There's a test stratum URL for merge mining. I've had my miners pointed at it for weeks with no issue.

But there's been no news either. Hopefully merge mining will be out of beta soon.

Unfortunately I don't have a 1200 watt PS, and a new one would be more than a Falcon is worth.

Is it possible to drive these with a pair of lower wattage PSUs? I probably can scrounge 2 980 watt units.

Alternatively does the OP have any used PSUs for sale that would work?

So these need a power supply and controller (Raspberry Pi) to run them?

If so, what's the recommended power supply wattage?

Nextdifficulty.com says 0.3%.

My cat is getting excited!

The litecoin price went up, but the halving hasn't happened yet. It's a little less than a month away.

Even better was the fact that nearly 2 petahash left before the good luck.

They're back now, but we had juicy good luck with fewer mouths to feed, so a slightly larger reward for those of us who stuck it out.

My cat took a long nap, so we missed out on the prime real estate this time. Grudgingly he's opting for this slight increase:

+0.26% to +0.50%

It's probably going to be higher. But beggars can't be choosers...

This!

I'm thinking the same thing. Let's hope Sidehack can parlay the stick thing into the miner of substance that we all want to buy.

In the meantime, I'm also thinking about running my upcoming Sidehack sticks solo. Gotta play to win...

Hats off to the OP. He's got solid brass clankers, as we say in my family (we're Irish too)!

I sure hope that these Sfard units (or something based on their chips) make some ROI sense in the near future. But the current price is nuts, even if the SF100 wasn't "sold out".

Like many of you, I've got that must-have-new-hardware itchy feeling. Rather than waste time or money on Sfards, I ordered a pair of Sidehack sticks. I'm hoping that will hold me over

I don't care if the sticks ever ROI. They're more of a fun toy than anything else.

Also I want Sidehack to be successful so that he can start making the kind of home mining hardware that I'm really interested in.

Maybe it's the zoomhash guy in disguise. He was probably tired of cloud mining complaints taking over this other thread.

Or may it's the guy who took over philipma1957's coupon for two units. That price for two is similar.

Regardless this is a very odd listing.

And without answering any questions, he's started a new thread selling two A2 units:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1128530.new#new

All I can say is, wow...

Now you've started a second thread, selling two A2s instead of just one, looking for more money than the first thread, with what is likely another stock photo, ignoring requests to prove you own the hardware by providing a photo of the units for sale with your user ID and date on a piece of paper?

Here's the original thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1128985.0

All this with an account that has 11 posts.

So what happened? Did your original unit spontaneously reproduce? It's a miracle!

You are wasting our time. Prove you have actual hardware or just go away.

Thanks for the response. I already have another wallet, so I'll use that one.

I agree that in general message signing is not needed for a mobile wallet. This is an unusual circumstance where the seller requires a signed message. Very rare in my experience.

Does Breadwallet support signed messages? I've searched around and it doesn't look like it supports this feature.

I really like Breadwallet, but I have to make a purchase today that requires an additional signed message. I guess I have to use a different wallet for this purchase.

Maybe the signed message feature could be added as an x-callback-url? Although that could get complex because the message would probably have to be URL encoded in order to work.

If you're buying direct, then you'll also need to sign a message, according to the instructions.

I've never signed a message from a Coinbase account, but I just did a google search and it looks like they do support message signing.

Wow, that sounds really exciting. There's been so little coming from the usual mining hardware companies recently.

Having a real alternative, designed with home miners in mind, is very interesting.

It's worth picking up some sticks just to support your larger effort!

Another thought on the Trezor. If you mine directly to a Trezor address (like I do), then you can end up with lots of inputs. And if you don't have much hash power (like me) then there's lots of small inputs

If you go to spend these inputs later, it can take a very long time. I believe this is because lots of little amounts translate to lots of signing operations when spending. Since the Trezor processor performs all of the signing operations in the device itself (which is the whole point security-wise), and it's not very fast, it can take minutes (or longer) to complete.

To deal with this I have two Trezor "accounts", which effectively translates to key sets. My main account is for savings. The secondary account is where I receive mining proceeds.

Periodically when I reach an arbitrary mined threshold (like 1 bitcoin), I transfer from the mining account to a receiving address on the main savings account. This consolidates the many received inputs and makes later spending from the main account more streamlined.

Note that other than this consolidation, I rarely spend directly from the Trezor. I usually buy things from Breadwallet on my phone. Periodically I top off my phone's Breadwallet from the Trezor, but I limit the amount to a few hundred dollars worth.

This way I get the security of a hardware wallet for savings, but the convenience of a mobile wallet for spending. So far this has worked well for me.

True. If your Trezor is stolen, you have to assume that the thief will eventually guess your PIN. So you have to move your funds as fast as you can.

But if you don't have a trusted computer (and therefore don't want to risk a local software wallet), you could use a "cloned" Trezor to move the funds temporarily to another wallet (maybe Coinbase if you have no other options). At that point, it wouldn't matter what the thief does because the funds associated with the keys in the device he stole would be worthless.

Then you could initialize the backup Trezor from scratch with a brand new, uncompromised seed, then transfer from your temporary wallet back to the "new" Trezor. Since it has a different seed and key set, it's just as secure as a brand new Trezor.

I agree that this scenario is a bit of a stretch. In my case, I've assumed that if my Trezor is stolen, I'll use Electrum on my laptop to quickly recover the seed, then send the Bitcoin to my backup Trezor, which I would initialize with a new seed. I'm on Macintosh and am security conscious, so I think the brief possibility of exposure of possibly compromised keys is worth the speed to move the coins.

But other people on more vulnerable operating systems (not to start an OS war or anything) might want to go the the other route for safety sake. In this scenario, having a cloned Trezor just for the ability to safely move the coins out of the hands of an attacker isn't necessarily a bad idea.

Your point about not being able to clone a trezor is only partially accurate. A trezor is basically a hardware HD wallet. During its initialization process, you're provided with the 24 word passphrase which is the human readable representation of the seed value for the wallet.

You can definitely recover another Trezor with the same backed up passphrase and both units will have the same seed and key set. Basically the restored backup would be identical to the original.

Currently I have a backup unit, but I've kept it in the box and have not used it to recover my main unit's seed value. That's because I figured that if I never use the backup, I might as well leave it in the box unopened. Maybe in the future they'll come out with a Trezor 2 and I can sell or give away my unopened backup.

As an alternative to having a backup Trezor, you could restore the passphrase to a software wallet. I think that Electrum V2 supports the same standard, but I'm not sure.

Of course you'd only want to restore to a software wallet if it was an emergency, like your Trezor was stolen and you want to move the funds out fast to another wallet under your control.

I won't comment on their BOM or whether the price is reasonable or not. If you think it's too much then don't buy it.

I have two trezors. One as a backup. I've always managed to get a deal and not pay full price.

My experience with their tech support as been great. They respond quickly and are well informed.

My most recent question to them was regarding using the trezor for both Bitcoin and Litecoin. Their response was knowledgeable and thoughtful.

FYI, you can use the same Trezor For Bitcoin and Litecoin and it generates different key sets on a per coin basis. For Litecoin I use Electrum LTC and for Bitcoin I use myTrezor and Electrum all with the same Trezor device.

It's really a nice product and worth it for me.