The older Scrypt ASICs were made because LiteCoin AT THE TIME was by far the second-highest valued currency, which made the market big enough that the ASIC makers were reasonably sure they could profit from making the ASICs.

 It says a lot about Litecoin (Scrypt) that it's the only coin OTHER THAN BITCOIN (SHA256) to have had multiple years and multiple generations of competition in ASIC-based miners.


 I don't see SegWit having a significant impact on Litecoin. I also suspect it's going to settle back into it's long-term $3.50-$4.50 range quickly after the Bitcoin "potential fork" issues get resolved - and I figure that resolution will also hammer current inflated pricing on most of the altcoins that have seen big rises the past month.

Short term spikes happen all the time on pretty much ALL cryptocoins - most sites that estimate hashrate do it based on time between blocks being solved, which has a significant random factor.

 IMO never pay attention to anything on a hashrate estimate that uses much less than a full DAY to go by.

 Not that the RX 500 line is big - minor process upgrade to the RX 400 series, ballpark 5% clock rate improvement and perhaps a little more efficient per the previews and leaks I've seen so far.

 Seems like AMD is still not interested in betting the farm on HBM yet.

 Mid-April for the release date IIRC the 17th?


 Then Vega looking like about a month after that - but only for higher-end cards, aimed at replacing Fury/FuryX and targeting the GTX 1070 and up.


 Unfortunately, the recent release of the GTX 1080 ti and price drop on the 1080 doesn't seem to have had any effect on 1070 pricing.

 Why repeat the ETH fiasco with DAO?

As a longtime Scrypt miner, I'm happy with Litecoin just breaking out of it's long-time $4 more or less range on the high side. Profitability well over doubled for me today. 8-)


 I just hope it stays above $6 for a while - it took a month or two to drop out of the $5 range when it spiked last year.




 Doge was never intended to be a real coin - devs stated from very early on it was intended as a joke, just that it's meme caught on for a while.
 Doge is nothing but junk now, ever since they decided to allow it to be merge mined it's had NO future on it's own.

Mixing generations like that will work if you use a driver version that supports both.

 It won't be as stable as a general rule though as sticking with same-generation cards.

 For reference, the HD 77xx/78xx/79xx, R9 2xx, and R9 3xx count as the same "generation" as they were all based largely on the same GPU from one "marketing generation" to the next with no more than a "faster ram and bios change between each "marketing generation".

8 amps at "220v" nominal is VERY marginal at best for that power supply if it's anywhere close to full loaded.

 On the other hand, you should be able to use the 1300 watt version of that PS for the rig you have planned and run it QUITE comfortably - and the 1300 will run on an 8 amp 220 connection QUITE comfortably even at full load.

Less than a gig a month - The Virgin plan was "technically" unlimited but that would cap your transfer rate if you exceeded a GB amount per month (but the connection was so SLOW I couldn't tell when the rate cap happened).
 The Exede plan was capped at 5GB a month - then WHAM major speed drop that actually WAS noticeable - but my TOTAL usage almost never was more than that for gaming, net browsing, AND mining - they had a "free zone" 4 or 5 hours in the wee hours of the morning that did not count against the cap that I normally used for BIG patch downloads though.

 Unless I was doing some MAJOR downloading, my total usage a day was consistantly under 100 meg/day - keep in mind that was NOT just mining, and a lot of web pages insist on shoving *high amount of data* video junk at you even when you don't want it (news sites in particular are NOTORIOUS for that).

 I'm pretty sure the mining-only data usage was well under 10 MB/day on a mid-sized home farm with 10-20 mining rigs at any given point most of that time.

GTX 980ti is viable on some coins - but keep in mind that it's generation-old Maxwell technology, so the power usage is quite a bit higher for similar performance *in most usage* to a current GTX 1070.

 Lowest cost GTX 1070s from NewEgg are commonly $379 (Gigabyte ITX shortie version is regular priced at that, and there are usually 2-4 more of varied make/model "full size" GTX 1070 on sale at any given time at that price point) while the Zotac "mini" is at $539 right now. I do still see a few "lagging price" 1070 in the $530+ range, but I suspect those will all eventually drop except for the ones with a water-cooler setup.

 Per PCI-E specs, a single 8 pin connector is good for 150 watts + 75 watts can be drawn from the bus power connection.
 The GTX 1080 is normally rated at 180 watts TDP (which is the same for the Zotac, and was the original spec on the Founders Edition) - I suspect the Zotac is going to be heat-limited to a degree on overclocking due to the small size HS/fan setup as much as by the max power that can be drawn.

BU vs CORE should have ZERO effect on any existing antminer - it's still the same SHA256 protocal that the miner is processing.

 I'm also 100% certain that the S9/T9/R4 at least have already updated the controller software to support BU *IF* it actually DID require such a change, since AntPool has decided to support BU.

There is no such thing as an AMD RX 780.

Perhaps you are thinking of the NVidia GTX 780, which is a 2 generation old high-end NVidia card that *might* be viable for mining some coins but I don't know enough about to say if it's profitable to do so.

 Perhaps you're thinking of the RX 480 (current, can easily make $75+ gross income (before electric cost) at current ETH or ZEC conditions and possibly more with some BIOS mods and tweeking)?

 There is also supposed to be a minor upgrade called the RX 580 showing up next month, should sell for a small premium over the current RX480 initially but only offers ballpark 5% better performance via usage of a slightly enhanced version of the same process the RX 480 uses.

 I don't have any RX 480 myself, but they're widely used in mining rigs for ETH ZEC XMR and offshoots of those coins like ETC - they MIGHT be the most commonly used GPU in cryptocoin mining at this time.

 I have had a couple of the "little brother" RX 470s mining away for a few months now, mostly have been on ZEC with some time on ETH depending on relative profitability.

3 GB actually, it's 2GB and less cards that can't mine ETH any more but my pair of R9 280x 3GB still can (had them swapped over a couple nights back for a bit to do some hashrate checking on genoil).

 I've seen a few adapters to go from a PCI-E 6-pin power cable to 3 (or more) barrel connectors.

 Used to be pretty widespread back in the Gridseed "pod" and "blade" days.



 Speaking of which - 2 of these would fit quite nicely on the 80 "blade" heatsinks if they could be attached somehow, though I can't tell if the pod has a heatsink on the bottom as well as the top one.

 You don't have the OPTION to set the fees - and they're ripoff-level excessively HIGH to start with.

 And it's a LOT different than how transactions are handled by most coins - most coins charge you in THEIR COIN for a transaction, not some insanely HIGH amount of Bitcoin that in come cases EXCEEDS the amout of the "asset" you want to transfer., and is commonly 10-100 TIMES the normal amount of a Bitcoin transaction fee.

 Then the transaction will often take bloody FOREVER - I don't remember the last time I had a Counterparty transaction complete in much less than a day, and I have seen them take 2-3 days twice now - which is totally insanely slow for the CRAZY transaction fee amounts they charge.

The "wallet" is slow and painful to use, as well as being VERY counter-intuitive.
The "exchange" is a bloody joke - you end up LOSING money to get most of the non-FLDC coins transfered into something usefull, and get hit *twice* with fees for doing so - FLDC is bad enough but at least the value is somewhat higher than the ripoff fees.
 The fees are a MASSIVE ripoff - commonly 10 TIMES what the actual Bitcoin fees for a transaction are, often higher.
 (no, you CAN'T set the bloody fees in any way shape or form)

What is there to like about Counterparty? I can't think of ANYTHING.

 FLDC should have their own wallet like most sane coins have, or at least a setup similar to CURE instead of their current "feed one of the bigger ripoffs in the cryptocoin world" setup - or they should just merge into CURE instead of making themself a redundant junkcoin.


 For those that don't know what FLDC is, it's "FoldingCoin" that serves as an additional income source for F@H participants - and it's why a lot of Team Curecoin have those really long "usernames" - part of that username is our FoldingCoin address.

It's not actually VRam - it's a raid pair of SSDs - which makes it DEATHLY SLOW for most mining usage.

Useless at this time for mining, even if they ever built the thing and the price was amazingly cheap for what's on it.

 The Zotac 1080 "mini" is priced at a significant PREMIUM to current pricing on a lot of other 1080 models - and is NOWHERE NEAR 1070 pricing for most 1070 cards.
 It's also not all THAT small - 9" long appx. vs 10-11 for most other 1080s.

 For a TRUE mini card, the Gigabyte "ITX" 1070 7" appx long is still the go-to option IMO - at $150 less than the Zotac IIRC as of this morning when I was checking prices on NewEgg.

 GDDRx5 seems to be a small minus for ZEC mining, though the extra cores on the 1080 do seem to help some on ZEC vs the 1070.

 1080 ti aren't good at mining most coin. IMO stick with the 1070, or wait for the RX 5xx and VEGA.

 ZEC is running FINE on some of my HD 7750 AMD cards that have 1 GB RAM.
 It's ETH that needs at least a 3GB card to work now (and probably ETC fairly soon).

 I don't see 2 rigs of 1070 achieving $2k/month right now (even if they are 6card rigs).
 I've GOT 12 1070 cards mining at the moment, and even watching for most profitable coin they're only pulling in $1100-$1200 total - and the "hold" option I can't do as I need the money to pay bills, even when it has been a bonus to income (right now it's not a short-term additional income option, as the big rise in ETH/ZEC/XMR/DASH/etc has stalled out).

 On the plus side, the 1070 also eats about HALF the power of my R9 290 cards while hashing even ETH at almost identical rate (the 290 is a beast on ETH), and its got some options for long-term profitability that do not exist for the R9 290 (or any other AMD card currently available).


 It might be worth looking at the 1080, but it's profitability on almost anything is going to be about the same as the 1070 while the cost is still noticeably higher.
 Depends on what you plan to do with the rig(s) and/or card(s) once the current surge in profitable GPU mining winds down.

I've had no issues with Coinbase Instant Exchange - though it can be a bit slow to confirm sometimes, I get the cash when they say I should (normally the second business day after I send the transfer).

 I've not sent BTC to them any other way though.