Might want to adjust the title if picks are closed.

It will be interesting to find out how it prices out, and where they try and sell them, both geographically and which merchants.

Just think, you can hand them out to your family members at Christmas!!! 

A new firmware release for the SP20 is a surprise to me as well. I figured that they were done working on the SP20 for bigger and better things. I too would like to know what is changed in 2.7.1 compared to 2.6.14.

Actually I think the brilliance is adjustable!!! 

Just couldn't resist the pun, though I completely agree.........

Just had a random thought. If it interferes too much with your data gathering feel free to delete.

I am wondering if the controller on the SP20 were to run warm for some reason (e.g. max speed, poor intake air temp, whatever), could that shorten the life of the installed flash on the controller? I am reluctant to tinker with my SP20, but I think it's basically a Beaglebone Black (BB) with an extra FPGA to connect it to the hashing boards. I think the BB has a builtin in EMCC(?) flash that it normally runs from. Lets say it was running for weeks at an elevated temperature, could some of the flash cells lose their state and hence end up with a corrupted flash (i.e it's bricked)? The external SD card is almost outside, and likely wouldn't get as hot, besides it's relatively easy to just swap in a new SD card if that gets corrupted.

Is it true that you can't reflash the native EMCC from the SD card? That seems like an unfortunate design situation. Would it "help" to periodically reflash the EMCC while it's still sane, in order to "refresh" the cells?

Of course this whole line of thinking might be completely off. If Spondoolies looked at this, they might also have some good ideas, and learn something from our experience. I doubt they would "fix" anything, but might have ideas to offer. They might also learn something for their generation of hardware (i.e. make sure you have an easily replaced flash).

Continuing to keep my fingers crossed and my SP20 "cool".

Here's another problem isolation step:

Turn off every miner in Shelf 1. Let it sit for 30 minutes for air to circulate and cool things. Then see if you can get Shelf 2 to operate better. Warm cables sound bad. It's important to figure out if they are warm because they have too much current through them, or if they are being warmed from somewhere else.

You need to figure out if Shelf 2 can operate with Shelf 1 off. If Shelf 2 works well with Shelf 1 off, then you need to figure out if the interaction is strictly because of power draw, or air flow and temperature problems.

Might be useful to get some pictures to illustrate what's taking in air from where and exhausting it to where. It might also be useful to get some simple thermometers that you can place ate intake and exhaust points on various miners to check your belief on what's happening.

Best of luck.

While it would be nice to actually hear something concrete on the S7 from Bitmain, I wonder what will actually motivate them to start selling it to the public? Do they need the cash?  Could they do just as well by replacing some set of their in-house S5 gear and continue to sell S5's? I think every one has accepted "new" means it has a warranty, not that it actually means "unused".

Is there actually any competitive threat to them at this time?

I am curious, will the difference between July 1 and July 30th matter in terms of deciding to mine or not? Sure it might influence what you decide to buy and when, but if you have no mining equipment already, the newest gear is rarely a good "training" machine.

My single SP20 was purchased used in February of 2015. For the most part it's been run underclocked in the range of 1000-1200 GH/s, with a few hour burst run when it was colder. The max has been about 1400 GH, since I only have a 1000W power supply, and only let it go to about 950W from the supply.

I try not to reboot it often, and sometimes when it's a power-cycle type of reboot, it seems to go through 1 or more additional internal reboots to get itself all squared up. I use my router to assign a static IP address. It's connected to my WiFi network via a Netgear WiFi-->Ethernet bridge that's powered off the SP20 USB port. I haven't tried to make the SP20 run a WiFi dongle in the USB port as others have.

I's been essentially trouble-free, with one hot ASIC, that's usually about 20C hotter than the others. That ASIC is on a loop that is usually 30+ Watts over the limit I specify. The other 3 loops run as specified, and seem cooler.

I cross my fingers whenever I have to reboot it.

Short summary of the above:

Configured via a Web interface in terms of pool, as well as the light bulb parameters (e.g. color, brightness, etc). Looks kinda like a "Party Bulb" with multiple colors and such. The example showed 2.6 GH/s. No mention of power consumption. Supposedly available at the retail level late in 2015. No mention of price or geography for retail sales.

I'll join Phil on the negative side.

-0.76 to -1.00%

You should probably see if it's no longer at the IP address it had before. Options for finding it:

- Log into your router and look under the DHCP section and see if there is a way to list the "clients" it's handed out an IP address to. Try those IP addresses from your browser. Try ping from the command line.

- Try using a readily available "IP Scanner" program for your network. Sometime they will give you a small clue as to what's out there. Try poking at those IP addresses with ping and your browser. I just don't recall how my SP20 identifies to my IP scanner.

Next time you turn it off, disconnect the power and let it sit for at least a solid 5 minutes before you turn it on again.

Hope this is of some help.

In terms of increased hashrate, which of course directly drives difficulty, then it's anyone's guess. I see the following major wildcards to consider:

- The long fabled S7 from Bitmain. The speed, efficiency, and price are completely unknown at this time, though we should have real insight within the next 30 days (i.e. July).

- What impact will SFARDS have? They have a shiny new, over-priced miner, that they will likely self-mine with for at least a while. They will clearly run everything they have built, in order to try and recoup some of their development costs. How many PH?

- What's Avalon got cooking these days? My understanding is that they are done building 4.1's for now.

- What about Spondoolies? Very quiet from them it seems.

- What's 21 Inc. actually going to build? They have plenty of money to spend, and I'll bet it won't all go for wild office parties. Could be anywhere from some really efficient big miner, or tons of "light bulb" class miners. Giant crap shoot here.

- KNC is supposedly on the verge of 14/16 nm technology, that will "blow everybody else away". The reality and the timeframe?

It isn't hard to imagine another "ASIC Arms Race" in the 2nd half of 2015.

The final wild card is BTC price (i.e. exchange rate). If I had a reliable clue as to what drove BTC price, I'd be wealthy by selling my insight to KNC, SFARDS, Bitmain and others! 

While I agree that the difficulty is way more "calm", that's only relative to our brutal experience in 2014. The difficulty has still adjusted upwards of 25% in about 6 months. That's about 56% per year assuming it remains this "calm". It's possible we have hit some kind of saturation point, that will essentially limit how rapidly difficulty can grow. If price were to go up significantly, I am certain we'll see bigger difficulty increases.

Another useful option is to look for an "ATX Power Supply Jumper" on Ebay or Amazon. Yes, it costs more than a paper clip, but makes things so much easier. Less than $5.

If you absolutely NEED .1 BTC/per day, you may well find that you have to invest/spend a lot more than you are willing or capable of doing. There is no easy, cheap, guaranteed way to make .1 BTC/day.

Not trying to be mean, just giving you reality.

How did you arrive at your .01 to .1 BTC/day "need"?

I have to ask: What motivated you to purchase your mining hardware and begin mining Bitcoins?

Various folks all have a different set of motivations for mining, though a common one is "to make money". While it sounds like it should be easy based on the common thinking of Bitcoin, that proves to be a fairly elusive goal. You have picked up on difficulty as being a key "ingredient", which it is. There is also the price of Bitcoin (i.e. what you can exchange it for in terms of  money where you live). What's interesting is that difficulty seems to follow price. By that I mean if the price of Bitcoin were to double, you can count on difficulty to increase over time. What we have seen for a big chunk of 2015 is that as price has fallen, difficulty has more or less "stabilized", though not really fallen since the end of 2014. In case it wasn't obvious, 2014 was a brutal year for mining, as it seemed like every 12-13 days, the difficulty would jump 5-10%, sometimes 20%. That was relentless, and almost caertainly due to the "ASIC Arms Race" for more hash rate at any cost. It's clear that thinking can't last forever.

Difficulty adjustments happen every 2016 blocks. Depending on how long it took for the network to "mine" those 2016 blocks, determines the magnitude, and the sign (positive or negative) of the adjustment. If it takes less than 14 days, the difficulty adjustment is positive. If the elapsed time is say 12.5 days, then the increase will be larger than if the elapsed time is say 13.8 days. If it takes longer than 14 days, then the difficulty will be lowered (i.e. a negative adjustment).

The whole point of the difficulty adjustment is to try and maintain a steady pace of blocks, and the associated Bitcoin reward within. As I view it it, it's intended to "regulate" the rate at which new coins are added to the "money supply".

Sure, maybe you can find a way to get Bitcoin in exchange for mining some other type of coin. However, his original statement , which you then "bolded" is completely correct.

It's impractical to try and mine Bitcoins directly using a CPU (of any caliber) due to the existence of ASIC's.

This really shouldn't be in doubt or dispute any more.

Just to refresh my memory, is the Amita a 2-chip USB "stick" or something else? Is that a "string" design in terms of power and such?

Sounds like good news!