But without earnings, what is the point of BTC mining as a hobby?
Unlike the good 'ol pre-ASIC days once a miner is setup it is very much a hands-off operation with virtually no user interaction at all. Sure ya can watch the blinking lights but that is not particularly exciting...

The only current incentive for mining is the block rewards and unless a miner is fast enough to earn more than dust where is the fun? That is unless the miner is pointed at a Lottery pool and your horse comes in, then, CHACHING! BTCBTCBTC

Um, Blockforge and probably other Canaan distributors still have their flash sale going as well. At BF the A921 is still $349 so why buy bulk and have to deal with import fees? And, Blokforge now has a 2kw PSU for the A9's as well. Just curious as to why the Group buy?

Is it possible to build a 100w miner? Sure. Just use only a few chips -- like the stick miners do. Will have near useless speed and be good only for Lottery mining (and being a small heater) though.

And I'd like to fly and spit diamonds -- don't see that happening either.
Ain't it a bitch when real-world physics get in the way?  

And of course if this ever goes to trial, the ONLY folks who will make significant $$ will be the lawyers from both sides.
Frankly the premise is so stupid - as are the plaintiffs if they can't input their info in a timely manner - I hope the judges find it without merit and dismiss it.

I currently sell using Coinbase or directly spend it with merchants accepting BTC.
As to how you as an exchange obtain BTC - same way a bank obtains any non-local currency: trade with other institutions or buy it from them and hold enough in reserve to cover operations.

Incentive for folks to use your exchange: charge low fees.

Interesting, the pictures in  the 911 spec sheet show it as having the usual PCIe jacks for power. Then again, in the past Canaan has not been the best at properly updating info on their site...

Considering it uses the same chips as the A8 series, wonder why they did not stick with the A8xx numbering? Call it a 861, 871, etc...

Actually the APW3++ is rated for 1.2kw (100A @ 12vdc) on 110-120vac input and from experience is very happy putting out over 1,300w with a high line of 115-120v so running 2 cards is very doable and possibly even all 3 cards though that will be pushing things.

As for speed, the per-card speed = rated speed / number of cards.

Is not a transistor. Is either a resistor or capacitor. Look at the same part on a good board and you will see a very tiny component number on the PCB next to the part, something like R123 or C123. If 'R' then is a resistor, if 'C' then is a capacitor. Then look at the good component itself and you should see a tiny number on it identifying the actual mfg part number. Search for the number on Google using  "resistor (or capacitor) <number>"  to find a supplier for it.

Just disconnect the ribbon cable and power from bad board and miner will run just fine with just 2 and even 1 hash board.

Once again, folks are NOT talking about transaction fees an operator might charge to withdraw earnings from your pool.
They are talking about the Tx fees that are part of the block solved. Those are the fees we pay to establish the transaction priority anytime you buy/sell/spend BTC. For miners those Tx fees are added to the 12.5 BTC finder reward.

Please ref Why all miners need to mine on a pool that pays them the tx fees at the top of this section...
edit: fixed link

Pricing on it is up but still no hard specs or delivery date. $1,475.00
https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=00020181107195820131prWuuVTy0738
Estimated specs here
Also checkout point-8 in their description re duty and tariff.

At least one user has tested the new FW against a pool that does not support AB and Kano.is which does support AB. They ran several tests and saw a 200w drop in power when pointed to Kano (AB) vs the non-AB pool and results are fully repeatable as they switched back and forth between the 2 pools. So that tells us that LPM is only active on pools that support AB otherwise the miner runs at original power specs.

Nice thing is, we finally have an apples-to-apples comparison to what AB can do unlike the Inno/Halong miners that cannot be tested because they only work on AB pools.

New product and process runs are a collaboration between customer and Foundry. Foundries set an initial cost the customer pays regardless of where defects occur.

Only thing I disagree with is "Years of extortion prices and abuse". It's called Free Market and BM just charged what the market would bear. No one held a gun to peoples heads to make them buy their miners so there is nothing wrong with that at all. If you have a problem with BM then don't buy their miners. I stopped buying Ants and moved to Avalons when BM tried to force BitCH on us and have never looked back.

If BM and other miner makers charged rock-bottom prices from day-1 and in turn sold even more miners can you imagine where diff would be today?

One must assume that we can use any btc wallet address right?
Or, are you requiring users to get one through you?

Does it say 'only Slushpool'? No.
Ergo, works with ANY pool that supports AB such as Kano.is, -ck's solo and his regular pool, and others.

Speaking of which, if you check the Little Dragon BDPL site for its list of licensees one company very obviously missing from the list is Innosilicon who are using AB in their T1+ and T2 series of miners. The companies that are listed have NO patents to their name to 'share' with others and aside from Halong nor do they produce/sell any miners. Are they shell companies owned by Inno or otherwise associated with them? Again, the BDPL covering AB is very obviously just an attempt to get access to other companies IP.

IMHO that rather points to Inno being behind Little Dragon and the AB patent...

Whatchou talkin' about Willis?
Only the operator of 1 other pool has as much public presence as Kano does. You have a question, you ask here and it gets answered -- most likely by Kano.

Ya might want to also consider not using bold text as it makes posts rather annoying and does not reflect well on the poster...

Yes the chips were designed with BM's version of AB in mind. However, after the kerfuffle over covert AB Bitmain seems to have decided to hold off turning on their overt AB until the noise over AB in general settled down AND until someone else got the pools to support it.

Why do so many folks still continue to wrongly say that Halong Mining owns the AB patent? As has been said time and again including being very clearly spelled out on the Halong site the patent is owned by Little Dragon LLC. Halong is just a licensee of it. Now as to who owns Little Dragon (and for that matter Halong) is anybody's guess as neither company wants anyone to know and both have gone to great lengths to prevent anyone from knowing. The only info on Little Dragon is that they are represented by a Chicago law firm (look on the Little Dragon LLC site) and all communications go through them.

As to violating the Patent - highly doubt it though of course I expect that to be contested. However BM made mention in their blog that the Patent has already been shot down in several jurisdictions. More to the point - you cannot Patent an end result (reuse of previous hash calcs) and there are always several ways to skin a cat. Case in point, Intel/AMD cpu's, the various makes of GPU's, etc. all do the same thing, just differently but producing the same results.

Looking good there!