No, no response so far. (apologies for the very late reply)

You can buy hardware and use it to mine Bitcoin (but it will cost you more than the value of Bitcoin that you'll mine).
Or you can buy Bitcoin for 'normal' money.  You'll need to find an exchange in your country that sells Bitcoin.
Cheers

It depends what sort of mining equipment you get.  Most of the current ASIC miners (Bitmain, SPTech) can run 'standalone' as they have a built-in controller.  They just require an internet connection and power (most of these use a standard PC power supply external to the miner). At the present mining difficulty you will not become 'rich' from Bitcoin mining.  It depends very much on your electricity costs if you are going to recover the cost of your mining equipment at all.  It still is good fun. There are stacks of guides (many written by Dogie) and a lot of information from users.  It is quite miner specific, so you can't get a full response here that will cover all cases.  Mining is still plenty of fun as a hobby.

Cheers

Thanks for the explanation.

If there is a significant rise by hashrate of some pool, wouldn't that have also some short-term impact on the relative number of blocks that this pool solves?  The difficulty drives the complexity of finding a solution, and if there was only a single miner, this would dictate the rate of blocks solved by that miner.  If there are 2 miners, there is some competition between them, as each block can be solved only once, so some of the work expended by one of the miners would be lost if the other miner solves that particular block.  Intuitively it is expected that the instantaneous relative hash rate would have some impact on the rate of individual solutions - why is that incorrect?

Cheers

It's not 'short term', but a long term trend.  Right now Antpool reports 57.77 PH/s.  Your chart at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104664.0 shows that DiscusFish and Antpool found about 27% of blocks between Feb 8 and Feb 14. Isn't this simply a case of smaller pools like Slush having a smaller fraction of the overall hash rate?

Cheers

Antpool jumped to 56.30 PH/s  (https://www.antpool.com/home.htm), which could be one of the reasons for poor performance at the smaller pools.

Cheers

Slush's web site is at http://mining.bitcoin.cz/

cheers

Can you login to the antminer?  What sort of display do you get?

Slush's server time is still off by 6 hours... Raised a ticket with Slush support about 10 hours ago but it remains unfixed. While this probably doesn't impact pool performance, it still seems a bit slack...

cheers

After following os2sam's advice about external powered hubs, if you still have issues look at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=300638.0 for advice how to 'clean' your device manager from old unwanted USB settings.
You need to configure your USB hubs in a way that doesn't span too many levels, or Windows will complain.

I used to run 40 BE's on both windows and RPi, sadly now they consume more electricity than generating BTC.

Cheers

If you actually do some 'research', you may find about the Arrhenius equation and the relationship between temperature and failure ratehttp://reliawiki.com/index.php/Arrhenius_Relationship.  Failure rate increases exponentially with temperature (in Kelvin).  As Dogie pointed out, using the maximum specified junction temperature of the ASIC as if it was the ambient temperature and applied to all components is flawed.  I totally agree with Aurel's graphic that you need to get your RMA forms ready (just to be rejected by any sensible supplier who would claim that you operated well outside the specified envelope). 

Looks like the OP is a gambling person, according to his banner...

Cheers

Check Dogie's guide at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=702653.  There is a reset switch accessible from the front panel, next to the 2 LEDs and Ethernet connector.  You power it up, press the reset button through the hole using a paper clip or similar thin object, hold it for 5-10 secs.  This will reset it to factory defaults, including the password.

Cheers

Congrats.  Happy mining

Cheers

The closest ASIC manufacturer to you geographically is http://www.spondoolies-tech.com/collections/products, in Israel (suggested by RoadStress in a previous post).
If your solar system is a standard grid-tie system, you need to factor the times that the sun is not providing you power.  I assume that 5 KW is the 'nominal' power, you can get an estimate of what it would actually produce by looking at actual systems in your region at (http://www.pvoutput.org/).  Unfortunately such systems deliver the full nominal output only for brief times.

Cheers

Thanks for the nice guide and photos.  I liked the '360 deg' view photo. 
As Rabinovitch said, the power connectors clearly look like 8 pin and not 6 pin PCI-E.

Cheers

Tried the phone and left a message.  He is probably still on holidays somewhere... The holiday season here lasts till somewhere in Feb.

Cheers

Pekatete,
Thanks for this thread.  It tried it on 2 S1's upgraded to S3 with Bitmain's kits and 1 S3.  They all seem to start mining significantly faster after any clock change with the voltage setting of 0750 than with the original (blank) setting.  It also seems to make them more tolerant to higher clock rates.  My S3 did not 'like' clock rates higher than 225 MHz.  It is now stable at 231.25 MHz.  I did not get a chance to make a comparison of power consumption.
I went back to the Oct 2014 f/w on all of these antminers.

Cheers

Congratulations on making some progress. Strange that the antminer is not visible on your network.  I don't think that the router can modify the antminer's address, if you set it as a fixed address. There could be a faulty component - try swapping the Ethernet cable between the Antminer and your switch or router with another cable.  Try using another port on the switch or router that the Antminer connects to (had some instances that a port got 'zapped' by lightning induced transients).  Usually the switch or router has an indicator light for each port - can you see that the port recognizes that the cable from the Antminer is plugged-in?  If your router supports LAN IP assignment, you could 'pre-allocate' the same fixed IP address that you set up in the LAN gui to that antminer (you'll need to find the MAC address of that device, which sounds like a 'chicken and egg' situation, as the easiest way to find that is to check your router configuration... however you could also reconnect the PC directly to the antminer to find the MAC address).
Did you remember to re-configure your PC back to DHCP mode?
Did you set the WAN address on the Antminer?  (you don't need to change the LAN, only the WAN, this is confusing as the controller board used was probably meant to be a router, but as per all the guides and direct experience, the only part that you need to set is the WAN).
Are you certain that your router covers the IP address range that you set the antminer to?  (check your router configuration).  Is there a chance that there is another device already using the IP address that you set the antminer to?

What make/type of router are you using?
Can you post screen shots of your Anminer's configuration screens for the network settings?

I have followed this routine with plenty of S1's and S3's and it always worked fine for me.
Cheers

You probably cannot see the antminer on your network, as its factory default IP address is 192.168.1.99, which is probably not supported by your router's address range.
Can log into your router's configuration and check what is the address range that it supports, and select 2 unused addresses in that range?  Assuming that you found that address 10.154.192.90 and 10.154.192.91 are those address.  Now disconnect your computer from the network and setup an 'isolated network' between your PC and 1 antminer.
To do this you would ideally use a 'crossover' Ethernet cable (which usually is red in color).  This may not be an absolute must, as many modern PC Ethernet ports would automatically reconfigure to support a normal 'straight' ethernet cable.  Your other option is to use an ethernet switch with 2 'normal' Ethernet patch cables (this needs to be an isolated switch which is not connected to the rest of your LAN).
Next you need to disconnect your PC from your LAN and configure the PC which is used for this for a fixed IP address. Assuming that you use Windows 7, this can be done by going into Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections, select your wired LAN adapter, properties, change the IP4 settings from 'obtain an IP address automatically' to 'use the following IP address' and enter something in the 192.168.x.x range, say 192.168.1.2  (this is necessary, so that both the PC and the 'factory reset' Antminer are both at the same subnet).
Connect the LAN cable between the PC and the Antminer and turn the antminer power supply on  (assuming that you have a paper-clip or similar arrangement to turn the power supply on).
Now open your web browser and type 192.168.1.99 in the address bar and press 'enter'.  If your antminer is at factory default settings, you should now see the web gui login screen in your browser.  The default login is 'root' and 'root' as password.
To modify the antminer address settings go to the Network tab, don't touch the LAN setting, modify the WAN setting by clicking on 'Edit' and then modifying the IPv4 address to your chosen address (in our example it is 10.154.192.90), 'IPv4 gateway' change to your router address, which is as you stated 10.154.192.1 (a rather strange address, hopefully it is correct). For 'Use custom DNS servers' enter again your router's address, or your IP provider's address (you might want to add a second DNS server such as Google 8.8.8.. Leave all other LAN settings as they are.  Click 'save and apply'.  Shut down this antminer.  Replace it with the second one, except now set it for the second address (10.154.192.91 in our example).  When you are done, change the PC lan interface back to DHCP and connect the 2 antminers to your LAN. Now you should be able to see them at the new nominated addresses (10.154.192.90 and 10.154.192.91) in your browser, they should connect to the internet and start mining on the test pools.  Change the settings to your pool(s) and start your mining.

Cheers