Here is how you test your boards.  Plug in one board only. Boot the machine, wait for it to start mining. If it is mining ok under "mining status" then that board is good. Repeat this process to verify each board. Where you see a bunch of "0" (zeros) those are the chips with a status. If you see "X" that means the chip has hardware errors. This can be due to a number of reasons and often a reboot fixes it. If you repeatedly boot up with "X" in the status then your board has a serious problem. If you boot up and the board doesn't mine at all then it could be a number of things but in any case you will have to get technical to fix it or replace it in any of these scenarios.

FYI it says on the sheet of paper that comes with an S9 that the boards can pull up to 533 Watts each.

That means if your power supply can only handle < 500 W you could have problems. Bitmain advertises inaccurate numbers for the power usage on the S9 on their site but tells you straight up on the paper that comes in the box. Under "normal" conditions where you have a 200-240 V power source you should be drawing close to 1600 W as opposed to < 1400 W as they claim.

These numbers are also dependent on environmental factors as colder temps will allow the fans to spin less which means less energy, sometimes 30 or more watts less (this is my average for an entire facility including building exhaust fans).

Has anyone discussed the economics of what these guys are proposing?

In general, a hallmark sign of noobs being played is when you get these outrageous proposals for ROI that your average person buying an ICO token would have no clue how to interpret because they lack sufficient technical and economic background to understand what's going on.

In a perfectly competitive environment there will be zero profits. That means you put in 100% you get back 100% due to a perfectly competitive environment. That doesn't mean nobody makes money. It just means at the end of the day the aggregate profits and losses in the market add up to zero. Given that Envion is competing based on energy costs, there advantages are slim due to the high number of entities using energy arbitrage as an advantage. In order to truly gain an advantage you would need to develop the next ASIC or the next node for a graphics card, both of which are insanely difficult and costly and also highly competitive.

In a low or negative interest rate type of environment, such as where your funding comes from an ICO at little to no risk from the founding party the competitive environment could be a "negative" surplus environment where everyone puts in 100% and on average everyone gets back less than 100% due to excessive competition. For example, if the market supports $0 profit in a perfectly competitive environment with 10 players you might invest $1000 and get $1000 back. But if even one more entrant enters the market then you suddenly have 11 players competing for $10,000. Unless the market grows to $11,000 then your average return per player becomes $909. Many markets suffer from this deflationary expectation and with crypto you generally don't have this problem, but over the short term, should too much competition enter the market with too much funding/easy money supporting it you could see a very problematic situation, aka a mining bubble (not a crypto asset bubble).

In order for mining to increase in profitability you need increasing levels of transaction volume. So if volumes stay at X but miner hash rate goes from Y to 2Y the difficulty level will increase and returns will go from Z to Z/2, i.e. half. You can see for example how Antminer D3s (and their competitors from Inno and Pinidea) significantly distorted the market from around July 2017 to now by exponentially increasing the hash rate in a way that far exceeded the growth in transaction volume. Miner profitability is dependent on a high rate of transaction volume growth.

Envion cannot control transaction volume growth. There are NO GUARANTEED returns in mining. They can take your money, build MMUs and if their competition is simultaneously increasing network hash rate in a similar manner mining the same coins while transaction volume stays flat or declines then profitability will stay flat or decline.

In a worst case scenario, which we have seen before, mining collapses entirely as you get a combination of 1) rapidly falling prices 2) rapidly declining transaction volume 3) rapidly declining mining profitability.

We have seen very significant and sudden price declines in the past year due to liquidity issues and if such a decline were to be sustained you could see serious problems with the Envion model.

Just think about it. Russian players want to invest $100 M in mining. Japanese players are probably investing closer to $500 M in mining and mining hardware.

This project is up against a lot of competition. Unless someone has done the calculations showing probabilities of these various outcomes and scenarios I think generally speaking, investing in an ICO for mining is much higher risk than say, buying cloud mining or investing in a few machines and throwing them into a colo data center or your basement where you can start generating a return IMMEDIATELY.

Time is critical when mining. You shouldn't bet on something that doesn't exist yet because as we've found out from the past (google KNC miner, CoinTerra, Butterfly Labs) if you're not putting your money to work right now, the risks change in crypto so fast that by the time your money is going to work, it could be worth a lot less than when you had originally invested in it simply due to changes in market conditions that you failed to anticipate.

I have no problems with concepts like this but I think they're much higher risk than what most people understand due to the extremely high capital intensive investment required and the time, labor, and transactional (i.e. hiring/HR/admin/licensing, environmental, permitting) cost needed to develop that capital. There are serious supply chain (logistics) hurdles that I haven't even discussed, but I can assure you that if you are missing even a power cord, ethernet cable, PDU, PSU, circuit breaker, etc. then you can't do anything with the rest of the your equipment or you suffer losses or diminished returns while waiting for whatever you need.

Presumably, you are talking about adding one 30 A breaker for 220 or 240 V power. You should be using a PDU (power distribution unit) such as the one linked below (not a recommendation BTW). Your electrician won't really know what to do unless you give them specific instructions since power receptacles are not universal. Ideally, you choose the PDU that meets your requirements (i.e. single-phase 208-240 V basic, switched, metered, etc.) and then see what kind of receptacle it plugs into. Then you should generally go out and get that receptacle and the box / plate to mount it in (Home Depot, electrical supply store, Amazon) and have it ready for the electrician so all they need to do is run some wire, conduit, and hook up the breaker. Don't rely on the electrician to figure out how to connect your miners to your power supply.

https://www.amazon.com/Tripp-Lite-Outlets-Rack-Mount-PDU1230/dp/B0007YG85A/ref=pd_sbs_23_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B0007YG85A&pd_rd_r=BQJBK5WJ9WK6TM2Z0631&pd_rd_w=1Is8m&pd_rd_wg=HYIq1&refRID=BQJBK5WJ9WK6TM2Z0631&dpID=31M8t%252BMq9yL&preST=_SX300_QL70_&dpSrc=detail&th=1

If you're supplying 240 V to the PDU, then you can run up to 5,760 W (.8 (derated to 80%) x 30 x 240) on that one breaker. This would allow you to run at least 3 L3+ and 3 D3+ (which are running at 1000 W ea) assuming you have 240 V power (if it is 208 or 220 then substitute that in the calculation).

For one rig bandwidth is irrelevant. As long as your latency is good then you're fine. These machines use insignificant amounts of bandwidth.

You don't seem to understand the concept of difficulty. Every coin adjusts difficulty based on the network hash rate differently. You need to google that. Basically, if a new miner came out tomorrow that was twice as fast at the same power as your machine you could begin to generate negative returns. At the current 16 nm node we probably won't see any huge leaps in the S9 for a while but you don't get "consistent" returns. It all depends on the network rate and difficulty and the coin value. If BTC tanks then your return will also diminish. There are a variety of negative feedback loops that have historically led to extreme volatility with Bitcoin prices but over time this should improve.

Basically, don't bother buying any ASIC that isn't the latest node technology otherwise you're just wasting resources. Unless you have free electricity of course.

Right now mining Litecoin has a decent energy usage to return ratio. Bitcoin requires massive amounts of power which in turn will generate massive amounts of heat.