Cool! Will you be submitting a pull request to contribute your modifications back to the repository?

So I got the Coinorama checkout set up on my full node here:

http://bitcoin.praeluceo.net/coinorama/

It's a little slow, but functional, I'll move it to better hardware if it is of use outside of my own network for visualizing stuff (mostly I just think it's awesome to have my own Bitcoin network visualizer and market analysis statistics).

I am curious razibuzouzou if the blockchain functionality that Coinorama.net use to have is included here or not? When I look at "blocks" there's no option to click on a block to explore its outputs, and there doesn't appear to be anyway to search by transaction ID, block, or address.

I know you're more hands-off now on the codebase, but some nice to see features (which I can try to work on implementing, but I'm not a programmer by any stretch really):

• To add an option for alts to be displayed as 1/(Value/BTC) so (for instance) Eth would show up as 0.00598 ETH/BTC rather than 167.04
• To add an estimated difficulty adjustment algorithm
• To expose the blockchain explorer (if present)
• And to add the ability to import historical data from exchanges via a source like www.bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD (especially for MtGox historical data so that really early data can be displayed)

Thank you so much for making your tool available to everyone and by putting so much effort over so many years to build it! I know sometimes things like this can feel dissatisfying and unrewarding (especially when you look at your donation address on a highly visible domain) but do know that your work has been appreciated.

Now this is much better luck today! Finally!!! I was beginning to feel like I was mining on Slush's pool...!

A 48 minute round, 2 hour round, and an amazing 16 minute round!!! We've clawed back some of our share reward percent, but it'll still take several more blocks to overcome the losses accumulated over the last several days.

Thank you for the quick update Luke! I know that luck isn't the same as stale blocks, but we did have 3 stale blocks this week, which feels higher than average at least, so I thought it'd be good to compare to Slush's update today.

So Slush's Pool posted a news update regarding recent orphaned blocks:

https://mining.bitcoin.cz/news/recent-orphaned-blocks-explanation/

I'd be very interested to hear from wizkid057 or Luke-Jr on whether we are also watching our pool; what version of bitcoind Eligius is based off, and whether block submission propagation times are being monitored at all. I'm not just asking because of our terrible luck as of late, which I understand is entirely by chance, but also because having more information on the internal operation of the pool and block submission/fast block relay statistics!

Mining cost calculations:

Antminer S7 batch 1 - 1.6481481481 BTC/TH
Antminer S7 batch 3 - 1.4666666667 BTC/TH
Antminer S7 batch 2 (slow) - 1.4658798283 BTC/TH

Break-even cost forecast: maximum of 5.6 BTC for the 4.66 TH S7. Anything higher than that, at this ship date, is unlikely to break-even by the halving. Obsolete within 1 month of the halving at current BTC exchange rate and 10c per kWh.

I don't understand what Bitmain is thinking, but I believe it's something along the lines of "...Born every minute". Because this pricing has gotten absurd.

For reference, at the current cost of the Bitmain S7 (roughly 1.6 BTC/TH), the SP50's hashrate would cost 181.29 BTC (~$41,700). The S7 is not capable of breaking even at that price before the halving, and does not include PSUs, so it isn't exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. What would be a better comparison, is against the SP20, new cost, when it was launched. The SP20 was 0.87 BTC/TH (ironically cheaper than the S7, despite launching when difficulty was -way- lower). So at SP20 costs, the SP50 would be only 96.75 BTC, or ~$22,252.

So if we estimate a price of 100 BTC for the rig, and if we estimate a 5% difficulty rise on average (currently lower, likely will be much higher as S7s and SP50s hit the market), at 8 cents per kWh and on a 0% fee pool, we have a potential break-even day of March 25th in what I can only call super-ideal-circumstances.

Now, if Spondoolies prices this more in-line with current hardware, and it costs upward of 125 BTC to order, it will no longer break-even before the halving, and since some people have estimated its price around $40k, at that point the device does not break-even and maintains a negative ROI.

What we are looking at, is a fundamental shift in mining strategy, because even at industrial scale (which is what an 11U 180V miner is), operators must be very careful with their capital investments and on-going costs to ensure everything remains profitable, or reaches a positive ROI before June of 2016. Likewise, even if the exchange rate doubles on the day of the halving, that still doesn't help because at these expenses, you can't afford to be an irrational miner. If you are looking to light up 1 PH of hardware today, you have 2 choices:

1) If you think Bitcoin's exchange value is going to remain constant at the halving. Pay no more for the hardware than can break-even before the halving, and ensure your operating expenses can stay below your income level after that date.
2) If you think Bitcoin's exchange value is going to go up at the halving. Having capital tied up in non-liquid mining hardware that is so large it has minimal resale opportunities is an irrational move. It would make more sense to  take your investment into Bitcoin directly, and monetize your investment through more traditional means.

But if you're in camp #1, you're not likely to be interested in mining Bitcoin, and you are still sitting on a very expensive asset, which has a lot of operational costs associated with it as well, which you'll have to figure out how to sell later to recoup your costs (or consider them truly sunk once it is no longer efficient enough to mine with at your power costs).

So, unless  this is 100 BTC or less, it just doesn't seem rational to buy it. As it stands, as a "prosumer" miner, I'll put an inquiry in to find out what the MOQ is, but I have existing miners eating up some of my capacity, so I would first have to sell those to free up enough room to run the SP50, or find other individuals who can afford a single rig, but not the MOQ. I can't imagine there are many though, even one miner will be a substantial outlay at 100 BTC, and that's likely far less than Spondoolies wants for it.

And the buy button just went live, despite the large expense, I wonder how long until they sell out of batch #1? I just made a table of the BTC/GH of my purchase from Bitmain, they -really- seem to like 1.47 BTC/TH on average, except that these cost almost the same per TH as my S3s did in July of 2014, and although they use fewer Watts/TH, a TH is worth a lot less. Today I'll flesh out my spreadsheet to include relative W/TH and percent/TH worth as compared to my S1s that I bought in April of last year. Altogether though, any purchase of new hardware where your ROI extends out past July of 2016's halving really doesn't make sense at this point.

Miner Cost Calculations

BTC   Quantity   GH   BTC/GH   Description   Date 2.697   3   180   0.0049944444   Antminer S1   2014-04-09 6.75   9   441   0.0017006803   Antminer S3   2014-07-16 4.62   7   441   0.0014965986   Antminer S3   2014-08-11 1.16   2   453   0.0012803532   Antminer S3+   2014-08-22 2.616   4   453   0.0014437086   Antminer S3+   2014-10-16 7.583   15   453   0.0011159676   Antminer S3+   2014-11-17 3.727   2   1155   0.0016134199   Antminer S5   2015-05-25 8.169   1   4860   0.0016808642   Antminer S7   2015-09-30

I'm an S5 buyer with no coupons, guess it had to have been later in the release cycle, or the s5+ only. I would appreciate it if you would be willing to send praeluceo a coupon!

Does anyone have any idea what the 1.7 PH/s jumps for 18.5 hours on the 10th, and for 6.5 hours on the 18th were?

That's pretty cool, pity about it being Windows though. I'll give it a try using Mono, but it would be cool to have something like this that's cross-platform (python maybe). I found your github repo, I might take a look at it, I'm not really a great programmer by any means, but it'd be cool if it could be refactored into something more portable.

Wizkid, a long time ago you had mentioned that if people want to be excluded from a manual payout, and only receive generated coins (with the subsequent wait) that we could request that with a signed message sent from our address that we mine on.

I sent that a long time ago, but never got a reply (the PM is long since lost in BitcoinTalk's message history). I know you've been busy, and it's a stupid vanity thing, but if you're able to, I'd like to have some way of requesting to avoid manual payouts at the cost of increased variance if you can do that. If not, I understand, I just like the idea of keeping my mining address "clean" with only Coinbase transactions.

Thanks for running an awesome and slick pool!

Friedcat, I am quite astonished actually.

This is a truly amazing and honorable offer. As a long-term AM customer, I had lost a lot of respect for you over our Prisma order. You just earned that respect back.

So I apologize for the anger in my emails and PMs over this whole mess. Yes, you still need to improve your communication, but your solution definitely more than make up for the communication gaps!

I look forward to seeing BE300-based hardware, and maybe ordering a reel of ASICs myself to build my own set of custom rigs!

We will be responding to the offer once the US-based buy-back is operational.

Thank you again for this generous fix for the Prisma.

Phew, finally! 3 blocks in the last 57 hours. That's some ridiculously unfortunate luck! And my hashrate dropped over the course of that last block, so although I was in the payout queue before, I got bumped into -this- block for payout. So my wallet hasn't seen any activity in way too long!

Here's to some extra lucky blocks coming up! Hopefully after I fix my power situation and get them all hashing again!

Despite the whirlwind journey, it doesn't look like you were impacted much. I don't think you're going to get a lot of traction from the community when even after your delay, you still got your hardware delivered in less time (or at least the same amount of time) as it takes the rest of the world to get their miners. A 5 day turnaround isn't that bad, especially considering the last two days of that were a weekend, which UPS doesn't always deliver on anyway.

Since the miner wasn't going to be delivered on the 9th, it makes sense it'd take until the 10th to go out for delivery. In fact, I'm honestly shocked that UPS gave a refund for that. I'm going to have to see about contacting UPS about missed delivery estimates. On what day did the first miner arrive?

EDIT: Now that I've looked at a map, I see that Bangkok is really close to Shenzen, so I can see that you would expect deliveries to arrive faster. I still doubt you'll find much sympathy on a 5 day delivery however.

And don't forget ASICMiner's flaming Prismas. Those are nice for keeping your house warm around Christmastime.

Because most miners already have a fleet of PSUs and don't want new ones with every miner?
Because most mining rigs ship from China, and miners don't want to pay to ship an extra several pounds across the planet?
Because a manufacturer would sell the rig+PSU at a profit, whereas most of us find extreme deals on PSUs and then buy a case of them at 50-75% off from retail?

If you really need a PSU and a completely set up rig, there are resellers that do that. Resellers are better in that situation because they usually provide local (i.e. English) tech support, don't require you to install QQ and speak Chinese, and are awake around the same times you are if you do need assistance.

So what I'm saying, is no one wants manufacturers to bundle PSUs with their rigs as a default. And those who do, don't actually want to be buying from manufacturers, they want to be buying from local resellers.

Do you have any citation for that? I use BitcoinWisdom exclusively because it's the only forecast I've seen that doesn't swing wildly (like baddw said), and as it gets closer to the change, it's rarely off by more than 0.1%. For this last change, near the last few blocks it forecast that difficulty would go down 0.88%, but it only dropped 0.73%, so they were only off by 0.15%, not too terribly bad if you ask me. All forecasts are "wrong" in the sense that it's the future, so it's unknowable, but BitcoinWisdom seems to do a really decent job at providing a reliable number that more closely matches how difficulty actually changes, unlike many other mining forecast sites.

As a customer with a batch of these miners, I agree. Several of the miners arrived damaged and we had to solder ourselves to even get hashing in the first place, after a month delay in even receiving the hardware. I do appreciate the offer to RMA, and I'm glad for the additional details since our original email didn't say anything about sending boards back without heatsinks, or that ASICMiner would pay shipping. I also appreciate the payment for the downtime.

However, at this point, I don't want refurbished boards returned. We have taken on a lot of undesired risk by running these Prismas in our mine, and the risk greatly exceeds the reward, because if there is a fire, we have the potential to lose all of our capital invested in mining. We have taken reasonable precautions by isolating our Prismas, and putting them on a flame retardant, but this is not what we signed up for when we bought the Prismas.

We do understand the modular nature of the Prisma, and that is one of its great strengths. The cost per board was 0.3725 BTC. Using your numbers below, in the month of October each hashing board should have mined 0.10 BTC, during the month of November each board should have mined 0.08 BTC, and if they are run through the month of December, they may mine 0.06 BTC.

I want to ship back the boards that we have, which have never worked since being delivered to us, and receive back 0.6125 BTC for loaning ASICMiner a considerable sum of money on a terribly failed product. You can keep the board and mine on it yourself. If additional boards fail, then we will request compensation of the original cost 0.3725 plus 0.1 BTC for the headache of dealing with down miners, the threat of fire, and the inability to resell something for fear of burning down someone's residence.

In the future, I'd recommend this sort of damage control to occur within days, not months, of launch. This is a perfect example of too little, far too late. In fact, it's an absurd attempt by Phasebird to try to salvage the situation after so many weeks of not replying to anything on this forum, all the way down to his hardware causing small housefires. It is entirely unacceptable and shameful for ASICMiner to put their name behind this.

Yeah, except all miner manufacturers take Bitcoin for their orders (Bitmain just added USD, but I'm not sure how that works yet), so you're stuck ordering from a third party if you want to be able to do a card. And I know for my sake (as a local reseller) I don't take cards, only cash or Bitcoin, for exactly that reason. I have been contacted by several people wanting to do CC purchases, some who even want to pay 150% up-front for it. Yeah, no thanks, I don't feel like being scammed, charge-backed, or taking stolen money. So take "real money" and if my clients have an issue then they e-mail me and I can troubleshoot it, or swap their miner out for one of my own.

So what I'm trying to say is that if I'm not going to expose myself to the risk of chargebacks, neither is a manufacturer. The issue isn't adding penalties to a trustless exchange, the solution is working with the amount of trustlessness you feel comfortable with. If you want to eliminate risk, buy from an established local reseller that you know you can talk to face-to-face, or call/email if you have problems. Crazyguy and Canaryinthemine have been really great through all this, providing a better face to this debacle than ASICMiner has, even to buyers who aren't their customers. That's the best you can hope for in this market right now.