3 % diff increase per increment, or about double that per month - the last couple months have been closer to 5% per increment.

 At 3% the S5 has ZERO profitability after the halfing, and it's noticeably UNDER .01BTC/day even now on GROSS income unless you overclock it a LOT.

 The December-July or so timeframe saw an average diff increase of appx. 1.6% - MUCH flatter than the last couple months, and VERY ABNORMAL for Bitcoin in general to date.

 If you bought an S5 late last year or very early this year, it's probably hit RoI already and will make you some decent money - but the market has CHANGED since then, if you don't already own the hardware, get it VERY cheap, or have VERY CHEAP electric your probability of achieving RoI on currently available mining gear is almost zero.

 Don't forget to factor in cost of power supplies too, that can make a noticeable difference - though at least most power supplies can be "recycled" to other usages after your mining gear goes unprofitable or you sell it.

 I'm pretty sure the "used" S5s they were selling had already been replaced, or were in process of getting replaced, by S7 units, and a few of the early ones may have been replaced by S5+ units.

 I can't say for 100% certain though, since I'm not working at Bitmain's farm facility(ies).



 I do? I've NEVER said anything about anyone deliberately restraining diff increases. What the heck are you talking about?


 Untill the next oil technology breakthrough. Oil also has major economic limitations on how PROFITABLE it would be to drill it all out that fast, which is why it's never happened and is why we're not likely to "run out" of oil for a good century or more (though we might see more short-term shortfalls as we have done in the past).

 There is some similarity of oil and bitcoin though, in that they are both limited in available product TO "mine" - the biggest difference is the artificial limits on how fast Bitcoin CAN be mined, but it still makes sense for a big miner (be that a manufacturer or not) to push to get as many as it can now BEFORE OTHERS BEAT IT TO THEM, and makes ZERO sense for a miner to try to "hold back the hashrate" - there are too many folks that WON'T collude to make that a viable strategy, unlike oil production where the number of significant producers is strictly limted by the HUGE PRICE OF ENTRY and the limitation of most major oil producing nations having nationalised their oil and access to it (The US and UK are the only significant exceptions to that last, and even the UK has been semi-nationalised for a lot of the time it's oil industry has existed).

 P.S. - who do you consider the "big three" - there's more than 3 makers still around, though a few don't sell to the public any more.

 D'Beers (sp?) is a very different situation from oil. One company in one country controlling the majority of the "reserves" of Diamonds is in no way comparable to the number of producers and countries in the Oil industry - even the Saudis and their "largest proven reserves of any country in the world" are nowhere near having the kind of control D'Beers has over diamonds (witness the current "oil price war", which certainly is NOT maximising profits for anyone).



 Closest we'll see to that sort of thing would be a "full custom" chip in 14/16nm - at this point the cryptocoin ASIC state of the art is too close to the leading edge of semiconductor technology in general for more than 1 more major efficiency jump in the next few years. The big jumps in ASIC have been about playing "catch-up to the state of the art", and there's only one more such jump available at this point and for the next few years.

IMO leave auto buy off, it looked to be a bit borked and not adding as much hash rate as it should have been per my calculations over the few days I tried turning it on.

 Worst case, you have more flexability if you just retain the BTC and can add a new contract with that when it accumulates enough *IF* you don't have a better use for the BTC by then.

The S7 will never achieve ROI at .15 cents/kwh - unless bitcoin price rises a lot more than it has been doing, or diff suddently stops increasing.

 Even at a 3% average diff increase and 6.7 cent / KWH power cost, the S7 costs more than it will ever return - and recent diff increases have been a LOT more than 3%.

 I'm not sure at this point if an S7 will be profitable AT ALL past the halfing, unless your electric is in the UNDER 5 cents/KWH range.

Way too many variables to tell at THIS point.
The biggest one is "how much will diff increase by then", followed closely by "what will bitcoin price be by then".

 Trying to figure profitability after the halfing based on where those numbers are NOW is stupid.


LTC is a much smaller market, so it was easier for it to move a lot - and as it happens it DID more than double before the halfing, then dropped back down a little. It's STILL quite a bit higher than what it was 3 months before the halfing.

 I expect bitcoin will see a bump too, but not nearly as much of one.

 "Used" S5 sale.
 Hashrate fairly stable for the first part of that.
 ETC.


 If the S7 had been in production for 6+ months, there would have been a much longer and bigger hashrate bump due to Bitmain using them internally.



 It would be counterproductive for "the top builders" to manage the rate of growth, they'd be eating THEIR OWN PROFITS to do so.
 Consider "market share" and how effective it can be in the long term to dominate market share.
 Additionally, there are limits to how much gear any builder CAN build, none of them have huge financial resources.

 The REAL reasons for slower growth rate of late are
(1) the bitcoin price collapse, giving much less incentive to folks to mine and lower profits for those that DO mine and sellers of mining gear
(2) the tech race is slowing a TON as the tech used to mine Bitcoin gets close to the best AVAILABLE tech
(3) the COST of developing new tech gets a LOT higher as you get close to the "bleeding edge" on tech
(4) the death of some miner companies due to the above factors making them unprofitable

 There is ZERO "economic need" to pace growth rate, in fact there is at least one good reason to NOT pace growth (ref market share) for any single company, and there have been way too many cases in history where it's hasn't happened even where it was a GOOD IDEA to do so (look at the history of Oil Production for a well-documented example).



 Do keep in mind that there is a significant random factor in hashrates.

It's eliteist to live in an area with cheap electric?
It's elitest to have gotten machines very cheaply, or to have gotten them back when Bitmain and Spondoolies were having their price war?

 What an INTERESTING misdefinition....


 I do grant that most of the folks making good profits are larger farms, but large groups making more money than small is nothing new to any profitable activity, especially as a given "market" matures....

The only devices capable of mining SHA256 coins like Bitcoin or Scrypt coins like Litecoin at a profit, or even close to being able to do so, are ASIC - and there are some older ASIC devices that can no longer mine profitably. This has been true of Scrypt for almost 2 years now, and quite a bit longer for SHA256.

 FORGET trying to mine Bitcoin with any GPU, much less any CPU, unless you like giving your money away for no reason to your electric company.

 Laptops have ALWAYS been a bad idea for any sort of 24/7 usage in any case, they tend to be too marginal on cooling to survive long-term when used heavily.


 Forget trying to mine ANY coin profitably with Intel graphics. VERY low performance, VERY low efficiency, compared to Nvidea or AMD/ATI graphic offerings.
 Even the AMD/ATI and Nvidea graphic cards need to be current-generation or at most one-gen old to be profitable - Nvidea Maxwell or AMD 2xx/3xx offerings depending on the specific coin, though most coins seem to like the Maxwell cards the best right now.


 Forget trying to mine ANY coin profitably with ANY CPU, unless the coin is very very new and doesn't have a GPU miner available yet.

Realistically, for ANY miner to achive RoI at this point needs 2 of the 3 following factors

 (1) VERY cheap purchace price
 (2) VERY cheap or free electric
 (3) Bitcoing price to start going up at the same or very close to the same rate as Diff increases

 *AND*

 The miner must be profitable for some months at your electric cost.


 Based on current trends, I doubt that ANY miner currently available at current pricing is going to RoI unless your electric rate is 5 cents / KWH or less, or you get the miner for a very few cents on the dollar of what it originally cost when new.
 I also doubt that any current miner will be profitable past the halfing, unless Bitcoin price jumps quite a bit before that, or the diff increase rate of the last couple months flattens back out to LESS than we saw on average during the first 7 months or so of 2015.


 I suspect that the early part of 2015 is going to be seen, 3-4 years from now, as the "silver" period of Bitcoin mining (the gold period being the timeframe before Bitcoin exceeded $1000).

"solar" is KnC's name for their 16nm "next gen chip" - which is not available to the public, and they seem to have even pulled out of the cloud mining arena.

 NOT "cheap", not even available.



 IMO the only "site" for mining that is worth looking at right now is the Hashnest PACMiC v3 contract stuff, but there MIGHT be something else out there I've not seen that has a prayer of RoI or even profit.
 Traditional "cloud mining" however even when legitimate has tended to contracts that cost more than you would ever make back on them, and recent diff increase rate seems to be making it almost impossible for ANY traditional "cloud mining" contract to break even.

 Both statements are FALSE.

 Lketc announced a machine a couple MONTHS ago, ETA appears to be December, and they've always sold to the public.

 In theory, SFARDS machines could be bought by the public, but they appear to be having major issues with the SF100 at this time and dunno when they'll actually start selling the next batch - there may be a few remaining first batch SF100 in the hands of dealers at insanely high pricing. SFARDS (as Gridseed) tended to prefer selling via dealers, and generally only did bulk deals when buying from them direct.

 Innosilicon is CURRENTLY selling a Scrypt machine to the public, in conjunction with the remains of Zeus (reference the "farm boy" thread in this forum, appears intended to clean out their last stock of A2 chips), I see no reason they won't sell whatever miner(s) they come up with using their announced A3 (SHA256) and A4 (Scrypt) chips to the public when they start production of such machines, though they seem to prefer "dealer" sales.

 Avalon is CURRENTLY selling a (badly overpriced and bulk sales only) mini machine based on their Avalon 4 series stuff. No clue about their future plans though.



Hashlet never existed, except as a scam promotion for a ripoff cloud mining scheme.

 Many "cloud mining" schemes are legit - but they are often priced in such a way that the only profit made is by the cloud mining operation.



 NO stick miner will RoI - even Sidehack's neat little device costs too much to ever ROI, though it comes closer than any other stick you can currently get.
 Most stick miners are flat out "lose money" at this point - not "won't ROI" but "cost more to run than they can mine" level.

 S5 can RoI if you can get them cheap enough, or your electric is VERY cheap, but it's VERY iffy on RoI at this point under any scenario where your electric isn't free. S7 is actually a hair worse due to the MUCH higher cost, despite the much better efficiency - and it's starting to look like even the S7 will become unprofitable once halfing occurs, unless Bitcoin price kicks WAY up before that point or diff increases flatten out a LOT in the next couple months.

 Hopefully upcomming competition will kick off another "price war" by the end of the year, when there is still enough time for a miner price drop to matter to the possibility of RoI....

Based on what I saw, I'd estimate Bitmain was replaceing S5's with S7s for 2 months at most, and possibly with S5+ for a month or two before that (and then likely sold those S5+ as "new" units once they got the S7 into production).

 I don't believe for a microsecond that the S7 has been in production for 6+ months.

 Because most cloud mining "contracts" have been nothing but unprofitable ripoffs with zero percent chance at ROI much less a profit for the buyer, and the rest are mostly unprofitable at best?

 Oh yeah, LOGIC, most "promoters" hate logic....

It's possible to RoI a S7 - if you get one early enough and you have cheap enough electric. Might even be possible in the US, if the diff rate increases flatten out sometime late this year back down from the recent 5% ballpark to 2-3%ish AND if you live in one of 3 counties in Washington State (2 if the diff rate does NOT flatten out this year).

Wire the +12 and a ground line direct to the power supply, wire only the PWM, Speed Sensor, and a ground to the S5 controller plug - do NOT leave a +12V line wired to that plug.
 Don't need a fancy external controller to do this sort of thing, just have to be able to do the wiring, optimally with a spare female MOLEX 4-pin "peripheral" type connector instead of hardwiring to the PS for that +12V and ground to the PS wiring.

 Yes, you'll have to split the ground lead somehow, or splice into it.

 You might not get the full flow out of the fan though, since the S5 controller is expecting a lower RPM fan.
 IMO better to just run the fan off the PS, don't bother with PWM, and just leave the speed sensor line and a ground in place to monitor it and keep the S5 controller happy.

Do people actually BELIEVE the crap scam lies out of Alpha after this long?

 About the only truth I can see in their message is "there are currently no other scrypt-based miners being shipped from any competitors", since SFards seems to have dropped the ball badly on the SF100 and Innosilicon isn't shipping A4 based machines or selling the chips to 3'd party manufacturers - YET.

GPU mining of bitcoin or other SHA256 coins has been EXTREMELY UNPROFITABLE for years now.

 It's been very unprofitable for any Scrypt coin for almost 2 years now.

 It might be profitable with carefull tweeking and use of the "right" GPU for other altcoins, but that's a question for the altcoin parts of the forum.

MBP is easy to guess - they're one of 2 rates, depending on if their actual mining location is in Chelan county or in Douglass county. US rates are (usually, and IIRC by law) PUBLIC - and neither of those counties are likely to negotiate a "lower" rate with a small company like MBP (for perspective, Alcoa has an ALUMINUM SMELTING plant in the area, THAT is a "big" power consumer).


 I do agree that most of the "big farms" have been located in cheap power areas - though that "sale" in another thread by a certain Polish farm with at least some association with MBP indicates that at least one early farm didn't chase the cheap power well enough.

 The very sad part for home miners is that 10 cent electric is NOT "high", it's actually a bit lower than average - at least in the USA.

 Would make a TON more sense to be able to adjust the voltage BELOW 12v, but I suspect that's a PS-based limitation?