Spondoolies-Tech vs Bitmain for a larger operation?

[sidehack]

Excellent advice. I have it on good authority that Ohio sucks.

[notlist3d]

I am in the exact situation here.

We have a cheap power here with a  rate of 2 cent per kw, and we are start to build our own farm. When me and my team decide on which gear to go with then at the last step we make a new  decision to wait for more 2 months to see what will go on with the new gears that we expect to come out next 2 our 3 months from now.

I advice you to wait a little bit, because it better to have a better deficiency than to be sorry.

Where are you getting 2 cent kw?

[CptTripps]

Where are you getting 2 cent kw?

Likely China.

[philipma1957]

Make your costs lower than anyone else, and you will do better than anyone else.  Never forget that mining is a zero sum game.  There is only so much pie to go around. 

Long term, the only thing that matters is are your costs lower than others.   Exact figures don't matter, what matters is can you beat labor and electricty rates that others will locate anywhere in the world to achieve. 

I would not be happy about your projected costs, they look bad to me.   You need to improve them.  Look outside of Ohio. 

[Medow]

I am in the exact situation here.

We have a cheap power here with a  rate of 2 cent per kw, and we are start to build our own farm. When me and my team decide on which gear to go with then at the last step we make a new  decision to wait for more 2 months to see what will go on with the new gears that we expect to come out next 2 our 3 months from now.

I advice you to wait a little bit, because it better to have a better deficiency than to be sorry.

Where are you getting 2 cent kw?

Where are you getting 2 cent kw?

Likely China.

No, it is not China.

It is Sudan, we have a 2 cent power here for industrial activity.

[stonerider]

^^^^^^^
Mining for btc is a form of GAMBLING. Even if you are not solo mining, you are still assuming a number of risks, not the least of which is btc price.

[CptTripps]

And....we're in business with the S5s.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/28538855/mining_1.png

Spent quite a bit of time talking to Gadi at Spondoolies Tech this AM. I should have those machines by Wednesday.

[dance191]

^^^^^^^
Mining for btc is a form of GAMBLING. Even if you are not solo mining, you are still assuming a number of risks, not the least of which is btc price.

If you hedge your equipment/expected mining value with BTC shorts, you can have minimal risk to the volatility of BTC.

Having a naked position in mining is gambling.  I would say 99% of people are in this category.  So yes, for 99% of people it is gambling.  Personally, it just isn't for me and I don't think it is for any serious operation.

It is just like any other large investment.  You need to get rid of risk.

[pekatete]

^^^^^^^
Mining for btc is a form of GAMBLING. Even if you are not solo mining, you are still assuming a number of risks, not the least of which is btc price.

If you hedge your equipment/expected mining value with BTC shorts, you can have minimal risk to the volatility of BTC.

Having a naked position in mining is gambling.  I would say 99% of people are in this category.  So yes, for 99% of people it is gambling.  Personally, it just isn't for me and I don't think it is for any serious operation.

It is just like any other large investment.  You need to get rid of risk.

Anything you mention in the same context as hedging IS gambling, that is without doubt.

[philipma1957]

^^^^^^^
Mining for btc is a form of GAMBLING. Even if you are not solo mining, you are still assuming a number of risks, not the least of which is btc price.

If you hedge your equipment/expected mining value with BTC shorts, you can have minimal risk to the volatility of BTC.

Having a naked position in mining is gambling.  I would say 99% of people are in this category.  So yes, for 99% of people it is gambling.  Personally, it just isn't for me and I don't think it is for any serious operation.

It is just like any other large investment.  You need to get rid of risk.

  yes and now that coin base has  a usa based exchange put in a buy at 150usd a coin followed by a buy at 125 a coin.    along with two sells of 325 a coin and 350 a coin.

each week I sell my mined coins and  divide the sale into ⅓ then put ⅓ into cash     add ⅓ to my high sell   and ⅓ to my  low buy positions

[dance191]

^^^^^^^
Mining for btc is a form of GAMBLING. Even if you are not solo mining, you are still assuming a number of risks, not the least of which is btc price.

If you hedge your equipment/expected mining value with BTC shorts, you can have minimal risk to the volatility of BTC.

Having a naked position in mining is gambling.  I would say 99% of people are in this category.  So yes, for 99% of people it is gambling.  Personally, it just isn't for me and I don't think it is for any serious operation.

It is just like any other large investment.  You need to get rid of risk.

Anything you mention in the same context as hedging IS gambling, that is without doubt.

I am not sure what you think hedge means.  Use this for a defination:
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hedge.asp

It reduces risk, makes things less of a gamble.  Anyways, I was just trying to point the OP in the right direction, not focus on the defination of words.  I am not sure if this is getting off top. 

Trying to keep things on topic, I would say if your power costs are low, go with the sp20.  The S5 is a good machine, but I question the long term reliability of it.  Each new piece from BitMain has been worse than the last, however I think the S5 is an exception.  Unless your power costs are really high, go with the sp20.  Actually, even if your power costs are high go with the sp20. 

[TheAnalogKid]

And....we're in business with the S5s.

Spent quite a bit of time talking to Gadi at Spondoolies Tech this AM. I should have those machines by Wednesday.

Good luck with the endeavor.

A few comments if I may:

1) Go grab M's Miner Monitor (search the forum or google for mminermonitor).  Written by a member on the board, mdude77.  It can monitor both Antminers as well as SPTech machines.  In addition, one of the more important things, is the ability for it to send alerts and reboot miners based on definable triggers.  Here's a screenshot of what it looks like:


2) As you can see from the screenshot the S5's are fairly over-clockable.  I've gotten most to run very reliably at 387.5 (roughly 1250 GH/s), and some are rock stable at 412.5 (1350 GH/s).  If it runs for more than 3 days at a speed setting, chances are you'll be stable for a very long time at that speed.

3) As you might also see, there's 3 miners down currently, which is common with Antminers - they will blow up occasionally and you will need to replace them.  The original setup was 48 miners.  One fried immediately on powering up, the fan didn't spin up and it wasn't caught in time ... the burning smell alerted to something wrong, and that was it.  I've had 3 of them lose a whole chain (one out of the two boards, as you can see from the .128 machine which has errored out (gone down and needing a physical reboot).  Another one just keeps dying after being up for random amounts of time, so it's worthless.

I use breakout boards from Gekkoscience for the Dell 750 PSU's as well as the DPS-2000BB PSU's.  A single 750 will power an overclocked S5 perfectly fine.  A single 2000BB will easily power 3, and you can get them to power 4 if you have good cooling and stable power (208V though).  I am running 2 S5's per DPS-2000BB simply for cabling and organizational ease.  These boards are indestructable and quality made, I recommend them highly, and they're very accommodating for special orders as well as special cabling needs.

I would also look into the breakout boards from J4bberwock (look in the Marketplace -> Goods section or just search).  He has just come out with boards to run on an IBM 2800 PSU, which will allow you to safely run 5 S5's on a single PSU.

Personally, if I were you, I'd deploy both Antminers as well as SP-20's.  They take the same PSU/wiring setups so you can interchange the units and the PSU's without having to modify anything.  I don't have any SP-20's, but I am ordering an SP-35 unit because I'm curious about the build quality as well as the simple ease of just plugging it in and running, without having to do so much custom wiring.

Finally, for pool choice, with that large of a setup I'd recommend looking at running your own P2Pool node in-house if you can, or possibly contracting Kano or CKolivas to set up your own local pool node using their new pool software (CKPool) and hooking into their pool network (which is already over 6PH).  Mining on BTCGuild is nice, but you're losing quite a bit with the 2% fee at your potential size, and if you're doing as much number crunching to get started, you should take note of the pool and its fees (P2Pool has zero fee, CK has I think 0.9%).  I run my own local private P2Pool node behind a firewall and not exposed to the outside, along with another VM to run just the wallet.  I have been running a side-by-side comparison between P2Pool and BTCGuild and I can tell you from personal experience P2Pool has been getting better returns over the past 3-6 months, as long as you can live with the variance (sometimes 2-3 days between a block).

Feel free to PM if you'd like for more discussion.

[CptTripps]

I've been up and running with the 5 S5s since about 2:30pm today. The SP20s won't arrive for a few days though. I still need to have power re-wired in that room for 208v, so right now, I have the S5s in the data room that we still have servers in. So far, I've been mining at a sustained 5.85 TH/s for the last 5.5h. They've mined 0.00387851 according to the BTC Guild dashboard. Although, the shifts aren't closed, so I'm expecting that to go up. I'll wait a day before I work out the actual calculations.

I'm hoping to have power run to the room I want everything running out of by Thursday. Then I'll run them both for a week and see what the results look like.

I DO like that the S5s are performing at/above the reported specs. Setup was a breeze. I expect the same from the SP20s. I've been looking at the Github repo for the Spondoolies software, and I like that it's seemingly more open. We'll likely build out a lot of custom dashboards and administration portals, so that's important to me too.

The quality on the S5 was a little suspect. One of the heatsinks was caved in...and it was clearly installed that way. The case around it was fine. Little things like that piss me off.

[pekatete]

Anything you mention in the same context as hedging IS gambling, that is without doubt.

I am not sure what you think hedge means.  Use this for a defination:
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hedge.asp

It reduces risk, makes things less of a gamble.  Anyways, I was just trying to point the OP in the right direction, not focus on the defination of words.  I am not sure if this is getting off top.  

Trying to keep things on topic, I would say if your power costs are low, go with the sp20.  The S5 is a good machine, but I question the long term reliability of it.  Each new piece from BitMain has been worse than the last, however I think the S5 is an exception.  Unless your power costs are really high, go with the sp20.  Actually, even if your power costs are high go with the sp20.  

There .... you said it yourself ..... makes things less of a gamble.

[neegeeboo]

I am in the exact situation here.

We have a cheap power here with a  rate of 2 cent per kw, and we are start to build our own farm. When me and my team decide on which gear to go with then at the last step we make a new  decision to wait for more 2 months to see what will go on with the new gears that we expect to come out next 2 our 3 months from now.

I advice you to wait a little bit, because it better to have a better deficiency than to be sorry.

Where are you getting 2 cent kw?

Where are you getting 2 cent kw?

Likely China.

No, it is not China.

It is Sudan, we have a 2 cent power here for industrial activity.

I'm so jelly...

[dance191]

Anything you mention in the same context as hedging IS gambling, that is without doubt.

I am not sure what you think hedge means.  Use this for a defination:
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hedge.asp

It reduces risk, makes things less of a gamble.  Anyways, I was just trying to point the OP in the right direction, not focus on the defination of words.  I am not sure if this is getting off top.  

Trying to keep things on topic, I would say if your power costs are low, go with the sp20.  The S5 is a good machine, but I question the long term reliability of it.  Each new piece from BitMain has been worse than the last, however I think the S5 is an exception.  Unless your power costs are really high, go with the sp20.  Actually, even if your power costs are high go with the sp20.  

There .... you said it yourself ..... makes things less of a gamble.

Yes, it makes it less of a gamble.  You can make it so there is no risk if you want.  Your point is?

Hey, if people want to gamble go for it.  But if it is a business it is different.  Even casinos, where all they do all day is gamble, they manage to turn it not into gambling.  They just want to facilitate the "gamble" and take their house edge as a fee for the transaction.  The law of large numbers makes it not a gamble, but a sure thing.

There are lots of ways to reduce risk, I say to use them.  I will take the sure thing over a gamble anytime.   

[pekatete]

Yes, it makes it less of a gamble.  You can make it so there is no risk if you want.  Your point is?

This ...

.... Having a naked position in mining is gambling. ...

Hedging your position in mining is gambling too. I'll go further and say bitcoin mining is gambling to a large extent.

Anything you mention in the same context as hedging IS gambling, that is without doubt.

It reduces risk, makes things less of a gamble.  Anyways, I was just trying to point the OP in the right direction, not focus on the defination of words.  I am not sure if this is getting off top.

There .... you said it yourself ..... makes things less of a gamble.

I did not want to digress but you've forced my hand .....

It's not just the semantics of whether mining is gambling that you definitely got wrong, or whether hedging your position in mining makes it less so (not negating the fact it is gambling though), it is that you can make such a contradiciting statement, pretend to be ignorant of your error and then proceed to advise on something else! Staggering!

[philipma1957]

I've been up and running with the 5 S5s since about 2:30pm today. The SP20s won't arrive for a few days though. I still need to have power re-wired in that room for 208v, so right now, I have the S5s in the data room that we still have servers in. So far, I've been mining at a sustained 5.85 TH/s for the last 5.5h. They've mined 0.00387851 according to the BTC Guild dashboard. Although, the shifts aren't closed, so I'm expecting that to go up. I'll wait a day before I work out the actual calculations.

I'm hoping to have power run to the room I want everything running out of by Thursday. Then I'll run them both for a week and see what the results look like.

I DO like that the S5s are performing at/above the reported specs. Setup was a breeze. I expect the same from the SP20s. I've been looking at the Github repo for the Spondoolies software, and I like that it's seemingly more open. We'll likely build out a lot of custom dashboards and administration portals, so that's important to me too.

The quality on the S5 was a little suspect. One of the heatsinks was caved in...and it was clearly installed that way. The case around it was fine. Little things like that piss me off.

It is how they lowered price.   These are not built as well as the s-3 were built.

Still in a farm setting where sound and noise are not a big deal they can run to freq 412 and hash at  1331 using 680-690 watts.

this is my 1 s-5 running with extra cooling in the form of extra fans  >>>   errors are 99.965 good and 0.035 bad.

[CptTripps]

Changed my freq to 387.5 and I've been cooking at 1.22~ for about an hour now. Not too shabby! Got to 8,731,648 shares on the last shift. That's about 200K more than I had in the last shifts.

I'm going to wait until we get the power situated a little better before I go any higher.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/28538855/tue-mining.png

[CptTripps]

Got the SP20s today. NICE units.

I'm going to give them a few hours to burn in before I start looking at the numbers.

I see why people say that 1.7TH isn't realistic. Mine are steady at 1.55 after an hour with the standard settings. I'll play with those a little later in the day when I have time.

I'll say this though, the QUALITY of the boxes is superior in every way.