Seems to me like a great opportunity here for someone to step in and make upgrade kits for all the S1 and S2 boxes out there, it would be like printing BTC. If only I had the know-how and resources...
Thats wishful thinking ..... I actually thought we were very close to that but bitmain are having none of it thus far. Case in mind was the much touted / dubbed C2, or water-cooled S5 where bitmain had come to an understanding with syscooling to sell them boards and they do a design and group buy. Bitmain pulled the plug at the last minute! I've also heard noises that bitmain are agnostic to selling boards (aka upgrade kits) anymore because it costs them a lot to test the boards .... apparently!
So there ...
Right, but what's stopping a 3rd party from stepping in and offering upgrades? That's what I'm surprised hasn't happened. Someone (several someones) could start a business doing nothing else and I'm sure it would be profitable. Oh well, wishful thinking as you said...
Price of the chips and assembly.
8-9 month ago, I was seriously interested in buying chips to build my own miners.
The cost of the chips alone was close to the full miner from the same manufacturers, and sometimes, the chips were even more expensive than buying a miner.
Some manufacturers were having a MOQ of over 20 000$.
With chips being obsolete and losing value every week, you also need to calculate how fast you need to make the assembly and sell the mining units before they are worth nothing.
The timeframe is really short between the date you pay for the chips, and the time you need to have everything sold.
Do you remember the Avalon 1, or maybe we can take BFL Monarch, or black arrow prosperos as an example.
Anyway, the main issue here is that there is no point in paying 20-30% more for something homemade when fully working units are available from the manufacturer.
And those 20-30% too expensive prices don't include any profit for the one who is assembling the boards... just chips, components, PCB, heatsinks.
