Bitcoin core will always be the Bitcoin. Bitcoin XT is the alt coin.

One of the most important rules for Bitcoin is called consensus, it is critical for its survival, if consensus is raped you have the situation you have now, a huge drop in price due to lack of trust, and the lack of trust is because a coup takes place.

we have 2 possible cases:
case 1:
If bitcoin xt were to reach 75% which I doubt but it could happen, then there will be 2 chains, bitcoin core and bitcoin xt.

that 25 % will most likely keep running bitcoin core based on principle, and most likely on the long run bitcoin core will gain ground, and also do not forget the double spends, bitcoin core will be able to double spend on bitcoin xt.

Also if bitcoin xt broke the rules of consensus once, and took a dictatorial approach for pushing bitcoin xt what guarantee do you have that in the near future other rules are not compromised like the 21million limit, or make bitcoins expire, or create some sort of inflation that does not exist now, anything is possible ones rules start being broken.

The not so bad thing, is that they programmed that for at 75%, that has helped bitcoin from having a complete collapse in price.

case 2:
bitcoin xt fails, and there is only bitcoin core.
This is the best scenario, since there is only one chain, the coup fails, and consensus wins, bitcoin stops dropping in price, there are no double spends since it is only one chain.
Bitcoin XT will become another paypal, of the equivalent of a Bank, that is not good, that is the main reason bitcoin came into existence in the first place.


I am not against larger blocks, but I am against insanity, with 8 MB blocks doubling per year, to reach a limit of 8GB per block, that will certainly without a doubt centralize bitcoin xt, only huge data centers will afford to run a bitcoin node, all independent miners will be out of business, bitcoin xt is doom to fail in the long run due to centralization.

Basic rules for bitcoin to succeed:
consensus is a must, under no circumstances is a coup to be acceptable.
decentralization is a must, under no circumstances is centralization acceptable.
anyone should be free (freedom) to pay anyone without restrictions.
 

if we all want bitcoin to succeed we must stand together for bitcoin core.

only 2 developers are pushing for bitcoin xt, all the rest are supporting bitcoin core, that alone should tell you something.

do not get me wrong many of the bitcoin core developers do support large blocks, but are studying the best method since it is critical that a change like that be done under consensus without destroying the principals behind bitcoin.

other things the bitcoin xt does are impose censorship, there is a list of banned ips, and a list of tor exist nodes, something that does not exist on bitcoin core.
with bitcoin xt if you use tor you become a second class citizen, that should not be acceptable by anyone.

Lets all unite for bitcoin core, do not get fooled by the bitcoin xt propaganda, bitcoin core is not against large blocks, bitcoin core stands for the principals that Satoshi stands for.

Support the revolucion support bitcoin core, not the anti revolution behind bitcoin xt.

Many might argue the price is not important, I will disagree, bitcoin represents store of value, and the value can go down or up due to market reasons, but  pushing a fork and raping consensus are not market reasons, it is sabotage, for all this reasons and the onces about lets all stay behind the core and keep a single chain, otherwise we will end up with 2 chains and there will be double spends.

most of the original bitcoiners the ones the value the financial freedom that bitcoin provide will most likely stay with bitcoin core even if bitcoin xt takes over due to principals, that split will cause a tremendous damage to bitcoin. Money is about trust, and once trust is broken it all goes downhill.

I can assure everyone something Bitcoin core will not go away, so if you guys want a single chain support the original bitcoin, the revolutionary bitcoin, not the alt coin, not the anti revolutionary bitoin xt.

there is nothing wrong if bitcoin xt started its own block chain independently like other alt coins, instead of trying to sabotage the bitcoin core block chain.

  

there was no consensus for a fork, bitcoin xt took a dictatorial approach.

Bitcoin xt centralizes bitcoin since it makes it very expensive to run a full node, and eliminates miners fees therefore as block halves so does the security.

Also Bitcoin Xt seems to cripple tor nodes, and has a list of banned ip addresses, essentially a from of censorship.
 
In the bitcoin world decentralization is your friend and goes with the spirit of Satoshi.

Lets stay with bitcoin core, the reckless approach taken by bitcoin xt is causing the price to collapse.

Bitcoin XT is all about centralization, and it is bound to die by itself. The problem is that it is causing a division in the  Bitcoin community and causing many of loyal Bitcoin users to lose lots of money situation which is not acceptable.

Furthermore the banning of IP address in the code is totally against the spirit of Bitcoin.

Lets all stick to bitcoin core and hope for the best, at least bitcoin core is about decentralization and financial freedom.

Consensus should have been respected, the reason sometimes consensus is hard to reach is because when it is not respected we have problems like the ones we are having now.

Lets hope Bitcoin does not fall bellow $200.

I predict Bitcoin Core will survive, after  all it is the honeybadger of money, but the honeybadger of money has been hurt very badly and this time it may take a long time to recover.

Bitcoin Core as it is currently and for many years to come works fine.

Now with the mess that bitcoin xt is causing the need for larger blocks goes down.

The reason bitcoin xt wil die on it own, is simple as the block reward goes down every 4 years and there is no reason to pay transaction fees, mining goes down as the block reward goes down, that in addition to the cost 20 times higher of keeping a database 20 times bigger, as mining goes down it is vulnerable to a 50% attack.

The reason bitcoin core does not have this problem, is that as block reward goes down, somehow that is compensated with mining fees going up, and to run a full node is 20 time cheaper due to the 20 times smaller database.

Mining fees going up it is not a problem since it is still a magnitude of times cheaper than paypal, visa, wester union, etc.
For micro transactions it is not a problem, since most people will not go though the trouble of a double spend to steal $1 dollar.



In regards to moorse law, it is valid for a given period of time, but not forever since after some time physical limitations imposed by mother nature are reached, like for example an electron can travel so fast, the max speed is the speed of light, and son on, as it can be seen with computers already over 10 years ago, every 2 years the speed was doubling, well now it is more like every 3 or 4 years for the speed of a cpu to double, or a hard disk to double in capacity.
.
It really sucks what is going on.

Lets all stick to Bitcoin Core, it is not just money, it is financial freedom.
Bitcoin core is the revolution, Bitcoin xt is the counter revolution.
I would not be surprised if big brother was behind bitcoin xt.

Not that spondoolies is any better, but the fact is spondoolies before running out of hardware they where the ones pushing the prices down, as soon as spondoolies sold out, bitmain raised their prices significantly. If Spondoolies does come back, lets not forget who is the one raising the prices, and who is pushing them down.

when the S5 was first released it was $300, the price keeps going up.
we need some competition, since it appears that spondoolies  is out of the business of selling miners.

forking bitcoin on the same blockchain is going to cause many problems.

you will end up with bitcoin and bitcoin xt, confusing many new users of bitcoin and cause the price of bitcoin to drop due to double spends.

a better idea is that bitcoin xt uses its own blockchain like all the other alt-coins, it will end up with a cleaner implementation and it will be more secure than the  plan on putting checks and rejected longer blocks just because they use 1MB blocks.

due to this the bitcoin price will most likely drop since confidence is lost.

The more we centralize bitcoin the closer  it will be to self destruction, we have to do the opposite,  decentralize as much as possible.

at 1MB block the database is over 30GB, at 20MB the database will grow to such huge proportions that it will be centralized, not only that but the idea of miner fees was to secure the network once the block gets reduced by half every 4 years, so in the long run there is no block reward only miners fees, by increasing the cost of maintaining the database, and with the reduction on miners fees the network will be insecure in the long run.

It is best to think of bitcoin as gold, as Andreas once said if the transaction is small there is no need to wait for a transaction confirmation, and it is large then you wait for the added security that the confirmations provide.

Bitcoin as of now works fine, and most likely will work forever, also a fork sends a bad precedent that things can change, politicians change the rules of the game frequently that is why bitcoin is superior to fiat currencies, if that confidence is lost bitcoin will suffer.

In brief:
Centralization --> road to failure.
Decentralization --> road to success.

If the plan is for bitcoin to be used in third world countries, where disk space and bandwidth are very expensive, it is best to stick with 1 MB blocks, and let some other alt currency fill the gap for tiny transactions if confirmations are essential, such as litecoin, or darkcoin (dash).

in the non digital world you have silver and gold, and there is a reason for that, gold is normally used for larger purchases, in a similar analogy bitcoin is like gold as litecoin or dash are like silver.

There is economy of scale, they pay less for the hardware, and pay less for electricity.

it is like in hospitals, insurance companies pay less for health care than individuals since they buy in bulk, and then resell that health care for higher prices.

Not really. In fact when the S5 was first released it was sold for about $300 USD, but shortly after Bitmain got news that spoondolies was out of the hardware bussiness they jacked up the price to $340, well as of now the S5 costs $360, growing difficultly and a growin price.

I am sure at $300 they were making a  profit, so to say the profit magin is really low it is not accurate, doing basic math you can easily conclude that the profit margin is over 20%.

profit margin is really really low for indepent miners, not for the hardware vendors.

.

try this link
http://kncclassaction.com/

It is possible, but the waste fats would have to be filtered, and the fats would have to be warmed to lower its density to the equivalent of diesel, and then under any circumstance could the generate be shutdown for a long period of time with the fats, otherwise once the fats cool down they increase in viscosity making the generator nearly impossible to run again. so before shutdown it would be needed to switch to diesel, make sure there is no fat on the fuel lines and then shutdown.
Also the fats would have to be free of contaminants that can not be filtered such as acids.

 

My advise which is not risk free.

buy $20000 worth of bitcoins, then wait a few months until Spondoolies releases their next generation of miners which may ROI, when that happens use bitcoinwisdom calculator to se if the miners can ROI.

Risks:
Spondoolies may not have a next release, but most likely they will.
Another risk is btc would go down, must most likely it will go up.

Current mining equipment is guaranteed  not to ROI, unless you have free electricity and even then it will take a long time to ROI, hardware vendors want to make a good profit knowingly that at current prices their is no ROI.

Current speculations are that 14 or 16 nm tech is around the corner maybe within a few months so waiting for spondoolies is a good gamble.,

And my final advice even if spondoolies releases good hardware at good prices avoid by all means preorders, preorders  most of the time are failures for the buyers.


In the used market there are lots of risks, not long ago I saw someone selling very cheap s3 on craigslist, I sent him a reply to let hiim/her know I was interested in the miners, he said we could not meet at his mine, I said fine, then at your home, he said  lets meet on the street, I said fine but will need to test the miners, then he said they had all sold out,  a few minutes later I see the same add posted again. so if he sold out, why does he advertize them again.. most likely he was selling junk that did not work.
So when buying used miners always have them tested.
 

They will fail I can assure you that, a company that lied to its customers will also lie to its investors, only a very foolish investor will not care. They are doomed.

That is why large successful companies honor their promises, because if they do not, their reputation goes down the toilet.

KNC reputation has already gone down the toilet under those condition most honest investors wont invest and will keep a very large distance from them, unless they have also gone down the toilet, and as such KNC could get screwed by people just like them, thats like a crook dealing with a crook, such scenario is a failure.

So by hoping the fail miserably there an implied probability that they will not fail, I am sure they will fail 100%.

SAM may have won monetarily at this point, but at the cost of sending his reputation down the toilet, most people would probably like to have some reputation left in them, I am sure it is sad for him to be a man with no dignity, and money can not buy his dignity back, so from that point of view he is screwed.

They have already going down, have you looked at their website, customer support is gone, forums are gone, no hardware sales, etc. They became the successor to BFL.




 

try the sony experia ultra Z, it makes the Nexus 6 look tiny, it has a 6.4" screen at very high resolution.

it seems that the power consumption of the Titans that where delivered with a bunch of bad cores is not constant.

my HPC antec 1300 keeps randomly shutting down, maybe thats  what has prevented my power connectors from burning, but it is clearly a defective production since the pci-e connectors are not designed for so much power, they violate all IEEE standards.

and yes Sam and other at KNC  are thieves, they lied to us and took our money for promises not kept, and most importantly broke the law.

In the USA:
It is perfectly legal. However you have to be careful since even though legal it is an activity the government does not like unless they get their share of Bitcoins ( theft by the government).

My personal commendation would be to keep a "low profle".

if you live near the border in Mexico tijuana they have "user friendly ATMs", however they are only good for small transactions and they are often empty especially in cases when Bitcoin is going down in value.

In the USA, there are also ATMs but definetly not user friendly due to legal requirements.

There is also localbitcoins, and craigslist, be extremely distrustful, the people dealing with bitcoin today are no the same ones that where using the currency 4 years ago.

Most people arrested for selling Bitcoins have been charge for a serious of financial crimes but not for selling bitcoins, but selling bitcoins has been the trigger to all the other financial crimes like "tax fraud", "money laundering", "drug trade", etc., things that have happen to all this people in common the buyer was an undercover cop and told the seller that we was going to commit some sort of crime (entrapment), the seller thinking it is his money I am not babysitting what he does with his money ignores what he says, if you are the seller do not ignore since it is most likely a setup, simple back off and refuse to do the transaction at that point and walk away the average buyer will not tell you he is going to commit a crime even if he is, most people are honest, so most of the transactions are legit.

second point to consider, all the people arrested have been doing large transactions, with bitcoin the money is on the blockchain you are not doing any money transferring, you are technically transferring the ownership of that money, so authorities bully anyone with large amounts of cash. There are many laws in regards traveling with large amounts of money, it is complicated since some laws vary from state to state. At the federal level that amount seems to be $10000.

So to play it safe with people that you do not know, stay well below the $10000 amount, for safety purposes since bitcoins varies in value stay well below $6000, now for extra safety since at the state level they also have rules. most likely under $1000 will keep you out of trouble.

if you follow this rules, you will most likely be safe:

1. use localbitcoins, or craigslist
2. deal in small amounts of cash, under $1000 for extreme safety, avoid going over $10k by all means.
3. take a friend with you, if something goes wrong he is a witness.
4. be anonymous, governments are known to make retroactive laws, so even if you do something legal today that same activity could be illegal tomorrow.

another option, use btc-e is very reliable, but they have high fees for getting the money out.

As a personal preference anonymity is a good thing and in the good old days there used to be anonymous bitcoin exchanges in the USA, the fight by the government to have control of your bitcoins has led for "all" anonymous bitcoin exchanges to be shutdown, some have moved overseas, but the fact that something as "an anonymous exchange" has been made illegal is a sign of bad faith on the governments part, most of the USA anonymous exchanges have been shutdown by force.

so in conclusion selling bitcoins is perfectly legal, but play it safe, playing by the rules is not enough.

many well known bitcoin exchangers have played by the rules and have gotten in trouble due to retroactive laws, entrapment, and other things, so playing by the rules is insufficient, play it safe, have your own rules to protect your safety.

 



 

I see a lot of problems with a 20MB block.
The blockchain database could grow to 1000GB instead of 200GB per year.
Blockchain spam could be a much worse problem.
If the bitcoin decentralized database grows too big it will be more centralized, centralization is a very bad thing.
The blockchain security will be weaker, as the block reward for miners halves, and miners have to depend more and more on mining fees instead of the block reward, by having a 20MB block there will be little motivation to pay any transactions fees at all, causing lots of miners to quit weakening security. With a 1MB block if you are buying something that represents a large amount of money like a car, house, computer, etc you will be motivated to pay a higher fee for a quicker transaction, and for a micro transactions representing something of very little value, it will not be a problem if you have to wait a longer time than usual for a confirmation to confirm the transaction, but on the other hand for a transaction with a tiny value for example a 1 mBTC  if you do not wait for confirmation the risk is little do to the amount.
In the very futuristic event that a block were to be generating more than 25 BTC in rewards based on fees, this would imply a large fee  to get the transaction though in the next block in such an event it could be considered to increase the block size only and only if the current block size would become a problem.

But as things stand now, 1 MB block limit is not a problem, and in the near future it will help secure the network by motivating the miners, only in a very far future it could be needed to be increased, but in such a case then a study would need to take place since in a far future the block reward could be 2 BTC and most of the miners reward could be based on fees as Satoshi had originally planed.

As of today for each block reward, 25 BTC are the block reward, and only on average 0.1 BTC are from fees, the amount of 0.1 BTC would go down to near 0, and that will be a problem for the security of the blockchain once the block reward is something like 3 BTC.

Another thing to consider, today people using modems and low bandwidth can be bitcoin nodes, with a 20MBblock they will need at least moderate bandwidth.

The 20MB block might be needed in the far future but not now.

Also a fork risks the price of bitcoin going down since some may stay on the other side of the fork.

It is better to concentrate on bitcoin gaining adoption instead of solving a problem that today does not exist.

to answer these 3 questions:
1. it looks like the sp20, but it is really hard to know as a fact, since the S5 seems to use more efficient chips, but overall the case for the sp20 seems better.
The S5 has an S1 design, clearly the S3 design is better than S1 due to better airflow due to the case and due to having 2 fans instead of one, so I would assume that the S1 design for the S5 was chosen to save money and not because it was better, otherwise the S5 would have been based on the S3 and not the S1.
I am not talking about the chips, since it is clear that in each release they are better.

2. I believe they make a good profit at the low price, they probably figure since the BTC price went up, they can make more money by mining themselves or by having a larger margin of profit even if sales drop.
There is a common concept of making a miner barely ROI to maximize its profit, the old concept of how much useful it is for you  it is how much it is worth, most asic vendors operate this way, but there is another business concept if it costs X to produce regardless of your benefit it will sell for a small margin of profit as was the case for CPU and GPU miners of the time, as such most high end video cards where always sold out during the early days of bitcoin.

I am certain that as mining becomes less profitable they will reduce the price, proving that the cost to make the miner it is very little compared to the price it sells, not because of all the sudden the miner has lower manufacturing costs.

Of course if the miner did not ROI, sales for them would be very bad, but as long as they can make the money mining it is not a problem for them.

As a rule Bitmain sells the miners in such a way that they will barely ROI. It has nothing to do with the bitcoin price since the hardware cost of the miner which most likely it is in Fiat is well below the sale price, so if bitcoin goes up the price of the miner goes up, if bitcoin goes down the price of the miner goes down taking into consideration the difficulty, if difficulty goes down price of miner goes up, if difficulty goes up price goes down, always making the miner barely ROI.

This is a case of greed, since instead of letting their customers enjoy the quicker ROI, the very low ROI is kept constant so you will always barely ROI, it is not like if Bitcoin goes up in price and then the miner cost more to produce, that is not the case, the fact is that the if Bitcoin goes up in price the price of the miner in Bitcoins goes down since it is sold in dollars, and as such you would have to generate less coins to achieve ROI.
No one will think that if Bitcoin goes up Bitmain will no longer make profit at existing price, the profit for them will be the same, since the cost of making the miner is the same, simply they figure they can get more for the miner.

it is not that they barely ROI due to market conditions, or because of hardware costs, or the price of bitcoin, they barely ROI because it is their business model.

An example of extreme greed is knc, they promised  a lot and never delivered, they got the money from customers, lied to them, and once they had the money they build a mining farm for themselves figuring out it was more profitable than shipping the miners to their customers, once they have new tech, they ship the old technology to their customers and very late,  so knc basically mine with their customers hardware.

Bitmain is far from being like knc, but the price increase is clearly an indication of greed, we have enough greedy hardware vendors that is the least that we need.

 
3. as long as there is a profit  in making the miner it is sustainable to sell the miner until there is much better technology in which it does not make sense to make the miner anymore, for example today no one would buy a miner that uses 5 wats per GH/s but from the time they were first released they probably had a life of sales of 1.5 years, and greedy vendors took over a year to ship (bfl).

The way mining hardware should be sold in my opinion, not that it is currently sold this way:
1. vendors of asic hardware should not mine themselves it creates a conflict of interest.
2. hardware should be sold like any other hardware, such a video cards, etc, this model was proven to work, as an example this was the case in the GPU days. No video card vendor would say you will make so much mining and therefore the video card will cost more, some individuals did this, but not the hardware manufactures.
The way asic is sold today it is based on your ROI, so the hardware could cost 10 times less, but if ROI is good you pay a premium.
Ironically the best mining days were the GPU days, it was a fair playing field and hardware costs were not based on ROI.

For choosing mining hardware, the hardware that can ROI the quicker is better, and reliability of the vendor is very important, bitmain if they decide to make it hard to ROI for us it is their decision,  then it is no good for us, if they wanted us to ROI they certainty could, as of now it appears that spoondolies is more willing to help us ROI, of course as I write this things could change.

if it was not because of the sp20 the S5 would cost a lot more, the opposite is also true if it was not because of the S5 the sp20 would most likely cost a lot more. The miners are not sold based on their costs they are sold based on how much they can ROI, which is wrong especially when it becomes obvious due to greed, also competition is a good thing, and right now there is very little competition.


As an example of this greed I will use bottled water vendors during an earthquake.
in the Asic vendors model.
bottled water becomes a very valuable asset as such it is sold for very high prices, a $1 bottle can be sold for $20 or more since it could save your life and it will sell at high prices, high profits are achieved due to people willing to pay a lot for a product, high volume of sales are not needed, this is a case of greed.

in the case of the traditional hardware sales model like video cards:
water is sold at the same price and it sells out due to high demand, high profit are achieved due to the high volume of sales but not based on greed.

Telephone companies in the old days tried unsuccessfully to implement the concept the more  advantage you take of the phone lines the more you should pay, however most people realized that if they were not doing anything special for modems to work there was no reason they should make additional payments to use a modem which they did not provide or did anything special to make it work, and as such their plans to charge more for the use of modems failed.

In the case of the ASICs the less greedy vendors will survive in the end, today no one talks of bfl cointerra, fast hash, or knc this guys were very greedy and they lost the trust of the community.

today we only have spoondoolies and bitmain, and it is a very bad thing is one of this vendors becomes greedy.
no other hardware vendor makes miners that even have a very small chance of ROI.

I am personally planning to buy some mining hardware around march, I will check how things stand by then, but if I had to buy today the clear choice based on ROI is the sp20.

True, however just as bitcoin is financial freedom, let members of this site express freedom of speech it is very useful for newbies and everyone in general, if it was not for freedom of speech newbies would be getting burned badly by knc, bfl, cointerra, fasf hash, and such.

I think it is a good to express ones thought on this issue since it will motivate bitmain not to be so greedy  and motivate honestly, look at knc when they were becoming scammers a lot of people said do not criticize them they are the best we have, at the time it was true but valid critics prevented many from getting burned or not getting burned as much, same for bfl.

it is not like we have lots of choices for buying mining equipment, right now from 2 vendors we have been reduced to only 1, unless of course bitmain realizes to scam miners like the bad guys is bad for business and decides to remain one of the good guys, then we have 2 vendors to choose from.

Remember a miner must ROI, if it does not ROI it can not be considered for purchase, the concept of barely ROI is not a good one, it shoudl ROI in a decent way.

Everyone should have the right to express themselves as long as it is related to the topic, it is in everyone's best interest, I have always been against censorship on any type.

It is true that bitmain is free to raise the prices to whatever they like, and it is also true for us to voice our opinion  that it is no longer a good business decision for us.

it is a simple matter of math, if the high price is good or not, I will provide a link to a ROI calculator, I can assure you based on the link below that it is overpriced, and could take  up to a year to ROI for someone with low electric rates, which is not acceptable.

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/calculator
based on the calculator make your decision.

As of now sp20 is a much better choice by the simple fact that it costs a lot less and you get much better GH/s per BTC, the S5 could be a better choice if the price was right but it is not.

believe me it is in our best interest to have freedom of speech and to have 2 vendors to choose from instead of one when deciding to buy mining hardware, but if one vendor decides that instead of selling the hardware it is better for him to mine with it, it is his choice, and of course we can voice our opinion and support the vendor that helps us achieve ROI sooner than later, sometimes later never comes as the time to ROI  is infinity.

Bitmain has been an honest vendor in regards to shipping on time, but does not help us if we will not ROI due to greed, in 6 months from now an S5 will be under $200, but it will be because there is something better out there  and cheaper not an act of goodwill.

This valid critics are very useful  to help in the decentralization of mining, we really do not want large mining farms own by the vendor of mining hardware it is not in our interest, in the old days of independent miners the miners kept their coins, now non independent miners which have most of the hash power sells the coins as soon as they can making the price of BTC go down, this did not happen in the early days of bitcoin, we really need the independent miners back, it will help decentralize mining.
In the bitcoin world decentralization is your friend.

Lets do not forget mining is an essential part of the bitcoin economy.

Thats not the problem, since it is the price in dollars they are increasing, first they remove the discount, and today after the discount was removed price was increased for a second time in just a few days.
At current price the sp20 is a much better choice, it is a cheaper product.
after shipping for 3, each costs:
sp20 $400 1.7 GH/s
s5     $410 1.15 GH/s

My guess is that greed has taken over, since at their low price they were still making a huge profit, as proof of that I will point out as spoondolies releases new tech at lower prices eventually bitmain will have to lower their prices below their low price that they had a few days ago.

what I think is happening they probably figure they can make more by mining themselves since the btc price went up, well for us it is a good thing we have a choice, since the sp20 has not gone up in price it makes it a better choice for us.

it is all in the business strategy used by each company:
bitmain sees that as an opportunity for them to mine and do not care about lost sales since the probably feel mining is better for them at current prices, if I am correct at a latter time we will see a lot of used s5 from them at a lower price, when they decide it is better for them to sell instead of mine. maybe bitmain is gambling that the sp20 will sell out and the only choice will be the s5, or maybe the know something we do not know, but increasing the price does not make much sense if the s5 is expected to be sold.

spoondolies probably sees this as a good opportunity to make money by selling their hardware and as long as bitmain continoues to increase the prices the sp20 sales will keep increasing.

it is sad because competition is a good thing, but in this case we will be left out with the sp20 as the only choice since one of the reasons we buy a miner is to make ROI.

Lets hope bitmain does not become the new knc or bfl, if they do someone will take their place, just like knc   or bfl is now irrelevant and most miners will never buy a product from them.

I will not be buying used mining hardware from the hardware vendors directly, because it only helps mining hardware companies compete against us the small miners in mining.

I was planning on buying some mining hardware for sometime in march, I guess I wont have a choice, it will most likely be the sp20 unless something better is released by then.

Bitmain by increasing their price will cause sales of sp20 to go up.

here is the reason:
3 s5 to the usa cost $1140
performance 1150 GH/s

$ per GH/s 0.33

for the s20 since shipping is free total $1200
performance 1700 GH/s 0.23

much better performance per dollar.

in terms of electric efficiency, since basically they cost about the same after shipping $380 vs $400, it would be fair to compare them at the same performance, the sp20 undervolted to provide 1150GH/s would probably give similar consumption.
Someone with an sp20 would provide that info.

But after the price increase for the S5 the SP20 is a much better choice, I am sure bitmain will be force to drop their prices in less than a week from now.

if we use the $ per GH/s ratio of 0.23, for the S5 to be able to compete against the S20, the S5 would have to be priced at $264 including shipping, but since it does not include shipping it would have to be priced at $224, at nearly double this price it is no match for the SP20, I was hoping bitmain would lower their prices against the competition, but instead they were increased, this is a very bad indication that they are loosing ground. I would think in less than a month assuming spoondolies does not lower their price would have to be prices around $200 otherwise spoondolies will get all the sales, now if spoondolies lowers their price, the sp20 will have all the market for themselves at least for a while.

I am comparing in a group of 3 since that is something that most miners could do easily and provides best price for sp20, for the S5 the group is 52 units which is way to large for most of us.