https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/calculator is the best calculator I've found to date, with a bit of manipulation it can be made to work with "cloud mining" type services in general (though it doesn't work well directly with Hashnest PACMIC contracts, where the "profit" isn't directly related to the hash rate).

 Home mining is only dead in places with non-cheap electricity, or for folks that insist on actually making money at it.

 The only big change is that the classification of "non-cheap" has gotten somewhat narrower in the last year.

 The only 100% monopolies are that way. Even Standard Oil at the "height" of it's monopoly only controlled a bit less than 60% of all oil refinery capasity in the world, though I think Mickey$loth did a bit better at the height of Windows market share.


 Not even close to comparable - there are MANY MANY sources of beer, it is NOT a requirement for modern civilisation to function, and it is EASY to transport to multiple purchace locations.

 Cable is closer, but it's not all that hard or expensive to string cable from multiple companies on the same pole.

 Running multiple power lines AND THE LOSSES INVOLVED for each power company would be a major expense and a non-trivial (though not super difficult) engineering challenge, or it gets VERY expensive if buried cables are used.


 BTW - governments have created bread monopolies in the past, such efforts tended to not end up well (reference the causes of the French Revolution, and the origin of Marie Antoinette's "let them eat cake" stupidity).

Looks more like a "solar chimney" type setup. Bit expen$ive to build those for something as small as a bitcoin farm though, unless you're a really really BIG bitcoin farm.

 S7+ by Christmas perhaps, S8 I'd guess longer or "skipped" again.

 I suspect the scrypt market isn't big enough for Bitmain to be interested - I'm actually a bit supprised Innosilicon has expressed continued interest in scrypt.

Nope, not that big of an actual jump - looking at "short term peak" rates is VERY misleading as they routinely bounce around a lot.

 Got to average over at least a full day to get a meaningfull look at the network hash rate.

 With that said, the ballpark 1.6% average diff increase of the first half of this year is obviously history, looking like 4-5% or so on average is going to be the norm for a while - so much for RoI on anything without VERY cheap electric if you haven't had it for a few moons or longer already.

I doubt they'd move to 5V power supply.
12V is far more common and available.

 I doubt they're going to be building anything else based on the BM1384, they apparently made the S5+ units at least in part to clear out their remaining supply of those chips.

Depends on HOW cheap your electric is, but at a common EER (SEER or CEER) of appx. 13 you would have to spend about 26% of your miner power load on cooling if you use mechanical air conditioning (some central units are well over 20 CEER, but those tend to be expen$ive in their own right).
This cost might be "make or break" on attaining RoI on mining hardware, much less profit.
Do factor in that if you can keep your miners cool enough, you can probably clock them higher and make back a LITTLE of the "lost profits" to A/C power cost, but not likely more than 20-25% of your AC power cost.

 If evaporative cooling aka "swamp cooling" is viable in your area, THAT is a lot less power hungry and you might be able to pay for it with the increase in mining hashrate vs. no cooling.


 Personally, I hate the "tons" rating on AC units. Dunno why we're still stuck with a rating from back when actual ICE was used in cooling stuff instead of using BTU across the board.

 "how much you had to pay for your mining gear" - which would include VAT and import taxes where applicable.

 you dropped a decimal point, both of those MH figures would be per 10 watts, not per watt.
 Titan IS still quite a bit more efficient (when it hasn't died yet).

 Alcheminer figures were around 250 MH for 2500ish watts, I don't remember the exact numbers but they're very close to that same 1 MH per 10 watts figure the A2 manages.


 Personally, I'm waiting for the A4, since tapeout on it was "leak" announced a while back.

 KnC Titans were and remain quite a bit more efficient than the A2 - but A2s are a ton better on reliability.
 The Alcheminer (and rebrands like MAT) was a tossup on power efficiency, pretty much even between one of those and an A2 based unit.

 Too bad you don't make A2 boards in a form factor that can replace the boards on the Gridseed "blade" things.

 Sounds like time to talk to your state's Utility Regulatory Board (or whatever the equivilent group in your state is).
 I'm pretty sure they are REQUIRED to post their rates somewhere by Federal law or FTC regulation.

 MegaBigPower, or set up by MBP, the setup actually looks VERY familier and that "100TH" and "Pico" stuff ON the boards is a pretty strong indicator.

 Therefore early Bitfury chip based gear.

 That's not a lot of power, actually - I've got more available in my mobile home.

 Right now, you'd be looking at Antminer S7 units to maximise your hashrate - but you might want to wait 'till late December, Lketc should have it's new 5TH unit out around then to give Bitmain some BADLY needed competition and there's a chance that Innosilicon will release a new unit on it's own too - and perhaps that way overpriced Sfards unit will drop in price to be competative by then.

More likely around 130 GH, given previous U series form factor - but they've changed things up before.

 They'd have to price them VERY low to sell any though.

Transformer, or bite the bullet and put the 220 circuits in to run it SAFELY, IMO.

 Way too high a probability of frying power supplies trying to run them that far outside their rated input voltage - and a significant chance of frying the equipment they are attached too when they die.

Looks like the SF100 second batch will be mid-August - at the SAME insanely high 8000 yuan price.

 I suspect the next batch doing "pre-sale mining, errr testing" might explain the recent Litecoin hash increases and perhaps a small amount of the recent Bitcoin hashrate bump.

Looks more like one of the Silverfish Scrypt miners to me, but the pics aren't super clear and I never bothered buying any of the Zeus stuff (it was overpriced and BAD efficiency) or the Silverfish (ditto) - IIRC neither was much more efficient than the Gridseed GC3355 based junk I wanted to replace....

Pools have very little to do with mining profitably.

 It's ALL about the electric rate, the efficiency of your mining gear, how much power you have to use to keep the gear COOL and how much you had to pay for your mining setup, and sometimes incidentals like "pay for help if you have a Mega Farm"....

 I'm not sure my S5s are going to RoI - too many factors I didn't forcee ahead of time, I'm seriously regretting buying the 2 "used" ones from Bitmain in particular.

 The 14.2 is only my "summer" rate, that ends in a few days and I drop to around 6.7 which gives me a prayer - especially if Bitcoin keeps climbing slowly.

 I've given up on even thinking about S7s though, unless the price on them drops a LOT very soon or difficulty suddenly goes flat soon. I've still got over a month before I COULD have had the cash to even think about ordering ONE though, since they made them BIG miners instead of HOME miners. 8-(