These power supplies also have really poor power factor correction, which is why they run hot. Fortunately we pay for watts and not volt-amps, but still it's pathetic.

C

There is also the concept of the "dollar auction" aspect to mining; if it no longer becomes profitable you still have a sunk cost, so you continue mining to *minimize* your loss.

Thus difficulty goes up as long as people think they can minimize their losses by mining. Which causes losses to continue to go up.

Moral: People are really bad at math....

Cloud mining is the latest scam. From a math point there is no other way; it's like promising 120% return on PPS or something.

I just took a look at one of these "cloud miners". Ah look, they have "referral bonuses". I wonder if it's another multi-level-marketing scheme/scam....

Good luck :-)

C

Pretty much. This weekend I spent some time building 12 volt buck converters for my shed's 24 volt power system. At the next jump I'm moving my JP out to the shed with the laptop. Then it can mine on the batteries+solar panels through the winter; 50*24=1200 watts per day, panels can put out 1,500+ watts in the winter, so it should be able to run on 100ah of batteries through the evening/night/rain.

Never dull.

C

Naah. Just lost a $400 bid on a beautiful 8k watch on Ebay, it's the place of sad dreams.

I'd buy it for $25 as a curiosity and maybe to run it on a solar panel.

C

So Dana, how's it going? Did the power supply implode yet?

I just ordered a pair of chips myself, if I get them I'll give it a try. Working with the Aoyue and taking memory chips off boards I'm finding that 285c for 30 seconds is enough if the board is preheated to 150c. Haven't tried 100c (recommended values) yet.

C

Interesting side thought: How low could the sale prices on things like this go?

Could the price of 500 erupters drop below that of a 1,500 watt space heater? That might be the minimum price.

C

Technically there is no long term profit, as it is a perfect market. I have most definitely made a short term profit with my BFL 5gh jally, but that is because I bought it in Jan, got it in end of August, and immediately boosted it from 4.5gh to 7.5gh with a $50 dragon. And I bought it before the price bump. So 291.73-210.00=$81 profit minus electrical cost (probably $10-$15)

However you *can* use erupters to generate heat. Now that it's winter run your erupters instead of an electric space heater. Come spring, they will be totally worthless.

C

Just got a friend's Jally in the mail. He's out for awhile, bricked his unit, and I sat down to give it a quick firmware update.

Opened the box, found that he had cut the heat sink (nice) to expose the connector but since my cable is a 20 pin one I had to remove the sink anyway. And it was on *TIGHT*, so tight I was worried the chips were cracked. I don't know about everyone else but I push down on the plate with the heat sink on the table, then screw both screws snug, then give each of them a finger tight twist just a bit. Just a torx bit, no handle.

I'm a little concerned about what's left of the heat sink pads, I might open it up again and replace it with the arctic ice stuff if the temps are high.

Wow. It's at 8.4gh right now to my jally's 7.5. About another gh more power. However his is throwing 8.3% errors on one chip, and his temp is 45to my 43. We both bought the same type of JP (5gh, no upgrade), looks like luck of the draw is there. I think I could get mine to run faster, but I'm going for low errors.

My guess is he has two or three more processors running on one chip, with one throwing errors. So be it.

Anyway, it's up and running, I'll watch the error count and see how it does after 24 hours. But it is nice to mine at 17 GH or so (I have 2 erupters). Good to watch while I think about buying a few more chips to make mine more of a single.

C

Holy cow. I think they're going to start rating returns on the position you are in the US Postal guy's delivery route plus the speed of her truck.....

This is hilarious. And Eclipsemc has had the worst luck (45% and spent the last 22 hours doing a block) in the world. Would have been much better to mine PPS, but Oh well, no time machine.

C

CPI is irrelevant. I'm using gold as the baseline, by all logical reasoning it should be at 3600 an ounce to 4800 an ounce today. It is not, it's around 1200. It was at 289 in 1999-2000 when I bought some.

The reason it is at 1200 now is the same reason it went from 300 to 1800 when there was "no inflation" in the 2000's. There was of course, then a massive deflation.

Gold is.

The reason there is "no inflation" is because an exceptional amount of virtual/fake/real/whatever you call it *money* was destroyed in the last downturn. Especially in house values, the money that people were borrowing against simply ceased to exist.

If it had been paper money that was burned, there would at least have been value created in the form of BTUs of heat, but there wasn't even that.

Thus printing a "trillion" dollars or so simply replaced the M3 type "money" that "vanished".

Kind of weird, but it is what it is, and it is why gold is where it is and inflation is where it is.

C

Eh.... It's a losing game. Due to the wonderful world of difficulty, the most the chips are worth is the cost of BTC they can mine before going obsolete. When you add the risk of trashing your unit and the difficulty of soldering BGA, it's way more worth it to just buy BTCs directly.

But of course we're not normal people. :-)

Ok, I've got a small Aoyue rework station myself, and I have done a fair bit of SMD work on IGBT drivers with a preheater element as well. So it might not be impossible for me to do (never done BGA either). Hm, I do have some old craptops, maybe I can practice on removing and installing their BGA cpus this weekend.

What's the worst that can happen?

For the list, what temps did you use and how long did you keep the heat on them? Given that you have a success, info is good.

I used the artic pads on my JP when I reassembled, and it seemed to transfer the heat fairly well when I jumped to 7.25 (One of my chips is crummy, so I can't make . I have a friend shipping me his JP that was hashing stock at 5.8gh that he bricked, two day USPS Priority shipping and the stupid thing is still in MA. Talk about sad ships. :-) I'll compare the temps between his and mine (mine is at 41c now) and see if having more ALUs online brings up the temp.

But it sounds like each chip is adding another 10-15 degrees to the sink, since the fan don't run any faster temp goes up. Are you running it open, or with the shroud on?

As for the PS, the stock one has a really crappy power factor of like .55, so it's already overloaded. A PFC corrected power supply would go a long way towards making it better but since we pay for watts and not for how sad we are with the lead/lag on power cycles people don't care much.

This might really work once it gets super cold out there.

Anyway, once I get his going I might be able to set aside some time this weekend to practice, then next weekend to risk my unit. Someone is selling chips for $40 on Ebay, that's probably high I'll see if he would accept $60 for two. Next week might be less, in perfect Crassus style.

Thanks for the info.

Wow, congratulations! Chips are tougher than I thought. Question: How did you solder the chips on? Air tool plus box tip? Did you use a board pre-heater? Now I *really* want a pair of chips. Or maybe six...... :-)

I'm impressed with the heat; if you dial the speeds back to slower clocks can you get the temps down? I've noticed my JP went from pretty cool at 5gh to warm at 7 and hotter by 7.5+ so I dropped it to 7.3 or so and it's a happy little clam.

C

Well, if you want to see the impact of the "small miners" (I'm thinking FPGA and lower) take a step back in time and look at that report from say March/April, before the ASICs hit.

That level of hashing should be all of the inefficient miners, and in an optimal world if they all quit total hashing would drop by that amount. Yes, it's significant, and yes you can finally get a BFL FPGA for your collection (that's why they are all over Ebay), but it's not that much compared to emerging ASICs.

So difficulty will not slow down from that. Nailing all the BFL ASICs might make more of a difference (my Jally will age out in Jan or so) but by then the 500-600gh things should be out.

We shall see. Block creating might be slower due to the doubling of difficulty, but it will probably recover. I wonder when the 10gh/s erupters will go out of style. Probably Jan/Feb as well.

People are irrational. I demonstrate this myself in that I have *not* put my 7.25gh Jally up for auction. They seem to go for $300-$400, and there is no way in God's green heaven that I will make that much in bitcoin going forward. My decision not to put it up for sale *NOW* is equally irrational.

Ah well.

C

If someone wants to send me a pair of chips to check I'd be happy to try to install them on my board.

C

The difficulty will simply follow the overall hashing power. If every asic were to implode tomorrow, the difficulty would drop to pre-asic levels.

The more asics that come online, the greater the difficulty. If someone figured out how to do quantum bitcoins or something the difficulty would just jump to that level.

Difficulty will go down when there is less hashing power. Which will not happen, as when people quit diff will go down and more people will get back into the game. And people will mine at a loss to minimize their investment loss.

Queen's race.