Topic: Mobile mining - dual use & latency (Read 1204 times)

First, what about the possibility of being able to use a rig for something else like password cracking.
Do you get that with ASIC or is that only possible with FPGA?
Which boards can also be used for other purposes? I'd love to be able to switch to cracking a WiFi password if I wanted to (or vanitygen).

I ended up giving up on waiting an cancelled my Paypal order from BFL because I couldn't budget for the unknown wait time.

 I get free electricity in some locations but the latency could be high. Is there a graph of latency to stale shares somewhere? Can you tell us how you get on with this?

 At first I thought perhaps I could just:

1) buy a BFL single,
2) carry it with me,
3) plug in wherever and
4) connect over anything I can find (3G, WiFi).

This would have the advantage that I can carry the miner with me and unlike gold or cash it hopefully looks like a hard drive so hopefully less chance of getting it confiscated and if things change I can settle it down somewhere more permanent.

However,
1) the tech is moving so fast and preorders are now the norm I don't fancy speculating that much.
2) Only the BFL single seems portable.
3) Plugging in would also need something like a Raspberry Pi. The location would have to be secure. I don't really have my own place to put things at the moment but I do have plenty of places where I plug in a laptop and I'm allowed to use the electric because in a sense I'm paying for it already.
4) Latency I hear could be a problem... but how much? Places I might plug in include satelite (1300ms) South America (400ms to nearest pool?) and Europe (~30ms). I wonder what the likelihood of stales are. In Europe I'd be paying the most for electric but on satelite & south america I should have access to solar panels and wind power. Is the effect greater with solo mining? Why don't more patient people solo mine?

5) The tech is moving so fast I wonder if it's really worth it...?

edit: Also, what's this Jalapeno? Looks like a trade-in? Too cheap?