The Bitmain Antminer S3 Bitcoin ASIC Miner is their next step in the evolution of their ASIC chips as well as going back to the basics with the blade design that started it all.There are some changes that have been made along the way though.First is the cowled dual fan enclosure that the S3 has is a new twist on the first-blade design.They also made overclocking easier as well.The Antminer S3 was initially announced to run at a 478 gh/s and then revised down to 440 gh/s.Specifications: Chips 32x Bitmain BM1382Gen2 Hash Rate: 440 GH/s±5% Power Consumption: 366 Watt at the wall Power Efficiency: 0.77 J/GH on wall Power Supply: 12V DC Size: 331 mm x 137 mm x 160 mm Fans: Two 14038 fans mounted on both front and back Operating Temperature: 0 °C to 35-°C Complied with: FCC / CE Network Connection: Ethernet The shipping gods were good to me yet again.The S3 arrived safe and secure thanks to simple yet effective foam and bubble wrap packing.

For those familiar with the S1 and S2s the interface is the same with a few tweaks.You log in as usual to 192.168.1.99 through your web browser and the default password is “root.” Change it immediately.If you are going to have more than one S3, i suggest you change it to something else as well.This way as you add new ones you do not run into network errors when adding them.Once done, you can go to the miner config page and set your pools.You can also set the S3 to failover or to perform load balancing for pool management.The setting is convenient as you can use multiple pools at once.I tried it on NastyPool and BTCGuild.Both sites reported 200 gh/s to 230 gh/s.My S3 has been great running at 260 gh/s with no overclocking and pulling in 340 watts at the wall.If you want to OC, you can plug in the extra set of PCIe cables to provide extra power.These extra power connections make overclocking much easier as you have the power on hand to OC.Bitmain listened to many in the mining community that mention the S1 could be better cooled with a cowl on it.

The S3 has a cowl over the blades and dual fans.The cowl allows for very efficient cooling.The fans, despite there being two of them, were actually not as loud as my S1.My S3 ran at 42 to 44-degree Celsius.In contrast, my S1 runs between 47 and 50 Celsius.ethereum potential priceBitmain has focused on making the S3 as efficient as possible.bitcoin asrock motherboardAccuracy has been tweaked so hardware error rates are as low as .01%.bitcoin price plnOn my units, the hardware errors hovered between .01 and .02.bitcoin ebay ceoThe low-error rate can be hundreds of times better than many of the competition’s miners currently.ethereum framework

The S3 is super easy to use as usual.Bitmain did not cut any corners.The new design helps show off the new chips.I have overclocked it only mildly, I was able to hit 502 gh/s and 374 watts at the wall and the temp was 48 degrees.I am sure that the OC masters in the community will be able to push it even further.bitcoin python tradingI have to stress the build quality again is amazing.bitcoin countdownIt is light yet built solid.bitcoin hong kong miningEach blade has an aluminum heatsink on the front that is large also one on the backside of the board this is all set in the cowl in such a way as to promote the best heat exchange.litecoin and wikiI heartily recommend the Antminer S3.Juan had this to say about the S3 and how fast the sales have been as well as how far it has evolved.

Juan: The S3 is a huge step forward in both power consumption and performance.We also have to remember that the S1 came out and was $3000, and Bitmain said “here we are, and we have miners in hand.” There were no presales just miners shipped and lots of them.The S3 sold out very very fast.People know and trust Bitmain to deliver, and they do.With sales of the S3 already into batch 3 and sold out, Bitmain is looking again to capture a huge portion of the global hash rate being run on their equipment.While their competitors like Butterfly Labs cannot ship anything and KNC ran out of chips building their personal mining farm Bitmain delivers.The S3 is one of my favorite miners along with the Spondoolies-Tech SP10Dawson.The bitcoin network reached another historic milestone milestone today, achieving an estimated total computational speed of 1 petahash per second (1 PH/s = 1,000,000 GH/s).The current speed is 40x faster than where we began the year, faster than 79% of the bitcoin community expected as of just seven months ago.

The path to this point goes back to the genesis block itself and offers insight into the foundations of the world’s first digital currency.After Satoshi mined the genesis block on January 3, 2009, the first difficulty increase took nearly a full year, occurring on December 30.Bitcoin automatically adjust the difficulty in mining blocks to maintain an approximate 10 minute block time.The faster the total network gets the more difficulty it becomes to find blocks.At the time, CPUs were the de facto hardware used as the bitcoin community began its initial growth.While eventual advances in hardware technologies were all but inevitable by nature of the economic incentives, the initial use of CPUs was implemented by design of Satoshi.By making mining profitable with a CPU, attracting new users would be easier than if customized or expensive equipment were required.The utility of GPU mining was recognized relatively early on, but intentionally delayed for the good of greater proliferation.While almost impossible to imagine now amidst the current ASIC bitcoin mining boom currently underway, the directive to remain with CPUs came directly from bitcoin’s creator: “We should have a gentleman’s agreement to postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can for the good of the network.

It’s much easer to get new users up to speed if they don’t have to worry about GPU drivers and compatibility.It’s nice how anyone with just a CPU can compete fairly equally right now.” – Satoshi Nakamoto, December 12, 2009.As the calendar rolled over into a new decade and both bitcoin’s community and value increased, the inevitable overtaking of ideology by economics became more prevalent in May 2010 when software for mining bitcoin with a GPU began to surface.GPUs can offer roughly 100x the hashing output of CPUs, depending on specific hardware specs.Additionally, mining with GPUs can be coupled with CPU mining on the same machine offering even greater total and taking advantage of advanced hardware that many in the community already had.As the bitcoin economy continued its newly-formed arms race, optimizations of GPU mining software became increasingly valuable.As modifications to the open-sourced code were created, developers saw a new opportunity for profits.An early optimization that increased GPU hash rates by approximately 25%, depending on hardware specs, was introduced in September 2010 and offered for a 5 BTC commission of each block mined using it (10% of each 50 BTC block found).

Bitcoin evangelists ultimately pushed for open sourcing of the software for the benefit of the community.Jeff Garzik, one of bitcoin’s core developers, paid 10,000 BTC – approximately $600 at the time) to have the software open sourced.Naturally, high end graphics cards saw a sharp increase in demand among the bitcoin community, with top-of-the-line AMD cards achieving up to 700 MH/s.Later in 2010, the first pooled mining operation was created by Marek Palatinus, often referred to as ‘Slush’ in the bitcoin community.Bitcoin mining pools combine the hashing power of pool participants for a fee.By combining efforts the pool finds a greater number of total blocks which it divides proportionally among the contributors of hashing power in the group, offering a more steady and dependable payout schedule than if each miner (more info here).Slush’s pool found it’s first block on December 16, 2010, forever changing the structure of the bitcoin network.By mid 2011, total networks speed had grown to 2 TH/s and field programmable gate array (FPGA) bitcoin mining hardware was introduced.

FPGAs are generic hardware that can be configured via firmware updates after manufacturing, offering significant advantages to repurposed CPUs and GPUs.The first FPGAs were initially announced on the bitcointalk forums and offered 100-400 MH/s.At the time FPGAs were first introduced, the cost/benefit was questionable with top-end GPUs able to run at 700 MH/s, but they did offer additional benefits.Notably, a single computer could run stacks of FPGA miners, compared with just a few GPUs under normal conditions.The introduction of FPGAs happened to coincide with bitcoin’s first major price boom.Bitcoin traded above $1 for the first time in February 2011 and climbed to $30 by early June, while network speed grew from 170 GH/s to 7 TH/s over the period.Price quickly fell back down to the $2 range by October of that year, but the majority of the network speed was maintained, falling only briefly at the end of 2011.By mid-2012 the price of bitcoin had again climbed to $10, sparking greater interest in mining and making viability of application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) a reality.

Bitcoin ASICs are custom hardware specifically built to calculate mining hashes.The now-infamous Butterfly Labs began taking orders for the first ASIC mining rigs in June which, at 5 GH/s, were poised to offer significant profitability to customers.Just a few months later in September, Avalon announced an alternative ASIC solution.The company would sell chips which could be mounted by either the customer or a third party vendor.The tremendous growth in bitcoin’s network speed this year is directly attributable to the worldwide growth in ASIC mining units.Avalon shipped its first batch of ASIC units in January, putting custom bitcoin mining hardware in consumer hands on a broad scale for the first time.ASICMiner began its hashing with units paid for by investors who have reaped remarkable dividends since then, as well as selling hardware for consumer use.Even Butterfly Labs shipped their June 2012 pre-orders.There are now a dozen different companies offering consumer ASICs, as well as others offering investment opportunities for hosted mining.