What's happening with the BF16 pods?  The BF16 stuff is the only thing I'm interested in because it'll be obsolete fast enough.  I can't see sinking money into more BM1384 stuff.  I've got a 2Pac, it works, but it doesn't break even.  Turning the speed up or buying more isn't going to make it more profitable because the power consumption will just rise too.

I've been looking around these threads for hours and my only conclusion is that Moneygram is starting to look pretty good again as a way to send money.  One explanation I saw touched on is that summers are like this because much of the bulk of bitnet business is students.  That's true of usenet too, it drops to about 1% of the users it has when classes are in session.  Really, with the volatility and lack of exchanges about the only thing to recommend bitcoin is that you can plunk down the money for a mining rig and make your own.  I've found nothing that stands up to scrutiny for exchanges.

Are you serious?  How do you find a "financial licensed exchanger"?   Seems like they're all crooks, you pick one with least complaints and hope you get lucky.  Look for bad press here and use bbb.org.

Run whoever you might otherwise pick through bbb.org to see how many complaints they have against them.  Kracken has a lot less than coinbase.  Coinbase has a slick website too, that doesn't mean diddly.  Bitfinex looks OK.  Look for how much they ripped people off.

As of a few days ago Coinbase had 193 complaints filed against them at the Better Business Bureau, I'd steer clear.  Just take a quick look at whoever you're considering at bbb.org.  Consider that there will always be cranks that complain about anything, but 193 seems like too high a number for just that.  Bitfinex for example has no complaints.

I had an account with Coinbase for a year or so, mostly using it as a place to buy bitcoin with a debit card or wire transfer and send it off to somebody.  Then my big run-in with them happened where a couple of transactions never got to the other end despite being withdrawn from my bank account.  So I filed a case with them, meanwhile checked the Better Business Bureau and 193 people had complained there about them.  So I filed cases with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.  So since they probably won't speak to me anymore I need to find someplace else to do business.

I do have an Electrum local wallet, I'm looking for a place that will let me buy fractional amounts of bitcoin with my debit card when I need a little.  Mostly small transactions under $200 or so.  If they also do Litecoin that would be good since I mine that a little.  Mainly I'm looking for a place I can trust that has good recommendations.  I guess what would be ideal is a bank or credit union that also dealt with bitcoin, and was FDIC insured, that whole bit.

Since I'm not using mine right now anyway:
length of the board, not including the USB connector: 3.117 [wrong] inches, 3.783 [wrong] with the USB
width 1.006, thickness 0.608 inches

multiply by 25.4 for millimeters

OK, I put the battery in the pesky digital caliper
length 3.170 in (80.61mm) with usb 3.763 in (95.57 mm)
width 1.002 in (25.55 mm) thickness 0.605 in (15.44 mm)

Anybody else seeing (Linux) cgminer crashes?

At least 2 or 3 times when I've gotten up in the morning my Pi is frozen with the thermometer on the screen.  Can't ping it or ssh to it.  If I haven't been running cgminer it doesn't do this.  And I just fetched a fresh copy of vh's cgminer yesterday from github.  I've got a question on the raspberry pi forums about how to look at log entries leading up to a crash with journalctl https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=187345

And no, it's not the Zero, that's running a Gridseed with dmaxl's cgminer.

I have a Raspberry Pi Zero running an ASIC.  Skip the cgminer that's in Raspbian ports, you need a version that has drivers for your hardware.  Raspbian Lite will do, you don't absolutely need X.  The big advantage to Minera is being able to control more remotely, but it's just a wrapper around the real mining software like cgminer.  See the first post, get VH's cgminer. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1764803.0

But also, I still have to "hotplug" (plug it in with cgminer running) my 2pac to get it detected.  I thought that was getting fixed.  I just fetched again from github and it's still the same way.  Once I do it I don't need to do it again on each restart or reboot though.

That's one of the things I like about cmake.  Maybe you have to set it up that way but I've had it run through a batch of tests and tell me what was missing at the end.  Also if it doesn't find something you know you have, you can manually edit a path into your CMakeCache.txt.

But then some configure scripts are like that too, it's probably just a matter of how much of a nuisance they were to create.

Well, it wasn't a big problem because they're only tying up $80.  Maybe that's the problem, that they don't want to be bothered, they can't make much profit from it.  Yet a $1 test went right through.  I thought all this stuff was automated anyway, it should be pretty routine.

I filed cases with the Securities and Exchange Commission and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, this is my description I filed: 

I don't so much mind them being a little late now and then but $80 is half a month's food money, it would buy 2 Raspberry Pi computers.  I'm trying to downscale and live on nothing, mostly big bags of rice.

They've been at this for 4 years now?  How?

Try hotplugging it, that is just plug it in with cgminer running.  There seems to be a different detection process at work when you do that.  On my Raspberry Pi under Linux if I've made some major configuration change I'll have to do that once then it'll be fine for weeks.

Running cpuminer on all 4 threads it drew 1.577 watts with a mouse and keyboard plugged in.  Only hashed at 1.84 hash/s total though.  Running through a DrOK inline USB power meter.  I think this thread is viewable by everybody, you just need a login to comment: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=186721  The Pi model was a 3B.  Not that I'm advocating CPU mining, just that some of these little guys are pretty efficient.

[edit]

Well, maybe but not for mining I guess.  I worked this out, I don't know if it's right:

1 joule = 1 watt second
A pi3b draws 1.577 watts and does 1.84 khash/s using all 4 cores

So each hash takes 1/1840 seconds or .00054348 seconds
times 1.577 = .000857 joules/hash(?)

I want Mhash/J so flip joules/hash:
1/0.000857 = 1166.861

That's 1.166 khash/j
so 0.001166 Mhash/J  (?)

That's a pretty nice looking hub.  I think at one point Sidehack was thinking about making hubs to sell, did that project ever go anywhere?  Sorry. the only sha256 miner I've got is one of your 2pacs.  But I'm using your cgminer on it.

You could always search for some already on ebay and Aliexpress to see what they're going for.  On ebay at least you can search the completed auctions to see what they sold for.  Some people ask absurd prices, those won't sell, but by looking at what did sell you can get a better idea.

ROI, I'd guess they'd make less than 3 cents a day for the 5 chip, but some people think they're going to get rich because they don't do the math.  Or use one of the online calculators.

Aw, the Superbpag is only twice the price and advertised good for 14 amps with 7 ports. https://www.amazon.com/Superbpag-Portable-Charger-Transfer-Samsung/dp/B013OK10YM  I'm fairly sure people have run up to at least 4 Compac/2pacs on them.  I'm tempted to buy one to have around even though I've already got 3 lesser USB hubs.  Should be able to handle a Raspberry Pi 3 and at least a couple of sticks.

I'm not trying to do anything devious here although I can see how the capability could be misused.  I was following some howto when I started that told me I should download and install Litecoin core if I wanted to mine, so I did.  Got an address from it which I used as my payout address for litecoinpool.org,  I'd made about $4 worth of Litecoin so I decided to take a payout since the price was spiking.

I didn't know that Litecoin core has to download the whole blockchain before it can receive a payment (apparently).  My internet connection is a cell phone, that's totally impractical.  I've read that unclaimed Bitcoin payments get returned to the sender after 30 days so I waited 30 days to see if I'd get it back, I didn't.  So have I just made a donation to litecoinpool.org?  Oh, well.

I've since got electrum-ltc set up (on a Pi, my old SD card crapped out) and rebuilt my wallet from my seed but that litecoin core is history.  I've changed my payout address to my electrum-ltc.

Not much info there.  What's the clock speed set to?

I'm using dmaxl's cgminer on the 80 chip version and seeing 5,317 kH/s by litecoinpool's reckoning.  You have 1/16 as many chips so I'm guessing you should see about 332 kH/s.

If you're using cgminer try adding the line
"gridseed-options": "freq=800"
to your cgminer.conf and restarting.  Ooops, just saw the bfgminer in your post  I used that briefly, don't know how to set the speed.  It's probably similar since one is a fork of the other.  Are you seeing any hardware errors"  I see HW:0.

Oh, those things are USB powered, right?  You're going to have similar power issues to stickminers, need to use a hub that can supply a fair bit of current to each USB jack.  A symptom is that one miner runs well but when you plug in several they slow down.  A good hub from the Gekkoscience threads is https://www.amazon.com/Superbpag-Portable-Charger-Transfer-Samsung/dp/B013OK10YM  It might be overkill for Gridseeds but it eliminates one worry.

Oh, and even with 80 chips I make about $0.20 per day so don't expect to get rich.

I have just one.  I've been mining mostly on Slushpool for 22 days, I have a reward of 0.00017938 BTC or currently just over 39 cents.  About 1 week before I got that I got a used Gridseed 80-chip G-Blade for Litecoin at $62 delivered.  It runs on nominally 100 watts and in the past 24 hours has earned 0.010524304440 LTC or $0.2396384120988.  Since I've had it online it's earned $8.08.

I think the best thing to do is set them up and forget about them, check once a day to make sure they're OK.  It's just a hobby, unless you've got free electricity (solar, parents, running at work, dorm room, etc.) the 2Pac won't quite break even.  There's a good calculator at https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/btc?HashingPower=20&HashingUnit=GH%2Fs&PowerConsumption=7&CostPerkWh=0.12

Get practiced up and wait for Gekko's 16nm stuff.  Or really bite the bullet and buy an Antminer S9.  That can do like $3000/year profit, you just have to pay about $1500 for one.  Everything seems to get obsolete in a couple years because the difficulty increasing makes them unprofitable to run.  But solar panels are coming down to just over $1/watt, even at Home Depot.