Unless you're buying straight from Ledger there is always the risk of getting a tampered Ledger wallet, even if it's from the Ledger amazon store. If you set up the Ledger as it should be set up you should be fine, always initialize a new seed once receiving your device and if you see a card like this somewhere in the Ledger box immediately get the product refunded. This is an obvious sign of a tampered box at  the minimum.

IIRC a few posts back someone compared their rewards on Kano versus rewards they received on Slush, and the rewards from Kano were far greater than Slush's. Mathematically Kano will always pay more than Slush with lower fees as luck comes and goes. The only way the ramp will go down is if more people join. That's just how PPLNS works on this pool to reduce variance.

The A3 was made to mine the Blake2b algorithm and only the Blake2b algo. There's no way you can actually make the miner hash another algo unless you somehow changed the chips on it. It's an ASIC, not an FPGA. If it were the latter it might be possible, but the A3 is an ASIC. The best blissz could do is probably something similar to the D3 firmware or some improvements on it.

I typically clean thermal paste off with isopropyl alcohol or I use some liquid glasses-cleaner that contains isopropyl alcohol to remove thermal paste. You don't need anything expensive to get it off. I then use a paper towel to wipe it all off.

Activity is still factored in and needed for rankups but Merit has also become one of the criteria for rankups on the forum. I don’t see any indications merit will completely replace activity or something of the sort anytime soon.

If you've got the patience you should not be buying any price-gouged GPUs at all. Nvidia's webstore is regularly restocked with GPUs, though you have to be quick and it's limited to two cards per customer, and EVGA also occasionally sells GPUs at reasonable prices, near their MSRP.

Reddit's /r/buildapcsales is also another place you can go to for finding deals. It's even possible to set up alerts for posts about a certain GPU on the subreddit. Haven't seen many people mentioning this for finding GPUs before, but I've snagged many nice deals for GPUs from there.

This thread was actually moved from Bitcoin Mining to Altcoin Mining so I assume OP is talking about alt mining.

Depends what miner you're talking about. Bitmain's currently got no competitor besides the to-be-released Obelisk on the Sia chain, the D3 has competitors like Pinidea and Baikal which are lesser threats now, and Innosilicon with their A5. With LTC, Innosilicon is really their only rival.

My response is a bit late, but the breakout boards should specify which server PSUs work in either the title or in the description of the product. Not all server PSUs work with all breakout boards.

I don't know what difficulty estimating sites you guys are using, but I've found BTC.com's estimator is decent enough after Bitcoinwisdom's estimator broke:

https://btc.com/stats/diff

Seems like some people weren't aware that Bitcoinwisdom was broken for quite some time and hasn't been fixed.

There's a link on the first post that's called "Voltage Adjustment Photo", near the bottom.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1764803.msg17678108#msg17678108

Philipma1957's post under the photo should contain sufficient info for you to use the pot correctly.

The breakout boards themselves are still in stock on Parallelminer- you can opt to buy those and 6pin cables to attach onto the boards and buy the PSU separately, perhaps from eBay. It's only the complete kits OOS atm.

It'll be interesting to see subforum activity as merits cannot be given out by anyone lower than Full Member- I suspect it'll probably decrease in spammier places like Bitcoin Discussion where the same thing is said over the course of hundreds of pages.

TBH if you're looking to store bitcoin or any crypto in cold storage it's still better to opt for a hardware wallet if at all possible- I know the prices on hardware wallets has been jacked up recently, but they're still a good investment to make. You should be able to buy a Ledger/Trezor with your money if you choose to sell the laptop and still have some money left over.

Yes, they offer hosting and sell miners, as well as miner repair too. I've got an S7 hosted with them hashing away, and it even broke down once but they fixed it in three hours for free. Philipma has had a decent time with them as well.

It doesn't seem like anyone's got their hands on one yet. I'd advise to keep looking at this thread for info about that.

ROI used to be a long process before Bitcoin started going up in price, people have been spoiled by fast returns and profits recently with not only alts but also BTC. So as long as you keep mining on you'll be fine.

Nobody ever said mining was not risky. You shouldn't be considering mining anything at all without being okay with extreme volatility in profits. With profitability being extremely high in the last few months I feel like many people have forgotten about this.

Minergate is legit and it's just a pool offering mining software a GUI on it. They don't even offer cloud mining or hosting of any sort, and I've mined with them and received payments from them in the past.

I've used Hashflare a bit in the past and I've had a mostly positive experience then, with payouts processing quickly and everything working correctly. Note that this was roughly a year ago, things could have changed.

Mining Bitcoin with laptops is pointless as you're going to make maybe a Satoshi or two per year. If you pay a lot for electricity even mining alts may not be incredibly profitable. Add in the fact that most laptops just aren't made to run at 100% speed for long periods of time and there's just no reason to mine anything at all with a laptop. Sell it and if you want to mine, make a GPU rig or buy an ASIC for BTC.

A better option is to just buy a miner and get it hosted or buy miners that are ready to be hosted, e.g Bitmainwarranty/Myrig who sell miners that are ready to be hosted, electrical fees payable through crypto or credit/debit card. You actually control the miners and you have the ability to switch pool, etc. Plus Bitmainwarranty offers free repairs on hosted miners, and the PSU is included on hosted miners.

The only thing I could find relating to a GPU Quark miner was SPH-SGminer linked here, and it seems to be old and unsupported now. Should be worth a shot still.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=475795.0