The same thing I'd do with $4500 in cash, pay down my mortgage.

You guys realize that 5000 satoshi is about 2 cents, right?  You seriously have a better chance of making money by looking for dropped coins on the sidewalk.  Your get rich plan sounds slightly less plausible than making it rich by going around to local convenience stores and cleaning out the give a penny, take a penny trays.

I'm not sure I follow your line of reasoning.  If you have the device in your hand (and can bypass the fingerprint scanner) you have pretty much full control over the bitcoins in the wallet. It seems really odd to me you could transfer coins out of the wallet but no see how many there are.  I'm having a hard time coming up with a scenario where I would be more concerned about someone being able to see how many bitcoins I had in a wallet than being able to transfer them all to their own account.

Checking via the website is an option IF you have a device on you with a separate network connection.  As a standalone device isn't Case supposed to remove the dependency on having something else connected to the Internet?

Yup.  I left it on the charging pad all day as I kept trying updates.  No luck.

Still no luck as I've tried to update.  I've started the process about 8 times here in my office (with a fine signal on my GSM phone, no way of checking how the signal is according to the device) but every time it's gotten less than half way before seeming shutting off.

The first firmware update seems to have been release, but I can't get my unit to update for the life of me.  It recognizes there's an update and will initiate the process, but keeps shutting off during the update process and tries to restart the process when it powers up again.  I remember reading something earlier about issues with firmware updates in areas with low GSM signal so I tried bringing it to work where my phone usually gets 4 or 5 bars.  The update process bar gets around 20% through and the system seems to shut off suddenly with no activity after letting it sit for 20 minutes or so.

If most of the units are going zombie because of thermal load is it possible yours isn't because it's only running 3/4?  I would think yours would only draw 3/4 the power and generate 3/4 the heat. 

Has anyone experienced problems with the Antminer U3 starting to "scream" all the sudden? Every once and a while (sometimes a few hours after plugging it in, sometimes a day or two) it starts making a repeated high pitched alarm type noise and stops mining entirely.  The only way to reset it seem to be to unplug it from both power and USB. 

I'm really considering trying a return through Amazon.

Have you checked in lately?  Not sure if you still had an account there, but I can guarantee you don't have any money there anymore.  Things went bad rather suddenly.

Basically you need to have pretty advanced knowledge of digital logic/VHDL/etc, really understand the math underlying the crypto routines in block mining, and have a relationship with a facility that can handle chip fabrication.  If you're asking that question it sounds like you have none of those skills.  Seriously, it's not a task to be taken lightly.

No experience using one with windows, but it seems to work find with cgminer and a recent version of Ubuntu.  The only hitch was that I needed to add these options to the cgminer command line or it kept connecting and disconnecting from the device:

--icarus-options 115200:1:1 --icarus-timing 0.22

Did you create a new AMhash account first using the same email address as your Hashie account?  You can't just use your Hashie login at AMhash.

Hashie.co is kind of in a strange state at the moment.  There's not a lot of confirmed info but the site has either been hacked, the operators have made off with whatever funds are around and are toying with the users, or whoever is in charge developed a tumor that caused them to become obsessed with the movie Frozen.  Withdrawals do not seem to be working.

Hopefully more info is forthcoming, but nobody seems to have a straight answer on anything related to Hashie at the moment.

Either they've been hacked, or they're trying to make it look like they've been hacked.

This morning the main page reads: "Hashie's operations are temporarily suspended."

They have a link to a forum with a single post that suggests they're starting up some kind of ARG, but in the meantime no info on existing miners.  Anybody know that's going on?