I don't know, a lot of people get sick of whatever they're doing, sell a bunch of stuff and go do something different.  Some people might buy a van and tour the country, some might move across the world, and I guess some people might by 70 graphics cards.  Running a restaurant is hard work, and many barely stay afloat. 

Thanks.  The HP looks like what I want.  I'm not trying to completely cheap out with a $20 PSU.  I just figured a 1600W $200 one was a bit overkill.

I ordered a Bitmain B3 miner, and I'm trying to find a suitable PSU for it.  Unlike other Bitmain miners, it only requires 328W to run, so I'm looking to get a smaller and cheaper PSU than the APW3++.  However, I need find a PSU that has a least 7 6 pin PCIe connectors.  Is there such a thing on the market?  All of the smaller PSUs I can find don't have enough connectors.

Those 40 days were the most profitable days in Sia mining though.  Looking at how that went, it seems like a good deal in retrospect.  I recall people were making like $100 a day, although part of that was the block time adjustment Sia did at the same time.  Also, while only Bitmain knows for sure, many think the only reason they came out with the A3 at all was to beat Obelisk (which is run by the same people as Sia) to the market and sink a new competitor before they ever really got started.  After the Sia devs said they wouldn't fork, Bitmain took off the 1 per person limited and flooded the market.  With Bytom though, they are partners rather than competitors, so they may have more of a reason to play nice.  Or not, who knows.

I just bought one.  We'll see how this goes.  I at least got to use my $420 coupon, so it was only a bit over $2k all said and done.  This all depends on how many they are going to sell.  Considering they limited it to 1 per person, hopefully not a ton.  If the 2,500 rumor is true, then that means around $100 per day with the current price.  If that was bullshit and they sell 10 times that, then it's like $10 a day.  Knowing my luck they'll sell a ton of them and the price of the coin will crash though.  One positive though is that the coin isn't going to fork, which is going to be a risk with a lot of new models that get released in the coming months.

Edit:  They just sold out, so at least that is promising.

You're right, and a lot of people have a hard time grasping this it seems.  The only advantage that a larger operation might have is cheaper electricity.  However, that in and of itself is not impacted by the amount of miners in operation.  It's just that people with cheap electricity use that opportunity to run a lot of miners.  Large operations have significant overhead like rent and the cost of running an HVAC system.  If you do it in a house you already own in your basement that cools itself, that's as cheap as it gets.

I agree completely.  POS does nothing to increase decentralization, and it will only reduce liquidity.  Right now, people are hesitant from spending their coins since they think they will increase in value in the future.  With POS, this issue still exists, and it introduces a second penalty for spending your coins by not being able to collect the dividends from staking.  People need to realize that if no one spends their coins they will eventually be worth nothing.  Adoption is what will drive the value of coins once speculation wanes.  If everyone just sits there and holds to get more coins, those coins will be worth nothing.

The Sia dev team are currently the only ones working with it as far as I know.  However, like many other coins, it is an open source project that anyone can develop for.  Still though, the dev team basically controls the future of the coin since it doesn't serve much of a purpose without the interface that they are building.  Unless Bitmain wants to do all the development work themselves, I don't see how they could benefit from it.  They could attack the network in retaliation if there was a fork, but if there was a fork I think most people invested in Sia would move on with the forked coin.  It would be like Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic.  Bitmain could control the "Sia Classic" in this situation, but I doubt it would be worth much compared to the forked coin.

Personally, I don't think Bitmain cares about Sia one way or the other.  They saw that a new ASIC company was entering the market, and wanted to crush them before they could even ship a single miner.  While Obelisk is only currently developing Sia and Decred miners, if they were successful they could have made other miner that competed with Bitmain.  I would not be surprised if Bitmain came out with a Decred miner a month or so before Obelisk starts to ship theirs.  Obelisk has money now from all their preorders, but I can't see them staying in business if all of their miners are worthless before they ship.  People aren't going to get shafted twice.

I do have a dryer outlet like the one I've linked to below that isn't in use since my dryer only requires 110v and is plugged into a normal outlet.  That was by first thought, but I cannot find the right combination of cords or adaptors that can make it work.  When I was googling around for an answer I found one guy who said it's impossible for some reason, but who knows if that is correct.  I don't want to jerry rig something though by splicing wires myself, be it from this outlet or from my breaker.  Saving a little money isn't worth burning my house down or zapping myself.  

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71ngHbefakL._SL1500_.jpg


It's gonna be in the basement.  I already have an L3+ down there as well as a furnace that is cranking away all winter making noise.

You mean the APW3++?  I have one powering my L3+, and it works fine for that.  The issue is that they max out at 1200W with 110v, and the S9 draws a little more than that while the L3+ only uses 800W.  Two of them should have more than enough power, but my concern is what would happen having two attached to one S9. 

It looks like you have 72 o's for each hash board, which is what it should be showing.  The speed that pools show often isn't accurate.  What the miner itself is showing is far more accurate.  I think you're fine here.

I'm looking to set up an S9 in my house with only normal (for the US anyway) 110v outlets.  I rent the house, so getting a 220v outlet put in isn't a realistic option.  Right now, I currently have two APW3++ Bitmain power supplies.  My question is if I am better off selling one APW3++ and buying a 2000W step up transformer like the one I've linked to below, of if I should use one APW3++ to power two of the hash boards and the other to power the third hash board and the controller, each on separate 15 amp circuits?  If I went with the step up transformer, it would be on a dedicated 15 amp circuit.  Would I risk damaging the miner by using two power supplies as long as each hash board only is attached to one power supply?  Also, how much efficiency would I lose by using a step up transformer if I went that route?  I tried googling for an answer about how people set these machines up with 110v outlets, but all I could find was people asking about using a single power supply or using two weaker power supplies that put out a lot less watts than an APW3++.  Any advice is appreciated.

https://www.amazon.com/Goldsource-STU-2000-Voltage-Transformer-Converter/dp/B0022U4J12/ref=pd_day0_23_3?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B0022U4J12&pd_rd_r=9VTW2PHBAZPD9XYAYWGT&pd_rd_w=wpxq6&pd_rd_wg=Dt8k2&psc=1&refRID=9VTW2PHBAZPD9XYAYWGT

I just recently got an L3+, and so far I've been mining with Prohashing.  They say they maximize profits with their algorithm for switching coins, and even after the fee they are paying out more than I'd make mining Litecoin alone.  However, that still only comes out to like $12 a day, and a quick glance at a mining calculator often shows individual coins making more than that at least for a few hours before they go back towards the mean for the popular scrypt coins.  The top coin is often over $20 a day, even if it doesn't stay there for long.

My question to more experienced miners:  Is it a viable strategy to sign up for pools for say the top 5 common scrypt coins and then switch to those as they reach the top?  Just looking at the mining calculators it seems like it would be if you're willing to put in the effort, but the fact that the multipools can't match these figures makes me think I'm missing something.  For a few bucks I probably wouldn't bother, but when the difficulty on a coin drops real low and becomes twice as valuable to mine as the rest, it seems like it would be a good idea.  Is the difficulty that the mining calculators consider actually real time, or does it get immediately capitalized on and the calculators just don't catch up for a while?

Also, for the purpose of this question, I'm not asking about the benefits/risks of holding lots of random coins.  I'd probably just convert them all to Litecoin periodically unless I actually found one I though had promise. 

As someone who just bought some miners this month, buying them is easier said than done, not even considering the prices.  They sell out incredibly fast.  With the Avalons, the sales are getting announced in advance which in some ways is nice but it makes it so everyone knows about it and they sell out in literally less than a second.  With Bitmain, a lot of their batches go on sale around 4 AM eastern standard time and they often only give about an hour of notice.  I had my phone alert me every time they sent out a tweet and had an alarm set every morning at 3:30 AM for over a week until I finally got lucky.  Even with that, they still sell out so fast it's hard to get one in your cart before they are gone.

I suspect this will die down a little if the market stays stagnant for a few months and the difficulty continues to climb.  However, as it is now, you can't just buy a miner like you can a normal item on the internet unless you want to pay a ridiculous amount of money on ebay for one.  I don't get why anyone wants to pay like $6k for miner, but I guess there's a lot of bitcoin rich people out there that think it would be cool to mine and aren't the best at math.

Also, GPUs aren't much better these days.  The ones that are good for mining are hard to come by, and have doubled in price since December with the rise of Ethereum.  They are either out of stock or insanely expensive.

Sure, but no one is expecting everyone to move at the exact same time.  The Chinese government is supposedly shutting it down in an orderly manner, meaning not all at once.  Still though, regardless of when they move, you can't just move a mining operation overnight.  This is the same for any business moving across international borders.  Unless they are moving to some place that is lawless, all the equipment they ship will need to clear customs.  They also need to set up new infrastructure, which is not trivial or cheap.  Then, they need to either hire new people to run everything or get work visas for themselves.  They had a real good thing going in China, but if the government is serious in stopping it, they either need to spend a significant amount of money to move or close up shop.  Also, if they move to Europe or North America, they will face new regulatory scrutiny that they may not be accustomed to.  While these guys have plenty of money, it is still a speed bump for them that everyone else could capitalize on.

Managed to get two, one L3 and one S9.  My business partner was trying at the same time, and it looked like the L3s sold out in like 5 seconds.  I know the ROI for the L3 is worse now, but I wanted to be diversified incase things change, and the L3s ship in 10 days rather than 2 months.  Buying ASICs these days is crazy though.  Even a few months ago they didn't sell out even close to instantly.  The difficulty will only rise from here, but if the China mining ban happens it should hopefully give the rest of us a reprieve at least as long as it takes to move and set up shop somewhere else.

IMO, if it is going to be like this from here on out, they should set up a lottery system where you know a few days in advance if you're gonna get one or not.  Then, when they go on sale, give people like 10 minutes to check out.  If you don't check out in 10 minutes, the rest go back on the market and sell first come first serve.  I get rewarding people who get there first, but in this case we were all there within a second of each other.  They are either going to people using bots or it's just dumb luck.  If nothing else, it would make life easier for Blokforge if 10,000 people weren't constantly refreshing the page.

Lol, is this a joke?  The second the add to cart thing came up it said they were no longer available.  Did anyone get one?

One can hope!  The reality of the current market situation is that it isn't a bad price.  People compare it to Bitmain's prices, but in this game time is literally money.  If you order one of the next batches from Bitmain, it will come at least a month later than an 821 from Blokforge.  A month of mining is worth $500-$1000 depending on what you mine and what the market does.  As more new ASICs are sold, the difficulty will increase and profits will go down unless the market can keep up.  The first month you mine will likely be the best month.

Also, while I don't get it, the prices on ebay and 3rd party Amazon sellers for any ASIC is through the roof right now.  Avalon 741s are on sale for $3,600 right now on ebay, and presumably people are buying them for those prices.  On Amazon, I saw an Antminer T9 with 11TH/s going for $5,200 yesterday.  If anyone thinks $3,600 is too much, they can always buy one, sell it for a 50% markup on ebay, and then use the profits to buy the next batch.  Going forward, I don't see the price of 821s dropping lower than $3,000 for a small amount of units.  There are plenty of chumps willing to pay $5k for one.

I mean, S9's are going for like $3,500 these days if you don't want to wait at least 3 months.  That's kind of the deal these days.  The price isn't really the price if nothing is in stock.  I actually heard back from a lot of the people on Alibaba, and most actually want over $4k for S9's and about half that for the 741s'.