Topic: ANTMINER S4 Discussion and Support Thread - page 116. (Read 301481 times)

Why hasn't bitmain replied to my e-mail when other people are already receiving their replacement PSUs?

Also is there a way to tell if my incoming Batch 2s are the old PSUs or the new ones? Or do I have to open it up?

I opened up the first layer of casing but am not sure how to disassemble the PSU further. Any help?

Are people buying it? Or we can hope for price dropping?..

Leave it at 200M for now, there isn't too much headroom on the PSUs.

Ok, thanks for the explanation. Rig is hashing much better with this build, seeing an increased reported hashrate on slush.

Yes I didn't build my binary with the text user interface support. It was easier to minimise the dependencies since it involves a messy cross compilation, and the text interface does nothing useful for the web interface.

Thanks for that, just finished upgrading. Also changed out --que-8192 for --lowmem. One issue, though; when I screen -r I no longer see the general cgminer stats at the top of the terminal window, this is what I get:



Is that normal or did I screw something up?

Hi everyone,

Finally ! got my S4 up and working as she should. She purrs ...
Thank you Dogie for all your time and effort in helping me  , turns out an exe and some of the downloads were corrupted for me , lesson learned to never try to install or set up anything when overtired.

I do have a question ,since I'm a noob .. can someone tell me about the frequency in the antminer S4 , what should it typically be set to and why so I can understand its purpose better. At the moment mine is at default 200M ..

Thanks

Many thanks for your excellent reply, ck.  There's such a rush to buy the latest kit as soon as it comes out that it's really hard not to get swept along with it.  The next time I get tempted, I am going to definitely going to re-read your post!  Your solo pool is starting to look mighty attractive!  Cheers.

Thanks for doing a very impressive reality write-up by ckolivas.
I quoted it to a new thread due to its importance especially for newbies.
Don't like to bury them after a new page.
The discussions regarding this may be continued there for keeping this tread clean.
New Thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/roi-of-a-mining-hardware-quotes-from-ckolivas-827480

As I read this I can see myself as I am sure many others can as well. Looking back when I started with buying my first 30 Bitcoins @$130 each so I could get 15 USB miners in a group buy to spending my mined coins until I had 75 of them running, then selling moving on to BFL singles selling them for the S1's and now down to 4 S'3 in the basement still mining .... It's been like catching a falling knife but I am done. Thinking of right now to sell off two of my miners and turning the last to "out to pasture" in your solo pool.

Because 1) not everyone is comfortable handling server PSUs with exposed terminals, and especially ones which require you to provide the cooling, and 2) ATX PSUs have a value after you're done with them, especially the high end ones which have insane warranties, 3) there is no warranty on a used server PSU.

Its personal choice, I was just suggesting that requiring everyone to put their own PSUs in doesn't make a lot of sense.

It no longer matters what the numbers are. For even if the value of bitcoin would drop to, for example, 1/10th of what it is, it is guaranteed that more than 1/10th of the existing big miners will remain. They will always be at an advantage compared to you, and the investment on their side has already happened so you'll push out the least efficient of the big miners but keep the most efficient of them. If anything, the other way is more likely to bring home miners in, but it will only be a temporary effect which will be offset by yet more big miner investors, and the stakes will be higher than ever. The only chance small miners have is for bitcoin to become small time again, so the value would have to drop to 1/100th or less of what it is, and stay there for an extended period.

Speaking purely from investment terms, it's a curious phenomenon that in the history of bitcoin, you could always convert dollars into more bitcoin than any mining machine you could buy with those dollars would generate over its lifetime, yet people inevitably choose to buy bitcoin miners because of the concept of buying a "money making machine". It is the most expensive and technically challenging way to convert dollars into bitcoin. By far the most money anyone ever made off ASIC hardware are those who purchased avalon generation 1. At bitcoin prices when the avalon was first announced, there is still a chance they'd be better off just having converted their dollars into bitcoin at that time. When the avalon actually arrived they were a steal at 60GH @ 1500$=80BTC but you could not order them any more since they were always preorders (how much is 80BTC worth now?). I think bitcoin was worth less when they made their Avalon preorders so they were much more than 80BTC. They may have been the one exception and ironically the first ASIC ever so they capitalised on the diff at the time.

It's funny because for years people would happily expand/extend their hardware for reasons that had nothing to do with making money, like having the best gaming machine, or the best Mprime or setiathome or folding@home results or whatever. Yet the attraction of bitcoin mining has been that the hardware expansion you've been doing has been in the quest for return on investment. It has clouded people's judgement and brought in a different population of miners compared to the population it grew from. Somehow people lost sight of the fact that bitcoin mining moved from the former group of enthusiasts to a massive money making venture and the former group unintentionally became part of the latter group unwittingly, and then started complaining that they would never make a return on investment (which strictly speaking is incorrect, they mean they would never pay off their hardware). People got caught in the bitcoin mining wave and unintentionally converted from hobbyists to real money investors, and that's the real crime here.

They're the default options. I'd suggest editing /etc/init.d/cgminer.sh and remove the "--queue 8192" and add "--lowmem" instead and then restart.

How low would the price of bitcoin need to fall for mining to be unsustainable for the big mining companies?  If the resulting dramatic reduction in network hash caused a corresponding reduction in difficulty, would mining then become sustainable again for the home miner?

I did this, turned the power off, turned it back on, and I have noticed that the web gui has become quite slow?
previously when navigating through it, it was quite fast on loading pages, etc

Also, after ssh the above, after reboot, in terminal it shows;

PARAMS = --bitmain-dev /dev/bitmain-asic --bitmain-options 115200:32:8:7:200:0782:0725 --bitmain-checkn2diff --bitmain-hwerror --queue 8192

Is that anything important?

Thank you for your help ck.

Interesting question. All the more interesting because no one has actually asked me before on the forums, even though I've discussed it at length on IRC and am very happy at any time for people to know what I think.

Mining died for the community/home miner a long time ago. It's just that the community miners haven't realised or accepted it yet. Community mining is only 15% of the hashrate now and shrinking. They're always hopeful and expectant but there really is no reason for them to be that way. Mining has gone to the data halls and the massive farms, mostly run by the manufacturers themselves who have the ability to create hardware on the cheap and offer it to the select few entities who can help their mining operations or provide funding or cheap hosting, instead of the consumer buyer market which is annoying, small time, noisy and boring. The only reason they continue to sell to that regular consumer market is there are enough people who have unrealistic expectations of making a profit somehow because they simply cannot believe that the numbers are stacked against them, such that the hardware manufacturers can charge a ridiculous premium to sell to that market to make it worth their while.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who's been watching bitcoin at large, but it will continue to surprise bitcoin miners, past, present and future. The reason miners don't see it is they're so blinded by the concept of a "money making machine" or the "goose that laid the golden egg" that they just can't see it.

Here's a quote of mine. Note the date on it:



To give you an idea of how long this has been known to the bitcoin community, even if miners refuse to see it, I think it's best to leave the final word to Satoshi himself, the inventor of bitcoin:

Server Power supplies are so cheap so, why should we go to $350 premium ones.
My assumption is that, S1, S3 are for DIY people and S2, S4 are for non-DIYs, so, PSU without an S2 and S4 even if prices are higher.

1) No you can't, unless you want to spend $350 on a PSU. You also can't because of the formfactor.
2) It depends on weight and volumetric weight. Most of these units's boxes are sized so their volumetric weight matches the shipping weight. There isn't that much flexibility to suddenly make the boxes smaller.

ckolivas, you are too big ckolivas.
600 BTC in hand in a single address, your mined them too early or doing some business.
Or, everything is donation for your great works.

Much appreciating your continued effort in improving the cgminer especially for this time for S4.
Do you have some comments on how mining will turn now? A lot of home miners stopped mining due to -ve ROI.

It was better for them to omit sending power supply than asking the buyer to buy their own power cable.
Less wait, so lower shipping charge.
Lower hardware price and shipping cost, so lower customs duty.