I won't be sad about a drop like that as long as it teaches these major players a good lesson, I am on the safe side due to my power rate but I can see how the majotity of small miners will be forced to shutdown.

I do NOT want to see the whole mining industry controled by 4 or 5 large U.S players, the first bad thing that comes out of it would be mining only "clean blocks" by imposing sensorship of all addresses that the world police aka the U.S put some sanctions on.

Gear prices did loosen up a bit recently, but nothing close to their ROI/profitability in both fiat and BTC, but this is pretty normal, it has always been the case, gear prices go up very fast when the ROI goes down, but the opposite takes a lot longer, I still remember that right after the halving nothing has changed despite the fact that profitability was cut by half immediately, it took about 2 months for prices to adjust accordingly.

Now compared to when prices were at +60k, profitability is below 50% given the difficulty increments, but for gear prices to fall 50% we will need to remain in this region or go to worse places for months, but then you have all those pre-orders and Bitmain does not seem to be in a rush to sell gears at much lower prices, so this time around things can be very different because of the big boys that joined the games, they make all the old Chinese mining whales seem like small fish in a huge ocean.

One scenario I see possibility coming is that some of the larger players go bankrupt if prices don't rebound, all of those big players paid a premium for gears that they have yet to receive, their investors will want some return on the billions of dollars they threw at mining gears, and since we all know that BTC price can stay low for a year or so, some of those players will have a very rough time, also the selling pressure from miners will increase which will make things even worse for everybody, especially those that have yet to receive enough gears to use the infrastructure which did cost them millions and millions.

With that being said, I personally doubt we enter a prolonged bear market, this massive correction wave will be over soon and prices will rebound, with that being said, since BTC price is nearly 50% down and gear prices are not even 15% down, it makes exactly no sense to invest in mining gears now as opposed to buying BTC instead.

 

Russia is hammering bitcoin at the exact right/worst time, if the ban proposal is accepted and applied it will bring the difficulty down, if it will be just vapor then it has just caused a price drop and will not affect the hashrate by much.

With that being said, some of those large players will likely start to migrate elsewhere just in case a sudden ban is activated, the migration process should take sometime and might at least just slow down the rise caused by the large U.S players. Interesting times ahead to say the least.

It has its benefits, it probably runs a lot cooler, dust-free, a lot less noise, but at the end of the day, it's just an overclocked S19 that will sell for a lot of money, judging by the previous hydro version Bitmain had which is the S9 hydro and how unpopular it was, I don't see how this one is going to be any different unless the price tag makes a lot of sense.

The S19 XP is a lot more effienct with 21w/th vs the hydro with 27.5w/th, which is pretty similar to the S19 pro.

The main strong point would be the noise part, but what I don't understand about the design is the 3 phase (5445w), this isn't home grade mining, so it has to be industrial for the most part, and industrial-grade miners don't give a damn about noise as far as I am concerned, however, a lot of companies gamble with their clients' money, which is why I won't be surprised if they buy these gears at a premium.

This one adjustment is going to sting, at current prices and the next diff, those that pay 15 cents or higher will be hardly making any profit even with the 17 series gears, and then with the slightest increment in the next epoch, they will be mining at a loss, if the difficulty continues at a similar rate, then by Q2 anyone with 10 cents or more will need to have the 19 series or the equivalent to be able to mine at profit.

Of course, all of that is irrelevant if the prices were to go up from here, but we all know that BTC can remain in the same price range for many months, s19 pro still sells for 12k which is a joke at current profitability.

Not true, the actual manufacturing happens in Malaysia (recently also in Indonesia) and so these gears are not made in China and won't be treated as Chinese products when they arrive at the U.S, in fact, many Bitmain gears that are located in HK are made in one of those two countries, it seems like Bitmain is trying to fully migrate from China, probably because

1- The Chinese Ban.
2- To get away with no China tariff.

It's pretty obvious by now that the biggest players are located in the U.S, it's to bitmain and their large clients' best interest that Bitmain moves outside of China, the 25% saved is good for everyone, Bitmain can just add 5% or 10% on the initial sale price and the U.S clients will still happily accept it since they can save 20% or 15%.

I still don't understand why do they move many of these non-Chinese made gears back to HK, maybe they can't handle the logistics outside of China yet, but the way I see it is that it's only a matter of time before every Bitmain gear becomes non-Chinese made, and that's bad news for the difficulty.

You are right if it's only just a matter of choice between old and new gears, but if they have more power than what they can fill with the new gears and those less effienct gears are for sale at pretty cheap, why not? it's not like they can buy an unlimited number of gears, Bitmain and the rest will always be limited by something, I highly doubt they can satisfy everybody, there will always be a need for more gears.

Based on this it is safe to assume that the only thing that could slow down the difficulty rise would be the manufacturing rate.

If hundreds of MW are brought in for under 3 cents in the U.S it is only a matter of time before existing gears start to move there so even those who are forced to shut down else where will have to migrate or sell thier gears to the folks in the U.S.

How likely or otherwise unlikely for the U.S to follow the Chinese path and ban or at least restrict mining? Pretty much unlikely IMO... Which means tough times ahead for the rest of us, even the smaller players in the U.S won't be having lotsa fun.

It's good that you have picked this one, as I said before I personally trust zeusbtc and can vouch for them, I have had many successful deals with their founder even long before I knew he was the owner of zeusbtc, a very genuine and trustworthy person, but if zeusbtc tell you they don't guarantee the folks listed on that list, then you should be careful, I know they don't randomly list everyone but I highly doubt that the due diligence is good enough.


I know that "Alpha Miner" which is owned by Mike and their website is www.alphaminer.io is legit, not sure if this "Alpha repair" is owned by the same company or not, I will hopefully have the answer by tomorrow and will let you know.

Edit: Mike replied, they are not related to the "Alpha repair" at all, using a similar name to a company that already exists makes me doubt them, I would be extra careful. 

How on earth do they manage to get this rate? if this is actually true and they can acquire more power at this rate, they will be the ones setting the new average, so anyone with say 5c or more will be at risk pretty soon, unlike what the majority of us now think, 2.5 cents/kWh is like finding a glitch in an online game.


It won't work, this business has grown way too large for any community to handle, we are now at an enterprise level, and it all boils down to how cheap you can buy electricity, which IMO takes a lot more than just collecting money, you need to know the right people and the right resources if you manage to get 2.5c Khw rate, be sure as hell that you will get all the funds you want, but how on planet earth one can secure 350MW at 2.5c, it's like magic in today's world.

It's safe to assume that the vast majority (in fact if I do want to say 100% but I am afraid of being unjust to 1 or 2 manufacturers) of non branded PSUs are trash, not only a risk to the miner itself but even to your own property since they are a fire hazard.

If this was a device that runs for a few hours day while you are next to it -- it might pass, but having it run 24/7 unattended for the most part is a recipe for disaster.

Buying a used miner isn't a good idea if both parties don't fully trust one another, a video proof means nothing as far as i am concerned, you could have gotten a broken miner from the get-go, of course, things could go wrong with shipping and handling and whatnot, or the buyer could be dishonest, so the seller can't just refund everyone who claims they received a dead miner.



Maybe it's for the best, I only heard negative stuff about this model from various sources, the PSU has a very high failure rate, and hash boards are poorly built, overall a bad gear from what I heard so far, which is probably why it sells a lot cheaper than its rivals Whatsminer and Bitmain.

No Altcoins discussion please  


This is likely the case, I would take the data shown on Btc.com with a grain of salt, since the hashrate that they show there isn't the "reported" hashrate but rather "block-based" estimate, it can be very inaccurate especially if you are looking at the 24h data, a pool that is supposed to hit say 10 blocks and ends up hitting only 7 in that span of 24 hours will show a 30% loss in their hashrate.

I believe looking at the reported hashrate from the pool's page itself (assuming it's honest) could be somehow more accurate, since only they know how many shares and at what difficulty they are getting, so lucky and unlucky days should have little to no impact on those figures, but well, you never know if they are honest and thus could be far from accurate too.

This leaves us to the only accurate way and that is the total network block finding, which is only affected by luck and some global incidents like miners shutting down or internet issues at some part of the world.

I have not been following much lately because I have to take care of my daughter, she has been sick for a while, but my view on the difficulty topic has not changed much, we are only going to to go up, the small guys that pay over 10c/kWh and don't have the most effienct gears are soon going to be forced to shut down, giants that keep buying  <30w/th gears will keep coming in and they have plenty of room for a price drop unless we fall to numbers that nobody is talking about (like 5k or 10k BTC), nothing is going to change.

An interesting read regarding Spain and Bitcoin mining > https://u.today/spanish-lawmaker-proposes-turning-spain-into-bitcoin-mining-hub

I finished a deal with grave like a week ago, she is still trustworthy and honest.

The correct telegram id is @gracezhou1993

That's a long shot, I doubt that anyone will go this far just to get mining gears at a cheaper cost, it also does not make sense to make your own miner just to use them, and thus it has to be more like a complete company such as Bitmain, and since not everything is equal here, it will be extremely hard to compete with Bitmain in this field.

Also being a miner you don't really want to harm your own profit by increasing the difficulty this way, it's wiser and easier to just secure the majority of Bitmain production even if it was less than what you actually want.


That is easily achievable by the current production of Bitmain, Canaan, MicroBT, and the other small guys, in fact, 2x  in 18 months from where we are now isn't too far stretched.

You are right, but keep in mind that it is just one entity.
 

They are still receiving gears from previous orders, their total hashrate is estimated to be at around 30eh after this order is fully delivered by year-end, the good news is that BTC hashrate is already so huge, it takes A LOT to do 2x or 3x, let alone 5x and the other figures we see on small coins.

There are many things that can go wrong, of course, the majority of them are probably things that aren't easy to fix, but let's just hope this solves it or at least a part of it, please report your results back.

Source : https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/12/23/2357553/0/en/Marathon-Digital-Holdings-Bitcoin-Mining-Fleet-To-Reach-23-3-Exahash-after-Latest-Purchase-of-BITMAIN-s-ANTMINER-S19-XP.html

Heck, Mara bought 78,000 S19 xps that they expect to receive between July to dec of next year, that's close to a 11EH, it does not seem like Bitmain has any production issues or any chip shortage b.s anymore, it's pretty clear that they have decided to change their customers and that's all about it, we don't know who else is making such large orders in secret, Mara folks need to publish this info given who they are, I assume many other folks rather just buy and mine without having to tell everyone about it.

Let's just hope we don't hit 2x diff by the end of 2023 as that isn't going to sting.

Op here is the link to the topic https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5032987.0

It was made for T9 miner but the same logic applies to other miners, just make sure you follow the steps.

The first thing I would do is try custom firmware like Vnish (Awesomeminer or Asic.to) just to rule out any firmware related issues, and then you could try to extract the hex from a working hash board and write it to the bad hash board using something like Pickit3, if you don't know how to do that let me know and I'll try to find the thread made by one of the members here.