a lot more wafers-worth of production in a MONTH than Bitmain could manage in a YEAR).



 "pseudo-random heuristics" have ZERO to do with cryptocoin mining.
 Nor does algebra - cryptocoin work is all about simple integer add and rotate operations, there is NOTHING complicated or random about it.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1489276.0

 Short form - S11 in (my ballpark estimate) about 2 years.


 The timeframe estimates out of GMO look to be way on the "too optimistic" side at best, given the OTHER news out of the semiconductor manufacturing industry as a whole.

 More like 2 years RIGHT NOW, and ballpark 4-6 years AT WORST after that.

 The days of "new miner tech with major upgrade in efficiency every 6-10 months" DIED when the S9 was released on the CURRENT STATE OF THE ART SEMICONDUCTOR PROCESS NODE.

 Mining now has to wait for NEW nodes to see significantly higher efficiency, just like the rest of the semiconductor world.

 Labor? If you can't run 30 machines yourself, you shouldn't be running a farm.
 Takes me perhaps an hour MAX per day to keep my farm up - and I'm IN that ballpark on rigs.


 Per sidehacks comments about voltage adjustability - pretty much died with the Spondoolies SP20, when almost everyone finally followed BitFury's lead into "string" designs to drop the cost of the miner (at the cost of adjustability).
 IN THEORY it's possible to run a string off of a buck, but I don't know if anyone current other than Innosilicon does so (and I'm not sure if THEY do so in the A4 or A5 or upcomming A4+).

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1489276.0

 And no, there probably will NEVER be a Antminer S10 model, though I anticipate a S11 model in ballpark 2 years.

 You've got 1070 model(s) that have a design TDP of 180 watts than not the NVidia default of 151.
 
 That's WHY I keep harping on the "TDP % setting is USELESS unless you specify the CARD as well" statement.

 YOUR 80% is more like 92% for something like the EVGA SC "Black" or Zotac "Mini" or MSI "Aero ITX" or Gigabyte "ITX" 1070 models (among many others).

 I have yet to see a "staking coin" offer returns that beat a good Certificate of Deposit, much less a decent "high yield" stock.
 They're not even in the same BALLPARK with PoW mining unless your electric cost is insanely high.


 If someone's GPU rig caught fire, they were doing something SERIOUSLY WRONG with it's setup.


 PC cases are ALMOST ALWAYS made of steel - aluminum is sometimes used on high-cost "vanity" cases but it's not the norm.
 Keep in mind though that most serious miners don't use cases at all, as they add needless cost and hurt ventilation (unless you add HIGH AIRFLOW fans that soak a fair bit of power).

 1080 ti for efficiency isn't QUITE as good as the 1070 - but it's very close at the card level, and once you factor in the entire system it's pretty much a tossup.
 1080 (non-ti) is in the same efficiency range either way.

 I'd be inclined to go 1080ti if my current infrastructure was set up for riser rigs as cooling wouldn't be an isssue, and fewer cards to manage would be a plus.

 Remote manageable models are ALWAYS bloody expen$ive, I'm afraid.

 In my experience, exhaust and gable fans like the Dayton models use a simple "on/off" type thermostat (and humidistat where present), so they're running at 100% when they're on at all.

 There is apparently ONE ASIC maker selling Scrypt chips (I'd guess Innosilicon, but the Moonlander II thread never answers that question).
 NOBODY is selling X11 chips at this point - and Baikal seems completely uninterested in selling their multi-algo chips.
 Bitfury AFAIK is the only SHA256 chip maker selling chips.

 No other algo has ASIC available at this point (SIA has had one announced miner but it's not being delivered yet).


 Basically, it amount to "you better be a LARGE mining farm/manufacturer for the economics to even have a prayer of making sense to design and build your own miner", unless you're designing a small niche product (like the Moonlander or Sidehack's sticks/pods).

BURST bandwidth usage isn't all that high - you're only accessing something like 1/2048 of your "plotted" space on any given block as I recall, and that's LOCAL access only.

 Plotting tends to be slow, especially if you do "optimised plots" for higher read speeds when mining (RECOMMENDED) - there is a GPU plotter but I was never able to get it to work, CPU plotting with my Ryzen 1700 runs about 16k-17k nonces/sec if I'm not doing anything else on the machine (my older FX 8xxx series only managed about 7K, for comparison).

 Folks talk about the Seagate Archive drives having a very low write speed, but in my experience with them that ONLY happens after you've already written a lot of data to the drive and have to REWRITE data over the existing "deleted" data space - on a CLEAN drive the Archives manage the same 140-150 MBytes/sec that my Compute drive does (all are 8TB models) - plot to a "never before used Archive" goes JUST as fast as plot to a Compute.

 ETH and it's spinoffs like ETC are the ONLY Cryptocoins that have issues with "not enough RAM" on a 1GB card, due to how their algorithm is set up.

 The real issue is that a lot of mining software doesn't support pre-GCN cards well if at all on coins that ARE currently viable to GPU mine, and the cards themselves eat more power for their compute ability compared to anything GCN and a LOT more compared to any current cards.

 I did THAT before the previous post - it's 3.6.2.0

 Also, as I said, it REBOOTED not "shut down". I saw it resynching after it rebooted the second time (the wallet, not the entire machine, rebooted) but didn't see the first time when it happened (I was asleep).

I'll keep the debug logs in mind if it happens again soon.

 ETH isn't going to be POW long enough for any ASIC miner to pay off at this point, unless someone started working on one many MONTHS ago and got it to market TODAY.
 Also, the "memory hard" factor of the altorithm and very high AMOUNT of memory needed to run that algorithm would make any efficiency gains from going ASIC fairly minimal at best, and the cost wouldn't be all that much better than a GPU rig for similar hashrate.

 GPUs aren't the only devices on the market that use GDDR - one of the 2 current "game consoles" also uses it (XBox One line I think, not the PS4) to feed it's custom AMD APU with for both the GPU *AND* the CPU sides.

 A "pure ETH" ASIC would actually need more like 4GB (possibly MORE if it's intended to be viable on the ETH spinoffs like ETC for more than a couple years).

 Bitmain will be more likely to pay attention when the A4+ actually starts shipping, I forget how the D3+ compares to the BW.com L21 (pretty close as I recall but I think the L21 narrowly loses) but the A4+ IS ALSO specified to be a hair more efficient than the L3+ and is a major miner from major competition.

 I think their "small business" line is actually rebranded LinkSys products (they bought out LinkSys some years back).

After a bit of playing with it yesterday, my Aorus 1080ti is now pushing 780-790 sols/s with Afterburner set to Core +150, Memory +100 (which proved to be VERY picky, higher DROPPED hashrate for some reason as did lower), and TDP at 100% (250 watts).

 Dropping TDP to 80% (200 watts) and no other changes still netted well over 700.


 If I'm doing other stuff on the machine, it drops to 160-170 watts (per Nvidia-SMI or per EWBF itself) and 640 sol/s more or less.