No, what you really need is a PSU that doesn't use 20AWG wires for its PCIe 6-pins. 16AWG would be quite comfortable drawing that load, and you'll have no trouble finding it on a not-garbage PSU. I'm not trying to be rude, but I assume the one you're using was either fairly old, fairly cheap or both?

It probably won't be hard to track down a half-decent PSU with at least 25A on the 12V rail. Look for 80+ Gold rating. I'd recommend a server PSU as an affordable option but the power output is overkill and if you're running R-Boxes you probably want something quiet - which you're  not likely to find from server hardware.

Fart around in the Computer Hardware sales forum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=75.0) and see if anything pops up. I bet some of this guy's stuff (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=958566.0) would meet your needs.

And don't forget one of the biggest spambots in history was a hacked smart fridge.

It's going downhill for exactly the reasons you mentioned - monopolies are taking big ol' bites out of it. Someone with a whole lot of money looked at the numbers, noticed that there was opportunity to turn a whole lot of money into a whole lot more money with very little actual work being done. Since hardware manufacturers would rather sell $1M at 80% retail to a single guy than $1M at retail to a couple thousand regular jokers who are going to need individual shipping and tech support, they get a leg up on all us regular jokers. And since utility providers would rather sell 1MW at $0.04 to a single guy in a single building than 1MW at $0.15 to a couple thousand regular jokers who are going to need monthly bills, service upgrades and repair hotlines, they get another leg up. And suddenly bitcoin slides from "hey here's an idea for the masses to get away from relying on rich guys who wield monetary systems in order to get richer at our expense" to "hey here's a monetary system for rich guys to wield and get richer at others' expense".

If you can compete with the big guys, go for it. Find yourself a return estimate calculator, punch in your details and see if a positive number spits out. If it doesn't, even with your low rate of power, now you know why. If you want to mine anyway, estimating a loss, in order to help decentralize the network or in the hopes that something will change your margins, go for it. You're better equipped to come out ahead than most people. If you want to support bitcoin without mining, buy bitcoins. Buy them and pocket them, which will shift the suppy/demand curve slightly toward demand and raise the price a bit, or buy them and then spend them on goods and services which will increase the perceived value slightly by encouraging utility.

Looks like it ought to, if you can grab some decent x1 riser cables. Is it going to be a graphics rig, or a computation rig? X1 socket bandwidth won't be enough for high-performance graphics but if you have a long algorithm computation it's fine.

I think about them every time I come home to my toasty apartment heated by an A1 Dragon instead of a DeLonghi Dragon. The kicker for oil-cooled miners as space heaters is probably access to internet, and reduced returns. Sure almost everyone has wifi these days, but what's the overhead cost of adding a wifi-enabled computer and enough interfacing to actually configure it? Additionally, how much money is there in a gimmick heater that'll return bitcoins during the season but when you plug it in the next year the returns are about 10% what they were the winter before?

I do know some folks using immersion miners to heat industrial space by patching into existing in-floor heat piping, but I'm not sure how "off the shelf" feasible it is for average folks.

243C would be something to see, for sure. The lead-free solder in those things melts around 215-220C so your ASIcs would be sliding all over the place. More likely they'd have just burst into flames, but it's more fun to think about them skating across the PCB.

So it's 5AM and I can't sleep. Second night in the last three nights that I couldn't sleep for all the thoughts happening. Who would get behind a BE300 board which could take in 7-20VDC, connect to a host via USB, and was fully software-adjustable between 350GH/140W and about 140GH/35W? If they were built so four of them could mount on an S1 chassis? These are just theoretical numbers based on BE300 performance test data from FriedCat's post, and what is hopefully a low estimate for regulator efficiency with the topology I have in mind. Hopefully the chips are affordable because I like this idea. We could sell boards direct which would save a lot on not shipping heatsinks, put a driver into cgminer and anyone with a retired S1 (or S3) and a USB hub would be sitting pretty. S1 heatsinks and AM Tube heatsinks are a similar size, so building them to fit either would be pretty sexy (though I'm not sure it's possible).

Swapping out the PCIe sockets? I've done that on a bunch of things. My best recommendation is, use a high-watt iron and take your time. You want a good solid solder contact between the pins and the hole plating, or you'll have more resistive heating problems again. It's kinda hard on heavy power traces because the board will tend to heatsink.

It's probably unintentional, but I really like that you used the past-tense.

Not necessarily. Bitcoin's value is also based on utility; I can trade bitcoins directly for products and services all over the world without an intermediary currency. Shitcoins can really only be traded based on a perceived value with no foundation in utility, and it doesn't take much market upset to collapse a useless coin. For reference, see the plethora of failed pump-and-dump altcoins; compare the number of people that made a killing on them (typically a subset of which is the coin creator) to the number of people that lost money on them before the coin disappeared entirely.

The temporary profitability of altcoins is based on the less-than-temporary unprofitability of them. A large group of people briefly ascribe value to them, then the few who hold the most sell their stashes, collapse the value and walk away. Mining an altcoin because it's briefly profitable is basically paying the electric company to let you rob some of their fellow customers. Regardless if those customers are idiots, it's still approximately theft.

That's how my business operates. Orders are First Come First Served, and when we had a big order come in alongside a bunch of smaller orders and had to run out a new batch to meet them all, we divided up the units as they came off manufacturing. From every 10 boards we set aside 6 for the big order and shipped out 4, so we met the big order within the estimated lead time but didn't screw over the guys that only wanted a few.

Yeah but altcoins have basically no viability. Even innovative ones just get exploited and/or forgotten.

Yeah probably. The miners are going to be shut off at the end of the month, so if you wanted any I could ship 'em out Monday. Pretty sure I have the factory packaging from the S3s still, and they fit nicely in a box with the PSU. I shipped a bunch of S1/PSU combos last summer without any problems.

That's kinda what I figured. I've never seen them release chips before, and I certainly won't have enough money to give them suitable encouragement to do so, but I'd sure like to play with some of them.

I see it working, but I also see a hashrate dip in the last half hour or so that could have been downtime.

I think he's actually already moved on to a different PSU or some such.

One problem with having only a few producers is monopolies and cartels. What if they decide collectively to block transactions from certain services they deem to be competition? If a few entities cover 90% of block generation and you issue a transaction from a service they don't like, it could take a couple hours to get first confirmation. Or they could start screwing with the protocol, or any number of other devious things.

The benefits to making consumer-oriented gear instead of catering to farms are numerous but not directly obvious to people focused on immediate profit. For one, you're distributing the network. It's not as dominated by a few entities, so it's more fault-tolerant and less cartel-able. For another, you're not aiding the rich in their quest to get richer by exploiting a new market whose intent in creation was sort of the exact opposite.