[ANN] US/North American Bitfury sales NEW STOCK ***NOW SHIPPING***

[organofcorti]

<snip>
What I meant to say was that if you spent the equivalent of 10btc back a couple of years ago on something that makes you ONE btc today, then you made a massive profit. I think.
<snip>

If I rephrase that as: "If I gave you 10btc back a couple of years ago and you give me ONE btc today, then I made a massive profit", can you see the problem? Still doesn't work.

I'm just gonna leave it alone. I'm not sure what I was trying to say, now. I was more intoxicated than I usually get. I tried to reconstruct it from what I typed, not memory. Suffice it to say it don't even make sense to me. I fucked up, I admit it, and I'll try to avoid drunken typing from now on.

If I had one btc for every time I posted something before I thought about it, I'd have, I dunno, lots and lots more btc than I have. Eventually I gave up even trying and just added "Poor impulse control" under my avatar. Don't sweat it

I think what you left out was "at the current exchange rates at the time"

Still doesn't work, Trongersoll - if I had the original 10btc, I'd have ten times as much btc.

[salfter]

however, the difference in user experience is vast. the antminers dont destroy SD cards. My bitfury has been stable for almost 2 weeks, but I am terrified to change it over to a less-noisy PSU for fear that the SD card will need to be formatted and imaged all over again just to get it running, not to mention re-doing all the autotune

Can't you copy the autotune file to a USB stick? "sudo shutdown -h now" has been sparing me reimaging.

on at least 3 occasions 'sudo shutdown -h now' has messed up the SD card image. in contrast when i first had the system i must have safely turned off and on the PSU to do tweaks and pencil mods a dozen times before the first issue with an SD card. At this point i just avoid touching it for fear of it losing my settings.

How long are you waiting after issuing the shutdown command before you actually shut down the miner?  The idiot lights on the RPi continue blinking for a few seconds before just the red LED stays on by itself.  Once it's just the red LED, you can shut it off.  I've never had a corrupted SD card.

On another note, more H-boards arrived today, two days after they were ordered.  Heatsinks still haven't arrived, but my first boards ran OK without heatsinks for a couple of weeks or so with no ill effect (and with less-optimal airflow over them), so I suspect I'll plug 'em in now and add the heatsinks whenever they arrive.

[Trongersoll]

Ok Dave & Company, I need to order some more V1 H cards so y'all should think about lowering the price some. Last time the price went down it was like 2 days after i ordered. 

[klondike_bar]

however, the difference in user experience is vast. the antminers dont destroy SD cards. My bitfury has been stable for almost 2 weeks, but I am terrified to change it over to a less-noisy PSU for fear that the SD card will need to be formatted and imaged all over again just to get it running, not to mention re-doing all the autotune

Can't you copy the autotune file to a USB stick? "sudo shutdown -h now" has been sparing me reimaging.

on at least 3 occasions 'sudo shutdown -h now' has messed up the SD card image. in contrast when i first had the system i must have safely turned off and on the PSU to do tweaks and pencil mods a dozen times before the first issue with an SD card. At this point i just avoid touching it for fear of it losing my settings.

How long are you waiting after issuing the shutdown command before you actually shut down the miner?  The idiot lights on the RPi continue blinking for a few seconds before just the red LED stays on by itself.  Once it's just the red LED, you can shut it off.  I've never had a corrupted SD card.

On another note, more H-boards arrived today, two days after they were ordered.  Heatsinks still haven't arrived, but my first boards ran OK without heatsinks for a couple of weeks or so with no ill effect (and with less-optimal airflow over them), so I suspect I'll plug 'em in now and add the heatsinks whenever they arrive.

I am sure I waited long enough. One occasion i waited about 3 minutes first

[allinvain]

My current limit for profitability is ~ US$5.10 per Ghps.

Any more than this and you're unlikely to make a complete ROI in the first 3 months - and if you have to bank on mining more than 3 months to make a complete ROI then you can't make any good (reliable) estimates anyway.

That's a pretty reasonable number. Bitmain comes close. Bitfury is double that. Disappointingly overpriced.

I think bitmain is right on the nose with thier pricing 90% of the time. the current 1.45BTC batch and the 2.65BTC batch they had 2 weeks ago both fall a little norht of what i consider 'reasonable'. 0.0065BTC/GH seems like a fair number to me for an antminer (2w/GH) and maybe 0.0075BTC/GH for a bitfury due to the slightly better efficiency.

however, the difference in user experience is vast. the antminers dont destroy SD cards. My bitfury has been stable for almost 2 weeks, but I am terrified to change it over to a less-noisy PSU for fear that the SD card will need to be formatted and imaged all over again just to get it running, not to mention re-doing all the autotune

Can't you copy the autotune file to a USB stick? "sudo shutdown -h now" has been sparing me reimaging.

on at least 3 occasions 'sudo shutdown -h now' has messed up the SD card image. in contrast when i first had the system i must have safely turned off and on the PSU to do tweaks and pencil mods a dozen times before the first issue with an SD card. At this point i just avoid touching it for fear of it losing my settings.

how could i copy the settings (or better yet, the full image) over the network or onto a usb stick to make backup SD cards?

What SD card are you using. This problem has yet to happen to me, so I'm not sure why people are getting these sd card corruption issues. I think a lot of the kits came with Transcend 4GB or 8GB SD cards and two of my rigs use those, and once again they have yet to give me any file system corruption issues. What I do is I first stop the miner (to prevent it from constantly trying to write to the .stats.log and other files) and then I do a "shutdown -h now". I then wait for all the light on the RaspPi to stop blinking (indicating that the shutdown process is complete) and then and only then I power off the rig. Maybe it's my method maybe it's luck; I dunno.

Regarding the tuning issue, yes I have that too. Because I overclock my rigs after some time (strange effect if you ask me) the overclock increases with age and I find myself having to downclock the chips a bit selectively to maintain stability. Suffice it to say this is a maintenance headache that I'd like to avoid, but with bitfury rigs it's a necessity. In the future I think I will buy only low maintenance miners. Sometimes playing around with this stuff is fun, but at other times I think of all the other more fun things I could be doing with my time.

To make a backup of the system you'd have to take it out of action, put it in a linux or windows box and use a disk image copy program to create some ISO or standard image file of it. In linux you can use the "dd" command. To copy just the key miner settings file you can use plain old ftp or something more fancy like rsync - oh, or NFS.

[Asinine]

If you are having data corruption woes, you can also try the old sync; sync; halt method.  Shutdown is supposed to run the sync on it's own after killing the non-essential processes.  But, you can evoke it at any point.

If I can get into a terminal, I typically run:
sudo sync
sudo sync
sudo shutdown -h now

I was told back in the day, the second sync was there to trigger a head park on old mechanical hard drives.  But, as far as I can tell, it just makes "double sure" that the cache is flushed to disk.  So far I have not had any trashed SD cards and have rebooted the rig about 2 dozen times, primarily for tuning.

[klondike_bar]

If you are having data corruption woes, you can also try the old sync; sync; halt method.  Shutdown is supposed to run the sync on it's own after killing the non-essential processes.  But, you can evoke it at any point.

If I can get into a terminal, I typically run:
sudo sync
sudo sync
sudo shutdown -h now

I was told back in the day, the second sync was there to trigger a head park on old mechanical hard drives.  But, as far as I can tell, it just makes "double sure" that the cache is flushed to disk.  So far I have not had any trashed SD cards and have rebooted the rig about 2 dozen times, primarily for tuning.

Over the weekend, there was about an hour of power outtage - when it returned all 7 antminers returned to hashing normally but the bitfury did not due to another TOTALLY corrupt SD card (wont format and image - throws 'semaphore timeout 121' errors like the last sd card that became bricked.

off to buy a pair of class 8 cards now see if they handle better.

[nbtcminer]

If you are having data corruption woes, you can also try the old sync; sync; halt method.  Shutdown is supposed to run the sync on it's own after killing the non-essential processes.  But, you can evoke it at any point.

If I can get into a terminal, I typically run:
sudo sync
sudo sync
sudo shutdown -h now

I was told back in the day, the second sync was there to trigger a head park on old mechanical hard drives.  But, as far as I can tell, it just makes "double sure" that the cache is flushed to disk.  So far I have not had any trashed SD cards and have rebooted the rig about 2 dozen times, primarily for tuning.

Over the weekend, there was about an hour of power outtage - when it returned all 7 antminers returned to hashing normally but the bitfury did not due to another TOTALLY corrupt SD card (wont format and image - throws 'semaphore timeout 121' errors like the last sd card that became bricked.

off to buy a pair of class 8 cards now see if they handle better.

Are you using an MLC card or SLC SD card? Its possible the MLC card simply reached its limit with too many read/writes (can happen with frequent read writes and the card won't die till after it has powered off). Try using a Panasonic RP-SDF08G; its a little pricey but should give you way more read/ writes if that is the issue.

Re:
http://panasonic.net/avc/sdcard/industrial_sd/lineup.html

cheers,
nbtcminer

[bobcaticus]

Hi everyone -

Just a heads up that our M-boards were delayed due to Chinese New Year.  They should be in by Feb 21st.  H-boards are in stock, though.

[klondike_bar]

Hi everyone -

Just a heads up that our M-boards were delayed due to Chinese New Year.  They should be in by Feb 21st.  H-boards are in stock, though.

when will there be a price reduction - or better yet pricing in BTC?  An h-card that is rated at 25GH and capable of ~33GH is only worth around 0.25 BTC or $200 right now based on your competitiors such as Antminer (180GH/1.45BTC shipping after the CNY)

[xzempt]

you cant really compare bitfury and antminer,  when antminer uses double the power.... the market sets the price.....  so as long as people are paying what bitfury asks.... then the price is fair....   when people are no longer buying..... the price should drop.....    basic economics.....  if you are selling something at $400,    and people buy it....  why would you drop the price?   



 

[kendog77]

you cant really compare bitfury and antminer,  when antminer uses double the power.... the market sets the price.....  so as long as people are paying what bitfury asks.... then the price is fair....   when people are no longer buying..... the price should drop.....    basic economics.....  if you are selling something at $400,    and people buy it....  why would you drop the price?  
 

At 15 cents per kilowatt hour, the Antminer only uses ~$20 more in electricity per month at ~200 GH/s, so clearly BitFury gear should not command such a large price premium.

[allinvain]

The "market" is misguided as clearly some miners don't understand basic economic principles. I also suspect that some miners are using hardware as a sort of long bet on btc. They figure who cares if they overpay for hardware now when the bitcoins their gear mines today will be worth a lot more tomorrow and in the end they will be in profit overall.

Anyways, klondike_bar is right, power consumption is NOT a big advantage of bitfury hardware as compared to bitmain antminers. It will be a strong advantage only when the difficulty is high enough that you're nearly at that razor edge of profitability. I suspect if ever that becomes the case bitmain will either just lower their prices to match the current difficulty landscape or by then they would have 28nm based gear (or lower but I suspect the next logical jump for them is 28nm) that can match or overtake bitfury gear on power efficiency.

[kano]

The "market" is misguided as clearly some miners don't understand basic economic principles. I also suspect that some miners are using hardware as a sort of long bet on btc. They figure who cares if they overpay for hardware now when the bitcoins their gear mines today will be worth a lot more tomorrow and in the end they will be in profit overall.
...

As has been stated many times before ...
If you buy BTC then you will have X BTC.
If you buy Hardware that mines BTC, in the long run it will generate less than X BTC.
If BTC/$ price goes up, down, sideways it doesn't really matter.
More BTC is ... more BTC.

[organofcorti]

The "market" is misguided as clearly some miners don't understand basic economic principles. I also suspect that some miners are using hardware as a sort of long bet on btc. They figure who cares if they overpay for hardware now when the bitcoins their gear mines today will be worth a lot more tomorrow and in the end they will be in profit overall.
...

As has been stated many times before ...
If you buy BTC then you will have X BTC.
If you buy Hardware that mines BTC, in the long run it will generate less than X BTC.
If BTC/$ price goes up, down, sideways it doesn't really matter.
More BTC is ... more BTC.

And if a reader fails to understand either allinvain or kano, I have an offer for you. Give me 10 btc now, and I'll give you 5 btc back at some time in the future when the exchange rate is twice three times what it is now. Good deal, right?

[repairguy]

you cant really compare bitfury and antminer,  when antminer uses double the power.... the market sets the price.....  so as long as people are paying what bitfury asks.... then the price is fair....   when people are no longer buying..... the price should drop.....    basic economics.....  if you are selling something at $400,    and people buy it....  why would you drop the price?   
 

At 15 cents per kilowatt hour, the Antminer only uses ~$20 more in electricity per month at ~200 GH/s, so clearly BitFury gear should not command such a large price premium.

Exactly, 20 a month isn't anything to get the miner now and cheap! I bought 1 antminer at 4.25 four at 2.25 I will get crazy with it at 1.45, And the antminer is standalone, no backplane no rasberry pi no sd card. Just plug it in and program it, then leave it alone.

I would think that when bitmain was doing slow releases with group buy and auction, bitfury had more business because of shorter supply and they were the same price per gh, I would assume now they are going to have to get more price competitive to keep in the game.

[allinvain]

you cant really compare bitfury and antminer,  when antminer uses double the power.... the market sets the price.....  so as long as people are paying what bitfury asks.... then the price is fair....   when people are no longer buying..... the price should drop.....    basic economics.....  if you are selling something at $400,    and people buy it....  why would you drop the price?   
 

At 15 cents per kilowatt hour, the Antminer only uses ~$20 more in electricity per month at ~200 GH/s, so clearly BitFury gear should not command such a large price premium.

Exactly, 20 a month isn't anything to get the miner now and cheap! I bought 1 antminer at 4.25 four at 2.25 I will get crazy with it at 1.45, And the antminer is standalone, no backplane no rasberry pi no sd card. Just plug it in and program it, then leave it alone.

I would think that when bitmain was doing slow releases with group buy and auction, bitfury had more business because of shorter supply and they were the same price per gh, I would assume now they are going to have to get more price competitive to keep in the game.

You know I wonder if they really have an incentive to get competitive. My hunch says no, they do not. I think they have all the money the could ever need and enough income from their massive farm to acquire more than enough future funds for either re-investment in new tech or adding additional hashing power. But I could be wrong.

[bobcaticus]

you cant really compare bitfury and antminer,  when antminer uses double the power.... the market sets the price.....  so as long as people are paying what bitfury asks.... then the price is fair....   when people are no longer buying..... the price should drop.....    basic economics.....  if you are selling something at $400,    and people buy it....  why would you drop the price?  
 

At 15 cents per kilowatt hour, the Antminer only uses ~$20 more in electricity per month at ~200 GH/s, so clearly BitFury gear should not command such a large price premium.

Exactly, 20 a month isn't anything to get the miner now and cheap! I bought 1 antminer at 4.25 four at 2.25 I will get crazy with it at 1.45, And the antminer is standalone, no backplane no rasberry pi no sd card. Just plug it in and program it, then leave it alone.

I would think that when bitmain was doing slow releases with group buy and auction, bitfury had more business because of shorter supply and they were the same price per gh, I would assume now they are going to have to get more price competitive to keep in the game.

You know I wonder if they really have an incentive to get competitive. My hunch says no, they do not. I think they have all the money the could ever need and enough income from their massive farm to acquire more than enough future funds for either re-investment in new tech or adding additional hashing power. But I could be wrong.

Dave mentioned to me that there are new chips and products in development.  I don't know any specifics, nor do I know any pricing.  

I also want you all to know that your requests are not falling on deaf ears, and I do pass along valid pricing issues to him.

Thanks again,
-Jason

[davecoin]

New chips, huh?  Time for a little efficiency showdown with friedcat?

[klondike_bar]

you cant really compare bitfury and antminer,  when antminer uses double the power.... the market sets the price.....  so as long as people are paying what bitfury asks.... then the price is fair....   when people are no longer buying..... the price should drop.....    basic economics.....  if you are selling something at $400,    and people buy it....  why would you drop the price?   
 

At 15 cents per kilowatt hour, the Antminer only uses ~$20 more in electricity per month at ~200 GH/s, so clearly BitFury gear should not command such a large price premium.

Exactly, 20 a month isn't anything to get the miner now and cheap! I bought 1 antminer at 4.25 four at 2.25 I will get crazy with it at 1.45, And the antminer is standalone, no backplane no rasberry pi no sd card. Just plug it in and program it, then leave it alone.

I would think that when bitmain was doing slow releases with group buy and auction, bitfury had more business because of shorter supply and they were the same price per gh, I would assume now they are going to have to get more price competitive to keep in the game.

+1. Even if the bitfury was price-competitive (factoring in a small premium for lower power draw), it is not a plug-and-play system. it needs tweaking, has trouble standing upright, and seems to obliterate SD cards just a little too frequently. I had a power outtage for 1hour, and all the antminers came back online without a problem. the bitfury sat for almost a day because it fried the SD card (second card it has totally trashed, not just corrupted) and I had to go and purchase 2 new cards for it.