You can get computer power cords with NEMA 6 plugs, which is the norm for 240v appliances. They're not common in residences in north america, but not that uncommon commercially.

They've also gone completely unresponsive to me and are ignoring all attempts at communication.

I think they must have meant the price was 0.5 BTC. That would actually be competitive and interesting, otherwise an antminer is a lot less costly— more than enough to ignore the form-factor an included power supply differences, especially considering the power usage. Maybe it could find a use filling in some space in colos with fixed-per-rack power costs.

Under an assumed growth of 2%/day a 315GH/s device delivered Feb-15th will only mine 2.54 BTC in its life. That kind of growth can't be sustained, but it could certainly be sustained long enough to make something drawing 3.2W/GH worthless.

It's currently the Chinese new year.  Everything in China is more or less shut down right now.

I wouldn't be surprised if the problems persist for a couple more days.

This is also why units sold now aren't scheduled to start shipping until 02/08.

There are two PSUs in the unit, and it should be perfectly fine to run them on separate legs of a residential service.

Yea, my experience has been things like... order on Sunday, they ship Monday... actually mining on Wednesday, or another one, order on Monday, mining on Friday.

One of the common arguments against using pie charts is that growth in one item makes it look like the others are shrinking.

P2Pool is somewhat lower than its all time peak hashrate, as your note— a lot of miners fall prey to gamblers fallacy and are only fair weather miners who mine only if the pool has been unusually lucky, even though there is no rational impact... but most of the percentage change has been due to large hashrate increases elsewhere...  And why is P2Pool not getting more of that increase— well, it lacks things like payment in yaun instead of Bitcoin.

So the  fcc/ul approvals are in?  Why aren't we hearing from anyone else about shipping? My order just shows "processing" as it has for months.

Bitmain gave out 0.02 coupons to people who bought at 1.9 BTC, log into their site to see it in your account.

As far as "only 1 week ago", the new price applies to devices which will ship after feb 8th,  9 days from now.  If they hadn't lowered the price substantially they wouldn't sell any at all— at least not to sane customers.

As a KDF?  Can you provide some evidence for that?

I've never seen someone suggest that but perhaps they should.

In any case it absolutely should not use SHA512 as a KDF. SHA512 is a hash function, not a KDF, and it does not make an acceptably secure option.

If instead you were saying PBKDF2-SHA512, okay— but probably not worth the complexity to include more mandatory code.

The parameters selected should work on embedded devices. And with the support for delegation it doesn't matter quite as much if the selected parmeters didn't work on some device.

Is it fraud to declare the actual cost of the goods?

Like, if you pay be 1 BTC, I feed half of it into /dev/null and tend the other half to Alice. Alice sends you a product with a declaration of $500.  Is that kosher?

Don't confuse retail with "cost", do you think KNC is paying $3/GH for the hashrate they are putting online themselves?

I agree that 10x in three months is pessimistic, but 6x is what 2%/day suggests— and thats what we've been averaging for some time now (http://bitcoin.sipa.be/growth.png).  It can't continue forever, of course, but long enough to prevent profit for everyone buying at $3/GH delivered months from now? I absolutely think it can.

None of the antminers I've received showed the slightest evidence of being used. The reason they are dropping prices is that they're selling these things near or beyond the boundary of profitability, and so as more hashrate increasing days go by they need to lower the price to keep it from being an obvious loss to everyone.

I didn't see a way to transfer the coupons, how do you do it?

And would also create a concrete incentive to delay your block announcement when the block you have is a likely winner.

I'm fairly sure this has been proposed before and debunked.

They'll recognize r when they see it in the network.

Yup. Unless you get into touchy feelies soft valuations of your contribution to the Bitcoin network security (which you probably shouldn't unless you're running and mining on your own node), there is no scenario where a miner which produces less in Bitcoin than you could have had instead is to your advantage.

I only wish the reduced rate had come with better than anticipated power usage instead of the reverse.

I think the point there is that the claim that they're shipping is a currently unsubstantiated. People with early orders, who would have expected to have heard something, seem to have heard nothing so far.

It doesn't matter (and for some curves— e.g. ones where the x^2 term is non-zero, though IIRC in scep256k1 there isn't a tidy LSB pattern, some 32 bit LSB patterns are unused entirely). About half of the X values are not points on the curve, but this is accounted for in the order of the group. There are ORDER points on the curve, and the private keys 1..ORDER-1 uniquely map to them.  Lets say that all the X values were even— they're not— but lets say— it doesn't matter since any search is already limiting itself to valid X values, e.g. any statement about the security already excludes the points which are not part of the curve, which can't be reached by any private key, and which wouldn't be included in any key search.