So although I have steered clear of Bitmain miners in the past I figured enough people have been having issues with these miners and it's time to figure out what the heck is going wrong with them. So I'm starting yet another thread on hacking these things to either fix them or at least figure out why they blow up.

This will be under my normal license: Information should be free, skills should be paid for. Therefore as I find out stuff about these miners I'll put it here. If anyone else has thoughts or technical specs please feel free to share them.

I'd rather this not turn into a general discussion on the merits of Bitmain, Bitcoin Crash, or anything else like that, will try to keep it to the technical bits.

The second post will be a FAQ of most interesting stuff, and the third post will be reserved for other administrivia.

On with the show. Or as I like to say:

"What's the worst that could happen?"

Garbage, and irrelevant. Who would ever want to have a miner mine Fedcoin? The dank of possibly mining BCH by mistake is bad enough; it sticks to the inside of your miner and smells for weeks.

Meantime BTC is at 16k again. Back on the elevator to the top please!

Morning everyone, and HAPPY MACARTHUR DAY! *

Looks like a good 15,800 at the moment, which is a bit nicer than the moping around in the 13k's.

Now to see if it holds..... And back to work I go at the reheat station....

* MacArthur day is a retailing holiday in the US, probably the busiest day at stores when every American wakes up with their pile of presents, looks around and says "I SHALL RETURN!!!"

They need their own thread, and it's spilling over to other threads as well. Yes Bittrash is a bad faith garbage coin. How do we make bitcoin better?

Meantime how are things this morning? Everything is down again, wonder how people are getting money out and we're at 187k unconfirmed transactions. Better, but bad.

What I wrote above was a basic flat fact. No politics, blame, whatever.

KNC used cheap PCIe sockets on their boards. Switching to all nickel plugs makes a fairly nice difference on the burn rate.

Typical build a thousand dollar cube and save a dime by using a cheap component.....

*sigh* Litecoin's main value is you can use it to do transactions. Back when Bitcoin was in the dumpster a few days ago I went to the ATM and took out some money:

$500 in Bitcoin: $50 fee, took 8 hours to get a confirmation, had to go back to get my $500
$500 in Litecoin: Buck or two fee, took 4 minutes to get a confirmation, walked out with my $$$

If you're actually trying to buy something, or sell something litecoin can be used to make the transaction. If you have a hooker in your hotel room and need her to go away, litecoin is the fastest way to pay.

THAT is the benefit of Litecoin. Bitcoin right now is clogged and locked up transaction wise. If litecoin can maintain a somewhat stable value it can be very useful.

Don't open the loop unless you have a spare heat sink set (some guy is selling them on Ebay for $20 each, if your Monarch had a leak in the cooling system that's a nice fix). Those things run the chips quite warm (60c) and any disruption in cooling will blow the chips since it is *very* thin (which really helps with heat dissipation).

Use the V3X and FBX values to slow it down, remember the second digit is hexidecimal but voltages above 4 are locked out) and have fun with it.

They can run a good .5 w  /gh. Nice part is how quiet they are. 3 plug units were the best just run them.

That would be me: I sold $500 USD worth of Bitcoin at 12,000 or so yesterday at 10am and paid $50 in fees to do it. It took till late afternoon to get one confirmation, and I picked up the money last night.

By comparison I also sold $500 USD in Litecoin at 220 or so, paid a few bucks in fees, and got the money within 5 minutes.

Not because I needed any money, not because it was a good time to sell. Mainly because I always seem to sell at the bottom, the market needed some turning around, and I was tired of everyone going WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE in the MSM.

So I took one for the team (and damn it seemed to work)

Now back to fixing stuff, got a fair bit of research to do.

Ok. I fixed the bitcoin thing, my transaction just confirmed at 12k. So now that this has been taken care of, can someone else watch the bean for awhile, I need to get drunk on eggnog.

C

Eh, just $500 of BTC and LTC. However given the fact that the transaction with 10% fees still hasn't cleared, I think it may be the third before I get my money. And thanks to LIFO I can write off the loss against profits this year.

That said, if I don't get the money till next year when do I declare the loss? At the time bitcoins left my control, or at the time I get the money to control in fiat? This is a complex question, I should call the IRS (who at this point is probably so sick and tired of my questions they might ask if I have considered just moving to another country, they're all the same really.....)

So let's see. Rolled down to the ATM and sold $500 of bitcoin @12k. $50.00 fee to transact, it still hasn't come up on the blockchain an hour later.

Sold $500 of litecoin. $2.00 fee, money ready in 4 minutes.

I think at this point Bitcoin is not usable as a transaction medium for a business without the understanding that funds could be locked up for days (I bought some mining gear on Tuesday, paid seller in coin, and I see it still has not been included in a block. We trust each other, no problem) and subject to at least 20% in fees (10% for my selling, 10% to get it).

That's not a bitch, that's not an argument, that is a simple, plain, flat fact.

Hm.

Well I said wake me up at 10k, and here we are. Merry Christmas!

I guess I should roll down to the ATM and sell some bitcoin. Did that with litecoin 2 weeks ago and the price doubled in hours. Let me know how it works out....

Why, oh why do I always have to be responsible for everything.......

Eh, we're all going to die, film at 11.

Ok, let's get this out of the way here....

Oh good, we're glad to have you back. Because let's face it: Would you rather have immense wealth, or be here with us?

Wait, that didn't come out right....

Well transactions are down to 3-4 per second, so the backlog should clear up here. Just takes a bit of time....

That Lambo is turning into a second-hand Schwinn as we speak!!!!

C

Big warning here: If you ever plug the cube in so that the bottom three pins on the PCIe plug go into the top three pins on the socket, or put it in upside-down, the following will happen instantly:

1) The cube will be damaged, all drivers blown.
2) The ribbon cable will burn.
3) The controller will be damaged, needs new FPGA and power chip.
4) Every other cube on that controller will be permanently destroyed with no ability to repair.

Doing the above puts +12 on the ground plane which destroys the hashing chips pretty much instantly. I have seen this happen several times with people, whole miner is gone.

So if you're running on burned connectors always check every plug before powering on. One mistake does it.