If anyone is curious about the PinIdea model, all you need to know is that the miner hashes at a fraction of the speed of a Bitmain, Dragonmint or Baikal miner and still takes roughly the same amount of power (55kh/s @ ~330W on CryptoNight-Lite, same thing with the fork). It's also priced insanely horribly at .3BTC, and interestingly enough they use the same pics on their CryptoNight miner as one listing for their DR-100 (sold out, should be right under the CryptoNight miner in their webshop). I didn't even know PinIdea was temporarily in the game before I looked up the device, here's the link to the miner.

https://shop.pinidea.io/index.php/product/asic-cryptonight-miner-rr-200/

If you're going to buy the X3 you might as well just gamble the $2000 or however much the current batch costs, I'm not going in depth on the fork again as you most likely already know about it. If you don't, the X3 and Baikal threads are a good read.

I'd personally go with the L3+. It's on a relatively developed algo with established coins, things will likely go as they have in the land of Scrypt and mining rewards won't fluctuate as they might with Sia or CryptoNight coins. It's significantly less risky than the X3 or A3.

Well, by releasing the V9 Bitmain gets the opportunity to sell old BM1385 chips in 'new' form, so that's one reason why it's selling like it is now. If they had sold S7s as used I guarantee there'd have been less buyers.

If you'd read a few pages back you'll find the V9 design overall is slightly different than that of the S7, like the hashboard with L3 markings and outer casing. They're not exactly the same, but they are closely related with most specs. Given this, there would've been implications selling these as plain S7s, and most people want a more efficient miner nowadays anyways, as mining profitability on the S7s is dropping like a rock.

I've seen absolutely no news about the E10 yet, but from what I can tell from their website the first few E10s will come out at the end of this month.

Miner reliability and customer support is something else you missed with the cons of the Ebit miners. This post and the quote within it should be enough to keep you well away from Ebang as a whole. Pricing on these things is a joke, and you're much better off even just getting an S9.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2638479.msg32223485#msg32223485

Electroneum might not be forking, but if XMR does fork (which is planned) and ETN becomes the most profitable coin to mine, then Bitmain X3s are also going to switch to ETN and it’s the D3 situation all over again, except both miners are significantly more expensive this time around. There’s basically almost no way the X3 or the Baikal will break even in a reasonable amount of time.

Either way there’s eventually going to be a coin that won’t fork that’s the most profitable on the CryptoNight algo, and difficulty’s going to skyrocket on it. The question is which one.

It’s a very large gamble with a very low possible reward. There’s way better ways to make money mining, even with such low rewards as prices on most coins have tumbled. There’s very little reason to buy this miner at all, and if the thing breaks down you’re facing Bitmain’s horrible repair services. Unless you get into the first batch you have a near zero chance of making your money back, and even with the first you’ve got a slim chance.

Tell that to the CryptoNight coins that plan on forking to stop ASICs from mining on their chains. The fact that ASICs greatly increase centralization doesn't exactly help either- just take a look at BTC. If a coin wishes to stay GPU-only they will choose to do so, whether it's to keep the coin decentralized or for another purpose.

I’m staying away from anything that’s not BTC and Scrypt ASICS and GPU mining for the time being. Incredibly risky times right now for buying miners of any sort, and it seems Bitmain’s releasing new gear left and right and profitability on those miners drops like a rock after the initial batch. Pricing of miners doesn’t help either.

Inactivity is a potential sign that they might be discontinuing their cloudmining operations soon. I recall Hashnest used to be bustling with activity back in 2015 when the S3/5/4 were still on the markets trading and there were hundreds of people active in their chatboxes, and things have mostly gone downwards from when they removed those miners and the S7/9 and later the L3 were the only things on their platform for about a year or so. They haven't even released any new miners onto their markets since the L3. I can imagine things aren't going too great on their side.

Bitmain's generally not great with support in the first place, and Hashnest's support is even less prioritized than with actual miner sales. If you've still got issues with deposits, just hang in tight and wait for support to help or try to tweet them. I've personally transferred all my money off Hashnest and what little I had in cloudmining about a year back. If you truly want a good investment in mining but can't stand the noise or you don't have the circuit capacity to power miners, colocating miners is always a good option. It's much less risky than cloudmining, and you have nearly full control over your miners.

If profitability doesn't change and you're mining with Nicehash (or just plain Ethereum as it's currently one of the most profitable coins you can mine with the 290X), you'll break even in around 11 months. Whether or not you think that's good is your own interpretation, though I will say that if the card does last that long then it's a good investment (considering most other investments aren't as lucrative as mining), even though profitability may have been greater in the near past. When you're buying a used GPU from pretty much anywhere (but especially eBay) you're taking a gamble that the card wasn't overclocked, even if the description says it hasn't been. eBay is buyer sided, but I often see people with broken GPUs shortly after the return period ends.

This is true, and besides that, the fact that Baikals can theoretically be flashed to hash other algorithms gives it away. The Baikal miners being FPGAs also meant that they were less efficient than the D3 X11 ASICS when the D3s first came out. FPGAs are typically weaker than ASICs.

If you want to seriously start mining, consider selling the laptop, buying rig components now and waiting for a good deal to come on a GPU. User above me mentioned pretty much everything about heat and how it's damaging, you could try mining with less threads/cores than your laptop actually has to try minimizing thermal stress, but in the end laptop components are fragile and you shouldn't be putting them to the task of mining.

I believe there are WiFi extender modules with Ethernet ports sold on eBay that you could try out- they're significantly cheaper than buying two powerline adapters, and they should work for your purposes (though the connection may be slightly less reliable than with a good powerline connection). I used powerline adapters for my GPU rig and  multiple miners including the SP20, S7 and S5 and they all ran fine with almost zero down time.

Here's an example of the extenders I'm talking about on eBay:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/300Mbps-Wifi-Repeater-Wireless-N-802-11-AP-Router-Extender-Signal-Booster-Range/191937833598

If you're not willing to set up everything yourself to solo mine, whether it's too much of a hassle for you or something else, it's always possible to mine at a pool that allows you to solomine (but keep in mind these pools usually take a small cut, around 1-2% vs none if you setup solo mining yourself).

An example is this pool below. They take a 1.5% cut, but if you don't have the time to set up solomining yourself it's convenient and easy.

https://solo-eth.2miners.com/en

 

If you find dust, make sure you clean it off with compressed air (a simple search on eBay or Amazon should give you results, should be in can form). Even a small amount of dust buildup can cause lots of issues in a mining rig, especially additional heat.

I've heard of people messing up their computers and miners with electric air blowers before, so I tend to just keep cans of compressed air, but there seem to be favorable reviews for some computer air blowers on sites like Amazon. I'm personally on the edge of getting one.

There's almost no reason to go for the Ebit miners at all considering most of them are selling for ridiculous prices even used as of right now, and they're just not very good miners in the first place. They're incredibly prone to breaking and Ebit's support is terrible. HagssFIN's post should be enough to keep you away from them.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2638479.msg32223485#msg32223485

Avalon miners tend to be exceptionally reliable and well-built in my experience, and their support's better than Bitmain's. Never had issues with them before, and they use simple RPI controllers that can easily be flashed and bought if they break, and there are ways to bypass the AUC3 adapters they use.

The fact that this article was even posted on Coindesk is good as it'll hopefully make people realize how risky cloud mining really is; I'm honestly surprised so many people are still buying into cloud mining today and how popular it is, even on these forums though we tell people not to invest into cloud mining at all (and to be ready to lose everything if an investment is made).

There's so many alternatives to cloud mining like just simply getting a miner hosted at a colocation (yes, many reputable colos today are at capacity, but it's still possible to find hosting space rather easily) today that no sane person should ever consider cloud mining. Can't wait 'till the day cloud mining isn't available to US residents.

The miner you linked to us is an absolutely blatant scam. There's news about the F3 existing and some proof of it, but ethmine.ws is just a paste of Bitmain's miner description.

Take a look at Warranty for starters, then take a look at any Bitmain listing's Warranty section- the T9+ for example.

https://shop.bitmain.com/productDetail.htm?pid=00020180302142134304q3O9kyoG06AC

The site just changed the words Bitmain to Ethmine and the miner name for their entire Notes and Warranty. If that weren't enough, there's a tweet at the News widget at the bottom that's just a bunch of spam. Remember, if it's too good to be true, it most likely is.

Does anyone know how the coupons were distributed (in terms of what amount is given)? I've seen posts everywhere about Bitmain coupons of varying discounts, but I'm personally curious as to what sort of purchase from Bitmain would warrant a $400 coupon compared to a $100 coupon. Haven't seen anything about that in my browsing recently.

There are other CryptoNight coins out there that can be potentially more profitable than Monero for CPU mining temporarily, but that’s essentially true.

If you’re mining with an Intel CPU on Nicehash, though, it seems to default to HODL since Intel CPUs typically aren’t that great at mining XMR with their small L3 cache. Seems like it’s only been on XMR for a short time this month if you’re theoretically mining with an i7-6700 or even a 7700K.