They've been getting progressively worse over the last two years, which is why all of us should be pushing for merchants to adopt alternatives to Bitpay such as BTCPayServer and Coinpayments. It's not hard to change to a new system, as Coinpayments is actually backwards compatible with most of the features in Bitpay. It'll take some time, but if we all make an attempt to alert merchants of better options than Bitpay, we won't have to pay via a standard made by an obscure BIP anymore.

The trick of appending a website prefix (https://bitpay.com/invoice-noscript?id=) to get a regular address starting with 1- or 3- doesn't even work anymore. It just leads you to a HTML version of the URL payment page, which is the end of easily extracting a standard address from those Bitpay URLS easily (for mobile users, at least, as there are still applications that extract a regular address on desktops like this: https://github.com/achow101/payment-proto-interface).

EDIT: BIP70 decoder (thanks TryNinja!)

At the very least, if you're a new site and you don't have any reputation you should accept some form of escrow so buyers aren't getting ripped off. All of your sales pages are incredibly undetailed, and your blog is filled with grammar errors, and your site overall looks unprofessional and not something I would buy from even if your site happens to be legitimate, which I strongly doubt it is.

You don't always have to buy directly from Bitmain. There are times when you get much better deals in the Computer Hardware section or even sometimes eBay. You just have to remember to always use escrow on anything you're not willing to lose and you'll be okay.

The Halong may have sold for $1500 last November, but they're currently OOS on Halong's site, and even before these miners went OOS I recall they raised prices to somewhere around $2000. Still, a markup of $5000 is still extreme considering you can get 4 S9s with  PSUs from Bitmain direct for that much.

Only main difference I see with this new batch is that they ship starting from the 20th of April instead of 11-20 like the last batch they had, and they raised the price of both the L3+ and the E3 slightly ($462-485 and $1800-1872 respectively). I guess they really want to get rid of their existing L3+ stock and prepare for a potential new Scrypt miner release right now.

Yes, nearly all of them except for some obscure coins with tiny market caps, listed on only one or two exchanges that are also tiny, that won’t be profitable when miners try to mine them. Basically RIP for CrytoNight ASIC buyers, there's no way anyone that purchased these ASICs will ever make their money back unless a miracle happens and they somehow find a way to make these things profitable again through adding a new algo or a major coin doesn't hard fork for some reason.

Looking at Bitcoinwisdom's difficulty chart, it seems you are right about difficulty growth- I haven't checked in with LTC difficulty in a while, and even in a theoretical situation where a new miner isn't even introduced, the difficulty on the chain could double in just around three months (and historically speaking again, it has), and considering Bitmain's practices with releasing ASICs difficulty could be in a position to skyrocket once more when they release a new Scrypt miner. The 4-5 month return given by Nicehash seems like a mirage given these factors.

If coupons are applicable for these units (I'm not completely sure if they are, IIRC you can only use $200s or something of the sort), the prices still go down to ~$300-350 with a PSU. It's not a large amount of money lost if you don't make all your money back, but overall I do agree there is some risk involved in buying an L3+ right now.

I know some countries have pretty high customs fees, but there's zero reason to buy a miner from Amazon at all, especially the T9+, when you can get a $400 Bitmain coupon for around $100 on these forums and shave off $300, and the T9+s supposedly ship about nine days from now in a worst-case scenario according to Bitmain's site (though they are occasionally wrong).

The T9s and T9+s are completely different miners with different internal designs and specifications . Please do not refer to the T9+ as a T9. The original T9 did 12.5TH stock, while the new T9+s do 10.5TH stock as a starter. The original T9 also housed 171 chips instead of the 162 in the T9+, and the T9 is slightly more efficient than the T9+ (0.126W/GH vs 0.136W/GH).

How did you lose? Did you lose your balance as in a technical issue that needs to be resolved or did you just happen to be unlucky and you lost your money? If you’re gambling at any site there’s always the risk of losing your money no matter what casino you go to. It’s really just a matter of what’s fun for you in the end, as gambling should only be a recreational activity and nothing more.

You shouldn’t expect to make significant amounts of money for gambling; if you want to do that, take a look at lending and loaning, etc.

I did acknowledge with the 50/week part a bit, but it’s difficult for one to make 50 posts that are constructive unless you’ve got lots of time available on the forums (or you’ll fall into the habit of burst posting). I hardly have the time to make more than 30-35 most of the time, so Fortunejack’s the right one for me, but I know there are people with the time to hit the 50 cap in Chipmixer.

With longer lived campaigns, you can imagine what a small part of a service’s revenue is actually used on signature campaigns and overall revenue as a whole- it’s incredible how much casinos and coin mixers make.

It's significantly better than a D3 or V9 based off current earnings for both miners (through Nicehash's calculator) at $0.10/kWh (both are in the red), no ASIC Bitmain currently offers really beats the L3+ at this price point. Wouldn't be a bad miner to introduce people to mining or how to set up miners in general, and at lower electrical costs this thing could potentially be quite profitable. Plus these things are supposed to deliver in just a week or two, not bad at all.

I also agree there's got to be a new Scrypt miner coming from Bitmain soon- there's no reason that they'd drop prices this steeply without something new coming soon.

Since we are already so far off track, I just noticed the X3 has sold out as well. Could just be Bitmain removing all stock on their site, I find it unlikely that anyone would buy that $2000 heater that also happens to ship in May.

Bitblender's been running since October of 2016 and I participated in it until very recently when payrates dropped to $60 / 2 weeks- a bit of a shame since the campaign had more than reasonable payrates for a very long time (0.035->0.025->0.017/week 'till this change for me personally, though do note I ranked up from Sr to Hero during my time in the campaign), and Lutpin was a great campaign manager and member of the Bitcointalk community in general.

If you count per post, Chipmixer isn't actually one of the highest paying signature campaigns. Assuming the title to the main thread is correct, you're getting paid 0.00075/post and Fortunejack currently pays me 0.0008/post, assuming I make the minimum requirement of 25 posts per week. I do like how DarkStar_ runs the campaign, though- a member of the campaign isn't required to make the full 50 posts/week, and he doesn't expect many to do so with decent posting quality.

As for the effectiveness of signature campaigns, a logical conclusion one would come to is that they're quite effective if companies and organizations spend thousands of dollars a week on them. Bitcointalk being a great place for practically uncensored Bitcoin discussion in all aspects makes them great as an advertising tool, and signature campaigns target a very relevant audience.

The campaign that gave out a cut was Sportsbet IIRC (definitely gambling-related) or something of the sort- I remember seeing a thread for such a campaign perhaps a year back or so.

The sales page on the Baikal website for the Giant N states you need three 6pin connectors; these can be found on most power supplies- just check the product description of a PSU and you’ll likely find a list of connectors.

I don’t normally recommend molex or SATA to 6pin connectors as neither of these connectors are made to transfer huge amounts of power, but they should work here as the Giant-Ns use just 60w hashing CryptoNight and CryptoNight-N. Best to stick with a server PSU with a breakout board that has 6 pins on it, though, and these should turn up on an Amazon or EBay search for ‘Server PSU’ and ‘Breakout Board’ (note you’ll need to provide six-pin connectors for this unless the whole thing is preassembled or they come with the breakout board).

There's no reason you shouldn't have 2FA in the first place unless you don't have a phone. People have been begging to get 2FA on Bitcointalk to prevent account theft since I joined the site in early 2015; it's absolutely great that Fortunejack offers 2FA for account security. Even if you're absolutely sure your password is secure, always enable 2FA. It's a great last line of defense to stop anyone that wants to get into your account, and if you write down the backup code for Google (or basically any other 2FA application) 2FA and store it in a safe place, unless you lose the code and your phone there's no way you'll lose access to your account on the 2FA side of things.

I wonder why Bitmain's keeping their X3 prices so high even though they seem to know that practically nobody is actually going to buy these units (and XMR has ALREADY forked, so you aren't gambling on it forking anymore). The miner doesn't even ship till May, and the price is still at $1900 and hasn't budged a bit. Funnily enough they've still kept the ten-per-customer limit on the X3 too. Even the E3 at the new price of $1800 is a better buy than this, though I would suggest against buying either miner.

I recall on the day of the E3 releasing I saw a picture of something like a web control interface listing the miners (can't recall if it listed individual hashboards or whole miners) as GPUs, with numbers from 0-10 listing the miners. I don't remember it well, though, so this could be completely false.

It is entirely possible Bitmain has chalked up something GPU-based. If they've done so it might explain how cheap the miners are, as if this is what they've done then Bitmain doesn't have to go through as lengthy of a process to get ahold of GPUs like through Nvidia or AMD. They're definitely doing something with the wording here like you said, as doing CTRL+F and entering 'ASIC' on the E3 Batch 2 page gives no results.

Avalons aren’t going to be quiet enough for the living room like you said; they’re still industrial grade machines just like the S9s, though they are indeed somewhat quieter than the S9s. Every decibel counts in home mining, though, so if you aren’t going for the living room approach, the Avalon or S9 is fine for the garage or basement as long as there is adequate airflow coming in and heat extraction out.

There’s no need for the R4 in a warehouse considering you get way better bang for your buck with alternatives like the S9, T9, A8xx, etc.

The house edge on certain online casinos is different, and odds for certain games may differ from site to site, but in general what you've mentioned is correct.

Due to the house edge on every casino, you're never going to win in the long run (which is something you should already know). If you enjoy gambling, set aside a certain amount of money every week or month to gamble as a control mechanism. If you want to make money, investing in a casino can be profitable, but not always. Lending to an exchange may also be a good idea.

There are also good tipsters out there that provide good, quality tips. Tipsters offer a legitimate service that should be paid. A good tipster puts effort into his/her work, and these people should be paid.

Some tipsters have years of prediction experience, and gaining prediction experience yourself can be time-consumimg. It's entirely possible to learn to predict yourself, but if you're not willing to do so, buying a subscription from a tipster is a convenient and easy way to make picks.

The second batch being more expensive has happened with other Bitmain miners in the past like the D3 IIRC, though I don't have the exact numbers for the pricing for the first and second batch of that particular miner.

I doubt sales were that great for the E3 in the first place, and they still chose to raise the pricing for the next batch. Interesting moves on the side of Bitmain. Anyone who buys an E3 at this price is throwing their money away, and even the $800 E3 was a gamble.

No modern computer that is not an ASIC can mine Bitcoin effectively and at a profit, so your question has been answered.

That being said, if you wish to mine altcoins there is still hope. If you only have a couple a low electrical cost, mining CryptoNight or HODL on Nicehash may be an option for you, though profitability has lowered significantly there.

If you're looking for the simplest way to both CPU and GPU mine, Nicehash's software is the way to go. It's one click, input your address and go. About as easy as it gets. For more information on mining alts I strongly suggest going to the Mining (Altcoin) section. The link to it is here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=160.0

The Currency Exchange section of the forum in Marketplace is a good place to look for conversions to almost anything from BTC or other crypto. Just open a thread there, make an exchange, and you're done. Make sure you use escrow when you purchase anything on the forum that you're not willing to lose, a brief list of escrowers can be found here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=855778.0.

I've had good experiences ordering Steam GCs totalling a few hundred dollars from SteamGamesBTC.com, and they also seem to sell Amazon GCs (albeit only $10 cards, and at a premium- $11.90). If you want to go this route, this is the link to the listing: http://steamgamesbtc.com/index.php?page=item&id=12.

Egifter's also a good option; I've ordered about $200 in Amazon GCs from them and they were all delivered in a timely fashion. Paxful may also be a viable option, but I haven't tried using them yet.