No, actually it came from KnC.  It just happened to be relayed to blockchain.info by BTCGuild, as eleuthria explains quite well in his post.

Let me give you an example of one I know.  Bock 297777 was found on April 26th.  I know, because I'm the one who found it.  I was mining in p2pool, and it was one of my S1s that found the block.  If you look at who relayed it, you would think someone in Prague found it.  I was running on my local p2pool node, in my home... and my home is not in the Czech Republic

Nobody knows when batch 4 is rolling out except for Bitmaintech (the real ones, not the guy on eBay).  His assurance that it will be delivered in the first week of August is nothing more than wishful thinking on his part, and blind acceptance on yours.

At least you have the option of getting some protection from eBay/PayPal since you can claim nothing was ever shipped.  Just make sure you completely follow the process through eBay (i.e. all communication, payments, invoicing, etc are done directly there and not in some other fashion).

Well, since Spondoolies-Tech is currently online, I don't imagine anything happened to them personally, or any of their facilities.

@hawkfish007, gotta love the scammers... I'm wondering if posting that wallet address is such good idea... oh, and definitely report to mods.

It's not, and they don't.

Bitmaintech does not directly sell on eBay, or Amazon, or Joe's Miner Shack.  Resellers sell on those outlets, and they are constrained by Bitmain's shipping times and dates.  No reseller currently has an S3 in stock (well, perhaps some Chinese might have picked up their S3 directly from Bitmain's factory...).  If they tell you it's in stock, they're lying.

Since nobody actually answered your question, let me.  GPU mining is better than CPU mining because a GPU can far better handle parallel processing.

That's a bit different than your original query, which was how to explain mining.  As I originally stated, and then the joint detailed, mining is nothing more than processing transactions in the ledger (the blockchain).  Expanding the credit card analogy, you can state that credit card transactions are "mined" as well, just that the mining process is wholly owned and controlled by the credit card provider (Visa, MC, etc).  You have to trust that provider to accurately and truthfully manage everything for you.  Want to make a purchase?  You have to trust that the company will properly authorize and settle that transaction.  Since nobody owns Bitcoin, there is no centralized entity you have to trust.

He's getting off easy if she only gets half... usually it's more like, "what's mine is hers and what's hers is also hers."

Did you try the "track by reference" trick on the UPS site?

My S3s are to be delivered by end of day tomorrow, they shipped on the 15th.  Bitmain finally updated the website and my order shows as shipped there as well.

EDIT: My order was placed 14:01:44 on 6/30.

Is it capable of mining?  Yes.  Will it earn you anything?  No.

I'm really beginning to love these kinds of questions... they're all variants of, "Hey, I want to get rich, but I'm not willing to invest any of my own time or money and I'm not willing to learn anything about it.  Is this Bitcoin thing the answer to my prayers?"

You do realize that it's KnC finding those blocks, right?  It's not some rich yahoo in the great white north solo-mining with a few petahash... well, I guess if you consider Sweden the great white north and KnC is certainly a couple rich yahoos... lol.

The Antminer U2 sticks are pretty much plug and play.  Both cgminer and bfgminer support them out of the box.  On windows, you might have to install some drivers (I'm not sure since I don't run Windows boxes), but I remember reading something about Zadig... at any rate, if you're going the rPi route, it's exceeding simple:

1) Install your favorite mining software
2) plug the U2 into USB port
3) start mining software
4) Pray that you hit

Personally, I mine directly to the Bitcoin core running on another machine on my network (it also runs my local p2pool node).  However, a number of people use "bit solo" pool so they don't need to be running a local node.  The pool is obviously less setup; however, you have to trust that the operator is actually going to pay you out the 25BTC.  So far, they've found 1 block and indeed the miner was paid, so they've got a 100% track record.

Where's the fun in buying and holding?  In all seriousness, I've read through the thread and you had a number of unfortunate incidents throughout your mining experience, which more than likely impacted your ROI.  Anyway, best of luck with the new speculation approach

Yes, that's how p2pool works.  The sharechain counts the previous 8640 shares for payment when a block is solved.  Every share is about 30 seconds, so that's where the 3 days comes from.

There are a number of calculators out there that will help you out.  For example, if you input an expected difficulty increase of 20% with a 0% pool fee, $11000 hardware costs, $0.04/kwh, 5000 watts and a start date 60 days from now, and 12TH/s... it's a negative 9BTC return.  Now, if we change up those parameters a bit to be a 10% jump in difficulty, you're at a positive 10BTC return.  Also, if we change the parameters to have BTC priced at $2000 a coin, and leave the difficulty at 20%... you'll see a 4.66BTC return.

That's only 1 calculator.  You can drastically change the outcome depending on the parameters you use.  Take a look in the Mining Speculation forums to see some discussions regarding ROI.

First, just try to start the software without using a config file... pass the parameters in manually.  Also, just start the thing with the most basic options, don't bother with all of that stuff you've got in your config file for now.  For example:


If that works, then the problem is in your config file.

Also, in your config file... why are some of your parameters quoted and others not?  Example:

"intensity": "17",
"failover-only" : true,

Is it supposed to be that the boolean values are not quoted?

Of course, you should probably do what the error says and start it again with -T to get more details...

I almost pulled the trigger to grab them, but a bit too high on the price.  Don't suppose you'd take 1.6BTC for them both?

Yeah... if you've got an SP10 and are running it on 110V power, you can get rid of the PSU limit.  You have to SSH into the miner and just do the following:


You can see the tech blog post here on the SP-Tech site: http://www.spondoolies-tech.com/blogs/technical-blog/14433873-version-1-4-2

Hope this helps... and gets you some extra hashing, too

Pretty slick little tool.  I just used it and compared it to my actual results.  It's pretty close.

Used S1s, Rockminer Rboxes, Gridseed orbs, furies, USB miners...

The scrypt miners are really pretty much in their infancy.  Gridseed only produced the first orbs a few months ago.  Since then, a ton of options have come out, and many more are in the works.

At any rate, with a budget of 0.5BTC you're not going to get a whole lot, but there are still items to choose.

Cloud hashing outfits exist to make profits for themselves, otherwise they would go out of business very quickly.  Assuming it's a legit business with actual hardware, and not a ponzi scheme, they need to recoup their capital investment, pay for power, pay for cooling, pay for infrastructure, pay for employees, etc.  If some hardware mines 1BTC a day, do you honestly think they're going to sell you a contract for less than 1BTC?  In other words, why would they sell you a dollar for 75 cents?