Yes, go right ahead. Also, Scrappy, I've been meaning to formally apologize for telling you to calm down about and be patient about the Technobit minion boards you ordered. Turns out I was quite wrong, and it only looked like they were actually working hard to get things taken care of. I never saw a single board of the 50-odd I was supposed to get for hosting for multiple customers. So yeah, you go right ahead and sell off those PSUs since I know that's what they were for.

When have conditions been bad enough for Bitmain to sell at a loss? They're usually the ones working hard to undercut everyone else and drive their prices down. Bitmain has always been an instigator in race-to-the-bottom price wars.

Additionallly, if they have to sell at a loss, why would they sell at all? For one, it's stupid. For two, shelf it in one of their massive data centers and self-mine on it.

Yeah, PPS is great because it puts all expense of losing streaks on the pool operators and it's really easy to exploit.

No, it was a test design string miner with BM1382 chips.

In the bitcoin world, just almost every time the term "ROI" is used it's supposed to be "positive ROI" or "breakeven". I'm one of those guys that gets steadily more and more annoyed when incorrectness is perpetuated. An ROI is just that - a return on an investment. If you plug in your miner and mine for one hour and get one payout from your pool, you've gotten some return on your investment. So yeah, if you look at absolute returns then breakeven happens at ROI=100%, but if you're talking positive/negative relative returns then breakeven happens at ROI=0.


My hosting facility has a fixed power cost, so the BTC billing changes based on the exchange rate. Some others do this, and some charge a flat BTC per month for certain machines, and some charge a flat USD per month. There's a lot of ways to do it.

If you're looking strictly to profit from an exchange and not utilization, you buy and hold. If you're looking to grow the bitcoin economy as an independent economy instead of growing it as a subset of your local currency, you buy and hold.

I wouldn't mind playing with an S3++ sometime. Or an S5 someday when they're priced fairly.

Also, anyone needing PSUs I can probably hook 'em up for reasonable.

Actually, your return on investment will be 1, since BTC in = BTC out.

Also, if you really believe in bitcoin you'll buy and then spend. The exchange rate may grow if supply exceeds demand because people are hoarding coins, but the economy as a whole will not because overall utility decreases. A healthy economy will have plenty of purchases of goods and services in bitcoin, and as that process becomes more mainstream and more vendors accept bitcoin in exchange for their various wares, everyone benefits. This doesn't really happen if all we do is hoard.

Speaking of BFL, the price of an S5 once you factor in shipping and PSU isn't too far off the $/TH for a new Monarch. I find that hilarious.

"The spam attack took place between 23 December 2013 and 6 January this year, said Proofpoint in a statement. In total, it said, about 750,000 messages were sent as part of the junk mail campaign. The emails were routed through the compromised gadgets.

About 25% of the messages seen by Proofpoint researchers did not pass through laptops, desktops or smartphones, it said.

Instead, the malware managed to get itself installed on other smart devices such as kitchen appliances, the home media systems on which people store copied DVDs and web-connected televisions."

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25780908



Sorry if I'm the only curmudgeon not happy about a digitally immersed world, but I don't want spambots able to rout Giant P3n15 emails through the wireless sensors attached to my regular-sized one. And I certainly don't want the already-rapidly-expanding bitcoin blockchain filled with them either. Maybe if they want to start their own Spamcoin for IOT devices and leave the rest of us alone that'd be alright.

There's one thing you all appear to be overlooking. Solo mining doesn't have a daily payout. Solo mining, you either find a block or you don't, so your payments come in 25BTC chunks scattered randomly across time. It's not unheard of for 800% variance, which at 25 days per block means he could be waiting 200 days for a block, paying his bills out of pocket until then. He could get lucky and find one on the first day, but that kind of luck is stupid to bet on. In a long-term average he'd find a block every 25 days (plus diffchanges) but until that block is found he foots the entire bill without ANY return. I wouldn't advise anyone to solo mine without about four times that hashrate. Even at 400% variance you get a payout within a month, which can help with that month's bills.

Yeah I'm pretty excited about the prospect of cluttering up the blockchain with masses of IoT traffic. I really hope my internet-connected washing machine doesn't spend all my coins on frivolous purchases.</sarcasm eyeroll='true'>

I second that.

I am definitely interested in the news that BE300 will be happening. That's the best chip going right now and I really want to play with some. Glad things are pulling together over there.

Would you consider selling to a bulk buyer not in China but in continental East Asia?

Additionally,

A less crappy pricing model, at least for the upperbound, is "how much does this cost to make? Let's add a bit of margin so we can keep the lights on and pay someone to design new stuff" instead of "how much does this cost to make? How much profit can we possibly wrangle from our customer base before they refuse to buy any more?" I don't have the nards to look my customers in the eyes while adding an extra 30% profit margin onto my products just because they have nowhere else to buy from. I think that's called "abuse".

I probably will at some point. I'll have to talk with Novak tomorrow about size/power targets, firmware code, and a few other things. We've had two big jobs fall on us in the last week or so that are going to keep us busy so hopefully we'll be able to budget enough time on this to get something going soon. I'm afraid this is going to be another one of those nights where I only sleep about four hours because I can't stop rolling the numbers around in my head. It's productive, but annoying.
Depending on what we decide tomorrow could make things run quicker, or make them wait for another project or two to come to fruition. I'm a bit torn over which is the better option right now so conferring is good.

I'm hoping to make something which can run quiet and fairly low power, something Jalapeno-style which is more powerful than a USB stick but not S1/S3 caliber. I got ahold of some New R-Box last week for repairs and that type thing is pretty good, but I'd like if it could run off a decent brick as an option instead of requiring a 6-pin PSU; that'd make it a bit more desk-friendly. I know bricks tend to have terrible efficiency, but with a 20V input rating on the regulators you could use a decent laptop brick. I'm pushing for 95% on the regulators instead of a current typical efficiency of 85%.
I want to make the clock and core voltage dynamically adjustable from cgminer command-line flags. Run the thing as a native USB-tethered device, and put as wide a clock/voltage range as possible on it so you could crank it up to full speed/power or turn it way down to silent and super efficient mode.
If the board is modular and practical enough, several could be put in a larger case for scaling to larger setups. I'm not sure how practical it'll be but I'm hoping we can work out building something that'd mount to an S1 chassis, basically I'd just have to ship you four bare boards and you could make your own approximately-S5 out of it (requiring a small USB hub and controller of course, like a Pi with cgminer). That's the dream, anyway.

I haven't put up a lot of details but Bitmain's rep says they're also looking forward to the project and "would like to support the good thing which is good for the bitcoin community" so here's hoping it doesn't crash and burn. Gekkoscience has always fought for the small miner, and if we can make this project happen affordably it'll be a good solid victory I think.

Also, just throwing this out there - Dogie got me an email address for someone at Bitmain and it looks like they're gonna be handing off some sample BM1384 chips so we can start prototyping that. I actually was working on the prototype power circuits earlier today and hope to have it fairly ironed out by tomorrow afternoon. Pretty cool.

He probably means it's not a cost you have to worry about returning within the lifetime of the miner, as once that machine is retired the PSU is (hopefully) still fully functional for the next machine and/or maintains most of its original value for resale. The problem with Dogie's one-off replies is they're so short it's easy to overlook context and misconstrue intent, especially when you read them through cynical lenses.

When I buy gear I'd rather buy gear without built-in PSUs as I basically factor PSU as a zero cost. We have so many running around at the shop (one benefit of being a PSU hardware manufacturer/supplier) that the cost is negligible and, oftentimes with our gear, the reliability is improved.

As an update, parts are inbound to finish out the next batch of 750W boards. We've got the big stuff, now waiting on the little stuff so we'll be back in stock and selling by the end of this week. We still have some DPS2K boards available, and about a dozen DPS2K PSUs in stock.

My first prototype was running to bizarre issues and required a complete redesign. Novak and I spent some time going over a bit different (more flexible) concept, which I finally found to breadboard an initial prototype today and I'll keep working on it tomorrow. We're way behind on R&D for just about everything these days. If I can get the regulator working how I like, it'll actually be a first step in a couple other projects you'd probably be interested in.