It's quite possible that the target audience of a KNC announcement is NOT the public at large. It may well be to satisfy existing investors, or possibly attract new investors. It's probably easier to get significant money from actual investors, rather than folks that thought they were customers (i.e. pre-orders).

Don't forget that the chicken farmer also has to supply Internet access. He probably doesn't already have that there.

If there was inverse "premium" applied to VERY large purchases, it might blunt the impact of large mines. For example:

Buy 1 miner, it costs X.
Buy 5-50 miners and each one costs .95X.
Buy 1000 miners and they each cost 1.2X

I don't think this could actually work, but it would discourage massive mining farms and/or purchases.

Just a random thought.

One other thing to remember: Watts = Heat

Assuming you put two 500W miners in the same room, it will heat up the room the same as a single 1000W miner. They all have their wrinkles in terms of chip temperatures, fans, air flow and such. However, the total heat production is based on total watts consumed.

Just because I am a worry wart, I would think two S5's on a single 1200W power supply is "on the edge" in terms of power draw. Each S5 is "about" 600W at stock speeds, so two is the limit of your power supply. While I expect that the EVGA P2 is a very well built PSU, You should probably consider down-clocking the tso S5's if you put them on the same PSU.

It's a real shame that there are only used SP20's. They are great box, and very flexible in terms what you can choose (i.e. Hot/Fast/Loud or Cool/Slow/Quieter).

Why all the negativity? Everyone knows it's all about "securing the network"!

Exactly what it's being secured from isn't clear. Maybe ISIS will attack Bitcoin? The more hash, the more secure it is, right? If this is right, then we must be at least 1000x more secure than 18 months ago.

There is a "Mining Support" sub-forum that might be useful:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=40.0

I know zero about KNC, so I can't help.... 

Thank God KNC will be around to increase the total hash rate of the Bitcoin network. I have been thinking to myself how insecure the network could be right now. It's obvious to anybody, that we really need another 50Ph to be "more secure". I think we know how much more secure folks felt as the difficulty rose 10% every 2 weeks. I will be rejoicing for sure when it arrives!  

What a load of horse poop.

You better hope there is a quantity discount. There are 71 light bulbs in that sign. 

Not going to hide that rig anywhere!!!

This is only true if the micro miners select a variety of pools, and not just the inevitable 21 Inc. pool. If the 1 million micro miners are all part of a single pool, then all you have done is distribute the hardware, and done nothing to decentralize the network. It's the number of reasonable sized pools that matter not the number of physical bits of mining hardware (IMHO).

I am always curious about peoples perceptions on what it means to be decentralized. To me, ten roughly equal sized pools is decentralized, even if they all ran the exact same type of hardware. Some folks seem to think that sheer number of mining hardware units does it (e.g. the micro miners). I am also curious as to the reasons behind the rabid desire for a decentralized network.

I too am not keen on "The Internet of Things" concept in general. Although, it will no doubt accelerate the push to IPv6 in my opinion.

You should also consider something to circulate  the air. These things can get pretty hot. Nothing like a GPU is required for cooling, but a "gentle breeze" around an ASIC stick miner is pretty beneficial in my experience.

You should also consider CK's Solo mining pool. Take a look in the "Pools" sub-forum of mining and you'll find. If you hit a block, he takes .5 BTC from the block and rest is yours (as I recall). If you don't hit, there is no charge. I think it's just like a regular pool in terms of setup and such.

If/when I solo mine, that's what I'll do.

This all depends on how KNC decides to deploy their newly minted gear. If they replace N Megawatts of old gear with N Megawatts of new (more efficient) gear, then difficulty will rise. On the other hand if they replace X Petahash of old gear with X Petahash of new gear, then difficulty won't change, and they pay less for electricity.

It's not a requirement that they force a difficulty increase, and start a news "Arms Race" in Bitcoin mining.

While I expect this won't be popular, you can try "down clocking" your S5 to reduce it's power consumption, and therefore it's heat production. My thinking is that in the summer I'll down-clock my SP20, and push it up more in the winter, when the heat is useful. Adjust according to you locale.

Of course if you live near the equator, this advice is semi-worthless.

Maybe the light starts out as RED, and turns GREEN when it starts to make money? 

I wonder what Accel Partners got for their $15 million. I sure hope it was more thnn the 5 Neptunes pictured  and some "magic beans". Looks like KNC has repeated, except this time they used folks with deeper pockets to keep their funding going. I guess the pre-order customers investors didn't pay well enough.

What a gigantic Cluster F**k.

The reason I mention the SD card corruption is that if it's corrupted, then it likely won't restart correctly when you get the power back. You'll want a good backup in case it does get corrupted. I was looking for "hands off" operation, and while I wasn't concerned about the information on the SD card per se, I didn't want to have to fiddle with it because of SD card corruption.

At what voltage is this battery pack of 4Ah (i.e. 4000 mAh)? I think you can expect the Pi + a hub + a single U2, to draw at least of 2-3A at 5 volts. My recollection might be wrong, but you'll want to check the actual draw to see how big you need to make the battery pack to "last all night".

Best of luck.

I don't equate this to the "stick miner" at all. The USB stick miner has never pretended to be anything but that. It wasn't going to be added to anything that wasn't a Bitcoin miner, so there was no attempt to lure people into thinking that mining was going to be "free". Also at the time their biggest competition was GPU's. They beat them handily in just about every category, except the Block Erupter had no after-market once difficulty and more efficient ASIC's crushed the BE100. GPU's could be sold as just that, or turned to another coin (e.g. Litecoin).

I guess it's possible that ASICminer could have chosen to push their technology into unrelated products, but they didn't. I think they realized all the surrounding infrastructure wouldn't be present (e.g. cooling and Internet access) if they added it to a bunch of other devices.

Has anyone on these forums actually seen one of these device live?

While the English is better than "Tochachista", some of the themes and such are very similar. Maybe it's legit. Either way, fifty S5's is plenty of power, plenty of heat, and plenty of noise. Is it still possible to buy fifty S5's from Bitmain? I've lost track of the "Batch numbers" from them, but I thought by now they expected to be "sold out" (i.e. the last batch was spoken for).

Of course there's nothing that would prevent Bitmain from altering course and making another batch or two given the current state of affairs. Unless of course they have decided to just throw in the towel when they saw the "BitFury light bulb". 

One other item to consider in making a "4-blade S5 Extreme" miner. The most recent firmware that Bitmain has released will NOT support four blades on a single controller. If that doesn't bother you then feel free to proceed. I personally would keep it as two separate miners. I think Ethernet switches are pretty cheap. A used one couldn't even cost $10, could it?

The only real drawback I see to Bitcoin as one of the payment options is that there isn't any obvious way to make a "recurring charge" like you could with a credit card. As the operator, you'd get X Bitcoins for whatever the negotiated terms was, and then that would be it.

As was mentioned above though, the sender/buyer has precious little recourse with Bitcoin hence you should probably give them a good rate, though it is "one time" in nature.