In my long experience with PC-based components, Seasonic has a very very good record - they have infant mortality problems like anyone, past that they have an excellent track record on every one of their designs I've used a significant number of.

 Won't say they've never had a turkey design, but it's been a very rare thing....



 PC Power and Cooling used to argue with them or even be better when they made their own units in San Diego county, but then they started outsourcing and their quality dropped a lot, then they sold out and got even worse for a long time.

There are actually 3 criteria.

 Electricicy cost
 Efficiency of miner / power supply setup
 Cost of miner + needed power suppl(ies)y

 I would call electric cost the single most important factor but they ALL matter.


 If you invest badly, "high investment" can lose HIGH amounts, it's not a guarentee at ALL that more invested = more profit.

 Amount invested has pretty much ZERO effect on profitability - just affects how MUCH you're going to make or lose.

 Sounds like you weren't putting consistant numbers into the calculator, or the calculator itself was broken or incomplete.

 Might also be that you're looking at $ income not BTC income, that WOULD have varied a lot more as BTC price moved around.

 To be picky, DOS was a (initially ripped-off later paid for) CP/M varient, based on "Seattle OS" that was a licenced CP/M "clone" written for the 8086/8088.
 CP/M however took it's interface almost directly from RT-11, even maintaining the "PIP is BACKWARDS" command structure among other obvious tipoffs.

 So the RT-11 to DOS steal was indirect, not direct.




 If I remember the timing correctly, it was more that DEC was dying/had just died and they needed a place to go to work.
 Similar reason and timing on how Intel ended up with the Alpha IP (bought out of DEC bankrupcy IIRC), which they used as part of the input into designing the Pentium.



 Gotta wonder when sidehack is gonna change the name of this thread (if possible) from "BM1384" to "BM1385"....

 There's life in Labrador?

 8-P


Washington


 Probably so - I'm still talk for now, but do have serious plans for next summer.
 Had tentative plans for November timeframe, but the finances aren't comming together as well as I hoped.
 I also suspect that many of the folks that HAVE moved just aren't talking about it, or aren't active on bitcointalk.
 I HAVE noticed a few "looking for site" ads on the applicable Craigslist, and note that they don't seem to last long - but ONLY a few of them.

 No, you can make money and achieve RoI on many miners if your electric is cheap enough - even now.
 It's just that "cheap enough" on Electric is now limited to very few areas of the world.


 I've seen profit out of mining at times in the past, paid for several of my current video cards via Litecoin mining back before the Gridseeds were introduced.
 They're currently doing other stuff I had intended to buy them for anyway, just got to buy them sooner and more OF them....


 Folks that bought Sp20s and S5's back before around March 2015 have probably made most or all of their investment back by now, most of the rest will probably RoI real soon.
 Sadly, I figure the only reason I'll manage to get RoI on my S5s and single SP20 is that my electric during winter heating season is "effectively free" most of the time.

 I'm pretty sure that Ebay sold Paypal back off fairly recently, due to massive underperformance.

 I dunno why anyone uses Paypal, it's NOT trustable and widely known to be both a ripoff company and to have a 'corporate plan' that FORCES it to rip folks off to actually make a profit.

 Amazon hasn't had more than 12 S5's LISTED at any point in the last 5 months.

 Not real impressive for sales to me.

 If you ignore difficulty increase, you WILL lose money in the long run unless you get very very lucky and buy your hardware at an optimum time - and sometimes you lose even THEN.
 It's also not that hard to get a general estimate of difficulty increase for short-to-medium term, the only times it makes major changes is when significant new hardware gets introduced or at halfings.

 The S7 is profitable NOW at .2c/KWH electric, but that won't be the case for very long - it'll go UNprofitable long before the halfing if recent diff increase trends stay close to the same for a few months.



 Nope. An S5 raw income dropped on average about 3.5% compounded PER MONTH from December 2014 to around July 2015, and unless your electric was FREE it lost more than that in profitability.

 Must be a local to you thing, Electric prices most places are pretty stable with a VERY SLOW (usually small single digit %) increase every year or two.

 Some places probably have been DROPPING the last few months as oil got a lot cheaper, though not a lot of places use oil as their primary electric generation fuel (most of them being OPEC members, small islands, or pretty remote areas).

 I would guess that most of those folks are betting on a large Bitcoin price increase around the time of the halfing.
 I personally don't like the odds on such an increase being enough to matter, but won't be shocked to be wrong.

 Doesn't seem to be any other reasonable scenario where the S7 will ever achieve RoI unless your electric is VERY cheap or free.


 There is NO sign of Bitcoin price "following the difficulty" as one person keeps talking about, and no reason for it to do so.
 There IS reason to believe in a jump in price near the halfing (probably a little before) due to speculators jumping in based on "reduced availability" or some such, similar to what happened to Litecoin about a month before IT'S halfing this year (and the price on Litecoin has stayed up some, though not near what it peaked at), but given the much larger size of the Bitcoin market I doubt we'll see it do the near-quadruple at peak that Litecoin did. I'd guess 50-100% jump at most at the peak for Bitcoin, then a drop back down to not a lot more than it is now - other factors like Greek near-meltdown excluded.



 Nope, an S5 or SP20 is still profitable - BARELY - at double the current difficulty and electric around 10c/KWH - but unlikely to RoI if you bought one now as you wouldn't have enough time to get your money back before halfing makes anything pre-S7 UNprofitable at current trends, or even if diff increases drop back under 2% per incriment - free electric and SUPER cheap electric folks excepted.


 Keep in mind that most of the "big boys" ARE in the "super cheap electric" areas of the world, at least for their farming activities, and they're probably paying 60-80% of the up-front cost for their miners that most "home miners" are paying. Makes RoI a LOT easier for them.



 I would bet that they don't, but that they are working on their "NEXT gen" chips pretty hard - I also suspect that the "next gen" is going to be full-custom 14/16nm from all surviving ASIC makers, and that it'll be the LAST new generation and the LAST major jump in performance for 4-6 years.

 Will that happen by July 2016 and the halfing?
 My guess is "not across the board" but I won't be shocked if a couple of them are ready around that timeframe with new hardware.




 Usually, but sometimes competition drives manufacturers into fighting for market share rather than maximising profits in the short term. That's what I'm waiting for, probably in December or so.

I don't believe any AMD 6xxx series card is efficient enough to make money even on altcoins - too old, too power greedy for the performance.

(edit) You MIGHT be able to find someone working Distributed.Net on RC5 that would be interested in it, if you put it up for sale cheap enough.

I suspect there are quite a few "miners" that have moved to Washington in the last couple of years....

The real issue is usually electric cost, at least as much as the cost of the miner per GH.

 ANY miner can achieve RoI if your electric is free, most can probably achieve it if your electric is 3 cents/KWH or less.


 S5 is a bit less than 2 Ghs/Watt - 1155 rated GHs for 590 rated (but commonly a hair more) watts "at the wall".



 Every time I've tried to use coinwarz in the last 3-4 months I get a "can't connect" error, I'd go with the bitcoinwisdom calculator anyway as it's more flexable.

 Scrypt only though, can't mine Bitcoin with those (though you could mine a Scrypt coine like Litecoin then sell that to BUY bitcoin with).

Even 5e is overkill for miners, unless you have LONG runs for some reason.
Standard Cat5 is plenty.

 Only reason to run "better" is to have the infrastructure in place for later faster connections - would make sense to run Cat6 from the rest of your network to the switch(s) your miners are connected to, but the run FROM that/those switches should be a short one and cat5 patch cables should be plenty.


 1000 GB from an ISP is a bloody rare thing, unless you have a LARGE business - and even then it's not widespread or common unless that large business is running a HUGE data center for web access out of that location, like Amazon or GoDaddy or Mickey$loth or the like.

Not sure why Spondoolies announced the SP50 publicly, since they won't be selling it to the public. Kinda rude, actually, to tease us this way with UNAVAILABLE hardware.

Now, if they decided to sell a more affordable model based on the same chip, THAT would be worth announcing to the public.


 The BIG thing I look at this miner and wonder seriously about though is the cooling. Even if we assume that those 6x 120mm fans are the HIGHEST flow Deltas at around 250cfm, that's not a lot of airflow to keep 16 KILOWATTS WORTH OF HEAT GENERATION cool. That's ballpark 50K BTU, which is enough to heat most houses in any climate short of Siberia or Northern Canada / Northern Alaska (do note that most houses have a lot more furnace than they actually NEED).
 Good heatsink design can help a lot, but these units appear to have a similar problem to the SP20 - long boards, back part of the board getting already-warmed air flowing over it causing issues removing the heat. Those heatsinks they show better have a copper base plate, they're too short for a heatpipe design to help much if at all.



 TSMC has had 16nm for a while now, just very low yields as they work to improve the process. fab companies don't run "just one size", they commonly have multiple processes available at the same time, just running on different machines in different partsof their multiple fab facilities.



 I too would like to see Spondoolies make a smaller miner - single or 2 blade unit in a 2U shouldn't be hard at all for them to engineer, perhaps a 1U unit with a single blade at 10TH or so - though it looks like the blades might be too wide to fit in a standard rack-mount case horizontally. Perhaps a custom case?



 I'd call that "when will", not "the likelihood of".
 KnC I'm not worried about, even if their Solar has actually hit production I doubt it's going to make any big splash soon between yield issues and previous issues KnC has had with making RELIABLE chips (ref the MANY Titans with "dead die" issues).
 21 so far doesn't appear to be targeting serious mining at all, VERY iffy if they're going to become a serious factor.
 Bitfury, I'm guessing mid-to-late 2016 based on what they've already announced, will be hard to verify unless one of their "big corporate customers" speaks up (MBP perhaps?).
 Bitmain or Innosilicon, I'd guess late 2016 at the earliest and more likely mid-2017.

 Still at least one major unknown out there. What is Avalon doing?

Probably not valid. There has been at least one scam based on the specs of KnC's "solar" chips.

 .1W/GHs isn't even close to any of the announced but "not seen in public" 14/16nm chips, and is quite a bit better than any of the 28nm chips that have been seen or announced. Odd point for someone to be claiming....

The only one CURRENTLY selling miners that are viable for home miners *RIGHT NOW* is Bitmain.

 There has been at least one other "soon" announcement, out of Lktec, for a miner that the S7 appears to have been specifically designed to try to preempt.

 Since the Lktec design appears likely to be based on the "announced as taped out" Innosilicon A3 design, and since Innosilicon has made miners in the past, I expect a fairly good probability of an Innosilicon miner design as well - but even if they do that, I suspect that that Innosilicon's miner would be more along the lines of a rack-mount 4-5U unit in the 20-30TH range, similar to what they did on their A2 Terminator design.

 Too bad Spondoolies has abandoned the consumer market, perhaps they'd be willing to start selling their new chip *soon* to someone like Sidehack to build an actual HOME miner design out of.

 2 fans on an S7 vs 1 on the S5+ is likely the difference there.