While I would certainly like to win, I think the most likely outcome is the final change will end up in that vast expanse between myself & Mr. V8.

Bitcoin Difficulty:    678,760,110,083
Estimated Next Difficulty:    711,349,406,888 (+4.80%)
Adjust time:    After 27 Blocks, About 4.5 hours

Looks to me like a roll-over if Phil is interested in repeating.

Looks like Mr. V8 is sitting pretty......for now.

Bitcoin Difficulty:    678,760,110,083
Estimated Next Difficulty:    715,327,382,407 (+5.39%)
Adjust time:    After 246 Blocks, About 1.7 days

+4.5 = alh

3 days ago this seemed absurdly low........

Assuming you abandon BTC mining on your CPU (as you should) and switch to a different coin, you will almost certainly want to visit a different sub-forum. This specific sub-forum is intended for Bitcoin mining in particular. The "sticky" threads at the top may give you some guidance.

Your first two questions are answered in depth in the preceding posts in this thread and others.

The 3rd question is answered with 30 seconds of Goggle research. 

I too want to congratulate Phil on deciding to undertake this again!!!

As for the future, while the last week has seen a significant "correction" in the price of BTC, the longer trend of 6 months has been very good in terms of price appreciation. I always believe that hashrate follows BTC price, obviously with some lag time for folks acquire and start mining. Once that's happened, it will usually take a significant long term decline in BTC price to force out inefficient mining hardware from the global BTC network. Looking back 6 months, $2000/BTC still looks pretty good, even if it was $2700/BTC just in the last few days.

It also possible to 2 (or even 3) power supplies to power an S9. You have to be careful with the total power draw, and how you wire it up so as not to have more than one suppliy for a single hash board. You also have to fiddle with the sequencing, but it can most assuredly be done correctly. It is more hassle than a single supply solution.

You are probably thinking of phillipma1957 in terms of "Solar on the Northeast".

Sorry to burst your bubble, but GFLOPS (Billions of Floating Point Operations per Second) have nothing to do with GHA (Billions of SHA256 Hashes per Second). The SHA256 Hash operation involves numerous logical operations (And, Or, Xor, and Shift) on binary data. It has absolutely nothing to do with a Floating Point Add, Subtract, or Multiply. The lowliest 333 MHS (i.e. .333 GHS) Asicminer USB stick from 2013 is many times faster than the fastest CPU mining on any general purpose processor (e.g X86 or ARM in the Raspberry Pi). You might be able to find CPU mining software that you can compile and run for yourself. For BTC mining with the SHA256 at the center, an ASIC is the only cost-effective way to mine Bitcoins. This has been true for at least 4 years.

The ASIC miners of today are so streamlined and specialized, the ONLY thing they can do is the SHA256 operation. They are 0.0 GFLOPS (couldn't do a Floating Point Operation of any kind).

I know I saw one picture of a Hub that had been opened up, and and additional +5V and GND wire had been soldered on top of the thin trace already present on the PC board. The idea is that the thin trace would have too much resistance and would cause a larger voltage drop when more current is drawn.

There were a lot of posts on this in the latter half of 2013 and early 2014 when USB miners were popular.

Since this sub-forum is supposed to be Bitcoin-specific, you'll probably want to make sure to post this in the Altcoin sub-forum. It's possible one of the moderator's will force that to happen.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=160.0  (Altcoin Mining)

Diff change came in at 7.43%. Since November 5th (about 3 months), the difficulty has increased by about 66%. That's a pretty brutal pace on an annual basis. At $1028, the BTC price is nice, but I don't think it's improved by 66% since November 5th, has it?

Looks to me like we are still losing ground aren't we?

You might want to visit: https://canaan.io/product/avalonminer-741/

This suggests that 7.3 TH/s an 1150 watts are your answer. I don't know if the A741 has any serious overclock potential. I kinda doubt that it will overclock well, if at all.

So for Bitcoin mining would that be a robe and slippers? 

Very little "dirty" mining for most folks......

While I am no PCIe riser expert, the fact that there is a USB cable in the picture doesn't mean that it's got USB protocol on it. I expect that the USB cable is strictly a cheap way to carry the PCIe signals on it to the other end. As a result a USB hub won't work in this application.

Bitmain is observing the Chinese New Year. Check again next week (roughly February 5th). You might be able to find a previously owned one for sale on the "For Sale" sub-forum:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=75.0

The S4 isn't particularly current technology.The S9 is probably the most efficient and will likely remain so for quite a while (i.e. > 1 year). I don't recall the details of the S4, but I expect the S7 is more efficient than the S4 as well.

If you actually mean GPU, then you should visit the Altcoin sub-forum and read over there. For direct mining of Bitcoins, both CPU and GPU mining are no longer cost effective.

Just to put things in perspective, at the current difficulty and BTC price, you'll need about 6 TH/sec (Terahash, aka 6000 GH) to produce $4 per day. That also assumes your electricity is free and you are willing to run whatever hardware you have flat out, 24/7.

None of the above even remotely fits a laptop. It cannot even hit 1/10000 of the hashrate, and it's not built for 24/7 operation flat out. Laptops do short bursts of computation just fine, but not several minutes, much less hours all day. Attempting this will produce literally nothing in terms of BTC, and will shorten the life of you laptop significantly. A desktop might not have it's life shortened a lot, but it's still woefully underpowered.

Read lots of the threads here to see what you actually need if you want to mine BTC.

Doesn't look like they over-priced it does it? I wouldn't expect a lower price on the next batch of the T9 if it sells this well.