252k for a US flat in a major city? You haven't been to New York lately, have you? :-)

To be honest I have seen a number of small houses at the Solar Decathalons that are not too much bigger but have more than enough space for two. Check them out sometime; google it.

C

If you had, things would have been different.

That's what bugs me about statements like this. It's not "If I got my miner 3 months earlier", it's "If I had gotten my miner and NO ONE ELSE HAD GOTTEN THEIRS 3 months earlier".... That doesn't make sense.

The pizza thing is the same. Yes it was a 10,000 bitcoin pizza, but if it had never been bought then Bitcoin would not have made CNN that first time and it would have gone the way of flooze or whatnot. It's because the person bought the stupid pizza that we are where we are.

Seriously, you can't change the past without affecting the present so don't bother.

C

Spent about a bitcoin buying a new cell phone and some household stuff at Overstock. Yes I should HODL FOREVAH but I'm reminded of the episode of SpongeBob where Mr. Krabbs can talk to money.

The money says "SPEND US!"

But my heart sez HODL!

Guess I need to make more bitcoin.

Overprice is a complicated word. If the asic companies priced it for less then more people would mine, difficulty would go up, and more people would complain about "not making ROI"

And people would buy the miners for less, then sell them on Ebay for "more" and pocket the difference. Who is adding more value here, the company who makes it or the middleman who marks it up for profit?

The root problem is Bitcoin mining is a perfect marketplace where the cost of entry is low and profits are not possible to make. That is a flat fact, and it is the lack of this kind of understanding that drives 99% of the Bitcoin angst here. :-)

Wait, we should build a miner powered by BITCOIN ANGST! :-)

Pretty much. Mining went from 30% increases to 15%. Which stretched out the operational time of my singles for a month or two. Not sure where things will go from here, if the price of bitcoin does not rise, then we will hit a technical limit as to how much money people want to donate to the blockchain (ie: none IMO).

Which will stabilize mining at a level where people can grind out a small profit. Which should be replaced by the damn transaction fees.

*nod* Ok, still a fair bit of power. I like the dual lines of FETs around the chip, excellent design.

My bid was overbid, so I'll stop hijacking this. :-)

Runs at 100c+ indicated? That's a hot little power supply ground plane. When you get to 120-150c you start shoot-through on your FET pairs.

Interesting.

C

Put the water block in a window and blow out. I did this with my jallies.

I'll try one for .25 inc shipping. Let me know.

That sounds pretty silly.

C

Well, you can replace one of the two voltage sensing resistors to drop the chip voltage to .85-.9 volts. Then you can clock down to speed 1 and reduce the power to 2-3w/gh. The other thing I'm working on is removing the 3 top side FETs per power controller and replacing them with two 052ne2LSI's to reduce power loss in the supply stage.

With that you don't really have to run the fans on top anymore, my goal is to cool it with a single fan in the case end. That should lead to a quiet purring single hashing at 30ish gh instead of 50+.

C

Bad thinking: They weren't worth anything back then. It's the 10,000 bitcoin for a pizza argument, that's what they were worth then, this is what they are worth now.

*Exactly*! Simply mining is not going to make profits, what you need to do is have an angle that adds value.

What I did was take my little single, use my skills on SMD rework, and added 3 chips. Bingo, had a 20gh miner in November. That helped. Then I did the same thing for other people, charging them a bit but never more than what it was worth plus something. People were happy. Then others who had chips marked them way up. Bye bye business, now they are sitting on a lot of worthless chips :-)

Note: It never pays to be too greedy.

Other people brought hosted locations with extra power to the table. Some brought that cool water cooling or immersion techniques to cool the 110nm blades. Those ideas added value.

So the question is what value are you bringing to the community? Figure that out and there is your profit.

I really should work on other miners or something. Or fix more pocket watches for Bitcoin.

The problem is quite simple: Bitcoin is a perfect market for mining. Therefore it is *impossible* to make a profit in the traditional sense of the word. Yes you can make money for awhile, but true profits are not possible due to the nature of the protocol and the low cost of entry.

It is a queen's race. Provide services and use bitcoin for what it should be: transactions.

C

Honest thoughts: I think this is all my fault.

See, the math said two weeks ago that running my turbo jalapenos was no longer profitable at their 5w/gh power consumption. This is due partially to the lower efficiency of running a 5gh unit at 30+gh, along with the water blocks to cool it.

Last Friday I shut down my singles because with the 25% increase without a price boost my Singles were no longer profitable at 4w/gh. I have a feeling everyone else with 65nm class equipment did the same thing.

It is completely illogical to mine at a loss with electricity factored in. Completely and utterly illogical. So I think a number of farms shut down; you can't mine at a bitcoin price below that of the electricity used to mine.

This is why the Monarch chips are interesting; they can mine easily when others have to shut down. Unless you live next to a river or a volcano, this is not something you can get around easily :-)

C

(note: I will be hacking my Singles this weekend to run a lot slower and more efficient. This will help for awhile)

I keep wondering when I will see these in Toys R Us.

C

Chobham.

It is going to *squeak* under there...

C

No, buy and HODL.

C

Ok. Is there a hidden document to use the hidden RPC option, or do I hop into the source code?

Mmmm.... source code. It's written in Fortran/77, right?

C

Question: This may sound super stupid, but I have been checking the docs and I don't see it.

Can BFGMiner or CGMiner issue explicit commands to the miner while running? I'd like to do a ZCX on a BFL Jalapeno while it is running (trying to lower the 1.0 volt voltage while hashing to see what effect it has) and I can't figure it out. Or do I have to use screen in some way I'm not (I can run Windows or PiUnix)

Thanks
C

Yep, and it was dead the last time before I cleaned it and got it running. Perhaps the rain plus corrosion allowed things to go bad again over time.

But it is working , and it could be just sensitive components.

C