Well, the conspiracy theorist in me says the increased hash is directly from Bitmain turning on those S7s in their data centers.  We were certainly right that the S5+ was nothing more than them liquidating their remaining stock of BM1384 chips.  Imagine the same form factor with the BM1385 chips.  That'd be about 14.6TH/s for 3630W.  Pretty sweet.

Alright, so this upcoming difficulty adjustment is likely going to follow the 5% trend according to my tea leaves and chicken entrails.  Also, Marty McFly paid me a visit earlier and told me so.  I tried to steal the DeLorean, but no such luck - he said he knew I was going to try.  Stupid time travelers... think they know everything.

Aren't there a few pools out there that offer TOR connectivity?  I swear I've seen a few... of course I could be wrong here.

See... the funny thing about your statement is that it was proved absolutely wrong.  BAN claimed they had the highest paying pool, yet I showed that during the entire time of BAN's existence, had you mined on p2pool you would have done better.

Hexa is 1000 Peta.

See the effect that Phil has??? 

While it is quite unlikely, it certainly falls within the realm of possibility that AntPool could have gone for over 10 hours without finding a block.  Of course, it's also just as likely that they tried to do something like change their pool's coinbase sig and just completely screwed the pooch.

Like it was written just above me, Bitmain is not known for its transparency.

Hey... if you're going to park your van full of miners near a charging station, why not piggyback on the wireless network from the Starbucks right there on the corner, too?

In all seriousness, owning your own hardware requires a bit more dedication than saying, "I'm going to try my luck and throw a bunch of rented hash at CK's pool."  In case 1, you're limited by how much available power you've got, cooling, all the standard crap associated with running your own hardware.  In case 2 it's just a few clicks.

Another benefit of the rentals is that you can drastically alter your hash rate again with only a few clicks.  Considerably harder to do that when you've got your own gear.

I think I'd laugh pretty hard if I saw some guy with a large van sitting in front of a few charging stations powering a bunch of miners.  Mobile data center!

Definitely the wrong thread, but to answer his question, UNO can be merge mined with standard Bitcoin Core nodes.  It implements auxpow.  For example, you can setup a p2pool node to merge mine a whole host of other coins, including UNO.  It's pretty trivial to do so.

You run into the problem regardless of which rental site you utilize.  You are placing the trust in the rig owners and the rental site operators not to have malicious intent.  As Phil's example above shows, I can very easily guarantee that you and I would both get paid, but make the pool suffer.  Or as the case would be here in a solo pool, I can guarantee that I get paid, and you don't.

Ultimately, it's up to you to decide whether or not you trust the operators enough to pay them to utilize their gear.  Are there going to be people out there looking to scam you?  Always.  Are there also people out there who are providing an honest service?  Absolutely.

Exciting times indeed .  I'd love for a few difficulty decreases or a nice boost in BTC price (just so I can keep my S3s plugged in), but I don't see the former happening any time soon, and the latter would likely only exacerbate the rising difficulty.

Crashing and burning... down 1000 points at the open... major players (Goldman, Apple, Merck, etc) getting hammered (losses of more than 10% per share).

BTC price is still around the $220 mark.  I'm going to go with another positive difficulty increase.  I'd like +3.51 to +3.75 please.

Yeah, I saw that just a minute ago.  I edited another post where I mentioned the second batch.  At least I didn't copy the scam link, but just said that it was available .  They did a pretty good job of mocking up Bitmain's site.

Define "fairly low" power costs.  Let's say that you could indeed get an S5 and PSU for your $400 budget.  As of right now, that S5 expects to mine 0.01071BTC a day, which at current exchange rates equates to about $2.36 a day.  Even if you had completely free power, and everything stayed exactly as it is now, it would take you just about 169.5 days to make back the $400 you initially invested.

If you were looking to sit back and make gobs of cash, then to use another travel cliche, that ship sailed a long time ago.  Long gone are the days where you could plug in your PC, let it run and mine coins.  Even now, purchasing advanced mining hardware is a game of margins.  The guys who win are those who have access to lots of extremely cheap power and can purchase hardware in bulk at a discount.

Had you purchased those S3s during the initial sales period last year, then you likely would have made some money (again dependent upon your power costs).  Unfortunately now, those are outdated tech.  I've still got mine running, but as the difficulty continues to increase, they make less and less BTC every day.  It is very likely that soon I will unplug them.  In truth, they've lasted about 8 months longer than I thought they would when I initially purchased them - due to relatively small increases in difficulty this year.

Mining solo means you are taking your chances and hoping to solve a block on your own.  The result is that you get the full block reward (currently 25BTC).  Either you hit, or you don't.  Mining in a pool means you, along with everyone else, are attempting to find the block solution.  If and when a block is indeed found, the 25BTC is distributed to the miners according to some known payout scheme (like PPS, PPLNS, etc).  In other words, you get lots of little payments.

The pool I described in my first post is run by -ck.  He, along with kano, are the guys who wrote the cgminer software.  This "solo pool" works just like any other pool, except that when a block is found, only the person who found the block gets the reward.  It's not about combined hashing power like in a traditional pool.  Basically, you're solo mining without needing to run your own full Bitcoin node.  The pool does that bit for you (and so far they've found 88 blocks).

What happened to BAN was exactly what was predicted: it failed.  There was no way the pool could operate as it was advertised.  It was simply an unsustainable model.  Time and time again it was posted that BAN could not continue, yet people continued to mine there.  Oh well.  Hopefully those miners have learned their lessons.

Batch 2 of the S5+ is currently available for sale from Bitmain.

EDIT: as mentioned in the following post, I was incorrect about the availability of a second batch of S5+.  There IS NO SECOND BATCH.  The people propagating the rumor are spreading a scam link.

Such a system doesn't exist.  It all boils down to how much you pay for the electricity the miner will consume.  An S3 will get you 440GH/s for 340W at the wall.  With a BTC price of about $220 USD, that means the S3 would expect to mine about $0.90 a day.  At $0.10 per kWh, your power costs would be about $0.82 a day.

Currently, the most efficient hardware is the S5+ from Bitmain.  It gets you 7.7TH/s at a power draw of 3436W at the wall.  Using the same parameters as above, this would mean you'd expect to mine $15.70 a day with a power cost of $8.25.  Of course, the S5+ is currently sold out, but if you could get it, it's $2307 before shipping and duty/customs/VAT/whatever else you've got to pay in Australia.

EDIT: Correction - the S5+ batch 2 is currently for sale at Bitmain for $2307.

EDIT 2: It appears I was incorrect.  I followed a link that didn't actually go to Bitmain, but a scam copy of the site.  There is no batch 2 of S5+ available on Bitmaintech.com.

Sure.  You stated you had a GigaWatt of available power.  Each S5+ consumes 3436W and gets you 7.7TH/s.  I simply took 1 billion watts and divided by 3436 watts to get 291,036.  That's the number of miners you'd be able to run if you really did have a GigaWatt of power.  Since each gets 7.7TH/s, I multiplied 7.7 by 291036 to get the total number of TH/s you'd have at your disposal.

That's why I stated it was extremely unlikely you have that much available power.  Even the largest data centers measure their power capacity in megawatts.

I am absolutely not wrong here.  XT is the only client that implements BIP101.  It changes the block version as I described.  Therefore, Slush has XT running on one port, and Core running on the other.

If you use the port that is running XT, you not only vote to support BIP101, but you also vote to support the other things that I listed.

There's a very distinct difference between saying "I want larger block sizes" and "I'm using XT".

The more Bitcoin nodes to which your own node is connected, the quicker you will receive transactions and block notifications.  Further, the better connected you are, the less likely chance you have of any blocks you find becoming orphaned.

Power to run a pool... that's actually pretty minimal.  Got a spare server around?

Estimating performance of total power is pretty vague.  It depends on how much of that power you use, and what hardware you have.  For example, let's say you truly can use that entire GigaWatt for nothing but mining gear.  If you used Antminer S5+, you could have ... let's see... just under 300,000 of them?  (A billion watts available, each S5+ takes 3436 Watts...).  I'm sure you don't have that kind of power at your disposal... but just for fun, that would mean 7.7 * 291,036 = 2,240,978 TH/s = 2.24 EH... or roughly 5 times the hashing power of the entire network.  Following this through, you'd expect to make 20,770BTC a day in the current environment.  Of course, you wouldn't really make that for long because with that kind of mining power you'd expect to find a block every 103 seconds or so... so about 830 blocks a day.  You might make that for 2 days, then the difficulty would adjust.

Ok... enough speculation about a scenario that is exceedingly unlikely to occur