No, it's not too late to buy an S7.

No, it's not too late to "turn a profit", depending on your circumstances. You need to NOT pay a significant tariff/tax/whatever, you'll also need to have low electricity costs, and have a place (with Internet access) that is OK to have 1300W loud heater running 24/7.

NOTE: If you invest $1250, and get back $1251 after running costs, you have "turned a profit".  Only you can decide if it's worth the effort and risk. It's also worth noting that for most folks, you'll have to have BTC increase in value to realize a profit during the time that you have the miner. If the value of BTC declines during the time you own the miner, you'll almost certainly lose money.

Yes, it's too late to "get rich quick" by doing nothing and taking no risk.

The theory is that "Transaction fees" will cover the cost of the infrastructure that processes the block chain. Those fees are embedded in each block and are presently dwarfed by the current block reward of 25BTC.

We'll have to see if that actually pans out, though we won't know for at least a decade or more.

Personally, I think that the "Too Big To Fail" banks don't care about Bitcoin hardly at all. Until it amounts to $100B or more, it's probably not interesting. Today, BTC might be $11 Billion?

That's two bad trades in a year for JP Morgan.  

Yes, they'll have folks look at it, but I think they have zero interest in trying to "control" it, whatever that might mean. Bitcoin shares a common trait with all fiat currencies. A loss of confidence by those holding it, and there will be a run for the exits to a safer currency. It could easily fall from $500 to less than $100 in a day if folks don't think it's "safe". BTC has no alternative use as do some metals like Gold/Silver/Copper and such.

Sorry for the delay, but I think I have correctly rejoined the pool. The Raspberry Pi requires essentially zero attention, and as long as my sticks were flashing, all was well.

I now have a massive best share of  1469!!!! 

If you are absolutely convinced that USD will crash, then your path is clear. Just take the $25K you would invest in Bitmain hardware and buy BTC as soon as you can, and skip the "Bitmain middle man".

You could consider a "cell service provider" for Internet access though that would hinder your profit considerably I expect. Free electricity, lost to costly Internet.

My thinking is that difficulty will continue to increase until the halving at least. We may not see +15% every time, but I think the days of difficulty decrease are over for a few months. I say this because I think the major ASIC vendors want to sell everything they can. They are worried about the impact that the halving will have on hardware prices, and they want to "sell while the selling is good". I think with their current Batch 8/9 design, Bitmain has whittled the cost down, and they'll continue to push hardware, adjusting the price down as they need to keep folks buying. When the demand for an $1100 4.6 TH miner dwindles, they'll find out who will pay $1000 for that same miner.  Rinse and repeat until it doesn't work anymore. This hardware they sell WILL get deployed and turned on. In some cases it will replace existing less efficient gear, but the net effect will be an ongoing increase in network hash rate. As long as the price of BTC doesn't stall (for too long), they can keep the game going. Difficulty is irrelevant to them, it's all about the price of the hardware, and how much they can push out the door in the next few months.

Come May/June/July, we'll see what happens, but until then, it's "sell baby sell" for any and all of the ASIC vendors.

It's not clear what the benefits are for any of their customers, certainly NOT the home/hobby miner. This feels distinctly different from a year ago, when there wasn't a mad rush to sell everything possible.  I think it is driven by the price of BTC. As BTC price rises, that pushes network hash rate, which then spurs difficulty increases.

I assume it's OK with whoever is paying the electric bill to add about $3/day in order to run the S7 (electricity isn't really "free" hardly anywhere).

You might want to find out if the room is really going work for your miner. As an experiment consider the following:

1) Buy a thermometer and a 1300W heater.
2) Put your thermometer in the room and check the temp after 24 hours. Leave it in
   place.
3) Plug in your heater and turn it on full blast. See if it trips something somewhere.
4) Return after 24 hours and re-check the temperature. Note the rise and temperature.
5) Repeat step #4 until the temperature stops rising.

Decide if it's OK to have it that hot there for the other items in the room, as well as your S7. If it's winter there now, consider what it might be like in the summer.

Will anyone else be annoyed by the sound of S7 when it's in there (i.e. other tenants, etc.).

Plenty of outlets doesn't indicate that the room is really meanet for a 24/7 1300W load heater to live there. There may be several outlets for convenience, not actual power draw.

OK, I aam in.....

+7.4% = alh

Personally I don't think the wild swings are for nefarious purposes, but just digesting all the new hash being turned by Bitmain (sales & internal), BitFury (internal), and Avalon (?).

Do you still have these for sale? I sent a PM offer suggestion/inquiry and heard nothing. Did I miss something?

Is there a specific way I would need to purchase of two of these?

Good to see you are "back".

It would seem quite possible for an entity to hide it's mining power, just as it could hide it's total stash of Bitcoins among multiple wallets.

I personally have little fear of  the "51% attack scenario". There is zero economic incentive for somebody to try and crash or double spend Bitcoin. While it might seem that it would be swell to do so, if there is a small whiff among folks that the Blockchain has been compromised in some way, it's value will plummet. I don't mean like cut in half, I mean like nearly evaporate. If you held a lot of Bitcoins and initiated the attack, you would decimate your holdings. Even if you didn't hold much in in Bitcoins, your investment in SHA-256 hardware would likewise be decimated. Who would would want to own  500PH of specialized ASIC mining hardware and infrastructure, with nothing to use it for? Your hardware would literally sell for pennies on the dollar, since there is essentially no other use for such specialized hardware.

It seems to me that Bitcoins has at least one of the major risks of any currency, lack of confidence. If/when a significant number of folks lose confidence in the "money" they promptly try and trade it in for some other kind of "money" that they think is safer. And by another kind of "money" I don't mean Litecoin. the flight will NOT be to another crypto currency, but rather an established fiat (e.g. US Dollars).

And it was doing so well when I looked in at +11.22%..... 

Guess I'll have dial back my SP20 and see if I can coast into 11.25%.

I have to take exception to the comment about hosting and centralization. There is a huge difference between "cloud mining" and "hosting". A hosting facility does exactly that. It supplies electricity, space, cooling, and internet access, period. You own the miner, and direct in what way it's used. The hosting facility doesn't care how you use your miner. If you want to mine some obscure alt-coin, they don't care as long as you pay your monthly bill. You do have trust them not abscond with your hardware and not damage it. There are lots of the places.

Cloud mining on the other hand is just a financial transaction where you fund the ownership and use of the miners. You generally have zero control over the mining operation. You don't own anything, and are completely at the mercy of the operators to not just take your money and run, and pretend to cloud mine and not actually run a Ponzi scheme.

It also looks like you've set the fan speed to 20. That seems too low for your power settings, and is reflected in the temperatures on the otjher ASICs. I don't expect that will revive the loop that's down, but you might want to turn it off and let it cool for at least 30 minutes to see if that helps. I personally get nervous when I see chip temps in excess of 100C on my SP20.

+11.2 = alh

Looks to me like like Ck's pool is still having DDOS problems. I have switched back to the "de." version for now.

Merry Christmas folks!

Just noticed that my 3 sticks were no longer blinking. I logged in, and the Pi was still up from 3 weeks ago, but couldn't contact CK's pool. So now I am happily blinking again on de.ckpool.org again.

While it ain't speedy, or powerful, that Raspberry Pi just chugs along rock steady.

In general, it would make more sense to try and figure out a way to work out a 120V solution instead of killing your efficiency even more by putting in a step-up (i.e. 120V --> 240V) transformer. For example two 120V power supplies instead of a transformer & 240V PSU.

I'd swear that Phil had a Batch #1 S7, certainly not a Batch #8. He can correct me if I am wrong. Preliminary photos suggest that there is a different voltage regulator on the Batch #8 S7, that would likely nullify any fiddling with the 12V actual voltage (i.e. a small bump to say 12.5V).

As others have said, I would suggest that you "start small". If you can, or can't, make money with a single S7, having 9 more won't make anything better. Be prepared to sell your miner in the next six months if you want to try and recoup some of your costs. Just using the Bitcoin wisdom calculator, you will almost certainly turn from an operating profit to an operating loss sometime in June, if all goes really well. That time window could easily shrink to 3 months.

The "halving" (i.e. when the BTC reward within a block shrinks from 25 BTC to 12.5) is expected to happen sometime in late June or early July of 2016. Most calculators don't take that into account.

$.14 power is poor starting point for any serious (i.e. not a hobby) mining operation. I consider 10 S7'sa "serious" mining operation. While it may look "easy" it's hardly a risk free way to acquire Bitcoin. It's easy to spend more on mining than the BTC received.