Quote from: albguy40 on March 28, 2018, 12:33:49 PM

If the current rewards continues riding at under $0.50 / per day / per TH, I do not suspect difficulty to keep increasing.
Just look at bitcoinwisdom and their difficulty predictions... We should be holding at roughly where we are for the next little while. The next prediction has it as going up by less than 1.5%.

I personally think what has happened in the last 4 weeks when it comes to ASIC machine costs, BTC price and difficulty is great for weeding out those that were trying to make a quick buck and great for the long term health of the [Suspicious link removed]dluck trying to flip those S9s purchased for $2000+ USD now...

I just wish that the ASIC machines on the market right now were more robust. I find it extremely strange that Bitmain won't offer brand new hashboards. They would honestly make a killing and would make more money selling the parts than the whole units themselves. I could see them having no problem selling S9 boards for $400US and they would sell hundreds based on the fact that there are countless people out there right now out of warranty with dead hashboards in their machines.

They can also just force people to buy new miners which makes them more money still, which is what they seem to be doing. I don't know when the last time they sold hashboards and parts for miners was, but I think they stopped around the time of the S7. Repair services like MyRig/Bitmainwarranty are out there and reputable, and it is possible to find hashboards (albeit most are used) on eBay, though prices there seem to be upwards of $600.

Bitmain's got so many customers that they can afford to use cheap materials to make their miners cheaper and increase their profit margins, other companies like Avalon offer much more reliable and robust machines than Antminer units. It's sad but true. Their first few iterations of the Antminer like the S1 up to the S3 were pretty good, then they started falling from there.