SO has their been any news from Bitmain regarding the s1 upgrades yet or this still a no go. As I see can only order from them for them in pairs of 2s and wanted to maybe buy 3 units and also buy upgrade modules for old s1s that are now beginning to collect dust.
Your are MUCH better offer selling your S1s and buying S3s than waiting for these "upgrades" that may or may not actually happen. I know these DIY projects appeal to us all but financially a miner that is just sitting around is losing money.
I disagree.
If you can still ROI with your S1 then run them as long as they ROI, once they do no longer ROI to to less GH/s per watt compare to the S3, you have to do the math if the S3 is a good purchase or not.
Right now if you get free electric energy it takes 84 days to ROI using this data as input
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/calculator9% difficulty increase
2% pool fee
440 GH/s hash rate
at 0.68BTC is $395 dollars
340 watts at the wall
0 electric cost
This is a best case scenario,
now with 0.1 Dollars per kwatt
it takes 97 days to ROI
at 0.2 dollar per kwatt
164 days to ROI
at 0.25 dollars per kwatt it does not ROI.
once it is time to buy a miner do the math, if it ROI in 30 days or less, then it is a great buy, up to 60 days it is a good purchase, beyond that it is high risk, specially if the calculator tells you there is no ROI.
Right now Bitmain is priced the best in regards that all the other miners do not ROI, but Bitmain really needs to lower the price for us to make money, the calculator does not lie, the problem if see if the same problem I see with other hardware vendors if the miners where priced to ROI less say in 45 days then they would prefer to mine themselves, and they do, so that is why it takes so long to ROI, and any miner that ROIs in more than 60 days it is very high risk.
We need decentralizacion we have that on the software en p2pool, however we do not have that in the hardware, and time goes by bitcoin mining has become more and more centralized, I believe this will not last forever at some time in near future it will begin to decentralized again.
The mining problem is a big one, here is why, Bitcoin is a great financial revolucion, and to support that revolucion one of the best ways it is mining because it secures the network by having mining decentralized, and the very large mining pools are not to be trusted, some of the very guys that run very large mining pools are taking about implementing the idea of clean coin for their own profit furthermore they sell all the coins they mine that is a very clear indication that they do not believe in the bitcoin revolution, only on bitcoin profits. therefore it is important for us to mine, it is very important that the average person supporting this revolution mines, however mining at a loss is no fun, or if ROI takes 200 days then there is absolutely no way be will get bitcoin decentralized in the short term.
One thing for sure stay away from pre-orders that are longer than a week, and only pre-order something that is already in production.
Bitmains model of selling within 48 hours was great, I do not know why they changed to preorders like the rest.
my advice, before ordering any miner use the calculator above, and stay away from all calculators that do not take into consideration the difficulty increase, your profit is not liner, it is logarithmic.
The profit of a miner is the summation of a convergent geometric series, most people on these forum do not know what that is, and you do not need to know either, it is something the guys that wrote these calculators had to know, just use the calculator and you will be fine, most do not even use the calculators, otherwise how do you explain Neptunes selling a $4 per GH/s, or BFL even at much higher prices.
The only reason the SP30 does not look good, it is a preorder months in advance, and it is very hard to predict anything with accuracy that much in advance.
At some point in time once enough S3 are sold, the S3 will have to drop down in price severely do to market reasons, there are many miners including myself waiting to make a large purchase on a miner that can ROI in 30 to 45 days, and all the ones that have purchased at higher prices will not have any more rooms on their houses due to limits on electric energy available and due to the heat generated by the miners.
If Bitmain sold the S3 so it would ROI in 30 days, they would make a huge profic for themselves and for the miners and also help to decentralized the hardware mining distribution, but I do not see that happening, as of now if you have free energy it would take 3 monts to ROI, and if paying 25 cents or more per kilowatt there is no ROI.
Otherwise it is a matter of time before someone new steps in the hardware game.
