I made that pick 3 days ago, page 6 of this thread:

Some reason it never made it to the list.  Not sure what you can do for alh at this point.  If I win I'll give him a tip I guess.
Phil, please fix, thanks!

Yes, you have a chance at solving a block with 10TH.  The last solo block solve was a 7TH rental I believe.  It's a long shot, but not as long as some.  I'm solo mining with an S3+, someone hit a solo block with one of those a few months ago.

The "high price increase of BTC" actually helps you earn your money back faster, it's a good thing!

This.

I bet that the quantity of small miners sold to individual "home miners" would surpass the quantity of large miners sold only to data center type organizations.  Bitcoin started in garages around the world and it can still thrive there, all we need is the hardware - compact, relatively quiet, and affordable.

The first post has errors, I have pointed them out in this thread a few times.  For one thing, none of the hex values should have the leading 0 on them.

5.2.0 bfgminer does not support the compac stick (in may enumerate as a U3, though, I can't remember).

5.3.0 supports the compac stick, but you have to use --set cbm:clock=<hex value>, or you can use RPC pgaset (I posted in this thread and bfg support thread about that).

5.4.0 supports the compac stick and --set compac:clock.

So here's another mystery to add to the U3 story.  I've been running 1 U3 for several weeks now and it has been behaving "normally".  Today I turned my S3+ back on and, for no other apparent reason, the U3 now runs at a 13%-15% error rate.  If I turn off the S3+ the errors drop back down to "normal" (for this unit normal HW error is ~ 3%).  They are both powered by the same PSU (800W gold rated, plenty of juice for them both), but that is the only common thread.  Isn't that peculiar?  Anyone else had a similar experience?

Well aside from the cost of the equipment, which depending what you are looking at is nothing to slouch at, electricity would be your only other real expenditure (assuming you own the building that houses your gear and stuff).  Efficiency of the miner and electricity cost are directly related, so really it's only 1 issue.  But yes, I think electricity cost is the "main problem" with mining today and it ultimately will decide how much hash power you can throw down.  More efficient gears means more hashes for the same electricity use.

I just wish someone would produce an efficient miners that doesn't sound like a jet turbine and cost less than $400, and uses less than 600W - something like an S3 but with new chips.  My S3 is no louder than my desktop computer, but at 0.5TH it is easily outpaced by any of the new gear that is being released like the S7.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the pencil mod is only for underclocking (?), and while I know people do it/did it on the S1 I'm not sure if it was doable on the S3.

Some S3s respond a lot differently to overclocking I have read.  You could try picking up and S3+, they respond to the OC a bit better.

With bitcoin price through the roof (and temps cool enough I actually had to turn my heater on tonight) I've turned my S3 back on as a solo mining dream.  Here's to hoping I can duplicate the success of this thread!  

Mine is oc'd just a little to run about 500GH/s.  It has pulled over 1G shares before, so all I have to do is cross my fingers and hope for 60x past results, lol.

Now we just need you to bring some of that luck to the gekko solo stick club rentals!  A 3-way block split is really cool, especially how it happened, so imagine how cool a 30-way split is going to be!

I'm going to be turning mine back on early at this point and hoping for a quick solo lottery ticket.  Ride this wave while we can, who knows what the price will do tomorrow...

That was an amazing story of bitcoin karma that just played out, I can't believe ya'll hit a block just like that.  Who says this stuff only happens in the movies?  Congrats to the 3 of you, with btc prices where they are even a 3-way split is still a significant haul.

Try the latest 4.9.2 release of cgminer, https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer, it has some fixes to it specific to the U3.  There was one version, it might be 4.9.0, that did not recognize the U3 as a bug.

Make sure the U3 in zadig shows the winusb driver (that it "zadig'd" correctly).

Use --au3-volt 785 and --au3-freq 237.5 in your bat file to start out.

Clear, constructive, and concise don't mean anything unless you add something to the discussion you are posting in.  That is, after all, the ultimate reason for discussion forums to exist.  That is what this campaign looks for.

Well that's pretty amazing that you hit a block for that guy, but what's more amazing is all the rental hash you have pointed at the stick club and not hit one by comparison!

Keep on swinging. 

I bet there would be demand for even a single board version.  Right now "home" miners are desperate for new gear that is both affordable and efficient.  Anything over $1000 I do not consider affordable for a home miner (never mind how fast the S7 sold at full retail+ pricing...), that's a serious expenditure, but a single board for a couple hundred bucks that is close to 1TH would be pretty freaking sweet.  And it should be able to run cool enough that the fan requirements wouldn't necessitate running the thing in a sound proof enclosure.

Since you fail at reading the first post which 1) shows you how to apply to the campaign and 2) answers your question, my guess is the answer will be "no".

Rising coin price coupled with falling temperatures in the northern hemisphere and winter electricity rates, and all this new hardware is going to make the next few months very fun to watch from a difficulty speculation perspective.  Throw the halving in and wow, there's really no saying what things will look like in the near future.

I got a late guess in this round, but I'm glad I did because it's looking to be headed that direction.

Payouts are sent manually by Kano some time after the solved block receives 99 confirmations, which is when the reward is paid by the network for the solved block.

Are you still conducting this experiment and recording data?  I expect you to be on/around week 20, but nothing has been reported since week 12.  Thanks, very interesting study.

Yea, I saw that after posting to this thread and think that's really cool.  My single remaining U3 does ok by itself, it zombies out every day or so, but not more often than that, which is pretty good from experiences I've had.  I also run the U3 in its own cgminer instance which I've found to be more stable than when I have it lumped in with other usb miners.  But heck, a few extra dollars to get a wifi hotspot that keeps my U3 going is money well spent.

I just wish it had a better mining chip and maybe even a little fan so we could see like 15-20GH/s out of it rather than 5.  Maybe that's the next hack someone will work on, a chip-swap...