Seconded. Norm could be annoying sometimes but he was always pretty well-thought-out and participated well in discussions. Not a spammer or general idiot, and he was indeed calling out legitimate criticism over what is very likely a scam attempt. I'd suspect the plaigarism in question mostly comes down to an issue of formatting rather than some deliberate malfeasance.

I don't go too much farther than the Hardware and Mining Speculation forums, but his absence especially in the latter is noticeable.

Frodocooper does his work quickly and efficiently, but I've often thought he was too heavy-handed at times. We've butted heads before.

Try not to destroy these. I recommend leaving the voltage stock and using a fan.

Darn, I was thinking of picking one of those up.

There might exist a prototype with software voltage setting and the like, for which this flag is relevant, but it has no effect on production sticks.

Maybe it's God telling you to stop buying stickminers.

Might want to clarify this sentence a bit then.

*ahem* So, how 'bout them S17 eh? Honestly I've been so busy around the shop the last few months I haven't even looked at an S15 yet, or frankly much of anything else this generation. Really need to take some time and catch up on what's coming out.

240V isn't that uncommon. My shop's 120V runs a bit high (122 or so, unloaded) but I've got three-phase so my line-line is nominally 208V but typically meters out at around 212V. That'd get me about 245V if I had the same transformers at the pole in a split single phase.

Good to know about the 240V PSU issues, good to know that issue shouldn't pop up here because I might be hosting some S15s soon.

Coupons are only good on exactly one day? That seems pretty stupid. They're gonna be inundated with orders.

It'd be completely understandable if no reseller sold any of these metal hubs until the plastic ones were gone. That's what I did, after all, so almost zero of these have been distributed so far.

Also you might notice this one looks a bit rough. We're using these in place of Plugables for bench testing of sticks and stuff, so this one's seen some full-time duty the last several days. The brand-spanking-new ones will be super shiny instead of super smudged.

Hey guys, got a new hub version. It's based off the other one but with a few improvements.

http://gekkoscience.com/img_stash/base_hub/DSCN2408.JPG

http://gekkoscience.com/img_stash/base_hub/DSCN2409.JPG

The first thing you'll notice, if the pictures load correctly, is it's got a shiny metal housing instead of plastic. That's a definite improvement.

The second thing you'll notice is it's got 8 ports instead of 7. Per the diagram on the underside, one of those 8 ports is power-only. It's still 7 data ports, just like the black one, but the 8th power port means you can run a Pi and a USB fan off it without taking one of the high-current ports. It's still got the 12V fan header too, don't worry about that.

The dummy port and port 1 are also powered by a secondary regulator, which means using them won't take any power from the high-current ports.

And don't tell anyone I told you this, but that secondary regulator is actually rated for 3A instead of 2, so if you don't use Port D and are careful about it, you could still run 7 stickminers at full speed.

Right now it's still priced same as the black one.

The biggest issue with Trump tariffs is I'm not sure Trump has figured out that China's not paying the tax, Americans are. He's proven over the years to be pretty good at skirting paying taxes so he probably has a poor understanding of how they work.

If the miner has a built-in PSU with hard-wired connections, it could mean there's no string regulator per board. Depending how rails are handled in the PSU, that could mean less ability to fine-tune to each board's maximum efficiency but it would still increase the efficiency of the overall machine by 5-10%.

When figuring the efficiency of a miner based off the chips' operating point, you gotta add about 10% to the string regulator, about 60W for fans and controller, and then another about 10% in the power supply. That'll get you close at least. If there's no string regulator it cuts your conversion losses about in half. Sucks if something breaks, and that PSU will be useless for anything else ever, but hey it gets you a few extra watts in the meantime.

Bitmain could have done a more efficient string regulator from the start, considering they've been pushing at least 45A per board for a while now, if they'd switched to a dual-phase design (could have knocked that 10% down to around 6%) but that would have cost just a little more and taken more board space, and since they're all about density at the expense of everything else (especially reliability), and since increasing the parts cost shaves another 1-2% off the profit margin, I guess they figured it was a bad idea. But by replacing a generic PSU hookup with a model-specific PSU they get to boost efficiency, save on parts cost, maintain density and sell you two things at once.

Yeah... "now" it is...

Since the S5, S7 and S9 were all impressively reliable.

Yeah no I mean they actually built miners for a while, but the "scammer" tag happened when he decided to take in a lot of business and then disappear without delivering. I know some people who got hosed to the tune of hundreds of miners.

The cost to produce a miner *is* very low. The bulk of up-front is engineering. Once that's out of the way, the actual per-unit material cost is a fraction of what you're being charged. This is why early batches of miners always cost more, because they've got the engineering and prototyping investment to clear. You don't go straight to bottom-dollar, especially if your product is a couple years ahead of the competition.

That is, if you can prove it exists. If you can prove it exists, the right people will sell their children for it. If you're trying to con dupes you avoid those people and go straight to retail customers you can nickel-and-dime and who are unlikely to take you to court when you fail to deliver.

Something could be said of priorities. Perhaps they'd rather serve individuals or small customers instead of large industrial parties to help re-balance the system back in favor of the people.

Then again, I'm well aware that most other people don't get into the crypto business because they *don't* want to make an overwhelming amount of money, so the likelihood of this is much less than it's a scam.

If you bought it directly from me, sure. Otherwise you need to discuss it with the reseller.

Hey wasn't Technobit based out of Bulgaria? I wonder if any of those veteran scammers snuck out of the woodwork for this one.

Oh yeah, I had forgotten about the gekko-serial option. That's ridiculously handy.

"Missing nonces" condition is more likely as you reach the threshold speed for any given core voltage. If you see this repeating, and more specifically your effective hashrate starts to go down, you need to turn up the voltage a bit or reduce your frequency.

419's fan kit for those hubs is definitely some pretty slick work. He's done a lot to make my gear more accessible.

Sorry to interject, but every time I see the subject line of this thread pop up I can't help but chuckle and think "Research shows peanut butter is sticky" or "Research shows fire can be quite hot".

I don't know the numbers offhand, but it's exactly the same as the 2Pacs and they're posted in that support thread at least once. Might even be a diagram.