I am not going to quote above thread, getting too big. Now it is either S9 or nothing. Come July all of my S7s will not be almost worthless, once they are retired I would still be able to run my S9, 1 S9 will replace 3 S7s but still consume as much as 1 S7 and continue to contribute to the network. I pay 300x or 400x times more than it costs to make for an iPhone, I don't see it any differently.
Really what this comes down to is that there's multiple ways to justify mining. I originally approached this as a hobby. After playing with Scrypt for fun (not caring about losing money) I used the BTC-in-BTC-out discipline and that worked well for me. I profited in BTC terms with every miner. Then the S7 came out and I threw that discipline out the window. It was fun to have the latest hardware, but the fact that I could never get the BTC out that I put in bothered me. I ended up selling my S7s early to recoup fiat ROI. On top of all this was the S7 B1 delivery delays, and corresponding compensation delays, because Bitmain planned badly. Instead of getting my units on time, they missed the shipping deadline and my S7s stayed in their data center hashing for them instead of me while the whole country was getting plastered for a week long festival. All of this added up to me feeling like an idiot for stepping away from my discipline and yielding all control to Bitmain. As much as I love the hobby and as much as I miss actively mining (it's addicting), this time with the S9s I'm not buying until it makes sense in BTC investment terms. If that never happens, I'll stick with old miners. Depending on the timing, maybe when you're ready to sell your S7s I'll buy them back from you  Again, this is my preference, not an argument for how everyone should make the decision to buy or not. |
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So why do we continue to do business with them?
The same reason the west has always done business with China in increasing volume - they're always the cheapest, always. The race to the bottom in manufacturing of everything has continued in absolutely every other market where the number of people concerned with quality over price has only ever been a small minority. In the bitcoin mining world where bottom dollar is everything, that minority is even smaller to the point of being a virtually irrelevant part of the market. Be aware that we will almost certainly be obliged to work around this stupid random alteration in their stratum protocol in ckpool if they don't fix their software immediately and make it properly stratum compliant, otherwise we'll be shutting out the bulk of the next generation of miners sold. We're hoping not to need to do this but we're also realistic. This manufacturer has the lion's share of the only two left to choose from, being the cheapest, and we can't change that. As I've said elsewhere, it's not malice that is making them force people to mine on antpool. They just changed it to work best with antpool, and have no care factor for checking it works elsewhere. Thanks for chiming in ck. I appreciate that you're approaching this pragmatically, although it would be irritating if they force this change on you. Would their protocol changes also affect proxy software? As a hobbyist miner I have to admit that I'm ignorant of how mining proxies work. But if custom protocol changes might affect larger miners' ability to proxy, that would be a good thing to know about up front. Since Yoshi has said that the S9 works on Kano's pool, maybe they're dealing with this before shipping and these concerns are moot. It would be nice if they conditionalized their non-standard protocol additions such that it's limited to their own pool. |
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Shipping is right after the Dragon Boat festival. I hope that doesn't mean shipping delays for those that bought B1.
Probably not. You have to hope they learned their lesson from the S7 B1 delays.
The lesson being "let's promise compensation and forget it until months later"?  Ah sweet monopoly... Thanks fellow S7 B1 buyer! This made me laugh out loud. Yeah, but since Bitmain is definitely a for-profit company they hate to pay anything out, even if it's meager compensation. They want money flowing into their pockets, not out. At the very least I would hope the would be more careful with their schedule and promises. Anyway you're right. As the current monopoly they can do anything they want. And there are enough people on this forum who have short memories and a talent for rationalization where it comes to buying overpriced hardware that Bitmain's behavior doesn't really matter. |
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Shipping is right after the Dragon Boat festival. I hope that doesn't mean shipping delays for those that bought B1.
Probably not. You have to hope they learned their lesson from the S7 B1 delays.
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They are no longer for sale on the website. Are they sold out?
Yes. Consider yourself lucky. Hopefully we won't have to wait too many batches before the price makes sense. |
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I really hope they release the next batch soon, because I have already started selling my S7's and was too slow for the first batch
It looks like I'll cover 75% of the cost by selling 3 S7's -- So it is a no-brainer -- if I can get stock
Sure you probably make more by just buying and Holding BTC ,, but where is the fun in that
you are better off if batch 2 comes after ½ ing. Just keep selling your s-7's and then hold ½ in cash and ½ in btc. When the time comes get an s-9 or 2. there is 400ph in gear older then the s-7 it all dies at the ½ ing . So there will be a 10 to 15% drop in hashrate. By bitmaintech holding back on the s-9 doing moderate self mining. They will make their share of coin. You will be able to order the batch 2 and get a crack at some money. Around July 4th. I looked at what happened in November 28th 2012 for the last halving. Yes, it looked like a 30 day period the hash rate went down about 10%. But in another 30 days it was close to the original level. So if history is any guide (and what else do we have?) then we'll lose about 138 PH/s for a couple of months between July 10th and September 10th. After that it will be business as usual. I'm not sure where you came up with your 400 PH/s number, but maybe I'm missing something. I'm a bit jet lagged so I'm not sure my math is right. |
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Looks like Phil's wish was granted. Bitmain has currently "Greyed Out" the S9 Buy button. No more sales for the moment it would appear. S7's are still available for those that are interested.
Look for batch 2 in a few days... I see no reason why the S9 would be any different than any other Bitmain release. As soon as any new miner is released, the value clock on the hardware starts ticking down. They need to move as many units as they can as fast as they can. The upcoming halving and potential competition from BW (if they ever release anything to the public) could accelerate driving down the S9 price. It's interesting how people theorize about the big player's strategies, including price/difficulty manipulation, intentional hardware delays, etc. But I think the situation is simpler than that. Hardware manufacturers need to mine early and ship quickly. Any other strategy is risky. You can't be sure that any manipulation attempt will work, and you can't know when a competitor might strike (although I acknowledge that Bitmain has no real competition now, except for maybe BW). Of course some of this is wishful thinking on my part. I can't bring myself to pay the price Bitmain wants for the S9. But as it comes down, I'll be tempted, as well as others who are currently sitting on the fence. Projected difficulty is still negative, but it's had to think it will last for for 7 more days.
We may get lucky this period, but when the S9s really start pumping out, it will be as bad or worse than the increases we saw just after the S7. The power that Bitmain has over the mining market is so irritating. I really hope that some competition materializes... |
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I'll let Batch #1 pass by and wait for Batch #2 with a price correction and get me two of these machines at halving point for 50% of the Price now You are dreaming too many. Bitmain do not make with the S9 same mistake that with the S7 He had just sold off S7 because there was already S9 and waited on the available shelves . At present, better miners (as S9 blades) from Bitmain are not coming in 6 months. She has time for them to be sold at the prize of what he wants to ask (Selling one miner, or 5 per account.) The limited supply of miners per account had a good sales strategy. Efficient to me, I bought ten Bitmain is now the king of the home miner market. Batch 2 might not be that much less than batch 1, but all mining hardware trends down in price for successive batches. This time though the halving will provide downward price pressure. Also if BW ever ships anything comparable, the there would be some competition for Bitmain at last. Anyway, like it or not b1 buyers paid a premium to be the first. The price will go down, that's a certainty. The question is how fast and how far it will go. |
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The kittens that my wife was fostering are gone, so I've asked one of our other cats for his guess. Here it is:
+3.1 = edonkey
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Nice machine. Bad price. No surprises.
The Bitcoinwisdom mining calculator does not automatically take the halving into account does it? I don't think it does, which makes it a little tricky to really compute an ROI. You basically have to come up with a value up till July 10th, then compute again from that date with half the hash rate.
When I do that, it doesn't look pretty. At 5% difficulty and free power, one of these rolls in with a 430 day ROI. Of course that's probably optimistic because when these hit the streets the difficulty is going to go through the roof.
So I tried modeling a 10% difficulty up until the halving, and 3% after (assuming that things settle down for a while). That turns the ROI into 304 days. This is still a very risky investment.
Basically this is looking like the S7 all over again. I never made back the BTC I put into those B1 units. I only got ROI in fiat terms because BTC doubled in price and I sold off my miners early. I would have been much better off just buying BTC.
I'm going to sit this one out and see what the landscape looks like after the price drops.
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They priced it almost as the last batch probably because BTC went up slightly. They are trying to get every single dollar they can. Yup. Bitmain is consistent where it comes to profit... I have a very bad feeling about the S9. Based on recent releases, it will certainly be overpriced. And as the dominant force in mining hardware, everyone and his mother is going to buy S9s so the difficulty is going to skyrocket. It will be the S7 all over again, only worse because of the halving. With the overpriced S7 the only saving grace was that BTC doubled in price. Assuming a similarly overpriced S9 that also creams the difficulty like crazy, then this time BTC will have to quadruple due to the halving just to keep up. Yes, Bitcoin has been going up a lot recently and that's good. But if your mining profit is absolutely dependent on the price going up dramatically, then why buy overpriced hardware and fund Bitmain's further dominance? It's a bummer, but unless things go differently this time I'm probably out of the Bitcoin mining game. I'll just keep what I've been doing, namely buying BTC over time (using Bitwage because I'm lazy) and hanging on to old Scrypt ASICs just to keep my hand in. Not that my behavior matters. For every one of me there are plenty of others who are desperate to own magic money making machines, against all odds or sense. |
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It's now a little after 8 AM Friday in China. No changes on the Bitmain site yet.
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I killed the link , but if it really 9.6 th at 1350 watt and it is 4.8 btc it is not worth it.
There's no way for us to know if this is a leak of real information, or if it's just straight up fiction. Even if the specs are accurate, the price could be way off. All the mining hardware on OB that I've looked at is overpriced. Either way it would be crazy to buy an unannounced piece of hardware from some anonymous person on OB. |
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That spike is insane. In a couple of days we've gone from a solid negative difficulty to something like 3% positive.
Looks like it will be another roll over...
Up to now I've stayed away from eth mining. Now I'm starting to think about it, if it's not already too late.
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The price is still falling. Maybe that will provide some downward pressure.
Although if Bitmain is already replacing S7s with S9s, and if they are twice as fast, and if this transition explains the recent increase in hash (yes, it's a lot of "ifs"), then the price can fall a lot more before it would slow Bitmain down.
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Judging by a huge burst in network speed, they are deploying S9 right now for "testing" and will announce pretty soon and release in 1-4 weeks, in my opinion.
If that's the case, then that lends credence to the idea that the S9 has at least double the hash rate for the same power utilization. The assumption I'm making is that they are replacing S7s with S9s, and that they don't have enough spare data center headroom to power up S9s separately. At least not enough to be noticeable. |
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I purchased my coins from coinbase and then purchased my batch 1.
I live in USA so legally I need to use cash basis. My batch 1 made a cash profit.
I would have been better off holding the coins as they 2x the price I paid for them.
But I also purchase a lot of bitmain contracts with 230 btc that when they matured they paid in btc that rose to 450-500.
I have no complaints about my batch 1 in terms of profit. It was an under hasher that was compensated for on May of this year after complaining since Oct 15 or so.
I spent my hard-earned BTC on Batch 1 and it still hurts. Anyway, lesson learned, luckily I didn't go all in with the S7, and I'm not repeating this mistake with the S9. I made the same mistake. My only out was to sell off my S7s and the earned BTC to realize a fiat profit. But that was only possible because BTC nearly doubled in value. It would have been a much better investment to just to buy BTC, speculating on price, instead of buying S7s, speculating on difficulty. Like you, I won't make this mistake again. I'm already assuming that the S9 will be insanely priced. In which case I'll hang on to my crappy Scrypt ASICs just to keep my hand in. They're paid for and with the relatively flat Scrypt difficulty will continue to profit because they don't care about the BTC halving. |
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My wife is fostering kittens, so I asked them for their guess instead of our cats. Here's what the kittens said:
-1.4% = edonkey
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