Topic: ANTMINER S2 Discussion and Support Thread - page 218. (Read 355820 times)

For the record, I don't care what your profession is or how long you've been at it.  I don't come into communities with no personal history and start telling off one of the only manufacturers that deserves some respect. Someone who posts a diatribe like:


who claims to have 'been "lurking" enough in Bitcoin business ...since summer of 2010' is either full of shit, or has not been paying attention to the mining market.  If you followed any of this you'd be well aware that people have been requesting a 1TH+ rack-mount solution for their product for the last month.  Further, you'd also be aware that people have been antsy to know what the details are for S2 since the existence of said product leaked.  

Bitmain is one of the only ASIC companies that has more-or-less kept their word and acted in a respectable fashion.  Further, in Bitcoin ASIC land, pre-orders are resigned to vapourware that ships at some "date" based on BS and assumption.  Consider this delayed shipping similar to what was done at the beginning of February over Chinese NY.

Exactly. I don't want to just sit on my mined BTC and hope the price goes up. Most people do not calculate selling the equipment into their ROI calculations. I almost came out 150% ahead on my investment in Cubes that I bought last year just by the fact I sold them for 50% of what I payed for them, while pocketing the mined BTC to buy 5 S1's this year.

If Bitmain wants to consider a lower price with no PSU on these units, I will roll the BTC I mined from 5 S1's into an S2. Power is $.08 KWh where I live, so I am willing to take the risk.

No Dropt...you "lurk more" ...I have been "lurking" enough in Bitcoin business ...since summer of 2010...

The fact that I just started posting here ...so called 'newbie" status ...doesn't make my opinions less "informed" than yours... ( I have Master's in Computer Science ...NOT in Electrical Engineering... + 30 years exp.)


2 weeks pre-order ...is 2 weeks "pre-order"...no matter how you slice it...

14 days of  NOT mining ...loss of revenue...@ 1T is currently about 0.8283 BTC per week =  about 1.5+ BTC ...In that business "The Time IS Money"...literally...   

This. I dont mind buying gear with BTC because Ive already sunk what fiat i was willing to into BTC. If i think a miner can return 10-20% on its BTC cost then i will buy it as an investment. if BTC drops, i still have physical equipment, which at least counts for more then numbers on a harddrive

Im currently a bit over-invested in BTC, and am considering selling 2-3BTC to give myself a few more dollars to spend in the 'real-world', particularly to offset fiat$ cost items like power use or electrical equipment

You're forgetting that this is business. No one is doing for your own good. They were reducing the price to create a demand, to clear the inventory of S1 boards and supplies. They'll have more reels of the chips than they had host boards, so with the S2 they're looking to clear the stock of chips by tweaking the product, undervolting to increase efficiency, hopefully to clear the chip inventory while the next chip is developed.

Bitmain have confidence and have demonstrated they can perform. Everything appears to be going to plan. Yes the price is initially high. It would have been nice to see an item in the middle ground for the hobbyist, because with import duties and power costs, this writes itself out of many budgets now, while the S1 was fantastically accessible.

If you can't mine more BTC than you can buy $ for $, buy BTC.  It doesn't matter what future exchange rates are or aren't.  The only consideration is the opportunity cost of having to mine the BTC over time vs. having the BTC in hand to sell (if that's your thing).

Lurk more.

This 'preorder' is for delivery just a couple of weeks away... That's not even a preorder.

Personally I think buying a mining equipment with your earned btc is a zero sum game.
In most cases ROI is achieved when btc goes up in value against the $.
So it's better for us to  buy in  $,  if btc goes up to 40k like what
the winklevoss said, by the time you ROI your btc is 280,000$ instead of 3899$.

Argument can go both ways but if we truly believe in crypto it's always better to buy with $.

I think i'm in agreement with NetTime, i'd rather have a Neptune than an S2.

LOL, why? With the S2 you'll get an extra couple months of mining in.

From BitMain website :
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"Bitmain is a team of technologists, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and Bitcoin enthusiasts. Our core members have years of ASIC development experience, and have designed and mass produced several digital signal processing ICs.

We reject some business practice in the community, which is intended to distribute the risk and benefit asymmetrically. We are here to change it:  we will not accept pre-order forever before we feel logically 100% sure that we can deliver on time. There will be no unexpected waiting and failed/delayed taping-out or any other kinds of delaying risks for our customers.

We created a myth in bitcoin community: no pre-orders, shipping on time, even pre- shipping.  We are earning more and more trust from worldwide customers..."
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What happened to all this...which made the BitMain the company that we all love and trust with our money...BTC...

Now they are trying to joint the ranks of all others BS manufacturers...BFL...etc...you name it...

Pre-orders...(never, right...?),...$ price...fix configuration...no data...specs...details...no open source firmware upgrades ...no communication...limited quantities...only missing point is "shipping delays" (very fast and on time up to the moment!)...

Very disappointed...WRONG direction, BitMain...very WRONG...imho...think about your moves better...

Disappointing indeed.  Guess I'll hold my Neptune preorders.

I doubt you will get anywhere near 2Th from an overclock.  I think a 10-20% increase may be possible with a second PSU, but any higher than that would require both modifications to the cooling as well as hardware modification to bring up the voltage a bit

I don't necessarily agree that you need to reduce the voltage along with clock rate to balance H/W errors, but that's beside the point.  It's not a "new" 55nm chip, it's the same as the old one.

The S1 is not datacenter ready and not everyone wants to hum and haw about what PSU to buy and how to arrange/contain units for acceptance into Colo.  You can likely already achieve 1W/GH with the S1, but again, that doesn't reduce the production overhead so you're not going to see such a reduction in price just because the working HR has been reduced.

Lol, I honestly don't know why my power is so cheap here. It really averages about $0.08 if you take my final bill price and kwh used into account. There are also some basic fees and stuff I have to pay. My last bill was about $200 for 2500kwh.

anything with 'hashfast' written on the side. 

There is nothing "revolutionary".  I'm not sure why there should be the condition that something be revolutionary to warrant the manufacture and sale of a different model than the S1.  They've made the unit wholly contained and data center ready, this alone certainly opens up their exposure to a greater market.

As the old saying goes: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.  Bitfury's 55nm chip is more efficient than the A1, so why even bother with the A1 in the first place?

Im personally going to get of the s1's, maybe replace it with a s2, buy another s2, and then buy either the hex 6 fury USB sticks, (15 gh/s per) or get some usb stick scrypt asic miners from either zeusminer.com or fibonacci.io ALso, whats your definition of "small time" ?

Now I'm really torn between Gridseed and Bitmain
At this price I'm really unsure.

BTC difficulty is sky high and will go higher.
Do you all think that for small miners it's time to move to SCRYPT ?