~15.5GH/s worth of Icarus miners.

No you wouldn't. I was curious about how much I would pay in water bills if I setup such a system when I started mining. If I remember correctly where I live the water would cost 5 to 10 times as much as the electricity used to power the rigs.

And I did the maths using the best conditions: I computed the lowest water flow possible based on low incoming water temperature and highest safe output water temperature (60°C which should be safe enough for the GPUs but may not be safe enough for the tubing, joints, ...).

Hope the drink isn't the bottle of acetone just behind the glass. BTW I'm not sure of the size of the glass (lacks a reference near the glass in the picture): looks more like a smaller liquor glass.

Hum, don't feel down. The trade-in still isn't possible.

Ans as long as the boards are generating income, it may be safer to buy Avalon full price and wait for them mining with something that still is quite profitable.

Because it has always been trivial to script things with Unix: Linux geeks know how to configure their system to autostart everything at boot time. Windows users have to hack around.

Because you can't distribute a pre-configured Windows image for USB keys to others so that they can profit from your knowledge (both because creating a generic Windows LiveUSB is probably impossible and because Microsoft just doesn't want you to do that).

Because serious miners with multiple rigs and adding rigs regularly can simply copy an USB key content to another with minimal changes to get another fully configured system right away.

Because you don't have to pay for any license or make sure you don't infringe on anything.

Because you don't have to buy a PC if you don't use GPUs anymore: FPGA mining rigs can be run from smaller, less costly and less power hungry Linux-based home routers with 32MB.

There aren't any recent commit in the public repository and MemeCoind compiled from it returns :
"errors" : "WARNING: Displayed transactions may not be correct!  You may need to upgrade, or other nodes may need to upgrade."

If there isn't any public repository with working code where I can read all the commits since my last build, the coin might as well be dead to me. Are there any plans to correct this situation?

Stupid introduction without basis and in direct contradiction with public posts for the last 2 years on bitcointalk everyone can check out.


Kindergarten-level taunting.


"Users trying to improve" -> trolls that have repeatedly demonstrated they don't have anything to contribute other than their continuous rants.

Foregone conclusion: one more ignore. Enjoy ranting with other unproductive trolls wasting each other time.

What's ironic is that users don't understand that it's an interface problem and that there are 2 parts in an interface. As p2pool's interface fully respect the Bitcoin and pool protocols if your hardware doesn't work at all, you might have a bigger problem that not being able to use p2pool : if pool operators need to change their software and implement some of the protocol options p2pool already use, the hardware will suddenly stop producing income until they find about the problem, find an alternative pool or upgrade their firmware.

If this is a latency problem instead of a protocol support problem, trying to solve it on p2pool's end is OK in the short term (and the only person working on this right now is forrestv). But if you have a measurable latency problems with an average 30 second window of valid block template, you probably lose a few % of income on any pool too (even if it's less than on p2pool which will have more DOA). So ultimately solving the latency problem on the hardware/firmware is the only way of ensuring the best income on all pools (p2pool or not). Seeing users blaming large amounts of DOA on p2pool while ignoring that they are actively losing income on any pool by not pressuring the vendors to solve this is baffling.

When you compare the quality of ASIC hardware, which is often reported as being delivered in a beat-up state, with forked miner software and dodgy firmware and how stable p2pool is, the double-standard about quality is obvious. Miners are now used to crappy hardware and the fact that hardware manufacturers don't give a **** about their product once they have sold them (some even don't deliver...). This thread is a sad illustration of this situation.

BTW : maybe some Bitfury hardware doesn't work with p2pool, but clearly the chips themselves don't have high latencies or any inherent p2pool incompatibility, CryptX bitfury boards are working nicely with p2pool for ~9 months now

And finally the verdict is: both blades died with the PSU.

I found a replacement PSU that I had in storage (a brand new high quality 12V 300W PSU for large LED lighting setups) to test the a2mini and here are the results...

What I believed to be a 5V line is in fact 12V (the red wire used for it is a mistake). The wiring color is wrong for the high voltage wires too: ground and neutral wire colors are swapped. You can't replace the PSU with a standard ATX one: the connectors aren't wired like standard PCI-e: the 12V and ground connections are swapped. On one of the blades there was an extra PCI-e connector whose wiring might have been standard but it was too close to the fan to be used (and the other blade doesn't have this connector).

This a2mini had other problems: I noticed a bent capacitor and one thermal pad not properly aligned on one of the blades and corrosion around the screw holes on the side panel holding the PSU. I really hope the 2 surviving a2mini will not blow up like this one.

I just asked for a refund or replacement.

This is a view of the capacitors, you can't see them whole through the vents but you can see they are all opened instead of having a flat metal surface. The one on the top left shows the material best.


This is the material still clinging on the vents.


This is the projection of the material mostly on the edge of the controller board in front of the vents:

Currently the PSU is clearly defective: there's no way a PSU can run correctly with 3 large capacitors blown so I can't test much until I swap it (I can only hope it didn't take anything else with it).

Are you sure? There are yellow wires for all 12V related components (including the controller board) and a red wire from a different connector on the PSU connected to the controller board (through the plug you speak of IIRC). I assume the red wire is 5V as it's the standard coloring for this voltage (at least on PC equipments) and I don't see the reason why 2 separate 12V lines would be connected to the controller board with 2 different colors.

Edit: maybe there are different a2mini generations with different power supply solutions?

Yes, I saw at least a second one on close inspection. My initial diagnosis was wrong though: the Raspberry is connected to the controller board and is working fine. But I realized that the Raspberry should use a 5V power line (when it's powered by USB this is what is available to it) and not the 12V used by the fan and blades.
I looked more closely at the power supply and the cause of death is now quite obvious: through the vents one can see 3 blown capacitors and a dust-like material clinging to the vents and projected on the controller board in front of the vents. By the look of it the material is the same as what is protruding from the blown capacitors. Most likely scenario: these capacitors are part of the 12V transformer and the 5V transformer is independent on this PSU.

The PSU replacement seems the only option...

These are run in ideal conditions : 23°C ambient temperature but I fear the two other miners PSUs might not survive (they seem identical)...

Yes I realized that the controller had free ports and I thought about connecting the blades and the fans to another controller (I didn't take the miner apart yet so I didn't find a free port for a second fan though).
What worries me is that I would connect the two PSUs together at least by their ground. They are clearly cheap PSUs and if there's any defect where the grounds aren't properly grounded there will be leakage current and this could fry something. Unless minereu.com tells me it's fine to use the miners like this while waiting for a replacement, I'll probably remove both PSUs and use a common standard PC 80+ Gold PSU instead to avoid any problem, this is far more invasive and I would like to avoid it.

Will try a PM too, thanks for the suggestion.

As I can't reach warranty@minereu.com (overzealous antispam filter that bounces my emails), here is the message I sent 2 days ago to warranty@minereu.com, posted on the Google group used for support and retried sending to warranty@minereu.com a couple of minutes ago (with another bounce) :


How can I proceed to reach minereu.com support and deal with this problem?

I don't see how such a block wouldn't pay the .5% bonus. The blocktemplate must always include it from the start to make a valid block, it can't be added afterwards or the block wouldn't be valid.

That's not like he just started and he is alone on this. Competent devs don't often engage in technical discussions here, they mainly use github and irc.


That's twisting reality, having to opt-out isn't the same has being forced to do something.
Plus it means that the only people who pay without realizing it are the ones who don't bother to read the doc. These people are usually wasting everyone's time asking the very same questions that the documentation answers. I see it as instant karma.


And you seriously believe that they provide their time and hosting fees for free? I'm not sure what their business model is, but I don't believe for a second it's throwing money out the window.


« greed »: have you computed his earnings with best and worst case scenario (depending on when he sold his donations) and compared it to the amount of work done (count the lines of code in p2pool to have a rough estimate and ask a dev if you aren't one for an estimation of the time he would need to produce the same)? Until someone compared the two there's nothing to say about greed.

« p2pool can be huge »: that's a free statement ignoring all technical difficulties. Of course if all the technical problems raised by trying to bring lower variance to slower miners were magically solved by another dev and forrestv wouldn't cooperate I would have a far different look on the situation. But the actual situation is simple: no one else has contributed significantly yet and the only one working on solutions is forrestv.

« Find someone else »: and whom do you have in mind?

Hard to change?

You just pointed to the single line needed to change to change the donation address.  

I'm not a fan of automatic donation either: the main reason why I disable it myself is that I prefer distributing my donations to developers manually to better keep track of my donations (I have donated to ckolivas, lukejr and kano too).
But I understand why it makes sense for forrestv, most users wouldn't donate anything otherwise.

Currently (https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool/graphs/contributors), forrestv is by far the largest contributor, with more than 75% of the commits (not counting merges for code or content contributed by other developers which isn't free).
So it's not a problem currently: no other developer can claim having contributed meaningfully without looking like a troll. The second contributor way behind forrestv with ~1% of the commits is coblee who provided the litecoin support (which served as a base for other scrypt support). I'm not sure who gets the donations when using p2pool for litecoin, it might be coblee.
If someone else took over or even contributed large enough amounts of code they would have to ask forrestv if they can receive part of the donations or fork if they can't agree on this.

Don't see anything constructive from you.


Which basically shows everyone here with any will to check facts that you're a bit quick on the writing and slow on the fact checking.