Ahh, finally the scam comes to an abrupt end just as predicted. Hopefully anyone taken in by this learns from the experience and can avoid being fooled by such sites in the future. I guess the 10% daily profitability was just too much for them.

You can't regret it unless you actively considered buying in at the time and choose not to because it was too risky or it was a scam.

In another 7 years time you might regret not buying in right now.

When you hear people say Bitcoin to 10k next year, or to 50k in 3 years, or 100k in 7 years, what goes through your mind? Do you think, yeah right, wishful thinking those people are delusional?

Well if you do think that, then you would have thought no differently back when Bitcoin was sub $20. People back then were also saying Bitcoin is going to $100, $500, $1k, $5K, and so on, and just as many people thought they were delusional at the time as people do now when someone says Bitcoin to $100k.

So really, there is no need for regret. BTC is just as capable now of a 10 or 20x return in 5-7 years time as it was back then. It will probably take quite a few corrections along the way, but if anything Bitcoins prospect's are stronger now than they were then as it has already survived one rise and fall and proven it is resilient enough to come bouncing back.

You need to download and run a utility such as MSI's Afterburner to reduce your power usage.  https://www.msi.com/page/afterburner

Once installed, run it and adjust your Power Limit settings to around 75 to 80%. You may need to adjust the clocks a little too, if you are mining Ethereum you can increase the memory and decrease the core clock.

There are a ton of threads already on this subject as well as a lot of YouTube videos so I won't go into all of the details, but this should be enough to get you started.

I believe the problem is they increased their share difficulty before the fork to help reduce their server load. This was fine back then as blocks normally took 25-35 seconds to be found, so even with a high share difficulty even a modest rig could sent a share or two before new work from a new block was issued. Now after the fork with block times down to, or even under, 15 seconds the higher share difficulty means an increased chance that you may not find a valid share in the time in takes the network to find a new block.

Normally this poses no problem and the pool issues you new work which your client starts crunching on. But now with the lowered block times the chances of you finding a share and submitting within that short window of time when the work is valid and the pool issues new work due to a new block being found is also increased, meaning basically there is now an increased chance for submitting stale shares. This is probably more true for those with smaller rigs and lower hashrate users as they would be the ones to be more likely to not submit work, or submit late work, during the now shorter block time windows. The higher hashrate users submit stales too, but this is dwarfed by their valid submission rate, thus it looks like it is not effecting them, although it is, just to a smaller extent.

I believe Ethermine has a higher share difficulty than most other pools, thus why it is more noticeable with their pool than others. About the only thing you can do is submit a ticket to them and have them look into it. If enough users complain they might do something about it.

I have never tried your pool, but are you sure it is actual pool hoppers and not people who just setup your pool as perhaps one of their backup options in case their primary pool were to go down?

I primarily point my miners at Ethermine where they normally stay, but every once it awhile they fail-over to one of my backup pools, such as Nanopool. Since the mining software periodically rechecks the primary pool to see if it is back up, I may only mine on the backup pool for a short period of time before the hashrate moves back to the primary pool.  I would hate to think this sudden inflow of hash power to my backup pool would be considered pool hopping and be penalized for it.

Nice find, thanks for sharing. I also have been looking for something like this, but the products currently available were way to expense, especially as you said for people with a lot of rigs to control.

Just to confirm is the relay board you are using the USR-R16-T? Also, it looks like it takes a 12V DC input for power, is that also correct?

Thanks

Cool story bro, but I believe he was referring to the army of sockpuppet accounts that suddenly appear out of nowhere in order to add their testimony to how great and legitimate these programs are. Yeah, I am risking my computer and mining income on the word of a bunch of 3 activity newbies I never heard from before, and probably won't hear from again once they served their purpose.

With the decrease in average blocktime due to the fork, meaning blocks will be found faster, an increase in stale shares is to be expected. A stale share is the result of you submitted work arriving after the next block or work assignment by the pool has been generated. Basically you submitted a share for the last block and the pool is now working on the next block, thus your share is now old or stale from the point of view of working on the new block.

Your numbers do seem a bit high though, so it is possible something else is going on too, as if the block times halved your stake rates should approximately double. I believe Ethermine adjusted their share difficulty recently, so they might need to look at tweaking this back down a little if it is happening to a lot of people. I am still only at 2-3% stales on average, so it may have more impact on smaller rigs with fewer GPUs that submit shares slower.

To combat too dry of air, they do sell things call humidifiers which can be bought in sizes ranging from humidifying a single room to a whole house. Dry air will result from any heat source that doesn't provide some type of moisture, so mining rigs are no different in that regard. Also, on most furnaces you can run the fan alone without the heat being on, so you can take advantage of this feature to circulate the warm air throughout your house.

This will be the third Winter in a row I have exclusively used GPU mining to heat my house. I live in a cold climate where winters temperatures often drop below 0 °F (-17.78 °C) and even on "warm" days are normally under 32 °F (0 °C). So yes it is very doable and almost unavoidable, especially if you move a few rigs into your house.

I normally keep most of the rigs in either a shed out in the back yard or in my garage during warmer months, but in the Winter I probably have a dozen rigs scattered throughout the house and it keeps it quite cozy. In fact, I normally have to keep a few windows open even in the Winter to keep it from getting too warm inside. I would say the only time I do have to close most of the windows are the few times the outside temperatures drop down to below -30 °F (-34.44 °C).

So one 5-6 GPU rig will be able to heat most average sized rooms as effectively as a space heater, and depending on the size of your house you can easily heat the whole place with enough rigs.

Well they moved to other coins due to the fork or for other reasons, mostly it was chasing whatever was the most profitable coin to mine at the time. Now that Ethereum is the most profitable coin to mine again (at least temporarily) for many it is natural to move back resulting in the hash rate shooting back up and thus the overall profitability go down.

This slight increase in profits is also being reflected in Ethereum's exchange price, where the sudden increase in supply is being dumped almost instantly by some miners, thus suppressing profitability for everyone else even more.

Basically, enjoy the short-term increase in profits while you can because in about 2 weeks your mining profits will be back on track heading for the gutter.

It really is no different than running a few computers in your home or office, same components. The miners may run a bit warmer and heat up and dry out your air, but other than that no real bad effect should come of it. As was mentioned, there may be some new component smell the first few weeks, but again that would be no different than any other new electronics in your house. If you are really concerned open up a window for some fresh air.

There may indeed be an increase in the RF noise floor which can cause some some other radio devices in your house to not function properly (RF remotes, WIFI, TV (off air) reception) but this usually only manifests once you get 20-30 GPUs running in a close area. I do not really think they will cause any health issues unless you are sleeping or living right next to a bunch of GPUs 24/7. By that I mean you would need to be within a couple of feet at all times, since RF radiation adheres to the inverse square law meaning every doubling of distance between you and the RF emitter, the power level decreases by a factor of 4. So the RF power at 2 feet will be 1/4 that of 1 foot, and the power at 4 feet will be 1/16th that and so on. If you put an obstruction in the way, such as a wall, this increases even more so just keep them in a separate room than where you spend a lot of you time.

Mining at a loss is just plain stupidity. At no point does mining at a loss make any sense, as you are essentially paying more to mine the coin than if you were to outright buy it.

I am not saying buying and accumulating coins when the market is down is not a good thing to do, especially if you believe in a coins future, but to pay more to mine it than to outright buy it on the market is just silly.

You could set them up to email/SMS you when one goes down or the hashrate drops below a pre-determined level. That way you can quickly take action.

I don't know why you would be anxious about checking them, I would want to keep them going all the time. Does changing a burnt out light-bulb cause you anxiety too?

The difficulty at block 4369999 was 2997.274 T.

The difficulty of block 4370224 (mined just a few minutes before I typed this) is 2634.238 T.

So the difficulty is already going down noticeably and the fork only happened about 90 minutes ago. By tomorrow we should see more clearly where it will settle, and as was mentioned above the pools should have better profitability estimates by then as well.

The year or so before ETH came along were very dark days for many miners. There were numerous stories of miners jumping off of bridges with a mining rig lashed to each leg using Cat 6 cable to help weigh them down. Sad times indeed, hopefully the slow times after ETH becomes unprofitable to mine are not as depressing as back then.

Agreed. They would have no need for it anyway as they are the people who would be filling your order anyway. It is preposterous to think they would need your password to place an order on your behalf that they will ultimately fill anyway. Lol, its a scam designed to get your password and possibly send someone some Bitcoin. Perhaps your email was hacked and some scammer got your order information somehow, but I think it is highly unlikely Bitmain would need your password.

Correct, it has already gone down a little and the blocks are being produced faster but it might take some time to get a true measure of the average speed. I just noticed that uncles are now almost the same reward as a full block reward too, so that should help some too.

Pre-fork the block times were hovering around 25-30 seconds, so dropping down to 15 seconds per block is a definite improvement. Even with the block reward reduced, 3 ETH every 15 seconds is 12 ETH issued per minute, which is quite favorable to the little over 10 (5 every 25-30 sec) issued per minute before. Maybe not quite 30% increase promised, but then again we haven't seen a full days worth of blocks produced yet under the new rules to really get a feel for the true block-times.

Yeah, I am sorry man, I didn't mean it to come across as a direct insult to you, but more so as to the general environment we live in that causes this kind of thing to happen. There are too many people on this forum and Reddit, among other places that keep promoting the attitude of throw caution to the wind everything can only go up. Most of these opinions are from people who only just entered the market in the past 12 months. Most of the so called negative posters, which I suppose I could be considered one of, are not necessarily out to bang on people, but more to toss a different perspective  out there.

Basically, a lot of common sense is missing from our current environment, your case while it is indeed sad and I do feel for you, illustrates this. Unfortunately, certain companies and individuals prey on this type of environment and end up screwing a lot of people over in the end. You bought into the Antminer hype thinking it was your ticket to future profits and now may be stuck with nothing, or in the best case get a reduced share of your original investment back. Even if you did receive the Antminer in a timely manner, your profits would have been unlikely to be what you first calculated 2 months ago.

This same thing is occurring with GPU miners thinking the market will return to those 2 month ROIs anytime now, but most people don't have a clue about network difficulty and seem indifferent to the fact that there are 10's of thousands of other new miners are thinking the same thing. The mining bonanza that we just witnessed in not an everyday occurrence and will not happen again until we go through a prolonged period of next to no profits to chase a lot of this hash rate and miners out. So any real chance of great mining revenues returning will be at least another 2 to 3 years away. Sure, you might stay on the plus side of the profit/cost side of things, but there will not be any windfalls again anytime soon.

Anyway, I am again sorry for your situation and hope you can resolve things with Bitmain, but at the same time I hope you walk away from this experience more educated as this will help you avoid such circumstances in the future. I will leave you with "we can't learn unless we fail first" and "it is not that we fall down that's important, its the fact that we get back up again".