One other thought:

Unless you found a way to use that "free" electricity that didn't result in heat, it would accelerate the heat death of the Earth I suspect.

That's would be a major bummer, regardless of difficulty..... 

I don't think anybody should be surprised by an 18W difference at a power draw of 600W. That's about a 3% difference. The differences between Gold/Platinum/Tinanium/etc aren't really all that large. The basic Wikipedia entry shows only a 4% difference: See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80_Plus

So if you have a high quality Gold that beats it's numbers by a bit, then you have a 3% difference. The big jump was from Bronze to gold. When you are at 92% efficiency, there isn't a lot left.

One other small item. There isn't anything that says the two S5's are identical in terms of their actual power draw.If you switched the S5's between the power supplies, you might a larger or smaller difference. 

I think Crypto is in general correct that the differences between an EVGA Gold and an EVGA <better> are probably not worth the price, strictly in terms of efficiency. There may be other improvement such as cabling an wire thickness, though I don't really know.

I wonder if PSU manufacturers test and rate and grade their power supplies like an ASIC vendor would. Might a Gold power supply be a Titanium that didn't quite make the grade for Titanium after it's manufactured? Wouldn't be hard to put a different label on it at the end.

While I don't either personally, I think Bernie would take offense at the comparison. Bernie "worked" with Billions (with a capital B).

This is a very interesting idea. Essentially what's happened is that a company has found a way to try and dismantle a data center and distribute the servers out to individuals that need the heat. As described, they pay the electric bill, and you supply the fiber-optic Internet connection.

It's not clear what happens when you decide you don't want/need the heat any more. While the heat and electricity are similar to mining, the Internet requirements are hugely different. You don't need a big Internet pipe for mining, but you do when you are essentially hosting a server (i.e. the Data Furnace) in your house. As I think others have said, some small classes of heating devices might make sense to have a Bitcoin mining component as part of them.

I think the risk of "flooding the market" with Bitcoin mining lights bulbs is approximately zero. I just recently received an advertisement from Home Depot (a nationwide USA home improvement center). They have Phillips 60W equivalent light bulbs (i.e. 800 lumens) in a package of 2 for $4.97!

I think Bitfury will be hard pressed to get close to that price. This of course assumes that the reason people buy light bulbs is to light up dark areas (like I do), and not to do Bitcoin mining in a novel form factor.

I think what was shown is an amazing stunt, and quite novel. It's just not a viable product as a Bitcoin miner.

I think it's also important to remember that when the block reward halves, the rate at which blocks are solved doesn't change unless and until the hash rate changes. If lots of folks, big or small, decide it's too costly and drop out, two weeks (or so) later the difficulty will drop.

This self adjusting mechanism really make massive hash rate increases kinda self-defeating, and even if/when miners drop out, the difficulty drops to restore the rate with the remaining hash rate. Despite the name "mining" it's quite unlike any other kind mineral/oil/gas extraction process we know.

The title of this thread isn't very accurate. The article described is one guy that tried to implement the SHA256 function on a computer that's well over 50 years old. He talks about the difficulties he ran into and the incredible slowness. He wasn't trying to suggest that it made sense, any more than a "old car" guy tries to suggest that a car from the 1960"s compare favorably to a car today. I expect that his motivations were similar to that of the "old car guy" (IMHO).

I found it very entertaining.

OK, so then why aren't you guys going down the same path? Are the Venture Capital guys in Israel smarter than the VC guys in California?   

Yes, it's a flippant question and I ask only because in the 21 Inc "thread" the pedigree of the investors seems to shine brightly.

What I think people are trying to convey is that the most likely outcome is that you'll spend $100 on hardware, and mine only $50 in return. You might be just as well served by buying bitcoin and hoping it appreciates in value. Please consider:

https://www.coinbase.com/

In terms of the specific items you mentioned. BTCGuild is your pool, should you actually do any mining. The specific cgminer software isn't relevant until you have a specific kind of hardware. You may also find that your mining hardware already has the required software "built in" (i.e. a version of cgminer).

The questions about electricity are still relevant. While you may not pay the bill, will it matter to those that do if you run your computer 24 hours per day, or some mining gadget that seems like a noisy 500 watt heater? That's why all the questions at the outset.

I won't argue that the pedigree of the investors isn't impressive, way more than mine. What I am interested in though is what 21 Inc actually does.

Sorry to disappoint, but it's VERY unlikely that Bitcoin mining will help with your college plans. You can learn something about Bitcoin via mining with your parents footing the electric bill, but your financial returns will be small (i.e. will likely be less than $1/day).

It may be that Bitcoin mining is not for you. You will almost certainly be surprised then to learn that down the road that your income from Bitcoins will diminish over time as a result of the difficulty adjustments every two weeks, and the halving of the reward in the first half of 2016. This i all independent of the price of Bitcoin, which varies as I hope you know.

This will not prove to be a way to "get rich quick", or even slowly.

Besides getting the airflow and fan dimensions correct, there is another less obvious item to consider for the S5 and I expect some other miners. What is the static pressure of the fan?  In other words how HARD does it push the air through the dense heatsink and such, not just the volume (i.e. the CFM measure) of air pushed. This I expect is to some extent what distinguishes the stock fan from most of the alternatives. It has a higher static pressure I am pretty sure. Static pressure is a less well advertised metric.

This is generally what I though about the 21 Inc announcements. They seemed best suited as a presentation for Venture Capital firms, and not geared at all towards potential customers.

I can understand why a "newcomer" to the Bitcoin mining space would want to attract investors, but I didn't seem that a firm already established (e.g. BitFury, Bitmain, yourself) in the Bitcoin mining space would care. That's part of why I am interested.

Thanks for sharing what you can.

Can you folks elaborate on this? I understand the general "Internet of Things" mining premise, and don't think it really has legs. Nevertheless, I am curious.

What do you actually know?

I ended up purchasing a couple of the "Antminer Power Supply Jumper" gadgets. Search around, and you get a couple for about $3-4 each, less if you buy multiple. They aren't fancy, but they resolve the issues, and make it trivial to "power cycle" your miner when needed. Yes, they are more expensive than electrical tape and paper clip. They even include a little LED to tell you that the power supply is actually powered up.

An amendment to the above. When I asked in that thread, the poster responded that the gear was NOT new, but rather they were relocating. So my original thought though that it would  up the long term hashrate was incorrect. It is though, several Petahash that's offline for a while during their move. Hence some of the "variance" we see could be physical location churn of hardware, as well as Bitcoin luck/variance. I'll take it while I can get it, but they "will be back...." (said with Arnold's voice).

I assume that the costs you came up with are for "3D printed" copies? I can't imagine that if Bitmain had ordered mass production versions it would be more than 10$ for the pair. Or is ABS plastic really that expensive?

Thanks for sharing this, Newar!

How hard were you pushing your SP20 in terms of voltage/power/fan settings?

It looks like BitFury has beaten 21Inc to the "light bulb division" and that Sfards will take over the "Lava Lamp division", and all without any obvious $116 Million VC money.

21Inc better get cracking or the only thing left will be the "Toaster division"....  

I wonder if BitFury's lamp will have user configurable mining or not?