While I can't comment on Mitak, I can speak as a satisfied customer of sidehack. His Compac USB stick works just great. This includes a BM1384 (i.e. Antminer S5 class) part and has a very broad range of power speed options.

I would be willing to bet he could make a dandy USB stick based on their part that would be say 50GH or possibly more. If Bitfury would talk with him, and supply samples at a reasonable price, things would be swell.

Just my unsolicted $.02 on at least one members capabilities.

I would bet it's a "digit transposition" as opposed to a "Magical S7". I didn't look at hist quoted rate, and just couldn't see a "non magical" S7 doing 1BTC per month (before running expenses).

Just to be picky: "...about .05 BTC daily" would be more accurate.

It would seem that you could downclock a Batch 8/9 S7 to roughly approximate the Avalon 6 in terms of power and hashrate (maybe a little better). If you do that, can you dial the fan down enough to more nearly approximate the Avalon 6 in terms of sound?

Anybody got any experiences to share on making an S7 a bit more livable strictly by adjusting the frequency?

Can you please show the math that "easily produces" 1 BTC/month? My simple use of the bitcoinwisdom calculator indicates it's much closer .625, and that's assuming a zero difficulty change during that month.

While if you want to round to the nearest whole BTC, then I guess that .625 rounds WAY up to 1.

Spondoolies gave up on the consumer space last year. It's not clear if the SP20 soured them, or their "marriage" with BTCS. In any event, their only announcement to date has been the SP50, which is supposedly 110TH, with an unknown price, power consumption, or availability date.

I think they had great engineering, but have lost their way with the BTCS "hookup".

I wouldn't think you have much "headroom" to overclock, though I don't own an S7 of any vintage. Have your tried to find out what your actual power draw is today (e.g. using a Kill-a-Watt)?  Any sense of how hard your PSU is running now (e.g. fan speed and exhaust temp)?  Are all your cables to the S7 cool and connectors at both ends of those 12V cables cool as well? Is your S7 running cool as it stands today?

Personally I don't try and push my gear, but that's a personal choice not shared by all.

For some reason, I thought Hawaii electric rates were crazy high. Am I wrong, or do you have some way to mitigate the power costs?

My mighty SP20, getting less mighty each day, continues to plug away. Along with my three ultra-silent Compac sticks.

This is in a Southeast suburb of the Twin Cities as well.

I have lusted after an S7 or Avalon6, but haven't yet succumbed to the siren song of "more hash is better". I'd just love a 500W, 2TH, quiet miner, along with a million other folks.

Most, though not all, of the ASIC Manufacturers produce the complete miner and have decided that it's in their best interests to "self mine". In other words, they produce the miner and install and run it in their own "farm". I think it was KNC that first started doing this, but clearly Bitmain does, along with BitFury and others.

While I remain convinced that BTC price will drive hashrate and hence difficulty, I always though it was more of a long-term trend kinda thing. The BTC price continues to slowly decline, at the same time difficulty increase also starts to moderate.

I don't expect we are actually in any danger of a difficulty decrease, just perhaps a smaller increase than recently.

BTC now down to $379.

Is this the result of the "ASIC Arms Race" that was re-ignited back in September?

The other obvious question: What do you do at night?

I think the primary result of the "21Inc Bitcoin Computer" will be hype that will enable the current Venture Capital companies to make money when they try and take 21Inc public.

That's where the real money is this adventure.

Just out of curiosity,  where do you get 68" by 68" paper? And what kind of printer do you feed it into?

With an SP20, you can quite easily get by with a 900W to 1000W power supply if you downclock it. Contrary to the stated specifications, the SP20 is a really dandy 1200-1250GH miner with good efficiency. If you actually stretch for the 1700GH goal, you'll end up with a hot, loud, and inefficient (i.e. in terms of Watts/GH) device, that may not actually get to 1700GH/s. You can spend a lot of time and power the harder you push it.

Can you comment on the actual availability of these and when you can ship if I decide to buy?

Last I heard about 10 days ago was that you had NONE on hand.

The halving event introduces a great deal of uncertainty into  mining profit and loss calculations. The only thing we know for certain is that the reward will be cut in half, and as a result there will be 1800 BTC produced in a day (roughly). What we don't know is:

1) What will the BTC price be before and after the halving?

2) How will the humans respond in terms of their willingness to pay for X Th/s of mining hardware?

3) Presumably some mining operations will have to give up, since they may not be able to cover their fixed costs. Some think that will longer term reduce amount of hash rate. I think it will reduce the price of used mining gear.

The difficulty will be unchanged, and increasing your hash rate to try and compensate won't have any effect past the next difficulty adjustment. Your electric bill won't change. You'll leave work on Friday getting Y BTC/day, and on Monday you'll be getting half that.

Some folks have tried to look at the previous halving (i.e. from 50 BTC/block down to the present 25 BTC/block). That was a while ago, and there wasn't nearly the network capacity and investment in hardware and infrastructure.

My thinking is that the current ASIC vendors wish to make all they can in terms of hardware in the fear that the price that folks will pay for hardware will decline leading up to, and following the halving.

Lot's of speculation on what will happen then.

The comment on the "Block Reward being reduced to 12.5 BTC" (aka the halving) is right on the money. That event is not accounted for in most of the on-line BTC "profit calculators".

One minor quibble. The expected date of the "halving" is more like July than April. Some quick Google research will get you a moderately accurate date.

Sort answer: NO

While the 14Ga wire is better, it then funnels all the power into a just ONE 12V pin on the connector. That pin isn't rated for more than about 7-8 Amps, and that assumes it's a nice solid fit. Much better to have all the pins carrying power. I saw one setup that has a single 14Ga wire that  then was split to the 3 pins on the connector. Much better.

Assuming you are measuring power consumption "at the wall" using a common "Kill a Watt" device, the most likely explanation is that the two power supplies differ in their efficiency. Power supplies are NOT 100% efficient in converting 120VAC (i.e. at the wall) to the 12VDC (i.e. the output plugs from the power supply).  Some power supplies ar 94% efficient, others can be as low as 80% efficient.

Do some Google research using terms like "ATX Power Supply Efficiency". You'll learn a great in doing so.