Hey there,

Thanks for your replies!

- About the hardware, I own a sourcing company with staff on the ground in China and the EU. I've considered the following miners:

• Bitmain Antminer S9, 14Th/s, earliest delivery uncertain;
• Ebang's Ebit miner E9, 9Th/s, earliest delivery on Jan. 2018;
• Canaan AvalonMiner 741, 7.3TH/s, earliest delivery on Jan. 2018;
• Canaan AvalonMiner 821, XXTH/s, earliest delivery on Feb. 2018;
• Halong DragonMint 16T, 16TH/s, earliest delivery on Apr. 2018.

I got different quotations with varying prices & delivery times for each model, from different actors, including:

• The 4 original manufacturers;
• Their official distributors, and;
• Trading companies (random resellers).

I haven't taken the necessary steps in order to formalize any purchase yet, but for the moment, their feedback has been positive and I have no reason to believe any of them isn't real.

I'll be glad to update you once we go ahead with the process, but what machine we use is irrelevant to the question I outlined in my post.

- So, about the network difficulty, I understand it's a gradual thing, but 15% in 24h, does this mean in one week it won't be profitable anymore?

To give you an idea of the situation in USD, yesterday my forecasted monthly profit with 800TH/s was 71.5k$, today it's 60.7k$. And that's considering Bitcoin at 19.15k$ (it has actually gone down 1k$).

If network difficulty keeps going up at this rate or BTC goes slightly down, I won't even be able to recover the investment in months.

Cheers