Please put me down for:

+2.51% to +2.75%

I am curious about what folks would expect from a "quantum miner"? Would it produce prodigious amounts of hashrate for minimal energy expenditure? Would the difficulty mechanism still apply? Would the entire prospect of a crypto currency still have meaning?

If the difficulty mechanism still worked, then a 100x hashrate improvement would last less than 10 days, and then would be rendered largely moot. Yes, all the non-quantum miners would be washed out of business, but would it make anything better for you or me? I expect it would drive the price of BTC way down, since at least one economic theory suggests that the price of BTC will trend towards it's cost of production.

Eventually I will understand what "quantum computing" means.

My take on crypto currencies beyond Bitcoin: Virtually all the alt-coins have a BTC value. Since there is nothing that keeps BTC stable in terms of a fiat value, I think it's safe to say alt-coins are equally unstable.

If you wait a bit, you might well get the two coins Phillip suggested for well under $440. Don't put into BTC any more than you are willing to lose.

Just a little less rosy view of BTC economics.

While I would like to think that "something has to give", I am reminded of a saying related to the stock market:

'The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.'

I think the same is true of Bitcoin and it's price. There's nothing that says miners MUST make money. After all, if it's to be a currency, why must Bitcoin have a fiat value that makes sense?

When in doubt, try and login in with completely bogus Id/Password. I did so using offensive words at every usual place, it was completely happy with what I put in. I always wonder if the scavenger of the Id/Password info recognizes what I've told them to do.

While it's not another "crash" BTC price is now slightly above $220. Looks like a slow gradual decline from the $230 it "recovered" to after the mini-crash early last week.

It's not good with difficulty increasing, even if slowly, and BTC price falling, also slowly.

This is fairly depressing.

The above is what I think is from a "frozen" bitcoinwisdom. I've been seeing that for almost a day now, so it's really a meaningless number. It's also way too early to matter, but just thought I'd mention it.

While that sounds great, I'd be stunned if Bitmain would give up any of the BM1385 parts any time soon, even for a King's ransom. Maybe sidehack can "sweet talk" them, but I don't expect they will yet.

That's pretty sweet. Looks like you put together more like what folks would have a thought an S5+ would be, before pictures of the "3 module monster" appeared. I thought there was a 16-pin -vs- 18-pin mismatch on the cables between the controller and the hashing board. What happened there?

Have you got any power measurements? I expect it would be roughly 1150W at the wall?

I would also argue that without announced specifications (hashrate, power draw, etc.), and a fairly firm date for product delivery, price is kinda meaningless. Yes,  we got some good insight as a result of the BM1385, but the rest is still highly speculative. There are a variety of possible results using that chip, all of which have their advantages and drawbacks, along with associated costs.

As I've said before, price is the easiest thing to adjust on a product like this. All the engineering stuff is difficult to change once completed, but we've seen Bitmain tinker with the prices more than once in a week back in February.

Doesn't sound you plan on "testing" them for a month like BFL did either. Following the BFL line, you probably should be offering folks a way to convert their Compac order into a Compac II with 2 BM1385 chips for a an additional $35, to be delivered in 2016!

 

In case it isn't obvious to you, there is already a "cottage industry" that does this already. I expect with some research you'll find somebody that already sells a "plug in board" to match the socket on the IBM PSU with PCIe cables galore out the back side.

You might want to be more specific in the title of this in terms of the specific PSU, since there are already a bunch of post for other power supplies (e.g. Dell,HP, IBM, and so on).

Probably the most common "big ass" power supply I am aware of is the IBM 2880W for which there is a plug in as I mentioned. It too is 220V only.

Most large mines have no choice but to liquidate a portion of their BTC income. Salaries, rent, electricity and so forth alsmot always have to be pair in their local currency. It wouldn't surprise me if a large mine has to convert 50% of their BTC to pay expenses every month.

I agree, I think the days of "stable/flat difficulty" are pretty much over. We might get a small decrease ithere is some kind of unexpected event, of if the price of BTC crashes to less than $200 and stay there for a week or more. There is just too much new hardware in the works to keep the lid on hashrate through the rest of the year.

I have no idea about 2016, as the next halving will start to loom ever larger then.

In terms of the cost for the S7, I'll just bet it's more than you'll want to pay. I think that the primary driver for the S7 price will be "Whatever the market will bear". Unless they have some serious competition in terms of gear, they will try and extract every dollar they can for each miner. I don't think they care about ROI times, except to the extent that their customers do calculations and then buy or refuse to buy. Since the price of BTC also factors into customer calculations on return, that will fold in, but the number one driver will be what folks are willing to pay, large or small.

Right now, they seem to have approximately zero credible competition. The SFARDS pricing provided them with plenty of room to the upside. Besides, it's easy to lower the price later if folks aren't buying. I expect they they think there is plenty of pent up demand for new hardware, and they are probably correct. That won't lead to a low price.

Just my rather cynical $.02 on the pricing guesses for the S7.

I think it all depends on how hard you want to push an individual stick in terms of frequency. Phil can correct me if I am wrong, but if you want to run at 250 MHz, I think you can do that all day long, probably with multiple sticks and no Y-cables. If you want to push above that, then I think the stick will draw more than a single port can supply safely and reliably. The original USB spec (prior to USB 3.0) was .5A for a single port.

You might want to review the earlier postings and see where it starts to draw more than 1A, for a single stick, as I recall. It's not the total for the hub, but rather the current for the port it's plugged into.

As with edonkey, I don't want to risk my "relationship" with Comcast to run a full node. I looked into the website of a guy that was doing it, and I could see 100GB/month easily in the future, if not tomorrow. While I don't presently have an enforced cap on total usage for the month, I don't think that will last forever.

Hence I think a "full node at home" is NOT in my future.

Here's another thought. Use the Y-cable, but connect the "Power Only" cable directly to the supply for the hub. That would take the hub traces out of the power distribution for the most part, thought it would be fairly messy cabling wise.

I'll bet this was a "Marketing decision" and not a technical one. Who knows, after they have gotten all the folks that will pay for a 3-module version, they could start marketing a 1-module version . Of course the BM1385 and S7 might render that possibility moot. Just speculation on my part.

Personally, I think this is only slightly more useful that the BitFury mining light bulb. When I chose my most recent WiFi router I worried about things like range, throughput, configuration, reliability and all that boring stuff. Burdening it with any kind of BTC mining hardware would have been a complete waste of money and power. Whatever hardware is inside would be completely useless, from an economic point of view, long before I would want to replace the router. I don't expect to replace my router every 1, or even 3 years.

Quite frankly when I think of a router, I can think of at least a half dozen other companies that I would trust to make good router, before I would ever get to the name "Bitmain".

I actually hope they do produce this and see that they are NOT a router company.