I pretty openly don't care about other coins at all, so no I have no plans to make miners for not bitcoin. Got enough on my plate trying to do the things I want to do, without having to pencil in stuff I don't care about.

Also yes, the Moonlander requires a different driver (for the same USB chip) so as far as I know the two devices can't be run on the same system, at least with Windows.

While I'm pretty darn disappointed with this product as a whole, it certain served as educational. Customer feedback about fan inadequacy and improved stability with increased underside airflow, stuff like that, is being factored in to the new version's design.

The next version will have heatsinks top and bottom, and come in an enclosure with a single fan (probably 80mm or 92mm or whatever's standard and fits well) blowing sideways through both heatsinks. If you can picture a New R-Box, except in about a four-inch cube. Improved cooling, probably improved fan control, and stackable. The new one will also integrate software voltage control and cgminer will report both chip and PCB temperatures (I've already talked to VH about making fan control profiles in the driver). I'm designing the control package for that right now (just got some new parts in today to play with) for the new stickminer, and it'll be used on every new miner (of any size) going forward.

We've also done a fair bit of work tweaking the manufacturing processes and other issues which contributed to the general unreliability of the Terminus R808. The new one will be tested more extensively before shipping to prevent the warranty nightmare I'm still dealing with on the blue boards.

So, thanks for the feedback on what needs to be improved.

2Pacs have sold between $30 and $40, mostly dependent on the rise of chip prices due to the ridiculous price bubble some months back.

Shipping from US to Germany adds some.
Import tax adds ~20%
Shipping from Germany to adds some.

Bitshopper also runs his own website and any advertising, which have costs. And if the store is his job, he has to keep food on the table. And also provides his own customer service, which is value-added and therefore not free.

It's pretty standard for the price of something to double every time it changes hands. Middlemen love profit. My uncle (runs an aluminum die-casting plant) told me a story once of some aftermarket auto parts they contracted $1.35 per unit to manufacture, and the shelf price by the time it got packaged and put in a store was $40.
With bitshopper there are no extra middlemen, so you'd expect about one price doubling. And that's about what you're seeing. When he's manufacturing them for himself, the price will probably be more reasonable.

Anyways, back on topic?

Well if they're manufactured there, you won't have the added import tax of stuff coming from the US. And bitshopper's cost will be actual cost rather than my sale price plus the cost of international shipping.

US resellers don't have any VAT and they still at least double my sale price.

That fix helps stabilize imbalanced voltages that prevent the chip string from lighting up properly at low voltages.

Those are black bitshopper sticks. Are you in Europe?

The pods are not as reliable as I had hoped so I've stopped production on them. The only new ones rolling out now are replacements for warranty failures. It's mostly issues with a change or two to the manufacturing process that have since been addressed and won't be a problem anymore.

The Europe market is Bitshopper's. If he has no news, maybe it's because he sold everything already.

Good news is, I believe he intends to license the new stuff and manufacture for himself (like with the original Compac) so his supply of goods will be independent of my manufacturing schedule. It's also good because that keeps Europe money in the Europe economy instead of sending it to me in the US. I like that philosophy, which is why I do everything locally instead of outsourcing.

Also the next pod, at least from me, will come in a case and have much better cooling than the R808. Those little fans kinda sucked. There's room for improvement so improvement will be made.

Email from Bitmain overnight:

All my heatsink screws to date are various lengths of M3.

The 54-chip boards (4.86TH models) would still be live at full voltage; the 45-chip (4.73TH) models would be operating at a hardware-default lower voltage. With voltage still applied to the chips, even without work, they're still going to be pulling some power. For reference, my 2Pac at stock voltage pulls 360mA at plug-in (because the chips default to 200MHz core clock even without work) compared to about 800mA at 100MHz.

Without fans, whatever heat is building up inside (still probably less than 150W) wouldn't really have anywhere to go. With the extreme solidity of cross-section in an S7 due to the heatsinks, even convection wouldn't clear much heat. So though I haven't heard of anyone's S7s burning up like this (though I've also never heard of someone unplugging just the controller and leaving), I don't believe it's impossible. Bitmain probably specifically says not to do that, somewhere in the fine print.

With 4.73TH miners, the mainboard gets plugged in first because the boards' main regulators use the 3.3V line supplied by the controller to power on the parts used to set the output voltage. At least that's part of the reason; there's probably other things having to do with chip detection and stuff too, as well as making sure fans are running before heating up the hashboards.

Bitcoin was always supposed to wind up where transaction fees covered the cost of mining. That's one of the reasons the block reward reduces over time, and also why Bitcoins are infinitely divisible. The price of bitcoins can only either go up indefinitely or drop to zero, and if it goes up indefinitely the fees will cover the cost of mining.

If the fees don't, miners will drop out and the difficulty will decrease and the proportional cost of processing one block will decrease such that the fees cover the cost for the remaining miners.

The only potential issue with that is, for fees to remain low on a per-transaction basis (absolute, not relative low) blocks will have to take in more transactions so the total fee payout on a per-block basis is maintained while the per-transaction fees stay reasonable. Hence the block size debate which I don't know has actually been settled to everyone's satisfaction yet, and I think prompted some of last year's forking around. Because larger blocks require increased bandwidth and decreased network latency times to propagate properly and that can hurt some parts of the world with poor or massively firewalled connections to the general global backbone.

But assuming those issues are solved in the next century or so to everyone's satisfaction, yes, the transaction fees will cover the cost of mining, as long as there are still miners willing and able to mine for those fees.

And epoxied-on single heatsinks make a miner unmaintainable and unrepairable. They're great if you want super high density, but super high density increases the chances of failure - so you'll need maintenance and repair.

Avalon6 had issues in part because of unreliable pressure for adequate surface contact, and by design an increased risk of shorting through the heatsink. The chip design also still pushed a lot of heat into the PCB which may not have been handled properly.

I think the primary reason Bitmain switched to individual heatsinks, besides being able to pack stupidly unsustainable density, was to decrease the risk of shorting across voltage nodes in a string configuration while still allowing both top-side and PCB-side cooling. There are other ways to handle it, but you have to admit having a heatsink soldered to the PCB is about the best thermal contact you can get.

Of course, you don't need that good a contact if you aren't operating at 6KW per cubic foot.

I tend to prefer solutions like the S3 and New R-Box utiilized, where the PCB was sandwiched between monolithic heatsinks. This ensured even mating pressure for all chips, plus heat dissipation from both top and bottom. Both those miners used low-volt parallel VRMs rather than string topology, so additional care must be taken to avoid shorting, which will likely reduce thermal coupling into the bottom-cooling heatsink.

Individual heatsinks only have more surface area if you design them to have more surface area. Look at the S1/S3/S5 main heatsinks for reference.

Looks like a GPU rig, so probably pretty terrible for Bitcoin mining compared to any of Antminer's products.

A space heater would work better (economically, for the consumer), especially if you used a simple SBC with wi-fi for thermostat controls. The added cost would be divided out among at least an order of magnitude greater hashrate, and the heat wouldn't be an undesired side effect, and the power consumption would already be a necessity.

The cost of a core regulator for one chip is approximately equal to the cost of one chip. But with string design, the cost of a core regulator for ten chips is approximately equal to the cost of one chip. The brain isn't the only part we have to consider the added expense of.

Naw, because then y'all will get excited and I'll never unload the last batch of 2Pacs because everyone will want to wait for the new stuff. But I really want to unload the last batch of 2Pacs.

Did you ask advice from the guy you bought it from?

I'm still working toward S1 refit boards. Should have a much-improved pod available in a few months, and hopefully S1 refit boards (and possibly whole miners built around them) with a new cutting-edge chip in the first part of next year if the guys I'm working with can pull off what they're trying to do.

Maybe it'll be something you like.

I'm still operating on the opinion that a small-scale miner, somewhere between single-chip and 1.4KW 85dB industrial gear, is the optimal solution for household-distributed mining. Something whose cost/hash ratio is not painfully unreasonable, that doesn't need to be air-conditioned to stay cool, and that runs quietly and unobtrusively. The only better household miner would be built into something that is supposed to generate heat anyway, but is built such that the hashcard heat elements are easily interchangeable.

Seems like adding overly expensive tiny space heaters to other manufacturers' household devices would be a heck of a lot more of a pain than just building 50-500W quiet miners.

But hey, if they're not going to that means more business for me.

It stops making sense when the buyer refuses to buy it.

Also, why the hell would you root for a megacorp happily ripping off a billion people?

OR - or - you could make a $200 miner with TEN chips in it, and get ten times the hashrate for three times the money and it'd be a lot more likely to pay itself off in less than the entire service lifetime of your television.

Also how many of those 1 Billion TVs have internet connection? How many were cut-rate bargain models from Wal-Mart that can't afford decent components for essential innards, let alone the expense of add-on gimmicks? And how many people could be convinced to pay up the butt for add-on gimmicks with approximately zero value added, and zero fun interactive features to use as the excuse?

I won't say that nobody will do it, because someone will probably do it. But I will keep saying, like I've been saying for years, that the economics make zero sense. I may not know a lot about smart TVs and the whims of the general populace (who are, statistically, idiots) but you gotta admit I know a bit about the economics of small-scale miners. And it doesn't make sense.

The person handling sales is no longer handling sales, so I don't know details.

I do know that she sent out multiple "all call" emails over a couple months telling, as far as I know, everyone on the interest list that sales were open. So if you wanted to give us money you had about three months worth of opportunity to do so.

To be frank though, you might have dodged a bullet. I've gotten a lot of warranty requests for the pod miner so I've stopped selling them entirely until we can work out the common flaws that, somehow, absolutely didn't show up during the year or so I was working on the design but came up in roughly 20% of the mass-production boards but only after extensive testing and then shipment to who-knows-where.

So my best advice is, keep waiting just a bit. I'll have something better for you anyways.