Depending on your router, it's possible you might be able to control the miners access to the Internet. I have seen some routeers that had "Parental Control" options, the idea being that they could limit their kids access to the Internet based on time of day. I have never tried to do such a thing, but I know they exist.

I would think that some kind of cron job running on the miner might be able to re-jigger the cgminer config file at the right time and then force a restart of cgminer. I think something like that was present on the SP20, and the general idea could be transplanted to the Antminer S7 environment.

Don't forget Internet access wherever you place the miner. The mining hardware assumes you have an Ethernet connection to the Internet. Bandwidth is not a big concern for mining. Reliable, stable 24 hour Internet access is though. You'll need a computer with a web browser, to set it up once you get your S7.

Sorry if this was already obvious to you.

Did Yan indicate if the actual power consumption increased? Is it still "roughly 1000W" or what? It's really odd that Avalon would make this kind of change and not make a bigger deal about it.

The article quoted above is from late 2014. That's roughly two generations in BTC mining terms, To the best of my knowledge, there are NO PCIe card based miners being produced. Any that exist are long obsolete in terms of speed and power efficiency. Probably the last close approximation was the Butterfly Labs Monarch, and even that was never actually deployed in a PCIe slot. The PCIe form factor and connection provides no rational benefit at the present time. The connection speed (i.e. the PCIe link) is entirely wasted, and the power infrastructure doesn't support the actual power demands for any current ASIC implementations, except at tiny scale (i.e. a few chips).

While I am certain you could engineer such a PCIe card, it would be completely non-competitive in terms of cost, speed, and power consumption.

You have actually gotten a lot of advice as the title requests. You just have to listen to it, and not try and fit into an article that was interesting 15+ months ago.

Nothing says that they MUST be uniform across the batch. As long as the controller has the required ports to run what they ship, Bitmain has fulfilled their obligation. Maybe somebody got lucky and got an earlier batch controller, or possibly a new batch for a possible S7+.

Good that folks report what they get though. Buyers just should NOT depend on it being something more than is required.

If you are really serious about 100PH (i.e. 100,000 TH), then here is a starting point to consider:

http://bitfury.com/products#container-datacenter

I have no idea what it costs, nor when it could be delivered, nor all the other infrastructure costs. At $.08/KWh, plan on an electric bill of roughly $86,400 for a month to run a single one of them. Keep buying them until you run out of money, or electricity, or otherwise come to your senses.

Contact BitFury for further details. I am sure they will be happy to take your money.  

Is you interest in designing a 16nm based ASIC miner as a commercial (i.e. for profit) enterprise, or something else? Are you doing this to actually produce and sell miners, or do you expect to "self mine" (i.e. build and run your own miners for purposes of BTC generation)?

Just curious.

Let us know what they decide to charge for their services. I think you'll find the NRE (Non Recurring Expenses) to be quite intimidating to actually try and build your own miner, especially without any particular background in the of designing this kind of device.

While I am no expert on this by any means, it's not obvious to me that even a "51% attacker" can prevent the block chain from being progressed by the remaining 49%, albeit at a slower rate. While the Attacker might not confirm anything, isn't that similar to just turning yourself off? The other Unaffected will continue as they always do, and confirm transactions won't they?

Like I said, my understanding of this very weak, so I may well be completely wrong.

As for driving the price to $1, that seems to me about the same as destroying Bitcoin (IMHO). After that who would risk anything on BTC after that point?

Is there any particular reason to pay the small (i.e. .13 BTC) premium for a Batch8 S7 instead of a Batch9? Since we are now well past January 20th, I don't see the upside to Batch #8 anymore.

What am I missing here?

If you wanted to try and obtain a Spondoolies SP50, that would probably be the current "King of the Hill" in terms of heat production. You can obviously generate the equivalent amount of heat using numerous smaller miners. Right now the power consumption that miner remains unclear, though it's probably several kilowatts. Let us know if you ever find one one. It's generally shrouded in NDA's.

While I didn't take Thermodynamics in school decades ago, I am 99% sure that every single watt that comes out of the wall ultimately ends up as heat in one way or another. Even the spinning fans produce heat of their own, as well as moving air.

Maybe you really had something different in mind for your question.

My point really is that you have one whole Avalon 6 board that no longer hashes, correct? How do you surmise that it's "burned", as opposed to just some critical piece on the board has failed, and rendered that board non-functional?

Yes, it's worrisome that you exceeded the maximum voltage and may have caused that. Is there some symptom other than the lack of hashing and associated low temperature (since it's not hashing). Does it smell like it's burnt? While I think it's great to alert/warn folks, I wonder if maybe it isn't premature to call it "burnt". Obviously it would be wise for folks to heed your cautionary tale, and keep the voltage much closer to 12V and not 12.8.

Maybe I am just not seeing something obvious on the display that says "I am burnt".

Just to be clear on the "Avalon 6 burned board", that's determined from interpretation from values output by the GUI, right? It's the high temp and lack of hashing for a single board that are the primary symptoms right?

Have you actually removed the board and examined it? Does it have obvious damage from "burning"?

Another quasi-related question. Can you run an Avalon 6 with one of the boards missing? As in not physically present?

Obviously you'll want to work with BlockC, but it might be useful to them in any event, even if the determine that it was negligence on your part that damaged the hardware and refuse to repair it on their dime.

Just my $.02.

Could you, or somebody else, elaborate on exactly what such a collection of pools would do? I always read about the "dreaded 51% attack" possibility. What exactly would happen? Some kind of double-spend thing?

Are there any nefarious actions that would go undetected for a long period of time?

My simplistic view is that if the block-chain is being improperly manipulated it will eventually get detected. If that happens then there would be a massive loss in confidence of Bitcoin and the currency would essentially collapse as nobody would trust it's "value".

Is that the most dire outcome possible?

+4.3 = alh

@edonkey: You have your cat tasked incorrectly. He/She needs to be doing Powerball numbers, not BTC difficulty changes!  

How about the hash-board connectors? Still only 3, or are all 9 present?

Just out of curiosity, do you also track operating expenses in BTC? I am thinking of primarily electricity costs, though space rental, Internet access, and cooling could be present depending on your situation.

If you were to receive for S7's today, in about 40 days, you'll likely be losing money, just in running costs alone. The electricity price of $.22 just won't work for you. More miners won't help, only lower priced electricity.

Sorry to give you the bad news, but better to understand it going in (i.e. before Bitmain delivers a dozen S7 miners to you).

Besides the items mentioned above, I'll add that a sustained decline in the price of Bitcoin will slow difficulty growth big time. If BTC were to drop below $200 and stay there for 3 months, the impact on difficulty would be obvious.  The appetite for new hardware would wane, along with a great deal of gear becoming unprofitable to run.

While some people compute ROI using BTC only, 90% of the rest of the world has to pay an electric bill in fiat, along with rent, salaries, and so forth. When the profit margins become very small, or disappear, they will discontinue mining and then difficulty will stop increasing.

Would anybody's opinion change if you were willing to underclock it to say 500 MHz and then reduce the fan speed accordingly? I get that it's loud device as it normally ships from Bitmain. Can it be "tamed" if you are willing to sacrifice hashrate?

Anybody ever tried this experiment?