Mining OSes like ethOS are made to be easy to setup and they come with a bunch of features (in the case of ethOS) like automatically trading to BTC, being lightweight and offering easy BIOS flashing- I agree that it's easy to setup a Linux rig with an OS like Ubuntu and get everything that OSes like ethOS offers in a short amount of time, but it's easy and quick to setup for the less tech-savvy people out there (though $40 per rig is a pretty hefty cost for a mining OS, and the advantages of the OS aren't worth $40 IMO). These mining OSes are basically marketed for newbie miners for convenience (as suggested by ethOS coming preinstalled on some SSDs) and commercial/large-scale deployment, as the OS is sold by GPUshack under that title.

I'm down for an entry fee of £25- never participated in one of these before, I'm interested to see how it'll turn out.

Bytecoin themselves have even stated they fully accept ASICs and FPGAs from mining their coin from a blog post I found from them here with some decent points concerning ASICs as well as FPGAs, and how a fork would de-anonymize the coin, ASICs protect the network from attacks, and FPGAs can be reprogrammed to get around forking.

Basically, the chain's overrun with ASICs and you should be looking for alternatives to mine with a CPU. Some alternatives you can try to mine profitably include Electroneum and XMR (or, if you're looking for a one-click solution, Nicehash also allows you to mine with your CPU)- they seem to be the best coins to mine in terms of profitability at the moment according to calculators like Whattomine, though this is subject to change.

Thanks for giving me another chance, Hhampuz! Glad to be back and posting for a great organization again.

Thanks Raja, nice to see you again!

People are just generally ignorant (there are hundreds of posts daily about cloudmining being a horrible investment here) and still fall for
the gamble that is cloudmining, or they're new to crypto and aren't aware of the enormous risks associated with cloudmining. It's a shame cloudmining sites advertise themselves so damn much everywhere and draw in so many people- those ads do their job extremely well, and we'll likely continue to see people investing in cloudmining for quite some time as a result.

Mining's a huge gamble right now as a whole, and I really wouldn't suggest it to anyone even considering it at all unless your electrical rates happen to be extremely low- difficulty's still going up on all chains despite coin prices continuing to slip downwards.

Can't hurt to try again, eh? 

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It's happened on one or two occasions to me, but I keep my rigs securely placed and I personally think the potential savings are worth it on a used B250 Mining Expert- I guess we'll have to see the pricing on the H370 and some reviews of it in actual miners' hands to see if the board is as good as the articles I've seen about it claim. Hopefully a true 20-gaming-card board comes out in the future, though- those mining cards are still hard to find and expensive.

The thing is, the H370 still requires you to have special 'Mining edition' cards to reach full capacity if you want to use more than 12-13 cards, and there's really not a lot of differences between it and the B250 board besides a gimmicky USB connection instead of PCI. Your current B250 board is just fine and the H370 will bring little to no improvements if you choose to buy it, and the B250s are likely going to be better in the future as well considering the likely higher pricing of the newer board.

That ROI (break even period) you listed is soon going to be completely irrelevant as more Zcash ASICs come out and another D3 situation happens on the chain. Buying an ASIC on a previously GPU-mined chain is always going to be a gamble, even if you buy in first batch. Besides that, Equihash hasn't been the most profitable algo to mine with GTX GPUs for a while now- Lyra2 and even ETH have been more profitable due to difficulty and ASICs on ZEC.

Here's some tips regarding dust removal and temps:

The removal of dust is actually quite easy- just get a couple cans of compressed air, and clean out the heatsinks and fans of your mining rig every month or two (could be more or less depending on what kind of condition you are running your miners in). Simple and cheap, and this is easily the best way to keep temperatures down on rigs. Dust really does cause temps to rise quite a bit on computer components in general, and regularly cleaning out dust is a great habit to have.

Always have a tube of decent thermal paste handy and ready to use if you notice any temperature anomalies- if you see this on a GPU, see if any part of the heatsink is broken or dusty first (if dusty, clean the heatsink and mine again, looking for hot temps), and then try applying thermal paste on the GPU if you notice the paste is dried or cleaning the heatsink didn't work. I personally keep a tube or two of Arctic MX-4 for all my computer needs at home, and it does the job quite well.

Mining as a whole at this moment in time is extremely risky as difficulty's going continually higher on all chains and coin prices keep going on a downward swing- I'm not even going to take a look at mining gear in the near future unless things change with pricing. GPU profitability's continuing to slip and the time to break even on most GPUs are near or over a year at $0.10/kWh, FPGAs and ASICs are being developed left and right for every profitable algo imaginable, and it's just a shitshow in general for mining with the incredibly high risk that's present right now. I love mining, but I'm likely going to switch to temporarily just buying coins instead of investing into new gear.

$100 isn't a very significant amount of money to lose (and I'm not taking the coins you managed to withdraw into consideration) if you learn a lesson here and stop gambling by putting your money into cloudmining. In the future, consider buying and holding coins or find ways to get gear hosted if you're unable to mine at home. In cloudmining, only the seller of hash wins and not you- in a situation where the hash seller actually mines, having people purchase cloudmining contracts offsets the risk of mining onto you, the purchaser, instead of the hash seller.

I looked at your product listing for your Antminer L3+ (the URL says L3 and not L3+ which was a bit confusing to me), and the description of the miner showed that the miner ships with an APW3++ PSU- is this true? I didn't see it in the title so I just wanted to make sure whether or not I'd be getting a PSU+L3+ or just a L3+. I assume that the A3 ships by itself with no PSU?

Doing a quick Google search, your machine has a GTX 470 as its GPU which isn't worth mining with anymore- the entire 400 series ran pretty hot and inefficient to start with. If you do choose to add additional GPUs onto your rig, take a look at your PSU and see how many 6-pin connectors there are on it. Chances are you won't have enough to run more than two cards, and if you do go down the route of adding more cards, I would highly suggest replacing your PSU with something that has more 6-pin connectors (could be ATX or a server PSU with a breakout board) and perhaps selling your CPU for something cheaper that could go towards the cost of a new PSU or even motherboard outright.

The 1st Gen i7 chips weren't optimal for CPU mining even before things started going downhill. If you really want to go deeper into mining (I assume you already know the high risks right now), it may be better to just sell your computer and buy parts for a new rig with a better Mobo, etc. There's not much usable in it right now for mining, but it should be good if you just want to mine with a card or two.

ASICs are definitely made to be run in industrial environments like wharehouses on 240/220V circuits, but that doesn't mean you can't use them at home with structures to reduce noise and proper ventilation, such as with box fans in a garage and possibly ducting in a basement. I personally run S9s in my basement and garage, and they're not loud at all so as long as you're not in the same room with them. Saying that it's difficult to live with ASICs in an average house is a hyperbole (with proper placement of a machine you may not even need anything to keep noise and heat under control) but I do agree that they're not for the average Joe (though arguably, neither is GPU mining in certain instances), and ASICs do result in centralization of hash (e.g Bitmain wih BTC).

There's some pretty damn good deals going for RX 580s right now on Newegg and basically everywhere- I'd suggest looking at Reddit's /r/buildapcsales for news on card deals including Vegas and RX X70/X80 cards, like this MK2 RX 580 8GB on the US Newegg site for $299 + $20 Steam GC. Profitability definitely is dropping right now for GPU mining as a whole, but so are card prices, too. I'm personally not touching GPUs until things get better with profitability, as I see everything as high risk and low reward in GPU mining right now, but it's your call in the end to buy GPUs or not.

The only such cloudmining sites where you has the opportunity to receive a working machine after the miners became unprofitable to host were Hashnest and Eobot AFAIK. Hashnest does deliver on their promise of giving you a machine if you had enough hash during their redemption period, but just like with Eobot, they charged high shipping fees to discourage people from getting miners from 'em, and some of the miners they delivered were in pretty poor condition (especially the S5s, as the casing on the miners weren't as robust as on the S3s). The redemption period on the S7s is about to happen or something of the sort; you can find more details about it on the official Hashnest thread

Hashnest's backed by Bitmain and is less likely to be an outright scam than other sites like Eobot, but that's no guarantee that it's impossible to lose your investment on Hashnest. I wouldn't consider cloudmining a safe investment at all, but rather something along the lines of gambling.

No, they're not merge-mineable and you'll have to pick from one or the other to mine. Just because both ETH and ETC use the same algorithm to mine doesn't mean they're merge-mineable, and if you're looking for coins to merge-mine with ETH, Claymore's dual miner offers some options, though keep in mind many of the merge mineable coins like Sia have been dominated by ASICs and thus aren't too profitable anymore- it is better to just plain mine ETH or ETC at the moment to keep electrical costs down.

I also did try to purchase items from all4btc a couple months ago (and also a year ago), and both were refunded within about a week as they said they weren't able to purchase the items for me like you said, which leaves the question of why they're still up as a site if they can't do their job. Quite strange...

I have done about $200 of transactions with Bitwants, and they've delivered for me each time I transacted with them, whether it was for electronics or home goods from AliExpress (which was what I primarily used them for, as there's no easy way to purchase from AliExpress with crypto without obtaining a crypto debit card), mostly before they turned to Bitwants from Shopawl. I have no experience with all the new sites they added, so YMMV, but AliExpress should work with them at the least. They do have very responsive customer support, so any issues should be resolved relatively quickly if they come up.

In the past, I've found the Digital Goods and Currency Exchange sections are good for getting gift cards for sites like Amazon and eBay. Just make sure to always use escrow for amounts you're not willing to lose (I typically escrow all transactions over $40-50), and don't trade with red-trusted users and users with locked threads in the former. I've found recently most locked threads in Digital Goods are just scammers trying to lure in people to their scams.

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I've been pretty badly jetlagged for the last couple days so I haven't been posting, but I'm getting back to it as of right now.

I'm going to agree with most of what has already been said here and guess that GPU mining will continue to exist in the future, but it will not be nearly as profitable as it was in the past. POW hasn't been abandoned yet (you're massively overexaggerating it right now), and in my eyes there's yet to be a largely successful fully-POW coin yet (with only ETH really being the largest future possible development in that area). POW will continue to be the major proof system in the area of crypto, and there's not any big competitor to it yet.

ROI is no longer under a year for GPUs in 99% of cases, but that doesn't mean there's no longer profit in it. Risk is indeed greater than it was previously, but there's still profit to be made. GPU Mining hasn't truly died yet, just like in the past when ASICs replaced GPUs in Scrypt mining- profitability greatly sank, but there was still profit in other areas to be found, albeit very low amounts (though I will say the situation with the crypto environment and mining environment was much different than now).