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The issue with Apollos seem to be sourcing it.
And they specifically say it's a bitcoin node, not a miner, the miner is an addition.
Though they also certainly seem to have some issues that require some people to take action on the miner and be able to handle more than your average non-tech person can handle.
Probably due to the fact that they hacked up a 'new' miner for it for some unknown reason, even though they used an open source one before.
Not sure why they wanted to hide what's going on inside the miner.
And the system depends on
not having the machine update itself properly.
i.e. just be wary of handing a non-technical person one of these as a miner.
I disagree with you on this one. I've been messing with newpacs, raspberry pi's new pacs and stuff. the apollo btc is a lot simpler than anything else on the market for a bitcoin miner. a lot of people [myself included] want no part with a loud hot miner in their house. there are comparable altcoin miners that are a bit more profitable but i don't really want to mine shitcoins, or use a GPU. i appreciate that they are making something like this instead of focusing on altcoin miners imo. they got real efficiency gains out of the S9 chips, down to ~60W per TH. The only other way to get 1TH/s+ in a residential without a ton of noise/heat is the gekkoscience rigs but you def have to be more technical to get it running properly. I am more technical than your average person but even i kinda struggled with it.
i have an S9 collecting dust because the APW PSU and the device in general is just more "mentally intimidating" to set up.
any limitations im running into are just the limitations of me not really knowing linux/ubuntu (not really sure what the difference is tbh). pretty much just have no idea how to link bitcoin core to the block chain folder cause i was always a heavy windows user.
the entire processed was plug and play. you pretty much just plug everything in and if you already have a pool account somewhere, you enter the stratum URL, username and press enter and start. i was mining within 4 minutes of opening the device w/ accurate reporting on the pool.
i have not run into any issues, it's been hashing at 2.5 TH/s with no restarts or anything really. No fans coming off or being loud. It runs very cool. It's a great device IMO. had it hashing for 10+ days and it was super stable. I had it running at 3.6 TH/s overclocked for like 5 days no issues either. I just restarted them to change the modes and measure efficiency.
not trying to dismiss your points but cause im not sure how "locked down" it really is but it could just be a way for em to protect the RD they did while recouping costs. i doubt its malicious.