"Microsoft" mining is likely just someone using Microsoft's cloud infrastructure to run their private pool from. It is a good way to hide the actual source.

Bitcointalk 101: Never miss an opportunity to spam your sig.

Depending on how much BTC you initially spent for it, it may be worth it to request your refund now and invest it in an antminer before the difficulty explodes when/if BFL and BA start shipping. Requesting additional hashpower in the existing footprint would require a redesign and probably set them back additional months. You'd be better off asking for them to double your order and let them continue working toward the existing design.

I'm refunded except for my very first X1 order directly from BA which I will wait out because the exchange rate was better at the time and I think it will still be able to eventually return more BTC than it cost, assuming it ships before July.

Sadly, in an age where people think it is exceptional and newsworthy for someone to have turned in a lost backpack with cash in it, I guess you are right.

Yes, this type of activity is what convinced me more than anything else that PBmining must not be legitimate. I haven't invested any more, and I won't.

My little conspiracy theory is that they are ignorant about how difficulty is computed. Their hopes are to reduce the hashrate immediately before the difficulty change so that the next difficulty is lower than it otherwise would have been. If I'm right we probably have another 10 hours of dealing with this unless they go pick on a different pool.

Maybe we're talking about two different things then. Almost every time after a block is found, the stats says I need 0.00000000 to enter the payout queue blah blah and then within a few minutes after a refresh it tells me I am still in the queue. This is when I was and still am way above threshold for payout.

You can't get bounced out of the queue unless you change your payout threshold. It's just a visual issue with the stats. I'd give it 15 minutes or so after finding a block to make sure that everything is caught up and you should be able to see yourself still in the queue.

My eee came with windows starter edition. I spent about an hour looking at it so I would understand its limitations and then I installed Debian Linux. It's uptime is months, and I am sure I would have had worse luck with any version of windows.

I have an older eee netbook PC with an Atom processor running my own install of Debian on it. It currently has over 50 USB devices plugged in. This includes a new Gridseed 5 chip I just purchased, 6 Chilis, 6 Jalapenos, and a bank of USB block erupters. It also runs stratum proxy for a bank of 10 blades. I think I bought the thing 3 years ago as a refurbished model on Newegg for $150 or so.

I have a raspberry PI, but it wasn't able to handle the load, so I dug this out and it has turned out to be the perfect solution. Every time the power has gone out it has remained powered up from its battery and just waiting for the devices to re-power.

Yes Nimbus mining works. I purchased 1GHS to test the platform out, and it works pretty well. I have moved the miner around to several different major pools on a whim with no issues. I have also done SHA256 alt coin mining with it, which also works fine. The value isn't there to purchase it in quantity though, which is unfortunate. The only negative thing I've found about it is probably related to my hashing power - there are times that it goes offline for a few hours, but the long-term average has been good in spite of that. I have it hashing on Eligius right now, and here it its worker stats:

12 Hours           1,030.79 Mh/s   10368
3 Hours           1,037.16 Mh/s       2608
22.5 Minutes   1,170.78 Mh/s      368

I'd like to add my compliments here. I ordered a single miner and in spite of a Coinbase issue, the miner arrived the next day and is working great. Their customer support email system is state of the art and their communication is excellent. If this is how they operate when they are slammed with new orders, I have no doubt this company will end up being one of the few who are long-lasting in this new industry.

Ouch, Mr. Piggles, you were slammed down by a first post newbie for trying to help people out.

Blotter, you may not get it yet, but what you did by creating a new account and posting this is to make them appear less trustworthy rather than more. The first thing anyone is going to think is that your account is a sock puppet for the site owners.

If you really are new, welcome to bitcointalk where paranoia is learned and constantly confirmed to be justified.

For what it's worth, I agree with you. The novelty / geeky-fun factor is what is relevant here. Some people would run these things even if there was no hope of a profit. That there is one (hope of a profit) makes it all the more appealing.

The most often cited argument against that is that it would have been more profitable to purchase BTC with fiat now rather than a miner. For a $600 investment you return $49,400. For $600 worth of usb block erupters (30 of them?) at 10GHS you'll "never" mine 1BTC, however you'll pay roughly $100/yr in electricity at 0.15/kwh and depending on the difficulty it is debatable whether "never" is actually true. At any rate, in 6 years of mining you'll have spent $600 in electricity which is what that 1BTC would have cost you in the first place, and you wouldn't have had the hassle of babysitting them. Oh, and I also left out the cost of running a computer or PI 24/7 because some people do that anyway, yadda yadda. The argument works without factoring it in.

Now if you have cheap/free electricity and you pay for your used miners with BTC and you make some calculations about the equipment's longevity and the rate of difficulty increases, you may find that you can return a profit in BTC, which is worth it.

People were willing to "waste" electricity on computing activities such as Distributed.NET, Prime95, SETI@home, Folding@home, etc when there was no chance of seeing a positive ROI. Mining has a far better ROI (positive or not) than any of those activities, and they were in no way small endeavors.

Cex doesn't allow you to sell your own GHS to other people. Only their own GHS.

The market right now at 0.013 is definitely broken. By broken I mean engineered to take advantage of ignorance. Anyone buying at current prices while the futures contracts are available are severely mathematically challenged. It is very easy to calculate mining profit per day over the time remaining until the futures contract matures and will find that the futures contract is cheaper.

Still it is possible to make money trading, but at any moment those manipulating the market may take profits which will drop the price back to something reasonable. What dandirk said: Don't be holding the hot potato when that happens. The closer we get to the maturity date of the contracts the more obvious this will become.

<sarcasm>
Are you kidding!? Those things saved me hours of clicking on faucets for a slightly better return. They are a great investment!
</sarcasm>

Who is buying antminers above retail? Granted, it isn't much above retail, but bitmaintech.com has them for cheaper than that now. Cheaper still if you have a coupon. Selling now means a guaranteed loss/share. Hanging on to this and hoping we do better than depreciation on the sell out price is probably better, especially if there are buyers paying above retail for these things.

Two reasons I can think of:

Fast workers can be set high so they don't have to do a bunch of low level work before vardiff kicks in.

Vardiff sometimes switches difficulty back and forth constantly due to normal variance in my workers that must be right on the edge of a vardiff calculation. Setting it manually stops this.

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