I just purchased a used S9 14T antminer and upon inspection found the aftmost of three 1000uF capacitors under the pci-e sockets broken off with a screw hole in it. The hole lines up with the fan screw, so it appears a too long screw was installed.

I've order a capacitor matching the labelling (Aluminum polymer 1000U 16V) and will attempt to replace.

I was reading of others with capacitor issues and still run the miner. Given proximity of the cap to the power inputs, I'm guessing these smooth the input voltage..

Any thoughts? Do I risk further damage to the board if I try running it? Should I start my testing with just the other 2 blades connected?

Thx.

I've had good success buying via Wire Transfer on Bitfinex and Coinsetter. You do need to send them ID and stuff so they comply with US banking laws, but both were pretty quick to set up. Also used Coinbase, but my limits are very low and takes a week to get even that! (On positive side, you don't need wire transfer, can attach your bank account like PayPal).

This is a standard stock/forex and now cryto trading term.

Some exchanges (Bitfinex for example) will allow you to trade on "margin" at a certain rate. For example you can buy 10 BTC but only put up the cash of 2 BTC (this would be a 5:1 margin). Depending on the exchange, you are borrowing the cash for the other 8 BTC at a specified % rate, (or on Bitfinex you can bid/ask borrowing terms on a SWAP exchange).

So why might you do this? Well if your borrowing rate is lower than the rate at which bitcoin price rises, then you buy with the borrowed money then sell when price is higher pay back the loan + interest and keep rest as profit.

You can do same in reverse; if you think bitcoin price is going to drop, then borrow bitcoins to sell now for cash, buy them back when price is lower and repay.

The term "leverage" is appropriate.. in the physical world you can use a lever to lift a heavy object with a fraction of the force otherwise required (think of teeter-totter where parent sits halfway up the bar and kid can lift them..).

So the advantage is it a way to multiply your profits! Disadvantage its a way to multiply your losses. If the price goes wrong way, then you get a margin call and have to add more cash / bitcoins to keep what you got, or they get sold off and can be left with dust...

As an update to my learning experiences, so far I have now made multiple International Wire Transfers to Coinsetter & Bitfinex.

Both have been smooth, Coinsetter to (if I recall Bank in Maldive) was smooth, the instructions worked perfect and the money arrived in my account same day (once my bank processed after the weekend.) My bank (Bank of America) charged $45, and although I had no fee on the other end for first transfer, after that fee of $30.

The transfer to Bitfinex had a couple minor hichups; first the SWIFT code in their instructions was not recognized by my bank, and I could not find the bank through the provided address either. I e-mails Bitfinex's help and received a response acceptably quick with their head-office SWIFT code, that one was recognized.

The second minor thing was when I enter the bank's country as Taiwan, I received a warning that that country has in the past been "slow to process" and payments could be delayed. That could make you worry, but we are talking about "same-day" wire. My transfer arrived ready to use in my account in maybe at most a day & a half. Same fees as other end.

I finally got some level of verification on Kraken (with Canada address) but no access yet to do an "Interac" transfer (easy way to pay - like debit card). I didn't investigate their wire transfer since At this point I'll stick with Bitfinex for most stuff.

As for Coinbase; after several week's I'm still limited to $200 per day buy and those take a week to be available + since it doesn't have any functions as an exchange except market price, I have my 0.8 coin I should get tomorrow then I'm done with them.

Bitfinex is my favorite for the reasons I mentioned above, but plus they have some cool advanced features. One which I particularly like since I'm trying to accumulate bitcoins hoping the price will rise continuously over time. They let you lend your bitcoins (or cash or LTC) on the SWAP market. You offer to lend your coins at a rate that you bid (just like exchange people bid / ask prices for the swaps) and you set duration (so if you want easy access to your bitcoins you can offer 2-3 days). This is a "safe" investment because on the "high-risk" margin side where the borrowers are, they don't have direct access to your coins..

So if you plan to just hold your coins, lend them out and you get a few fractions of a bitcoin every night added to your account. You bid a daily rate; something typical right now is 0.0175% per day (I've gotten 0.025% best - I haven't quite figured out what drives the SWAP demand, it dropped when price of BTC went up, which is somewhat opposite to what I might have expected). Anyhow even at 0.0175% per day (sounds tiny) but compound that for a year is you calculate as APR = (1.000175^365 - 1) = 6.6% - Now they take 25% of your profit as fees, so that leaves you with about 5% per year interest... Yeah not a way to get rich, but try finding that rate in a Bank savings account, plus you still get all the capital gains on the bitcoins themselves.

Well todays payment is 2 hours overdue so far.. but I guess as the game goes on could happen.. 1 more payout and I'll be close to even.. anyhow.. investment of 0.1 BTC = ~$25 .. one hand at a blackjack table

Well... Unless you believe companies like Planetary Resources will at some point be able to economically mine asteroids

Apparantly Eros, one of many near Earth asteroids has more gold than all the gold mined on Earth during human history.

Baring some technological breakthrough though, I imagine the price to mine it will keep gold value high... 

Well if yesterday was my last payment, I got back .07762 out of my 0.1 after 4 days... Fairly inexpensive lesson.. Start a ponzi, don't join one

BTW, just browsed to the site and it is still up (or back up if it ran into overload or something). I'll know in a couple hours if I get another payment. If you believe their ticker data, looks like they were paying new deposits of about 2hr age.

I'm also new to the bitcoin game, and wanted to get my hands on some "instantly". That is not possible (without great risk, I guess).. Even calling bitcoin an instant way of paying is somewhat misleading in my opinion, since even if you are willing to risk just a single confirmation, that will still take at best on average 5 minutes (at best meaning your transaction makes it into the next block, and with blocks targeted at 10 minutes apart, on average it will be ~5min).

Nonetheless, I will share my experiences thus far. I decided to go the exchange route because I wanted larger quantities than I could see on eBay, plus eBay prices were high, plus using PayPal to sell bitcoins is high risk (I imagine buying is lower risk, but you pay high premium because seller is taking risk).

The first account I set up was at coinbase.com - They required my name / address / phone. I don't believe they required me to upload any documents because their verification system was much like PayPal's: Login to your online banking through their site to verify your bank account. To get access to instant purchases, attach a credit card, they will make 2 pre-authorizations (not actual charges) between $1-$2 on the card.. you verify by telling them the amount of the charges.

Upon my initial sign up and bank login I was allowed to purchase a maximum of $200USD of bitcoins (daily). At that point, I attached my credit card, and was given a weekly instant buy limit of $25. The first purchase took about 1 week to clear (had bitcoins I could transfer out of their site). I could not make any other transactions until the first one cleared.

Since the first one right away I made the $25 instant buy, and it was fast. Also for several days I made additional buys close to the daily max. These transaction each are pending and take a week to be cleared.

So as for coinbase: Pro's: easiest to set up (no document uploads or Wire transfers).Con's: Slow first transaction. Low amounts able to buy.

Another big limitation of coinbase as an "exchange" is it appears solely market orders; that means you say buy - it tells you the price you can buy it for same for sell. The other exchanges offer "limit" orders where you make a bid (to buy) or ask (to sell) and transaction only happens if both parties get their price.

The second exchange I tried was Kraken. Here I registered to "Tier 2" which allows a moderate level of bank transfers, however after submitting my name / address and phone #. The site informed me that I could only trade cryptocurrencies because the process of setting up all the government required stuff was not yet complete in my state.

I happen to residences in both Canada and the US, so I tried registering with my Canadian info. At tier 2, I got notification that they were unable to verify my information and please send ID / passport (basically Tier 3) - I did so, and yet to hear from them since...

Since then I've learnt Kraken is a UK based exchange, so EU residents probably will fare better than myself.

(Getting to the international wire transfer soon!)

Next I signed up at coinsetter.com. Here the signup process was well designed, and guided you through fairly thorough process from ID info, document uploads, account info, and setting up a wire transfer. I went through everything, got the wire transfer info and advised them to expect a deposit of a $$$ amount. I logged on  to my online banking (Bank of America) and was able to find International Wire Transfer through their "Send money to someone" pages. (Coinsetter's business is located in Canada, but their bank is in Malta (USD though)). I filled out the wire transfer info (carefully it can be a bit confusing the first time), and sent it on its way. I did this on the weekend - so good old fashioned banks, they informed me the transfer would be initiated the next business day. The bank fee was a little under 1% but I imagine will depend on your bank and the amount. I was expecting a charge on the receiving end, but there was none. On the Monday, my bank e-mailed that the next-day wire transfer had been sent (saw that Mon. morning) and Monday after work, I logged on to coinsetter and saw my money was there and placed a few trades... I'm now liquid with bitcoins (although I have not yet transferred any out of coinsetter yet).

On another note, Monday during the day, one of the coinsetter's VPs called me on the phone welcoming me to coinsetter and offering any assistance I might need.

Pros: Easy to use, fast, reasonable fees, nice personal touch - hope it reflects their customer service. Cons: Need to fund with wire transfer (but so far that seems the same everywhere for non-trivial volume, LEGAL methods that are accountable to governments wrt money laundering...), the exchange volume is low (which means trades might take more time, and possibly more (or maybe less) price volatility (so far their trades are comparable to the higher volume exchanges.)

So I did also sign up with bitfinex. Their process was very similar to coinsetter, and I have wire transfer info for them but have yet to make a deposit there.

I guess in summary, Wire Transfer is pretty much the only legit way to fund an investment sized bitcoin trading / purchasing account. This does require you provide identification and bank information as well as proof of residency etc..

My experience with the wire transfer process, was pretty simple, just have to read the instructions carefully, (coinsetter included an e-mail address to ask for help if anything didn't make sense). It was fast too (except for bank holidays, but still faster than the 1 week with coinbase for peanuts limits). Bank fees are a concern if it is for many small amounts, you probably want to make low frequency larger deposits.

A note, towards to OP original question; why buy from some Joe Blow you don't know with wire transfer when you can do it with an established exchange?

Hope this help some people.

Paying still, got my 2nd payment 24 hour after first:

TxID:
  01ca1c4e01773b06b57f67b25213fb35318d580af7eace45da8f5760128e33fd: Seen by 10 peers. Appeared in best chain at height 372301, depth 1.

Holy crap... was losing hope, cuz on their main screen, all the recent investments showed zero return for 3hrs.. but then clicked on my deposits and saw I got my first payout of 0.02189 BTC.

Payment proof:

TxID:
  3020d5d8d637f1f67eee4a206b8e5c667f61afa92c1da5160ab58f70ca6259be: Seen by 10 peers. Appeared in best chain at height 372146, depth 1.
  time locked until block 372054
     in 

Nice to see its paying out.. I put in 0.1 BTC, heck it is gambling.. probably should kiss those bits goodbye, but you never know..

What about if you restrict sales to only people with some level of feedback score on eBay? I'd imagine that should mitigate chance for fraud?

I've been buying physical silver, its fun to collect different things. Initially I started just grabbing any kind of silver I could, but now I'm strictly government mint issued. I like the Royal Canadian Mint (I'm Canadian, nonetheless their metals are .9999 pure versus others at only .999), their wildlife series (1 Oz rounds) have good numismatic value on top of the raw metal.

Unfortunately I started buying at about $40/oz, then more recently I thought $19/oz was a bargain... Trading at $14.65 right now.. hmm... better buy some more

The silver is getting pretty heavy though.. I prefered it to gold because in case of armagedon (LOL) 1 oz pieces is easier to barter with. But I should start getting some physical gold to add to the collection.

I guess the moral of the story is diversity.. right? Who knows whats safe, whats going to make money, whats going to crash.. Grab some of everything..

Such short sightedness by PayPal... Sure they could consider bitcoins a competitor to their business... but the need to easily convert between bitcoin & fiat exists and likely to persist "forever".. so providing an easy way for people to trade and convert, they make $$$ on their high fees (which I'm willing to pay for convenience).

To be honest, I've bought and sold tons of stuff on eBay w/ PayPal and had only one problem long long ago where seller didn't send my purchase and disappeared (before the days of guarantees). They work pretty good and IMO offer good service.

However, I'm pretty discouraged that they would always favour the buyer, especially when there is such easy proof of the transaction.

I'm just starting with bitcoin, and I want to buy some.. I want to buy 10 BTC right now from my computer and I can't.

Got my first $200 worth off coinbase.. took a week.. just initiated a wire transfer with coinsetter.. there goes another week..

Hey I was able to buy $25 instantly since my first transaction at coinbase went through.. next week I can do another one..

So a scammer just tells PayPal "my account was hacked" and gets money back at sellers penalty with no investigation? If sold on eBay means eBay account was hacked + associated PayPal account hacked + record of actual payment to provided bitcoin address in payment note.

hmmm.. PayPal people must be pretty stupid...

I'm new to this whole bitcoin thing, finally got my first fraction after waiting a week through coinbase.

I don't understand why selling bitcoin w/ PayPal is high risk. There is the blockchain record of all transactions, so if I want to sell on eBay, I would instruct the winner to send a note in his/her PayPal payment of their wallet address and maybe to include some statement such as "this is a unique wallet address, public bitcoin blockchain record of payment to this address is agreed as proof of delivery".

Am I missing something?