The thing is, the Obelisk will break even quicker and make more if the DCR1 is released before the B29, not to mention the pricing, even after any possible reseller markups if they're not too extreme. Sure, the Dragonmint will do better long term with its efficiency, but with pricing right now I don't think the better efficiency is worth paying 5x the original pricing of the DCR1.

For practical purposes you can still just input the hashrate and wattage of the other CryptoNight miners, no? It's fine to be advertised to list only a specific miner on a site if it doesn't impact anything in terms of functionality IMO. If you just blindly rush into buying a miner because of mining calculator results and don't do any research outside of that you  deserve to get burned. There's also hundreds of other mining calculators out there if you don't want to use Nicehash's calculator.

Their validation and trust pretty much comes solely from the fact that Bitmain themselves run them, and the fact that they've allowed users to redeem hashrate for actual machines once they became unprofitable (which I have yet to see any cloudmining operation do), among several other things. To be completely honest I don't know what regulation they run under and if China (or whatever country should be responsible for them if there even is one) enforces them. Being tied to Bitmain should be enough to make them reputable compared to operations like Genesis or Hashflare.

The only cloudmining operation I remotely trust is Hashnest, and even they have major issues regarding site maintenance and withdrawals and deposits every now and then. They used to be bustling with activity and the site hardly had any hiccups when I began using them back in 2015, but things have slid downhill since. Last miner released on Hashnest was the L3, haven't heard any news about future releases onto the Hashnest market since then. Considering Bitmain is one of the big players (if not the biggest), there's a very slim chance they'd try to run off with my money (why risk your reputation for something like this?), and for that reason I trust them. They're owned by Bitmain, so everything about em should be tied to Bitmain.

If there's an ASIC behind it, you bet miners will find a way to keep the ASIC profitable so they can at least make their money back. Bitmain had enough money to keep BCH afloat (and surprisingly enough it's still somehow still alive) and more profitable than even BTC temporarily, they can afford to fork Monero and keep ASICs profitable on it if they so choose to by methods like pumping the coin.

It's been business as usual on my end today, I haven't personally noticed anything out of the ordinary on the forums, things load like normal and even opening spam megathreads in Bitcoin Discussion takes just a second or two. I got the Cloudflare loading page today, which I've only seen two or three times in the last year, but that's about it.

https://gyazo.com/49b02fe76668f7ab8aba24f488cc97f7

Just did a quick ping check and it seems loading times are slightly slow today, though I don't personally feel it. I've had much worse in terms of response time on the forums though, this is nothing.

It's fine to use your Ledger for regular transactions due to security reasons mentioned above, but I (and many other people) agree that it's always good to have a hot wallet with funds you plan on using for convenience. I occasionally send funds from my SegWit Ledger to my Blockchain wallet for use online, and it works just fine for regular use. I've had this setup for three years now (though I only got the Ledger Nano a year ago, I previously used an airgapped computer for cold storage), and I haven't been hacked or compromised yet.

As a reminder, fees are extremely low right now. It wouldn't be a bad idea to combine low/dust inputs and consolidate them right now for lower fees in the long run, and perhaps start a SegWit address if you haven't already to reduce fees in the long run in the future if things change.

I guess there's just been less documentation of Bitmain having some sort of repair training program, I haven't even heard of something like that until now. Is there any information about Bitmain's program out there somewhere? I've never been great with the technical details of miner repair and I happen to be travelling to China this summer (specifically Nanchang and Beijing), I'd be glad to take a detour to Bitmain or Avalon's facility to see how things work.


Thanks for the info, I guess they used the 761 to help develop the 841 or something of the sort. Weird they never seemed to release it to the Western market, I recall seeing an article back near December saying they were only releasing it for Asian markets.

I love the technician Certification program Canaan are running, great that Avalon's actually being extremely transparent with their machines and they're willing to actually certify people to repair machines instead of a MyRig and Bitmain Warranty repair service (with some people like Lightfoot, of course) on Bitmain's side, and that they're actually concerned about customer satisfaction unlike Bitmain. This only increases my trust in Canaan, and I'm personally interested in how to troubleshoot and possibly repair these things now.  

Little question, is the 761 test model essentially just a 741 but with a PSU attached to it, similar to the 841? I wasn't able to find much information on it. I love your review style, especially this small documentary of your visit to Canaan. It's not often you get to see how miners are made, especially with most manufacturers being extremely closed-off.

There's actually a relatively easy way to get around the BIP70 URL that I recently found out about when I was trying to pay for something on a site using Bitpay with my Blockchain.info hotwallet on my phone- thanks to redditor jimmy58743 for posting this.

Take the URL and chop off everything before the https:// part. Then, take the URL you're left with, and copy everything after /i/- for example, LSn1DrmQ2RF2VaF8nFHvdt, and paste this in front of it-

https://bitpay.com/invoice-noscript?id=

With the example URL, it would come out to be https://bitpay.com/invoice-noscript?id=LSn1DrmQ2RF2VaF8nFHvdt.

The resulting non-BIP70 address and payment amount is shown on the new rather austere page, and the timer works on it, albeit it refreshes irregularly in my experience.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://github.com/achow101/payment-proto-interface

I tried using this on my desktop computer and I did succeed in getting the application to spit out a viable address- I don't recommend using it when you can just use the (comparatively) simple method above of appending a short string to the URL and cutting some things off of it, though. In the end, though, unless most major mobile wallets start accepting BIP70 URLS or QR codes, I personally feel the disadvantages far outweigh the (now few) benefits of Bitpay.

Interesting situation in terms of breaking even with the A6- with an electrical cost of $0.10/kWh and a pool fee of 1%, at current rates you're going to make around $5,350 a year mining LTC, which doesn't give you a lot of room for profit, and LTC difficulty is almost certainly going to increase, albeit it's not going up as quickly at the moment as Bitcoin. MOQ of 5 kills it for most people (including me), but the L3+ isn't the leader in efficiency anymore, though at current estimations the L3+ still breaks even significantly quicker than the A6- roughly 240 days compared to 310 on the A6. I'm not touching this with the pricing and MOQ.

I wouldn't recommend solomining unless you personally control large amounts of hashrate on the chain you want to solo on, as variance will be extreme if you only have a couple rigs in your control. Card prices will come down and are coming down even right now; there's a 1080 MSI Duke in stock for $679 on Newegg and it's been at that price for two hours now. Things will only slip down unless mining profitability goes up again.

So essentially colocating a miner/ getting one hosted? I already do this, and I know many other people that do this as well. It's pretty much the second best thing you can do besides mining at home, and if you get a good place to host your miner it's got nearly all the benefits of home mining but no noise. Easy, usually cheaper than residential electricity in most situations, and no ICO bullshit. It's practically foolproof and you shouldn't have to invest into anything other than hosting costs and a miner to start.

If GPUs and miners in general aren't available in your area, the Computer Hardware section of this forum might help out a bit with that. I've scored lots of great deals for hardware there, just make sure to escrow any transactions you might make.

They've got a representative from MyRig (Yoshi), which is a reputable and legitimate site that I've bought from many times and offers repair services based in Colorado (paid, but better and quicker than Bitmain's for Americans), and they certainly do have proof that at least their BTC miner is legit. Their Twitter page and Youtube channel shows proof of their miners hashing, including the B29 (which is a bit dated), just seems they haven't delivered miners yet, though they seem to be near that step. At the very minimum they've got miners that actually work, so their miners aren't vaporware. Once we get towards the end of March and April we'll start hearing more from Halong and customers that receive their ordered miners.

YT: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaLmTS38DfxJSEeW5rHDPLQ

Twitter: https://twitter.com/halongmining?lang=en

Another way to look at it is this: most all miner manufacturers sell preorders nowadays, and taking a short look at all the upcoming CryptoNight miners confirms this (it's been true for as long as I've been in mining). Halong's doing just that, and they've provided at least some preliminary proof their miners are legit, and they're backed by a trusted service.

There's plenty of proof out there that at the very least their 16TH/S BTC miner is legit, and philipma1957 is waiting on a demo unit that he'll review once he gets it. A few pages in this thread should get you caught up. Starting from the most recent should help the most; everything they've mentioned about that particular miner makes sense, including the part where they mention the miners utilize AsicBoost to achieve the efficiency they advertise. They seem somewhat reputable as of now, but there is still some risk involved. It's not nearly as bad as when Halong only had some blurry videos of their miners hashing away a few months ago, though. I personally find it extremely unlikely that Halong's a scam.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2443327.

http://www.papowerswitch.com/

This seems about right for my area, which happens to be NW Pennsylvania. We get our electricity pretty cheap here, about 6-7c/kWh. If you give us a location or state where you might want to start a farm we'll be able to do some more digging. I guarantee you you'll find a site like this for pretty much every state in the US, if that's where you want to start your newer farm.

I'd suggest practically anything that's not Bitpay. Bitpay forces customers to pay via a URL-style method (BIP70 if you want to look into it more) that isn't integrated with many wallets yet (especially mobile wallets), and it's an enormous hassle to get around this, especially on a mobile device. Even besides that, they're generally against Bitcoin as a whole.

BTCPayServer's a great alternative, as is Coinpayments, and Coinpayments is actually backwards compatible with most of the things in Bitpay IIRC.

There's always ways to make money in Crypto, even when mining profits have fallen. I'm personally not buying any GPUs at all anymore due to horrible prices and even worse profitability (still profitable for those who already have em, but for those who don't it'll take ~12months to break even with current pricing). I'm still profitable on pretty much everything I own, and at ~7c/kWh it will remain that way for quite some time.

If you're thinking about the new CN ASICs right now, don't try them. As you most likely already know, they're an incredibly big gamble as most CryptoNight coins are forking in an attempt to shut them out. There's no reason to resort to gambling even when profitability is low.

Depends what price you can get the 1070Tis at. The X1's going to be insanely risky if you choose to buy it, and the 1070Ti makes around 80 cents as of today mining, after electrical costs of $.10/kWh. Assuming you get your 1070Tis at ~$500 you aren't going to break even for more than 12 months, and that's if mining profitability doesn't continue to go down. I'd actually suggest not putting more money into mining right now as things are all  high risk and low reward. Buying any CryptoNight ASIC right now is essentially gambling.

In the Bitcoin Speculation section, Philipma1957 is waiting for his demo Dragonmint 16T model, and there are several indications that Halong Mining is a legitimate site. Most people there, including me, have essentially concluded that Halong should be considered legit. MyRig (a legitimate and reputable hosting and miner repair site) partnered with Halong and if you take a look at their Twitter site you'll find they have several images of Dragonmint Miners there. https://twitter.com/myrig_com?lang=en