Having a known physical address did not do anything to prevent Gox or Cryptsy although it would give you a good destination to which to carry your pitchfork and torch.


I don't understand, how do his actions potentially screw other users?

I don't know where I got them.  I think I was trying to find a less laggy server URL because the hub.miningpoolhub.com one would sometimes go to a very large latency for me.  I have been using those for quite a while now.  I don't know if it ever helped with the latency or not though.

No way the D3 is 16nm.  The iBelink is 28nm and the D3 is less efficient.

Hard to find information on this but it looks like the design process of the various manufacturers chips looks something like:

PinIdea      64nm (about 1.5 Mh per Watt)
Baikal        40nm (about 4.6 Mh per Watt)
Bitmain        ?nm (about 12.5 Mh per Watt)  <-assuming it meets the specs at release
iBelink        28nm (about 13.3 Mh per Watt)  
Innosilicon    ?nm (about 40.3 Mh per Watt) <-assuming it meets the specs at release

I would guess that the Bitmain D3 is using a 28nm process and the Innosilicon is using something smaller.  The S9 is 16nm so there is certainly room for an improvement here in terms of efficiency and newer generation miners.  I doubt Innosilicon's chip is 16nm whatever it is.  PinIdea is probably out of this game for good at this point.  They have been releasing miners using the same chip for more than a year and only making miner efficiency gains by playing with chip frequencies.  I don't know if Baikal has anything in the works in terms of new chip designs but their current generation chip is also basically obsolete as soon as any of the other miners hit the market.  We know based on the network hashrate that some of these other miners are certainly real.  iBelink seems pretty well confirmed on all fronts including the specs at this point.  The Bitmain D3 could conceivably change specs prior to release but Bitmain usually comes pretty close on their stated specs vs what they release so I doubt it will move much.  The Innosilicon one is the real question, but if they are using something like 20nm or even 24nm they can make a huge impact in the market even if they don't release for 6 months.  The problem there is that Bitmain is likely to get a more efficient miner in that range inside of a year or so if dash prices justify making it so Innosilicon better drop something soon or Bitmain will just bury them in the longer term.

I am on the fence about trying to grab a D3 if I could get it soon.  But it looks like all of these early generation miners are likely to be money losers.  The network hashrate is in for some really serious increase.  Over the longer term though it will get easier to gauge the profitability of a miner so holding out for a 20nm or smaller miner, which is no doubt a year or more out still, might be a better investment, or at least a more predictable one.

Well if history is any indication, when people have begun investing heavily in asics the associated coins they mine have gone up in price.  It makes sense, if people spent millions on hardware they aren't going to sell their mined coins for chump change.  But nothing is guaranteed as you should know.

Well hell.  I sort of suspected this was coming from bitmain but my ROI on my other x11 miners may have just gone to never.

This stopped working, although it was working before:
us-east1.dash.miningpoolhub.com:20465

This still works:
us-east1.miningpoolhub.com:20465

Not sure how I ever figured out these required the 1 in the us-east1 part of the address.  None of the other pools seem to and not using the 1 does not work.



If you use firefox you can use a plugin called "Reload Plus" to reload the tab as often as you configure it.  I have mine set for 10 minutes and I never get logged out, even after days.  Chrome probably has a similar plugin.

Pure speculation on my part which is why I put it in the title of the thread but it makes sense.  If "the man" has forced polo to freeze certain wallets belonging to alphabay admins (or vendors for that matter) then that could well mean that many, many, user wallets get frozen right along with it.  It could also mean polo has temporary insolvency issues because their own hot wallet totals might be locked up.  You can be sure that if the government came along and gave orders to freeze certain things they would also be giving court orders not to talk about it at all.

The ZEC wallet is completely down on polo and the explanation makes no sense but I believe I heard that alphabay had recently enabled ZEC on their market (I may be wrong on this so if someone knows first hand please correct me).

It would help explain why polo is such a clusterfuck at the moment and why they don't seem to be able to handle the serious damage to their own reputation that this clusterfuck is causing them.  If they have a gag order and they have multiple cryptowallets that they can't use due to court orders, they may well be muddling the best they can with what they are allowed to still use and can't talk about it openly at the same time.

If they can't touch certain wallets they can still see blockchain transactions which would allow them to still credit accounts for deposit but it would be a more or less manual process. If they are prevented from using some of their main wallets they would also have to figure out how to move coins around in a way to handle withdrawals which would help explain the endless issues there.  Basically temporary insolvency.

Finally available from the source at $7k: http://www.baikalminer.com/product06.php

I might consider it at a little less than half that price but no way I am even vaguely interested at 7k.

Here is my 2 bits:

Polo: This was my favorite exchange, hands down the best.  Right now I would advise anyone to stay away and until they sort their shit out.  It might be growing pains like they say but more and more it looks like cryptsy 2.0.  I had actually gotten everything out of polo but then I switched some of my miners back to ZEC recently and forgot to look at the payout address and had a payout sent to their disabled ZEC wallet so now I'm a victim of their mess myself.  I am hoping they get their shit together.  They have a good interface, good trading pairs, good variety of coins.  But right now deposit and withdrawal issues, complete lack of response from support, I wouldn't go near it.

Bittrex: Always been good for me.  Decent interface.  Good variety of coins.  I have never needed support so I can't rate it but that says something itself, that nothing has ever malfunctioned such that I needed support. I have a couple BTC worth of balance here in various things and do my low volume or more obscure coin trading here.  Actually I do a little of my big name coin trading here too just to spread out my exposure in case there is an exchange hack so I have XMR and ZEC here too.  Just not a ton.

Kraken: I do most of my high volume trading here but only because I have a sense that it is more secure than other exchanges (and I moved here from polo).  I have had higher verification status on this exchange for a long time so crypto transfers in and out have always been totally without issue for me.  I gather that the majority of issues users have with them is fiat transfers in and out and support lag (including long lag getting verified).  They do appear to have legitimate growing pains.  The interface on kraken has always been terrible though.  It improved substantially with the acquisition of cryptowatch so it's usable now but just about everyone else has a better trade interface than kraken.  I do my higher volumes here on the big name coins like ETH, DASH, ZEC, XMR but I try to limit my on exchange balance to around 10ish BTC total value for all coins just so that if there is a hack or a Gox\Cryptsy incident I don't get obliterated.  It would still totally hurt obviously if I lost my balance there but it wouldn't wipe me out.

Yobit: This is a scam exchange but since I mine obscure coins sometimes it is a place I sometimes use to dump them.  I wouldn't use it for anything serious.  I wouldn't trade there with serious trade balances and I wouldn't try and acquire anything there.  Many of their wallets don't even interoperate with the legit blockchains for the coins so clearly those markets exist only to try and game people with trades.  That also means if you mine something obscure and want to sell it there, make sure you can actually deposit there first.  But really every time you use this exchange you are gambling so just understand that you could lose it all.

C-Cex: Another place I use for obscure coins.  I have never had a problem with it and never had to use support so I have nothing bad to say about it.  But I only really use it for more obscure stuff I can't do elsewhere.

Allcoins: Scam exchange.  They ran off with everyone's money and then like a zombie phoenix rising from the ashes they seem to have reappeared.  Oh wait, I just checked and it may be down again.  If you see anything about it stay away.

campbx: Scam exchange.  Veterans will know the name, practically no-one else will.  Stay away.  Only in business to steal your coins.

Just to mention there are other legit exchanges but I am not using them.  Bitfinex, bitstamp, etc...  Never used cryptopia or bleutrade.

Given the current amount these things make, and the delayed shipping, and the huge diff jumps we are still seeing, and the price, I can't believe anyone is still buying.  I have one from Jan that I am still wondering about hitting ROI ever.  The income is a trickle and that is not factoring electricity at all.

In fact here is what a 13.6 S9 is pulling in for me for a weeks worth of mining going back for the past 4 weeks.  So those totals are the amount it made for the previous week of mining.

Sat 6/17         0.03983259
Sat 6/24         0.03746030
Sat 7/1           0.03617634
Sat 7/8           0.03455305

I still have .47 BTC for this one to ROI (disregarding electrical costs) which is almost exactly what a new one costs right now.  Diff is about to jump 14% today.  So even if diff stayed static after that I am looking at about 0.02971562 per week so still 15.8 weeks to ROI, so just call it 4 months.  Basically this machine will be mining for a full year to ROI, if it ever even does.  

With this kind of math why would anyone buy an S9 now?  I regret buying this one from back in Jan.

I actually quit mining there for that same issue on the ZEC pool.  First miner could connect then I could never connect a second.  I tried to go through their support, someone other than OC was responding but he seemed to think the problem was on my end.  He never fixed it so I just moved pools.

Yes definitely g-black boards.  I have two of these machines and on one of them the PSU fried some of the components so I had to jury rig it exactly as you need to now do.  I used PCIe extension plugs.  Basically I bought something like these:

and cut off one end so I can connect them from the PSU PCIe plugs and then run them out to bare wires.  Then I used something like these: http://www.newark.com/productimages/standard/en_US/4929973.jpg?01AD=3c47BJfkw23sA7hS_ubIpAIjl8f7kW8DnCAyvI5pUYtyDZ_EOOnoNCA&01RI=E5C75660FF6E8AF&01NA=
to wire them together.  Those are called barrier terminal blocks.

Just make sure you get the right wires connected on the barrier terminal blocks.  Black to black, yellow to red (assuming the PCIe power cable extenders are color coded correctly). Make sure and use all 4 of those low gauge wires to connect to the board and use at least 3 wires coming off of the PSU side for each 4 wire bunch from the miner boards.  I did have some wires melt on me with this setup from too much power draw.  I also ended up frying one of the ten devices (basically half of one board because there are two devices per board).

I was using bfg miner, newer version of bfg miner will recognize these devices.  You do need the STMicroelectronics virtual COM port drivers for windows machines.

EDIT:  I see your most recent post about the polarity reversal.  If that was the case with mine it was the case with exactly one device since only one of them fried.  I wired all ten devices (5 boards) at the same time, turned on the juice and heard a tiny pop and saw some smoke.  When I started bfg miner it only recognized 9 devices.  Through trial and error unplugging the mini USB cables from the devices I identified which one it was and just left it off after that.  So I think for mine the polarity on the wires was correct.

I still have these miners.  I am not running them currently mostly because of the summer heat and low profitability but with LTC up compared to what it was they are probably barely profitable again so come the fall I may turn them back on.

I should also mention, these things are a bit flaky.  I had batch files setup to kill bfg miner and restart it every hour because sometimes some of the devices just stop submitting shares.  Sometimes you have to power cycle them as well for the same reason. 

Ahh snap so bitcoin is dead again?

hodl your conis
except for the "classic" ones anyway

No it isn't.
https://bittrex.com/Status

Yep as others mentioned this happens if your ISP changes your IP every so often.  With DSL that happens with me.  My account has never been compromised but I have seen a number of these emails over the past year or more because of the changing IP from my DSL modem.

Sometimes their wallet generates the transaction but doesn't broadcast it right away.  Why?  Dunno. But if they give you a txid and you can't find it on a block explorer but then many hours later the same txid winds up being valid that means that's what happened.  They did give you a real and valid txid generated by their wallet, they just waited a while to actually broadcast it.  Polo does that.  If they give you a txid that is never valid or the txid changes later, then those are even worse shenanigans.

There was a time not very long ago when alt coins went way up and suddenly GPU mining was super profitable again.  Then apparently everyone on the planet bought up all the video cards and started mining.  With a single card, mostly what you will be doing is paying the electric company to buy a small amount of cryptos.  But doing that has paid off tremendously well for me in the long term.  There was a time a number of years ago when I had 5 GPU's mining LTC and I was kind of stoked to be getting $2 a day with those 5 cards, even though I was paying more than that for the electricity.  Since I have kept more of my cryptos than I have sold over the years, that mining has retroactively been worth much, much more than that.  I suppose the ultimate value in fiat will be determined when I cash out, but from my humble beginnings (those 5 video cards) I have over the years accumulated a number of asic miners, and newer GPU's.  I have 7 GPU's now and I earn around $100 a day between the asics and the GPU's, but the coins I have accumulated and hodled and traded with on exchanges are worth like 100k.

The point is really that you don't know what the future holds.  And the decisions you make as to what to mine, and how long to hold it will determine how much money you make per day mining more than the point in time calculations (unless you just sell everything right away of course).  If you sell everything right away it is hardly worth it though.  As I say, you will just be paying the electric company to acquire small quantities of cryptos in that case.  But if you are mining something and only making $1 a day now, if it goes up 5 times in value in the future and you never sold it, then you will actually have been making $5 a day retroactively.  

The real crypto gravy train has already left the station.  But there is still time I think to make some decent profit if you look at it like a long term investment and not just a matter of how much can I make today.

At this point I would be very careful about spending any sizeable chunk on an x11 miner.  Baikal has a new miner, PinIdea has a new miner, and iBelink supposedly has a monster right around the corner.  There is almost no info on how many of each of these miners there are or how quickly new ones will be coming out.  Hashrate could go really high very soon.