5263
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Alternate cryptocurrencies / Mining (Altcoins) / Re: Rate my RIG
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on: June 14, 2016, 07:07:58 AM
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Since you're buying the rig already, no reason to not use it for ETH miinng to defray part of the cost.
It's NOT a good setup JUST for mining though - the GTx1080 is horrid on hash/$ basis though it's good efficiency on hash/W, and the rest is severe overkill for a single-card mining rig.
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5264
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Bitcoin / Hardware / Re: IBM takes a leap to 7nm
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on: June 14, 2016, 07:02:45 AM
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The part that caught my eye was the "die made of a Silicon/Germanium alloy"
One of the reasons Silicon took over from early Germanium usage was that it could handle HEAT a lot better - gotta wonder what the heat limits on this new alloy are going to be like, and the power handling capability.
On the other hand, the band gap on Germanium is a bit less than half that of Silicon (.3v vs .7v or something like that IIRC?), which should help a little on lowering power usage.
I'm not sure about the A1, but the Innosilicon A2 has 432 hash cores / chip (going by the highest core counts on my 88MH unit, the software doesn't show that on the 110s). I'd guess the A1 should have had MORE as SHA256 is a simpler algorythm than Scrypt is.
I suspect IBM will share the tech with their partners - eventually - but they have to get it working reliably first. I think the claim about 7nm being in full production by 2017 is crazy and 2018 wildly optimistic, especially since they need new wafer manufacturing of their NEW wafer material to happen to SUPPORT the new process - that's not an overnight thing to achieve. I just don't think the INFRASTRUCTURE to support the new tech is in place enough to manage 2018, much less 2017 - and even if it IS managed by 2018, IBM will be using it internally for a while first before they start farming it out at all.
I doubt we'll see this technology used in cryptocoin mining before 2020 - and wouldn't BET on it by then.
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5266
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Bitcoin / Hardware / Re: Is BITMAIN a trusted source for purchasing mining equipment?
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on: June 14, 2016, 06:35:34 AM
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The one time I ordered direct from BitMain, the order arrived in 3 business days via DHL. Very competative on time with most folks I order stuff from in the US (Newegg can beat that if they ship from their Indianapolis facility, but usually takes a day or two longer since I usually use their "saver" option).
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5268
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Alternate cryptocurrencies / Mining (Altcoins) / Re: Is scrypt the only algo worth investing time and effort on?
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on: June 14, 2016, 06:30:46 AM
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RX 480 should have very good resale value for a while - but do keep in mind it's not just the GPU that needs to have resale value, it's the entire SYSTEM, if you're going to count on reselling gear to achieve ROI.
This does not apply to gear that has an already-planned repurpose, or gear that WAS repurposed to ETH from other stuff short-term and will go back to what it was doing before after it becomes ETH unprofitable.
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5269
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Alternate cryptocurrencies / Mining (Altcoins) / Re: How will this change the world of mining?? GTX 1080 / 1070
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on: June 14, 2016, 06:27:17 AM
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undervolting is also the same it limit how much voltage the card will use, which mean indirectly limit the current that the gpu can use
the difference is that you can be more precise, with undervolting
Undervolt is NOT THE SAME. Chips as a general rule are more EFFICIENT at lower voltages, as long as they can do the work at all. Take a good look at the spec sheet on the BM1385 sometimes, for a prime example with actual numbers. Ability to mine ETH for a profit has a few variables involved - MH/Watt of your SYSTEM, cost of electric, diff, etc - it's not a given that everyone will be able to mine it profitably for a year, in fact it's looking like it might achieve UNprofitable for most folks well before the end of the year (those in VERY VERY cheap electric areas have a lot more leeway). I do expect the rate of diff increases to slow eventually as more folks get to "unprofitable" on some of their rigs and point them at other things, and folks start realising they aren't going to be able to make anything on new builds in most areas. Oh, and the final verdict on the 1070/1080 for ETH is "not a lot of effect, too much money for the efficiency and hashrate" - but the jury is still out on other stuff - FoldCoin in particular can probably benefit a lot from the 1080 and somewhat less from the 1070 for example.
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5270
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Bitcoin / Mining speculation / Re: Which firm of mining hardware providers is the best one?
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on: June 13, 2016, 08:05:28 AM
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IMO Innosilicon is overall the most reputable manufacturer of hardware - but they don't currently make SHA256 chips (dunno what happened for sure on their A3, guessing the efficiency wasn't there to be competative and they decided to shelve it or take it back to redesign for better?).
Bitmain is king in SHA256 at this point, being the first to actually market a MINER in the 14/16nm full-custom generation - which is a shame since Bitfury demoed their comparable chip MONTHS ago but still has nothing available as a miner.
I suspect the market is going to look a LOT different well before the end of the year though, with BW having a few of it's LK-1402 spotted in the wild, and Bitfury SHOULD get it's chips into some sort of miner by then, and Avalon actually having started work on that generation (though their buyout might complicate things, dunno if they'll still be sellers to end users, but the buyout SHOULD give them plenty of cash to develop WITH).
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5271
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Bitcoin / Hardware / Re: Bitmain's Released Antminer S9, World's First 16nm Miner Ready to Order
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on: June 13, 2016, 07:56:56 AM
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Why mining is not profitable after halving?
What can be the exact reason?
It CAN still be profitable, but older less efficient gear probably won't be. Income will be cut in half (give or take difficulty shift) but the COST of the electric to run the miner won't change. Comes down, as usual, to how cheap your electric is - if it's cheap enough, S7s and Avalon 6s will still be (barely) profitable, S9s should be solidly profitable but will lose well over half their profit, and anything older than an S7 will probably turn into a serious moneyLOSER even if it's break-even or a little better right now. "The halfing" refers to the fact that somewhere in July, block 400,000 *IF* I remember correctly, the block rewards gets cut in half from the current 25BTC per block to 12.5 BTC per block. THAT is why "the halfing" is going to have a massive negative effect on Bitcoin profitability. Bitcoin price rise before then MIGHT mitigate the effects enough that even some older gear on low-cost electric will still be profitable, but EVERYONE is going to take a serious hit to their profitability. Bitmain seems to normally adjust their BTC price once a day - WHEN they aren't on "Dragon boat festival" holiday.
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5272
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Bitcoin / Hardware / Re: Is BITMAIN a trusted source for purchasing mining equipment?
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on: June 13, 2016, 07:41:09 AM
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You're suggesting that a company is implicitly unethical because its Chinese, not only is that racist but nearly every example of mining companies has shown the opposite.
"Western" companies BlackArrow AMT HashFast Technobit CoinTerra HashCoins BitMine BFL (lol) SpondooliesTech (unpaid debts etc) KNCMiner XBTech (Russian team in CN) BitCrane GAWMiners Bitfury (the exception)
Asian companies RockMiner BTCGarden Canaan Creative Bitmain ASICMiner (the exception, and one man)
You forgot a few. Innosilicon LKEtc (and BW.COM by extension) Gridseed/SFARDS Alcheminer Too early to tell on the X11 miner makers, but all three of them so far seem to have actual legitimate products, abet with some issues here and there. By Cryptocoin Miner Manufacture INDUSTRY standards, Bitmain is well above average on reliability and trustworthyness on gear sold, so-so on warrentee repair. By the standards of MOST industries, they could use some improvement across the board. Innosilicon has done sales to small miners also, especially those "Farm Boy" units that appear to have specifically targeted the small miner. They also made miners that had a VERY VERY GOOD reliability record - better than anyone else in the industry except LKEtc (then again, there seems to have been some cross-manufacture and/or cross-design on some of that gear given the Dragon and Terminator designs and LKEtc using Innosilicon chips IN the Dragons). Sadly, most other "direct to small miner" companies have either not done well in the long term even when they had a good product (Spondoolies as the best example) or were outright scammers/liars/incompetant (can YOU say KNC and Butterfly Labs, among other WORSE examples?).
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5274
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Alternate cryptocurrencies / Mining (Altcoins) / Re: How will this change the world of mining?? GTX 1080 / 1070
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on: June 13, 2016, 07:19:45 AM
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As for the bios mod for 1070/1080 - why whould you need one if you can downvolt with the same effect as say nano but without bios modding - and there is a bios modding for nv - we just dont need to use it as it just makes permanent what can be done with MSI afterburner temporary
Don't ASSUME everyone uses Windows to mine on. The one serious disadvantage to mining on LINUX is that the tools available are more primitive AND MORE LIMITED - there's no "undervolt" available in any LINUX configuration tool I've seen, NVidia OR AMD - though I have read somewhere that there used to be a tool (limited to what we classify now as OLD AMD cards) that could do so on certain specific AMD GPU chip versions. Adjusting the TDP doesn't undervolt the card, it limits how much current the card can draw and MIGHT in extreme cases limit the "boost" voltage the card can rise to. Has very little to no effect on the efficiency of the card, UNLIKE undervolting. If the RX 480 had shown up a couple months sooner, and if it's a good ETH miner, it WOULD have had the chance to make substantially more profit. Do keep in mind that Ethereum has a limited mining lifespan, even if it's still profitable while POW it eventually will be going POS at which point there will be no mining of it.
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5275
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Alternate cryptocurrencies / Mining (Altcoins) / Re: Is scrypt the only algo worth investing time and effort on?
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on: June 13, 2016, 07:11:46 AM
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With crazy BTC difficulty, SHA256 algo and miners will go obsolete fast. But looking at the China market, there is still demand for LTC and scrypt algo and the coins could be used to trade for BTCs.
Is SHA256/BTC mining dead?
That's the last algo I'd waste my time or invest money in. The only reason there is demand for LTC is the miners propping up LTC, it's not people using LTC for transactions in China. After LTC halvening and the hashrate didn't really drop and the price didn't rise nobody knew wtf was going on. Charlie Lee the creator of LTC said on reddit that Chinese farms with free electric were the reason hashrate didn't drop. So the miners keep the market alive buying enough to keep it alive and create artificial demand. If there was really demand for Litecoin then ASIC manufacturers would still be making new ASIC's but they aren't. Do keep in mind there has only EVER been 4 companies that ever made Scrypt miners. KNC is bankrupt, and their miners tended to be crap anyway (VERY poor reliability). Gridseed turned into SFARDS, but they've always insisted on doing that "dual miner" stupidity where the Bitcoin side of the miner chip quickly becomes TOTALLY unprofitable thus making the Litecoin side the only usefull part, but at too high a cost. No clue what happened with SFARDS after that first batch of SF100 units was released - but the specs on those units wasn't all that impressive to begin with, the PRICE was insanely high, and reports from the field indicated yet another "VERY POOR board-level design" unit though perhaps not for the SAME reasons the Gridseed 80 Blades were a very poor board-level design. Alcheminer announced plans for a new-gen unit, but they appear to have had issues getting the financing together and may no longer be around. Innosilicon - appears that they should have A4 Dominators FOR SALE sometime in July, which refutes your "no new ASICs" theory. The mind boggler is that *3* companies that came out with X11 ASIC the past few months. I suspect the first of them is now regretting that decision as their miner is by far the worst of the 3 on efficiency and they appear to have had issues getting enough of them built to sell while they HAD the market to themselves, the second is TRYING to hang in there but has a competative disadvantage due to issues with their early units and somewhat lower efficiency, and dunno about the third. New coins tend to be worthless crap - just because they exist doesn't make them worth mining. There have probably been 100 "new" altcoins for every one that actually managed to achieve any REAL worth at any point - and even some well-known coins that DID achieve some success (DOGE for one) didn't have any staying power. I wouldn't count on new coins for achieving ROI on new hardware. Ethereum isn't a bad bet overall, as mentioned the GPUs (and the rest of the hardware) will have SOME value after they become unprofitable to mine with - but it's still a risk at this point unless you have most of the gear for a rig already on hand, with the rapid diff increase rate. If you plan to buy the hardware for some other use ANYWAY, it's definitely worth pointing it at ETH for the short term to help defray costs, but otherwise it's iffy if you'll make your money back on an investment into new rigs at this point - even factoring in selling the gear used after you shut down mining on it. If you have VERY VERY cheap electric, the risk goes down quite a bit of course, as your profit is higher and your mining will stay profitable longer - but that's true for ANY mining option.
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5276
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Holy crap on a cracker! Another spike ($533USD) ! To the mooooon!
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on: June 13, 2016, 06:56:19 AM
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I'd LOVE to see 4 figure prices on Bitcoin again - but I'm not holding my breath.
More rise, though, I do expect to see.
Your wish will come true later this year or early next year. The price of bitcoin is already $640 now. I'm still not betting on it - but it's a lovely rise so far and I certainly wouldn't mind being wrong. I just wish I knew WHY this current rise started, and had some clue how long it's gonna go.
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5279
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Bitcoin / Mining speculation / Re: 0.05 USD any chanse to mine ??
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on: June 12, 2016, 10:35:52 AM
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5 cents / KWH is cheap - you SHOULD be able to mine for a profit on that, if you stick with current gear.
I'd wait a bit for the S9 price to drop, or for competiton to show up to FORCE pricing down.
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5280
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Bitcoin / Mining speculation / Re: Help me build the perfect mining setup...
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on: June 12, 2016, 10:34:31 AM
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On your budget, you should consider a pair of those new S7-LN units, I think that comes in within your budget and a pair of them RIGHT NOW should manage about $8/day - though that is subject to major change when the halfing hits, and some probably significant changes due to difficulty changes.
They include power supplies.
You're NOT going to want to keep ANY miner in your bedroom, unless you are used to lots of airflow - any semi-current miner generate a LOT of heat, and it's gotta move the air to keep the chips cool enough to keep working. Avalons tend to be quieter than Antminers, but they also tend to cost more for the same amount of hashpower.
Not sure if I trust Rosewill power supplies (Newegg house brand) since I have zero clue who actually MAKES the things.
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