Thanks for your fast response!

Good luck getting back online. That sucks to have your miners off this close to the halving.

The email regarding block 419561 just came through. Maybe you kicked the server?

The site is still not reporting new blocks. It says:

Time Since Last Block:
47 Hours 39 Minutes ( 419278 )

The last block (419561) was 45 minutes ago.

Also, my Dashboard is showing all zeros which I know is not the case.

The site has been very slow as well. Maybe the DB needs to be optimized?

I got a B3. It was kind of a sweet spot because BTC was at a high point, and I got it with enough time on this side of the halving to be significant. I actually have a chance to ROI it in BTC terms.

But the other batches have not made sense. In fact I just ran the numbers on B5 and it's worse than B3.

These are going to have to come down in BTC price terms before I'll get any more of them. I expect that will happen soon after the halving.

Or maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt and someone will start to compete with Bitmain. That would help drive prices down.

Whatever happened to BW's miner, for example? They been mining with them and were supposed to offer them to the public last month.

You can send it to me if you want

I've got free power and enough headroom to handle an S7.

For grins I scp'd a copy of bmminer from my S9 so that I could poke around with it. This is from a stock B3 unit without any firmware upgrade.

I used the strings command and searched for "midstate_change". I could not find it. Although it's clear from reviewing some of the function names that bmminer is a modified cgminer (as many have suspected).

Does anyone know what else to look for to get a sense of whether or not ASIC boost is included in this binary? Maybe someone knows how to disassemble the miner software? I'm a software engineer but have to admit that I'm better at writing code than reversing it.

There's a reddit post today indicating that the S9 supports ASIC boost. The thread included the stratum command for enabling it:


Apparently it only gets enabled on pools that support it. If there's any truth to this then I assume that ant pool enables ASIC boost.

There's a fair amount of negativity around ASIC boost in general. If the S9 uses patented technology to mine faster for Bitmain or ant pool users than anywhere else then people are not going to be happy.

Not that it will stop anyone from buying. If people are willing to buy without a hope of ROI I doubt that a theoretical philosophical issue will stop them. Bitmain is the only game in town...

Please note that I have no idea if the reddit post is accurate. Probably a good idea to wait before taking out the pitchforks. It would be good to get an official statement from Bitmain, but I doubt that will happen.

Well, your ZPool revenue quote was from today, and you extrapolated on it by multiplying that value by 30 days claiming a 1.3365 BTC return. Since that's the mathematical basis of your argument for your price, sounds like you're saying that people will consistently make that amount if they buy your S7s and point at ZPool.

I just don't see SHA257 alt coins making anywhere near that amount. Either that or I've missed out on a huge opportunity while mining straight BTC.

That said, you can sell your S7's for whatever price the market is willing to pay. Better be quick though, because the halving is almost here...

Let me get this straight. Currently that amount of hash rate makes about 0.03209 BTC a day mining straight BTC after a 1% fee with zero electricity costs at the current difficulty (before the halving).

You're telling me that ZPool consistently makes 0.0125 BTC more per day (a 39% increase) mining alt coins than straight BTC mining?

That seems either far fetched or unsustainable.

FYI Nicehash rentals are paying rig renters a mere 5% over current BTC earnings. Why aren't people renting in droves, pointing at ZPool, and making a 30% profit?

EDIT - Fixed some of my numbers and rephrased the "opportunity".

Bump.

-0.9 = edonkey

This guess is from our male indoor cat. He unfortunately got out while we were on vacation, but my oldest son got him back. What a relief.

Not sure about his guess though. I selfishly hope he's right though because I'm mining again. Got a B3 S9 last week.

It's too bad that BTC went down since B3. That makes B4 more expensive than B3 in BTC terms.

Even B3 was a stretch for me at 2.9 (after the unexpected duty charge from UPS). I'll wait for a better priced batch.

Block!

Yeah I'm back baby. But I didn't find the block.

These are still available. They make great starter miners.

PM me if you're interested.

One of the Corsair high static pressure fans went out, so I replaced them both with brand new fans. Now the fans are "pimp my miner" purple.

This hardware is a tank and keeps chugging along. Let me know if there's any interest.

So I paid the stupid duty to UPS (I figure I can contest it after the fact) and got my B3 S9 today. I deployed it at our data center powering it with a 2880 watt PSU from Finksy. Worked out of the box as advertised with no surprises.

It worked so well in fact that I tried bumping up the frequency to 650 (remember that B3 has default frequency of 550 and a correspondingly lower advertised hash rate). Hardware errors went from 0 to a manageable 0.0002% after a couple of hours. That boosted the hash rate from 12-ish THs to 13.6. Definitely worth it.

Temps are pretty cool since this is an air-conditioned DC. But it's interesting that each successive chain increases in temp:

Chain	HW	Temp(PCB)	Temp(Chip)
1	8	49	82
2	3	53	83
3	33	58	90

Not surprisingly the hottest board has the worst hardware error rate. This seems to match what others have found regarding inconsistent cooling and airflow to the boards.

But all in all the results are not too bad.

FYI, I wrote to Bitmain about this and they claim that they haven't changed the shipping codes. The implication is that it's the dollar figure triggering the difference, or UPS has gotten gready.

The fact that every S9 was in excess of $2k while every S7 was under ($1.8k I think) leads me to think that we're in that gray area that Phil indicated where anything north of $2k might be interpreted as commercial and hence subject to duty.

I'm going to take this up with UPS, but I doubt it will change anything.

Bitmain needs to understand that the $2k threshold has an impact on the US market. They should return to pricing that's more sane.

They've been especially greedy this time. They probably would have made much more money if they had priced the S9 lower, assuming that they could fill the unit demand.

I bought one B3 unit and noticed an exception from UPS. Apparently I owe $46.53 in duties. I'm in California.

I told UPS that I've bought similarly priced units from Bitmain before and never had to pay duties. The UPS service person told me that Bitmain must have paid the duties previously, but did not this time.

I know that Phil got hit up for duties too, but the thinking was that he had two units shipped at the same time (even if they were different orders). Maybe Bitmain is pushing the duty cost onto us now and didn't before?

Seems inconsistent to me. And very irritating...

Interesting. Your country's standard voltage is 220-ish, but some of the windows across the way have red triangles on them. I would have thought that you're in Japan. They also use red triangles to signal to firemen that those windows are breakable.

My family and I just came back from our second vacation in Japan. It was my fifth trip (the rest were business). We saw enough buildings with red triangles in the windows that I googled it.

Since Japan uses the 110 volt standard, like the US, you can't be there. It's a shame really because that would explain the anime fascination, unless that's just an homage to Kano's shift names.

Anyway, I don't mean to pry. I just thought the red triangle thing was interesting. Hope you figure out a good cooling solution.

Sorry for the OT diversion. Now back to our regularly scheduled S9 programming...

I've never used MRR but I'm curious. Do you just use MRR for pool management, or do you actually rent out your rigs? Maybe you've configured a high profitability requirement so that they're never rented?

I see that you've configured all of your pools to be MRR instances. I'd be concerned if all of the MRR servers went off line, or if they were hit with a denial of service attack. Maybe the last failover pool URL should be a different pool.