Actually, it's more accurate to say that BitMain has challenged Innosilicon in the scrypt market - and appears to probably be winning.

 I'm not sure if the TOTAL hashrate for all Bitmain Scrypt miners has passed the TOTAL hashrate for all Innosilicon Scrypt miners yet - but it's getting close if they haven't done so.


 Miners living for years is NOT uncommon - the long-time issue was always more about "miner is no longer profitable after a year or two, shut it down" in SHA256 due the greater competition.

 I've got A2 units that were bought USED from Zoomhash (who had mined on them likely for a year or two BEFORE they sold them) and I've had for almost 2 years now, have had ZERO issues with them other than a couple of the fans dying and needing to be replaced and one PS that died early on (the original PS was a bit underrated for the 110 Mhs units).
 The actual MINERS however have been rock solid reliable despite probably being 3-4 years old now.

 I will not be selling off any of my 1070 or 1080 rigs - but I'm not mining ETH on them (and the 1080 is a BAD CHOICE for ETH mining anyway, it's a good ZEC card though).

 1070 pricing and availability HAS improved over the last week or two, but I suspect it's more that the "mining specific" AMD cards have relieved some of the pressure on those cards as they're quite a bit less expensive (when you can get them). ETH profitability drop probably HAS been a factor though.

 1080 pricing and availability never took much of a direct hit from miners, if at all, since it's NOT a good ETH card and ETH has been driving the majority of the "GPU shortage" issue.
 I'd bet that the majority of 1080 shortage was an INDIRECT effect from gamers seeing it at the same or near the same price at the 1070 and the RX 470/480/570/580 cards and deciding to "move up".

whattomine seems to have the biggest selection of mining calculators, though they're not quite as flexable as the bitcoinwisdom calcs.

They do "multiple coins" on a few of the more popular algos, but their choices are odd on which they do that on - the rest you have to go to the various individual coin pages (and on the multi-algo coins like Myriad one page per coin PER ALGO) to get to all of the calculators.

We're a long ways from any serious "panic sell" of cards, though the "correction/dip" week did cause folks to stop building NEW rigs in significant quantities for a short while - ETH network hashrate spent almost a week FLAT, but it's starting to climb slowly again.

 I don't anticipate the REAL miner shakeout for a few more months.

ETH tends to want MORE power draw than most coins, not less.

 I've never seen a card that had 2 connectors on it that would start up at all without BOTH connected - though I concede my sample size is fairly small and such a card might exist.

 DO NOT connect only one connector though - there is a significant chance that the power circuitry is specifically designed to draw power SEPERATELY from each connector, and you'll have NO power to some of the "power phases" at all if you only run 1 connector and the card actually starts up which will tend to overload the other phases and cause failures.

 True to a major degree on Bitcoin, but older-gen Scrypt miners are still VERY profitable - even before the major Litecoin runup that started 3-4 months ago the Innosilicon A2 units were break-even at about 9 cents/kwh electric cost, the Alcheminer would be about the same and the KNC Titan a little better off when those are still working.

 I'm pretty sure the GRIDSEED based ASIC miners are profitable NOW (though their income is very low due to the low hashrate), as price is still a lot higher compared to the difficulty rise the last 4 months and they would be problematical to achieve ROI on unless you have free electric or got them VERY VERY cheap.


 I don't think the S5 is break-even any more even at 3 cents/kwh power cost. The S7 is, but it's getting marginal even with VERY cheap electric.


 There are a few Scrypt-based USB miners - several options using the old Gridseed GC3355, and the Futurebit Moonlander using the Alcheminer chip - they're profitable, but probably not enough so to pay off their purchase price unless you have FREE electric.


  NEW altcoins rarely show up using algos that have existing ASIC miners to mine with (the only recent ones I am aware of are all MULTI-algo and at least one of the algos is non-ASIC, like Myriad or DGB) - the normal progression for a NEW altcoin is "wallet has a miner to mine with a CPU", "stand-alone CPU miner(s)", "stand-along GPU miner(s)", and in a FEW cases "ASIC-based miner(s)" - though some altcoins skip straight to the "stand-alone GPU miner" step if they can.

You have the correct methodology for running a miner with 2 Power Supplies, but why limit your options for PS buying to Best Buy and office supply stores?

Just because something is LISTED on eBay at a specific price does not mean it actually SELLS at that price.

 D3 is 12V DC powered, like ALL recent Bitmain devices.
 
 They specify "at the wall" wattages based on using a specific model of THEIR power supply.

 From that point, figure the voltage you can feed the PS then divide that into the watts rating for an approximate value for the amps.

 Might be a limitation of the KNC software to not allow getwork, but the Innosilicon A2 units CAN be used to solo mine with via getwork so it's not an inherent "ASIC" limitation.

 You COULD also run a "stratum" proxy to work around the lack of wallet support for stratum, I would think.

 I wouldn't try it on Litecoin though - way too long to even have a PRAYER at mining a block solo with the current network hashrate.
 Try something smaller like DGB or GAME might work, but those have also had their network hashrate grow a LOT over the last 3 months or so.

Install the current 1.2.9 wallet on your own machine, then you don't have to worry about using web wallets.

Took me about 10 hours to sync it up from scratch couple days back - NOT using the new "opencl" GPU support as I didn't manage to get that "experimental" stuff to work.

 After-market blower fan designs should be OK.
 All of my R9 290 cards (which soak MORE power than any current-gen card except the Vega and possibly the Titan) are blower-style, and have been running reliable for well over a year now mining ETH or doing DNet work (which loads a card hard enough that it used to be a common "load test" used by a lot of test review sites, right up there with Prime95).

 FE cards though are known to be marginal on cooling, and definitely worse then the aftermarket cards, especially on the 1080 ti.

 If you run cards in a case, blower cards are DEFINITELY better in multi-card setups with a VERY few exceptions for some cards with fans but a heatsink where the fins run parallel to the bottom of the card (Sapphire mining RX 470 cards for example, but they need more open of a mounting bracket to actually be BETTER than a blower-style card), for riser-rigs with the ability to spread the cards out a lot blower cards offer no advantage.

 Gridseed merged with WiiBox to become SFARDS - their SF100 was a serious failure, wasn't competative on the SHA256 side by the time they released it, and WAY too high priced on the Scrypt side.
 It also had some serious reliability issues, per some of the very few folks that ever managed to get of one.
 I believe they built one batch, managed to sell that single batch off, then gave up entirely on cryptocoin as nothing has been heard out of SFARDS for a long time now.


 The Titan was notorious for going bad due to DIES on their chip dying, not just the horrible board-level design choices they made. Arguably the lowest reliability design anyone ever produced, though it was the long-time king of efficiency for Scrypt when it DID work.



 I would be EXTREMELY cautious about that "nodecrypto" site - NOBODY makes a 900 Mh Scrypt miner at this time, and the prices are very suspicious on their L3+ listings (and how the heck are they supposedly having REFURBISHED L3+ units).
 I smell a very strong wiff of "scam" out of that site.

http://127.0.0.1:8125/rewardassignment.html

 Also known as the "localhost" option for accessing YOUR OWN wallet.

 You do have to have the wallet server up and running at the time of course.

 "Move to commercial space" is often dictated by the limit of noise that it tolerable for home mining, or the limit of heat management, or by the limit of AVAILABLE electric to a particular residence - rates are NOT always lower, and sometimes are HIGHER on "small business" rates vs "residential" rates from a particular power company.

 CureCoin can argue that (for the SAME reasons), GridCoin somewhat (some of the BOINC projects it supports are also health-related science), otherwise very true.

 Central Washington tends to have hot summer days but cool nights as it's a semi-arid near-desert climate, winters are cool but not super-cold normally (last winter apparently was the "worst on record for a few decades" per long-time locals, but by the Iowa standards *I* was used to it was a WARM winter and average on snowfall).

 Pop density is fairly low except for the SeaTac area and Spokane - largest city in the 3 counties area is a debate between Wenatchee and Moses Lake - Wenatchee wins if you include it's suburbs (most of which are on the other side of the Columbia in the next county over) but even WITH the suburbs I think it's under 40k total pop.

 We're not talking MONTANA level "sparse population", but it's certainly not OVERCROWDED like most of the East Coast or the LA and San Diego areas.

 Innosilicon A4 is also a Litecoin miner - but like the L3+ it's currently out of stock.
 Lower cost per miner and higher reliability but less efficient and lower performance per miner.

 Many options for GPU mining, and most of them are more profitable than ETH on most GPUs most of the time over the last few months.

 HDD mining - is not working well right now, BURST has been suffering some major assaults on it's infrastructure and the other HDD-related coins were far less profitiable - and even before the recent BURST issues the profitability per $ of investment was noticeably lower than GPU or most ASIC mining. Up side is the low electric usage per $ of income when it WAS working.

 It's alive but not working well at the moment due to various attacks and some pools not having recovered.