Quote from: Tim@BQ on March 31, 2017, 11:58:28 AM

Quote from: GWhisper on March 31, 2017, 10:53:04 AM

What makes you believe your original hash board were new?

Good question! It's very possible that they weren't. I have long suspected that when Bitmain first manufactures their machines they run them in their own mine for a certain period of time, and then pass them off to their customers. Maybe the bigger miners get the least worked machines because they spend the most money, and the smaller purchasers get given the older machines with very little life span left. And if you claim warranty then maybe the boards they send you have even less life span, which seems to be the case with my replacements. It's a pretty good racket when you think about it. It's the perfect way to get rid of their old stock, because the machines are useless past a certain point.

I have heard that there is a lot of corruption in China, and I would not put something like this past Bitmain. They are either doing this, or just selling a very low quality product. Either way, they cannot be trusted.

I would strongly doubt that, however, even if it was true they would be doing you a big favour from this.

The bathtub curve of failure is very real - especially with hot, dense, heavy things like the Antminer S7/9. I'd personally prefer that the heatsinks fall off in their datacenter than my house, for example. Although that hasn't been too much of an issue so far as I have seen recently (black goo is far better than white stuff).

Hardware doesn't "degrade" if it's used in a reasonable environment and isn't initially faulty - it fails because something goes wrong. Too much dust, too many power spikes, someone breathed on it the wrong way, etc. Or because a manufacturing flaw was exacerbated by any of the above.