Bitcoin Forum

Hello, my developing crypto-currency business, BlockBurner (mostly a blog atm, but more to come), is researching feasibility in the generation of a real FPGA Scrypt Litecoin mining appliance, specialized for the task much like the SHA256 FPGA's and ASIC's Bitcoin is about to begin running on.

To do this, there are a few things I need to know from the crypto-currency community, please answer each question if you respond to this post-

1. Do you think the market and community is ready for FPGA Litecoin?

2. Is there definite interest in FPGA Litecoin machines? Would you buy one if the price was reasonable? What is reasonable?

3. Would you pre-order one to support first round funding for prototyping and first wave production? (I'm no one but a lowly computer specialist and budding entrepreneur burned by Big Banking already, so this would have to be crowd funded to get started without a loan shark involved. You would be relying on me to deliver the goods and not squander the investment with idiotic decisions, even still you would stand to lose your pre-order through economic issues and unseen factors, so there is a risk to early adopters as with all things, though Im thinking of other incentives for early participants once it gets off the ground, what kind of incentives come to mind to make the investment more attractive to you?)

I am quite serious here and have had correspondence with a few FPGA/ASIC specialists to case exactly how much funding would be required for prototyping and limited production run. Though it would be reckless to proceed with it without getting community input, and I want to build a device that is based on your feedback so we get exactly what you want at the price you want.

What do you think? Time to elevate Litecoin to the next level as we did with Bitcoin? Would you help BlockBurner achieve this goal though community support? Should I jump off a cliff covered in green jello?


Updated 4/25

FAQ (http://www.blockburner.net/faq/FAQ)

BlockBurner news:

BlockBurner Forums (http://blockburner.net/forum/index.php)

BlockBurner subReddit
 (http://www.reddit.com/r/BlockBurnerFPGA)

The Team (still developing):

Operatr - Administration/Operatations
Cheshyr - FPGA/Project Management
Zalfrin - FPGA Development


Project Overview

Design Goals:

Modular Scrypt FPGA system
USB Connectivity
Stand alone/Rack convertible casing for scalability
Associated open source software package


I have had a few PMs and have seen questions regarding pre-orders for this project:


On Pre-Orders

Any pre-order campaign will be associated with the current stage of development. Unlike other producers there will be no pre-orders until a certain capital requirement is met meeting the estimated costs associated with that stage. At this stage it would be in generating a working prototype device. I am taking a community approach for complete transparency, every transaction would be made public knowledge as I think if you are willing to take a chance on us, you should know exactly what your money is funding and see it develop before your eyes.

This approach minimizes risk and gives a linear progression of development that is seen by the whole community.

I don't believe it is fair to hold pre-orders in a way that in a way fakes it as if it is a real product sold online, knowing full well it does not exist. I think this practice itself is fraudulent in nature itself.

Prototype Stage

Proto-adopters would be taking the bulk of the risk, as such we would work out some other kind of benefit to funding assistance at this stage. I am open to ideas on what you would like to see if you opted to be a proto-adopter.

A known price point will be known before any pre-order campaing begins with a known cap to hit, all pre-order capital going into third-party escrow until the needed amount is reached. Otherwise it would be returned to you. This could be receiving a prototype device to help with testing or some kind of future revenue sharing.

Production Stage Once a working prototype is created, we will then move on to casing actual production costs, and much like the Proto stage, will have a certain goal needed before any capital is invested.

To do this will require a crowd-sourced effort, which would be conducted through various forums as well as things like Kickstarter campaigns and the like.


Thank you in advance for your time and support,

Operatr
BlockBurner.net

Can it be done? Sure.  Will it be faster than GPU/CPU?  Probably.

The only problem I see here is that Scrypt is designed to be slow, because of the different conversion and hashes needed to prove the work.  This means, to get the most performance out of your FPGAs/ASICs, you would need multiple chips per card.

I'm just now looking into scrypt, and so I can't get very specific on what you would need on a card to make it substantially better than GPUs, but from a cursory glance, FPGAs stand to have a wider gap from GPUs in LTC than they do in BTC.

There do exist FPGA's suitable for the job. Scrypt's main issue that it is incredibly memory intensive, where SHA256 is highly processor based and uses little memory. FPGA rigs would vastly outperform GPUs and cost much less to operate long term. GPUs work because they are designed for the memory intensity of graphics processing and delivery, which a regular processors fast cache memory is also applicable, FPGAs can follow the same path but just be much faster to hash and power efficient. Up front cost for these benefits however, is higher.

I'd buy one, and I'd pre-order if the time frame was reasonable.  But the the biggest risk here I think is will the price/performance ratio be worth it?

Yes i would be intrested in a nice FPGA+High speed Memory board, but  rather for use as a FPGA  than for litecoin mining. The problem is that a FPGA solution  will be hardly  less expensive compared to GPUs. Besides this, a Litecoin mining ASIC isn't that far away, there are some numbers from bitfury about  that. Besides the mining ASIC+external memory solution i would check if  a ASIC with embedded DRAM wouldnt more profitable, as it would save a lot of I/O pins, driver logic, expensive  PCBs, maybe it could even produced  in the style of topless memory Modules saving most of the chip packaging cost.

Jasinlee and LaSeek apparently already have working prototypes, so you're a little late to the game.  But yes, the community interest is huge.

I would suggest looking over the open fpga project for bitcoin first. See if it will work for what your considering. If it does not look like something you would be able to easily implement (it took us many months to use it as a guide) then I would not bother. That would be a good starting point since you do not even want to touch scrypt until you know you can handle sha256 since you will most likely need to write your own module from scratch. And there is basically 0 documentation for fpga implementation of the salsa stream cipher. And the sha256 fpga documentation is incomplete and undocumented from what we found, it looks like the open fpga project was created just to get the bounty and was left almost completely undocumented except for the bits where it would effect the bounty.

>1. Do you think the market and community is ready for FPGA Litecoin?
Yes.

>2. Is there definite interest in FPGA Litecoin machines? Would you buy one if the price was reasonable? What is reasonable?
Would definitely buy some. Maybe $2k worth. And a reasonable price would be $1 per 1.0 - 1.5KH/s (If power use was low)

>3. Would you pre-order one to support first round funding for prototyping and first wave production?
Probably not. One month wait at most. Just cause I've already waited once with BFL, and don't care to do it again. If you're going to hold my money, I'd rather use that money to build a GPU rig and run it for a few months. Then sell off the parts for the money to buy a working one that is ready to ship.

Which is the issue, the community has be so thoroughly burned you will end up having to fund it yourselves like we are doing. Or accept preorders and all the BS that will be thrown at you along with it. Its a double edged sword.

+1
Go for it ! I'd make em in three flavors ... economy, makes sense, big $$$ ... all modular obviously. But there again lies the cost of development ... cheaper to just develop one and scale ... the gamble factor gets a bit better as these fpga can mine a broader variety of dustcoins :)
I'd preorder with an ETA of 30 to 45 days with a 33% deposit...

Thanks for the great feedback so far guys. :) Keep it comin!


Well damn, I better just quit then  ;) A working proto and a solid business concept put into practice are two different things, it takes a lot to bring something new into the market. Anyone can have a design company produce something for a price. The infrastructure around it to actually ship them as a finished and refined product is the tough part. Many would be players will enter the fray only to realize this, only those who do it best will win in the end just like any other industry.


Do you think some type of modular system that scales would be desirable?  As in some type of rack system that individual boards could be added to over time?

The only problem with using existing FPGA's that are meant for Bitcoin is that they will not perform all that great with Scrypt because of the intense memory usage factor, which most FPGA boards out there are not equipped for. I've been told there do exist types that would be optimal, though so far the expense seems drastic for these (like Merrick 4/5/6 boards that have stronger memory on board).

This is the key difference between what I am attempting to do, and what is already out there for Bitcoin mining. Litecoin is a very different animal with different requirements for best performance, so that is the direction I am going with this. A truly optimized Litecoin machine with a hardware spec in mind for it over using Bitcoin hardware, which can do it though not as efficiently as it could.


Indeed, though I think companies like BFL are looking bad simply because their core team is not cohesive on their answers to the community. Assuming there is enough interest to bootstrap the device, I would make everything public in the spirit of Bitcoin transparency as to the operating fund, what it is being spent on specifically, and hopefully realistic timeframes or at least updating on what is going on. BFL is certainly being sketchy and quickly earning themselves a bad rep for it. I don't want that.


ASIC is extremely expensive , and we're talking millions $USD to jumpstart something like that. FPGA is much easier to get into, and follows the natural progression that Bitcoin followed.

I also don't believe the other currencies are ready for ASIC power, as demonstrated by the Terracoin issue where a single ASIC device hosed the network and is still recovering. The power must scale linearly with the growth of the market cap and overall usage. It would be irresponsible to flood Litecoin with such devices at this time I think which would just drive up the difficulty, kill interest in Litecoin mining, and then kill the currency altogether. FPGA is the next logical step from GPU mining.

It is not enough for a business involved in cryptocurrency to simply make and ship product, we must be careful for the care of the network. Assuming it all goes to plan, I would certainly curtail a large amount of these things from hitting market at any one time, adhering to some kind of release schedule or batching as the new ASIC companies are doing.


Adam (Operatr)
BlockBurner.net

I'd be down for a significant investment if you could prove that they offer a serious advantage over GPUs.

Yes. Why not? Don't see any reasons agaist that.
 
Yes but only if they will cheaper at 20-25% than similar bitcoin FPGAs, because they less perspective.

3. Would you pre-order one to support first round funding for prototyping and first wave production?
[/quote]
Yes. I'd want to preorder at least one sample by bitcoins (or litecoins) but only after people will write good reviews. Don't get me wrong, but here too much of scammers.

Defnetly interesting. maybe you come up with a concept to reuse old FPGAs as well. Like all those spartan boards out there (without memory) could be used in a chain to work with scrypt?! (Just guessing here, i don't know much about this)

There are other issues involved beyond memory.....we went down that road already a few months back.

Operatr: If you need help I am happy to give any assistance. The point of the fpga is to build value into LTC, we are not out to squash any potential competition. PM me if you would like any help I can offer.

Awesome jasinlee I will do that. I agree, I just see Litecoin going where Bitcoin is now right along side it as a silver to Bitcoin gold. As BTC is blazing a trail through the old world financial system, LTC will start getting more attention and grow larger as a secondary economy as well probably. BTC has hit Stage 4 into ASIC, LTC should follow the same path, it seems FPGA stage is imminent.

Anyone remember the value of BTC when FPGA's first appeared off hand?



FPGA is already proven to offer similar or better performance as GPUs without the heat and substantial power requirement once you get to a certain point adding ever more GPUs to the mix. In price it works more like a "more now but less later" long term mentality. However since the only FPGAs out there are more geared for Bitcoin SHA256 than Scrypt, I am uncertain what kind of performance an optimized board would offer. I will need to prototype to see.

Yes. I'd want to preorder at least one sample by bitcoins (or litecoins) but only after people will write good reviews. Don't get me wrong, but here too much of scammers.
[/quote]

Unfortunately these would be similar in price to Bitcoin FPGAs, simply because hardware cost is hardware cost, it doesn't care what you are doing with it per se.

Yes there are a lot of scammers out there to be wary of, I wouldn't expect a startup like mine to have any credibility until something is actually visible, and delivered as promised. Though this is why I am asking the community before anything else to build validity and everyone can see this start from the very beginning in detail. These sites like gxminer.com spring up out of nowhere (blatant BLF copy scam) without a shred of proof about their products or production even exist, or even who they really are, and are there just to snare a few suckers buying into Bitcoin hype. Even still legitimate manufacturers are so new to this emerging industry it is hard to tell sometimes.

I have no intention of scamming anyone, those people only hurt Bitcoin at large. My vision is a long term one, where many seem to be fairly short sighted when it comes to cryptocurrency. I believe its the future, and I want to help. Money is nice but only as a byproduct of the real reason Im getting into this, which is simply I believe we need it now in a world so utterly broken. BlockBurner exists for the betterment of mankind and nothing more. It feels like the right thing to do, and given my economic status personally, the only thing I can do that will make a difference in the world and in my own life. My faith is derived from being one of the many shut out of the banks system for good, which means also like many Im pretty much stuck exactly where I am, even my last IT position's salary was a sick joke, and I'm tired of it. With all my energy and resources, I will assist in taking that system out of power forever. Bitcoin is how we do that.  I am down to build machines with the direct purpose to siphon power back to the people, as they did to us.

Hardware is only one of the elements of Bitcoin business I intend to tap going down the road, which will give alternative sustainability to the hardware side.

I have an ASIC on order with BFL, though Im feeling a little iffy like the rest given inconsistent updates from the BFL crew. Unlike them Im not out to dick anyone around here. Just to keep building this dream with the rest of you.

Well first step would be comb through the old open fpga bitcoin project, that will give you most of the stepping stones. But you will need to read through the code yourself. It is a mess and extremely undocumented so if you cant find something let me know I might be able to point you to the resources we found along the way. Maybe you will be able to put the pieces in less than 5 months like it took us.

I started open development of FPGA mining designs in May 2011; BTC was about $5USD at the time.  The first commercial FPGA mining products first appeared on August 18th, 2011, and BTC was about $10USD then.

Food for thought: scrypt as it is used in litecoin is not a memory-hard algorithm.  Rather, it's an algorithm with a space-time trade-off skewed towards using more space, given the current relative costs of memory fetches versus computations.  You can implement litecoin's scrypt with only a little over 2 kilobits of memory, but it runs ~512 times slower.

It's likely that a performant implementation will use a sparse LUT to cut down on fetches.  For example, with a 512 element LUT (instead of 1024), the algorithm performs 50% less fetches, and requires only one extra salsa round 50% of the time.

I think a simplistic port of the existing scrypt.c from the litecoin source code would just use 128KB of block RAM, which is readily available on most of the FPGA's already in circulation.   I can see how it might increase the area/cost of an ASIC, but for an FPGA  it's a non-issue.

It's not clear why people are even discussing external memory requirements for this algorithm and getting ready to write-off their purchased bitcoin boards.

Overall, it sounds like we should expect an FPGA implementation of litecoin to perform at (1/1024) the rate of equivalent bitcoin hash.  And this is due to the sequential loops, and not the "memory-hard" aspect of the algorithm.

I'm very interested. I am on the fence about pre-ordering though.

Just speaking on purchasing part, only and only if it is cheaper than a gpu or equal pricing. End of the day someone could care less about the $50 extra per month in electricity compared to the cost of the FPGA. The break even point would be years depending on the price of it.

For example I can get a 7950 hashing for numbers sake at 600mh/sec at $300
The quad miner which does about 800mh/sec is sold for $1,069

In this example if you could offer 600mh/sec at say $400 is the only time I and probably many other people would consider it, other than that electricity costs don't justify spending over 200% for the device.

1. Do you think the market and community is ready for FPGA Litecoin?
Yes
2. Is there definite interest in FPGA Litecoin machines? Would you buy one if the price was reasonable? What is reasonable?
Yep, I would definitely buy one due to the electricity rates where I live. I'll be willing to pay $0.8-$1 per kh/s or so.
3. Would you pre-order one to support first round funding for prototyping and first wave production?
If the price falls into what I find reasonable, and I find the seller trustworthy.

it would have to be $0.6 or less per kh since you could achieve around that with simple gpu mining. I MIGHT buy one (no preorder plz) but i would rather buy the plans for building it myself.

The problem is that the on-device block RAM is insanely slow compared to GPU ram (about 10 times slower for most FPGAs).  The per slice block RAM for most FPGAs is also less than 128 KB (more like 8 KB in typical cases).

The tradeoff described above works (reducing the memory size a lot and just recreating the entire lookup table more often), but the performance decrease is usually so great that it's problematic.  If you can make the algorithm run in parallel better I think it may be possible to get into the high double digit KH/s or perhaps hundreds with an FPGA.  We'll have to see what LaSeek and friends come up with.

1. It is ready. We' ve been talking and waiting for this a long time ago.
2. I would definately buy one if it's really worth it. It should be cheaper than GPUs, quickier and you should consider the difficulty rise.
3. I would, but only if you guarantee me about the hashes that it would produce.

TIA

yes, will buy one if price and hash rate are resonable :)

being more interested in fpga mining than gpu mining myself, which currently puts me off litecoin atm
If this could be done, and hash rate / price etc were reasonable, yes

Awesome guys  :)

I am still researching into it and sourcing out an appropriate FPGA board that is more optimized for Scrypt than previous FPGA Bitcoin offerings.

I am very much interesting in persuing this further.

On the pre-order end, it would be the only way I could feasibly do it (banks wouldn't touch me with a 10 ft cattleprod...). I am working to get some pricing for a viable prototype to know where the cost to get started would stand, and following production. I assume as others they can be built on site easy enough.

Some of you have expressed deep knowledge of FPGA, I may be contacting you to build a dev team. Let me know if you might be interested in helping.

I am hoping by approaching a new company like this right here with all of you before just building some shady looking website populated with products for pre-order that in no way exist will alleviate scam concerns as we keep moving. We can all see this from the ground up. Nothing will be done at all without some realistic figures on the cost from prototype to production. Only in that case would I open it up, with you knowing 100% what your money is being used for with total transparency. Still that is a lot of trust in some random avatar on a forum, I agree. In roping in established and trusted community members and building my own credibility as well we can quench the scam alert and build a by-community for-community device.

A little more about me personally:

I am a long time computer and networking tech, primarily operating small-medium size IT infrastructures of all kinds. Over the last few years I have also added web development and graphic design work to my portfolio, as well as business tech consulting (aligning businesses with streamlined presence online and in house). My position in this would be mostly business logistics and organizing, though providing my technical expertise where needed as well to build the business support infrastructure.

My new company known as BlockBurner is just as new as any other, currently building my own Bitcoin/Litecoin mining farm as a 100% bootstrap effort on it's own that is in its infancy. Unlike most however, I have no pricing or products or services listed because I am realistic, and don't believe in what other mining operations are doing in this regard. If a product or service appears on my page, it will be because it actually exists and is ready to ship to the public at large as soon as you click "buy". I have no unrealistic expectations when it comes to trust, especially when there are so many scammers out there trying to cash in on enthusiast mania. (Im helping track these fly-by-night scam sites in fact because these people hurt the community and discourage adoption, which sucks) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=176262.msg1835276#msg1835276

More to come soon

Operatr

I would certainly be interested in pre-ordering. Here's a bit of math (very simple) for people to chew on:

A GPU rig can be built, if you know what you are doing, and have it in a out-of-box setup with cheap CPU, mobo, etc, for around $1 per kH/s. For example, a 1.5-1.6kH/s system could be easily built for $1550 or so. The major advantage that FPGA units have over GPUs is not outright price ($1 per MH/s in Bitcoin mining for GPUs, BFL's 800MH/s unit cost around $700 if I remember correctly) but power consumption, often by close to an order of magnitude. As well, they are generally quieter, and their modular design allows for you to run many of them in a small area from one host computer. Some of the usual worries about GPUs such as heat dissipation are not as big of an issue with FPGAs.

After I got off on a tangent, I feel a fair price would be somewhere around $1/kH (per second, of course), as it would be competitive price-wise against GPUs while showing some major advantages, especially for people with expensive electricity, or without a room where they can put very noisy machines.

Cheers, best of luck with this project!

A serious question would be- are FPGA's really necessary? What problems do they solve that GPU's don't already solve? FPGA's had an advantage in bitcoin only where cost per m/h was concerned, in total hashes- GPU cards still had more. I think there are probably few Litecoin farms (although this could change) and most LTC miners probably don't consider their power cost in the cost of mining.

So, is it really worth it?

Main advantage of FPGA is scalability. It will be interesting to get their tech. spec. of alpha samples.

I'd say that the logistics benefits alone make it worth it. It's very easy to run 20 FPGA's in an average home. It's not as easy running 20 GPU rigs inside a home, at least not inside mine.
I will buy Litecoin FPGA's as long as the price is reasonable.

Good point. A lot less heat too.

Indeed. Dissipating the heat from 3 GPU rigs is hard enough for me, especially now that it's getting hotter outside. Opening a window merely makes things worse.

2. I would definately buy one if it's really worth it. It should be cheaper than GPUs, quickier and you should consider the difficulty rise.

We will see- but I doubt it with be neither cheaper nor quicker. FPGA's were not cheaper then GFX card or Faster. Only use electricity, smaller and less heat.

I am looking at the linear path Bitcoin took. GPUs are power intensive and generate a lot of heat, at some point these two factors will outweigh any benefit to mining LTC as it scales up. GPUs represent lowest hardware cost/highest operating cost generally, where FPGA generally costs a little more up front, but you save in the longer run with less energy needed to power it and superior heat efficiency negating the need for A/C units or other cooling, increasing your keep long term.

Current FPGAs used for Litecoin are geared toward Bitcoin more, I am looking at one that is optimized for Scrypt for superior hashpower.

If I was being picky, id say best thing for an fpga board, is being modular...

If you can design the backplane to be expandable, and sell fpga expansion boards as it were (thinking modminerquad style) then new miners could get in with a little investment and toy with fpga too

Well, I'm not as familiar with GPU, but I doubt it is 10 times faster.  And I believe you have been misinformed regarding the capacity as well.

The Spartan-6 LX 150 used on many of the boards already built has 4.9 million bits of memory.  The memory in -3 speed grade part can run at up to 320MHz
Newer but similar priced Artix-7 have 13.4 million bits, with up to 509MHz in -3 grade parts.

As it relates to scrypt and it's 128KB scratchpad, the core loop accesses memory sequentially in 1024-bit widths.  Within an FPGA, you can have access to all 1024 bits in a single clock.  While you may not be able to achieve that performance point due to other issues,  1024 bits @ 320/500MHz is nothing to sneeze at.

I thought a FPGA was reprogrammable? Why can't someone just buy a blank FPGA with a decent amount of onboard memory and program the chip? Am I misunderstanding how to set up a FPGA?

I'd be interested in helping out on the development side of things, shoot me a PM if you would like to discuss more. I work on FPGAs for a living, so I have the proper skillset.

Total block ram on the whole chip for a spartan6 lx 150 (most expensive chip) is 4824 Kb.  http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/fpga/spartan-6/lx.htm

Memory bandwidth for the block RAM is about 30-60 gb/s (your numbers above) while GPU internal bus is usually around 250 gb/s on higher end cards.

Yes, that's what I said.  (4.9 million == 4800 K)    (the exact number is 4939776 bits).



I'm not following your arithmetic.  Are you citing some document somewhere for either of those numbers?  If so, can you paste a link? 

From my previous post, an FPGA memory with 1024-bit width at (lets downgrade it to a more modest 200MHz) is 200 billion bits per second or 25GB / s.
This would be per-memory-instance (or, per hypothetical scrypt-core).

Something like this might be neat to attempt.
http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031212-183607/unrestricted/FPGA_Design_for_DDR3_Memory.pdf


Please let me know if you need me to test it out...  ;)

My point is that off-chip memory for SCRYPT is entirely unnecessary.  It really doesn't need much and it can fit entirely onchip.  The latency of going off-chip would kill performance.

The total RAM per block is 18KB. Each block has a 72-bit width. I don't really know where you're pulling your numbers from. Even if you calculate in parallel, 128/18 = 8 block RAM units required, with 72-bit widths each --> not 1024 bit width either.

I think you are misinformed about what is and is not possible.

You can construct whatever width you like by putting multiple units in parallel.  This is commonly done, and is a general feature of FPGA's not unique to Xilinx.

The vendors put them into small blocks like that to improve the granularity / flexibility for the designer.  As a result, you effectively lose capacity (bits) when your chosen configuration doesn't map efficiently to the underlying memory organization.

Artix-7 is even better, but limiting the discussion to Spartan 6 which many people have already bought, here is some documentation:

See page two of this:
(a) http://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/ip_documentation/blk_mem_gen_ds512.pdf

See page nine of this:
(b) http://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/user_guides/ug383.pdf

See page two of this:
(c) http://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/data_sheets/ds160.pdf


To get a x1024 memory using (a), you can see from (b) that one possibility might be (32) instances of (x32) width.
As far as the capability of the LX150 part commonly used on existing bitcoin mining boards, you will see in (c) that this devices has a total of (268) such blocks.
So accommodating the 128KB scratchpad in SCRYPT could be done with (64) blocks configured for (x32) width and (32) units in parallel.   The LX150 could possibly hold (4) such memories, but I think you run out of gates for SCRYPT arithmetic well before that.

They are versatile though some are more optimized in architecture for certain things. At the moment I am looking into FPGAs with Scrypt in mind over a more generic type such as the Spartan 6.

At this point interest in this seem high enough, I am putting together a volunteer dev team to work with me. If you are an interested FPGA/Microcomputing engineer, software engineer, or have otherwise relevant skill in bringing such a product to market, please PM me.

Project Overview

Design Goals:

Modular Scrypt FPGA system
USB Connectivity
Stand alone/Rack convertible casing for scalability
Associated software package

I have had a few PMs and have seen questions regarding pre-orders for this project:


On Pre-Orders

Any pre-order campaign will be associated with the current stage of development. Unlike other producers there will be no pre-orders until a certain capital requirement is met meeting the estimated costs associated with that stage. At this stage it would be in generating a working prototype device. I am taking a community approach for complete transparency, every transaction would be made public knowledge as I think if you are willing to take a chance on us, you should know exactly what your money is funding and see it develop before your eyes.

This approach minimizes risk and gives a linear progression of development that is seen by the whole community.

I don't believe it is fair to hold pre-orders in a way that in a way fakes it as if it is a real product sold online, knowing full well it does not exist. I think this practice itself is fraudulent in nature itself.

Prototype Stage

Proto-adopters would be taking the bulk of the risk, as such we would work out some other kind of benefit to funding assistance at this stage. I am open to ideas on what you would like to see if you opted to be a proto-adopter.

A known price point will be known before any pre-order campaing begins with a known cap to hit, all pre-order capital going into third-party escrow until the needed amount is reached. Otherwise it would be returned to you. This could be receiving a prototype device to help with testing or some kind of future revenue sharing.

Production Stage Once a working prototype is created, we will then move on to casing actual production costs, and much like the Proto stage, will have a certain goal needed before any capital is invested.

To do this will require a crowd-sourced effort, which would be conducted through various forums as well as things like Kickstarter campaigns and the like.

sweet..

when you get to testing and software dev stage i can help more, until then ill be watching this closely..
gl and thx

Announcement:

A dev team is officially being formed

Thank you all for your support! There will be more updates soon as our team comes together to start mapping out Stage 1, followed by round 1 pre-orders (or you may simply donate) when it comes time.

Operatr

Good stuff!

Will pre order a few LTC hashers for sure, summer is coming. Heat is a issue

sweet :D I'm interested

I'm sorry, but I still don't follow.  (b) Table 4 that you cited shows a maximum width of 32-bits for a 9 KB block.  With 18 KB data blocks, the maximum width is 64-bits (plus error checks bits).

You can get get a 32-bit writes in parallel on 32 separate 9 KB blocks, which is sort of like a 1024-bit interface (I guess; 1024-bit interface really implies that you're writing 1024-bits a cycle through the same memory interface...).  I think a direct implementation like this won't achieve a very good speed, though (less than 10 KH/s on most of these chips).

The better implementation would just run in the allocated memory and remake the LUT as needed I would think.  See the kernel for cgminer and reaper, and use of the "lookup gap" function, which more or less does this.

1. Do you think the market and community is ready for FPGA Litecoin?
Yes!


2. Is there definite interest in FPGA Litecoin machines? Would you buy one if the price was reasonable? What is reasonable?
I  am very interested, will be buying if the price is right.


3. Would you pre-order one to support first round funding for prototyping and first wave production?
Would need to see a complete working prototype before placing a pre order, or investing.

 :'(Seriously some noobie statements  in this discussion.

1. FPGA  is NOT , I repeat NOT a single product from a single manufacturer and as such there are NO hard and fast rules on what you can and cannot do with  BRAMs or memory generation, even the Xilinx product range has a different 'flavour' across product lines.

So statements such as "you don't know what you are talking about" only show you up for the noob you are, if you were THAT WELL researched you would know this.

Talking about 'RAM' as a single entity is also a misnomer ,because generally there are multiple ways to 'construct' RAM, which is after all just a flipflop.

If you are "lucky" the FPGA may have BRAM blocks where the internal resources and routing are all optimized for you, and you just 'hook it up'
If you are not one of gods chosen people then you have to construct the 'RAM' from normal logic, with all the shitty routing and interconnection that infers.

2. Memory access speeds have little to do with it, ultimately it comes down to internal logic chains..., no matter how FAST your memory is,
if your shittly VHDL/verilog is so badly written it takes 20ns to execute a clocked routine, then you may as well just be using paper& pen as a scratch pad, ultimately it bottlenecks somewhere.
Xilinx allows their internal BRAM to be operated 'upto' 600Mhz on some of the V5/V6, but unless you can get the rest of your relevant logic upto that speed , it does not really matter how fast it is.

As regards Scrypt, I had actually contacted some members who claim to be interested in Technical co-op, but it came to naught....
People are only interested if they think you have an edge.

I have my own Scrypt code for Xilinx FPGA and a pluggable rack system, that takes 10 boards, I had to mux them as 8+2 hot spares.(yep sometimes they drop in & out of service randomly)

Its a nice size, about 70cm*20*35cm, which allows for cooling & to slide PCBS along to get the JTAG into each board, with per board highspeed 17CFM MAGLEV fans (none of those shitty fans with the oilpool and stupid split washer under a label)
Only oversight is WTF do I put the PSU's.....(I'd banked on an ATX actually being able to supply the 3V3 supply, but they all lie about the capability)

Unfortunately...
Performance is shite...... insofar as comparison to high-end CPU or GPUs.
Who knows if I can get an improvement but it is going to be very hard to beat the GPU thrughput Vrs cost.

Yes, an x1024 memory might be constructed with (32) blocks configured for x32 width.   Is there something you didn't understand about that?  (this is just repeating what I said earlier?)

Good luck, I will be following closely.

Count me in for seed/prototype financing/purchase. No pain, no gain! (once dev team, ballpark cost etc. is presented).

No, that makes sense, before I was confused because I thought you were implying that a 9 KB memory block could have a 1024-bit width.

Also: Not to be the guy asking the stupid questions here, but what is stopping bulk purchases of GPU chips (specific clocking/memory designed for mining) in bulk from AMD? With say 25 undervolted and finetuned 7850 chips on a fairly simple board that would plug via USB and be recognized as a multi-crossfire system I can see that being a $$ while solution. Or maybe I am just dreaming..

I am very interested in this development.  Great to hear that an official dev team has been setup.  Looking forward to additional updates and opportunities to get involved (probably mostly in the form of funding or pre-order) but I am very interested.  Good luck!

Interesting. Thanks for the detailed post, especially the last part where you share your results.

This is good news as far as I am concerned, the whole point of Litecoin using Scrypt was so it would be difficult for specialised hardware to have a massive performance edge.

You need to have product volume in order to get the chip vendors attention.

FPGA you can go to any number of distributors and buy them one at a time if you like (with discounts at various volumes).

SCRYPT doesn't attempt to make it difficult for special hardware to have a performance edge.  Instead, it tries to make it more expensive.  Depending on RAM requires die area which translates directly to unit cost.

In the case of an ASIC, this is something to be considered.  The 128KB used by litecoin translates to 1 million bits of SRAM, which might multiply the ASIC unit cost x2/x4/x10?.

In the case of an FPGA, you already bought the RAM.  In the case of the popular Spartan 6 LX150 used in bitcoin mining, you already bought over 4 million bits worth.

So, whomever picked the 128KB size for litecoin didn't go out of their way to make it that hard for "special" hardware already in circulation.

So all they needed to do it ramp up the 128k number to make it cost-prohibitive on FPGAs for the next few years?  That seems a fairly glaring oversight given their stated goal.

Yes, it does.

Hi mr_random!

I think it's a good thing. Although Litecoin was made so that it could only be mined on CPUs, that has been proven wrong and now GPUs can mine it much more efficiently. This allows the evil bloodsuckers that are bot nets to feed off our Litecoin ecosystem, just like they did on Bitcoin for years.

Specialized hardware will make strides to push bot netters off the network and on to some other ALT coin. Once they can't compete profitably, they'll be outta here. I don't thing FPGAs will completely accomplish this goal, but ASICs will just like they have/will do with Bitcoin.

Also, custom mining hardware for a crypto currency is somewhat proof that you've actually "made it" as a currency, and you'll most likely be around for a while.

I noticed, in a thread from 2012, someone calling out current Scryot implementations as light/fake/tuned down. Botnet safe, as it were. Is this still the general feeling on it? Is this the variant used in LTC? And is there a significant problem with running the full version of the algorithm? Honestly, I would prefer my CPU mining to occur mostly unnoticed in the background.

Anyone know the hash rate with the proposed setup?

With the advent of specialized devices simple botnets will become useless overall, the returns will become so low even on a million infected PCs putting a CPUs worth of hashpower into the network will still be eclipsed by ASIC and more powerful hardware. I would say the hacking game is on the way out for BTC, but Litecoin and other alts would still be suceptible to this as they are still primarily CPU/GPU based starting out. A USB type device could be secured easier from intruders and overpower them in raw computing power. Eventually botnets will be out of business but it will just spread to the altcoins instead until altcoin hardware is ready to grow up.

It seems Litecoin is ready, and so are you.


Presently I am just getting to know the dev team and organizing a proper home for us. This right here is the start of a brand new industry, by community, for community, as Satoshi intended :)

Sorry for the off topic.  It seemed relevant at the time.  Good luck.

So is this a second team now working on scrypt FPGAs?

Are they starting from scratch or continuing along with work already started by the previous team?

-MarkM-

I have not received any requests for help with this project so it is independent of our project.

The main thing with buying an FPGA (or ASIC for that matter) for me would be electricity use. It would have to run at better than 5khash/watt at the very least to get my interest.

Is there any specs for the hash costs for a bitcoin FPGA/ASIC? The memory accesses would presumablyincrease the power consumption for a litecoin system.



Could you not voltage divide the 12v from the ATX and then use a 3v3 regulator? You'd want to divide first because you don't want to drop too much across a regulator or you'll be throwing away a lot of money as heat!

To me this is somewhat of an odd statement. As long as you can mine at a profitable rate of hash/watt I would assume (for me at least) that speed would be the absolute priority. Sure, you can prob build something that is extremely low watt, but what you really want to do is beat difficulty increase by mining FAST @ consistent and profitable hash/watt ratio. Diff is the killer!

DIff is why you want high efficiency; all the fast-buck people with their marginal efficiency units will drive diff up fast, until their electricity costs put them out of business. Then the electrically efficient ones will keep on chugging along.

-MarkM-

obviously I would be highly interested but I'm also high interested in what the performance increase is really going to be.   I think the excitement over these devices is based on the fact people know the next step in Bitcoin mining was FPGA's and they are expecting a similar improvement in hashing when thinking of a scrypt mining FPGA.  I just do not see the gains being worth it, but perhaps I will be wrong.  Considering something like a 7970 gets 650-700 kh/s at 200 watts a card (excluding cpu/mb wattage for arguements sake) and one can safely assume the 8970's will be in the 750-800 kh/s maybe even 850 kh/s at around the same watts or possibly less - I just do not see there being good enough gains to justify it. 

Trust me though - I PRAY that I am wrong.  But I'm also thinking these things aren't going to be cheap.  So while you may save on electricity because say it only eats 75-100 watts (its just going to consume more power then a bitcoin fpga because of the memory, lets face it) If your getting saying 800-900 kh/s for I''m guessing around $1000-1500 somewhere in there?   To get to my current hashrate I'd be looking at around a 7 unit array at 7000-10,000 investment. 

That' s a whole lot of electricity before I finally break even.  At roughly a 1300 watt savings a month, your looking at what... $1500 a year in savings for electricty.  The initial investment in my rigs was a little over 3k so your looking at a minimum of 2 years before you start to see any kind of return.  And that is figuring things at my high 13.8 cents a kw/h cost!  There are a lot of people that pay a lot less which means your looking at an even longer time frame before you are able to see any kind of return. 

And at the end of it what do you have?  Something you MAY be able to sell for use as a miner or sold to someone to re-purpose or play with for an extreme discount.  Where as the GPU's you would at least be able to offload to possibly miners - but there will ALWAYS be a gaming market.

Maybe I'm not looking at this 100% correctly and I'm completely open to hearing other peoples opinions on the matter.  I just can not see the benefit for scrypt mining.  Maybe in an asic device?  Because then you might be able to crank out redonkulous hashing power at very little wattage.  Then, we are talking about something that makes a bit of sense.  Sure, the asic device can't be used for anything else but mining.  But at least the hashing power to wattage used will be advantageous enough to warrant the risk.

Sorry , you seem to have a very short memory....... or are you saying that it was not you that had the PM from me......

Not that I remember. But then again I get close to 100 pms every couple days and 100s of emails and IMs daily. What did you need help with? Or did you ask for something in our IP that I was not willing to disclose.

I have a couple of 5870's that give me 400 to 407 MHash doing SHA256 mining, but mucking around with all the suggested settings for litecoin the best I have been able to get them to do for scrypt mining is about 250 to 260 Khash. So to me GPUs are not looking real good for litecoin mining, certainly not the one Khash scrypt per 1 Mhash SHA256 one sees often as a rule of thumb estimate.

Maybe though there is more to getting the 5870 to work right than the thread about litecoin mining has mentioned?

Basically I am figuring I might as well use my GPUs for SHA256-based merged mining, mostly for the altcoins, and look toward FPGA for scrypt coins.

-MarkM-

K some VERY VERY preliminary verifiable measurements. (verifiable from my side).

Iv'e had code for some time that takes about 1ms to do ONE round (no laughing at the back there), which would make it about a 1kh/s.
This is actual code on an FPGA,  yes it has not been optimized yet and yes it is a SINGLE core.

I had not done any work on it, purely because I was working on a 'crypto job' for someone else.... then there was the work on getting  the Bitcoin FPGA code operating at a higher level, currently thats clocking about 350MH/s on a xilinx, with bitcoins at a stupid level, and the fact that BFL & TOM both shafted me on deliveries of ASIC kit it is about priorities.(beer money)

Since I recently took a slagging down on IRC about what some called  'stock images' that I : "had modified so they could not be google searched" , there were requests for a special 'proof' message which I have included specifically for the IRC doubters.

https://i.imgur.com/UHiTc3g.jpg

This is not a  'get rich quick scheme' but rather a pure research task, possibly the first images of  an FPGA product running litecoin.
Crypto currencies are of interest to me, but I really will be surprised if people can break into high double figures with a single core on an FPGA.

Looking forward to hear more on this project.

Any idea on prototype ETA? - some already have talked about various prototypes in the works?

The key is the transparency imho - is there a REAL product, and are they consistent in quality? Does it verifiably beat forthcoming 8750 and 8790 in measurements of performance and power usage?

NO.... I cannot see FPGA beating 8750 or 8790

But the real issue is no one is sharing any Litecoin FPGA figures, considering all these 'prototypes' floating about ......
It is the  'Tom'/ BFL fuckfest all over again..........

Personally I have great difficulty believing some of the figures that are being bandied about for litecoin FPGA. I've see statements such as

"Spartan6 XC6SLX150 fits only 8 scratchpads. If BRAMs are not used for bitcoin computations, it is possible to implement LTC mining for XC6SLX150 at about 50 - 100 kh/s per chip with about 80% of slices free."

Quite frankly  I find this very difficult to believe.. Because I'm seeing figures of about 3k flipflops & 5k =LUTS for a SCRYPT engine.

Xc6SLX150 is specd at  23,000 slices  each slice contains 4 LUTS & 8 FF
so ~23,000*4 =~98k LUTS

So just taking into account the LUTS:
 8 cores = 8*5k =~40k LUTS, which in no way leaves "about 80% of slices free", and NO way am I seeing anything near 100Kh/s.

To have ~80% free you would need to implement 8 engines in ~20k LUTS ,~2.5K LUTS per engine.
Sorry but  for a SCRYPT engine I have to call bullshit...

Then suddenly I see this sort of thing in the same discussion.
"multiple smaller DRAM chips working in parallel will do best job... Allowing about 500 mega-transfers for low-cost / mid-cost fpga, that is 500 giga-bits per second or 60 gigabytes per second. Overall cost of DRAM will be about 150 EUR- and of FPGA to handle that about 300 EUR-. If works in fully-pipelined manner it would give about 500 kh/s mining performance for litecoin application."

So  ABRACADABRA... we have a  5 fold increase in performance,  and not a SINGLE analysis on actual cycle times any place to be seen.

Can you share a link to the threads with your bandied about numbers?  I haven't seen anybody say anything that outrageous here.

Interested

I hope we will be seeing some updates soon.

Interesting stuff. Thinking about having a play around with this myself. Is there any opensource Scrypt VHDL out there? Or should I just roll my own with the SHA1 and mod the Salsa20 that is up on opencores site? I'm not thinking about mining or anything just to get some throughput data/energy costs etc and also work out what the problems are people will face who want todo it properly.

If all else fails I'm thinking of running it on top of a NIOS II implementation. Completely pointless but got to be worth a shot just for the laughs.

The team is just now being cemented while I get our home base in order, so no ETA yet but hopefully soon. This is pretty much day 1  :) And I agree, which is why BlockBurner will be a community driven company. Much like Local Motors (the community engineered Ralley Fighter car), the idea is to crowd source a design for a production device and utilizing open source solutions whenever possible. My position in it is overall project management and business logistics, organizing funding campaigns, design, and handling final production and distribution in house. Everything will be made transparent as to company operations and finances.

Bitcoin is a community built protocol, I think businesses around it should be built the same way. If this is the future of currency, then we must create the future of business to support it. The community spirit is the most pervasive element of the protocol. The response I am seeing here is evidence of that.

This is why I have no wish to simply fish for people willing to submit their money to a pre-order and hope for the best like other companies. A properly crowd-funded campaign is the better way to go for a bootstrap industry, so that is the approach I am going to take. BlockBurner has nothing to hide. Funds will only be delivered when a known point is reached that should suffice to fund that stage of development. This keeps expectations in check, and clarity to the process. Unlike BFL there will be constant updates and publicly accessible accounting so you know where your money is going. There will be a way to opt out as well if you change your mind, though refunds can only be done so long as those funds are not invested toward the goal. Until goals are reached, BlockBurner will take possession of nothing, safe in escrow until then and not before. The dev team will be compensated for their good work at project completion, in a way that is decided as fair, likely a reserved front row stake in a Batch 1 device.

Nothing is wrong with crowd funded efforts, but these companies are doing it wrong. I want to fly right by the community with transparency so I never see "is BlockBurner a scam?" pop up here someday. There is no trust being developed by these companies by being dodgy, not a good way for a business to start out with a cloud of doubt over it.

The response here is awesome guys, I have been working on getting things set up on my end non stop, I will do my best not to disappoint you.

All devs interested in this project are welcome to PM me, I am getting things organized and we will break things up into separate focus groups soon and start talking about the logistics.

To the devs I have talked to so far, thank you again for your interest, you will be hearing from me soon as I get the BlockBurner site forums up over the next day or so. I am going to also try an integrate a project management system.

New logo  8)

http://blockburner.nailedmedia.com/files/2013/04/blockburner-paragram-logo.png


Operatr

You could certainly start with a pure software approach and then gradually optimize it with custom instructions.  You wouldn't ever get the speed of a pure RTL design, but it's a good (rewarding) exercise.  With the reduced resource, utilization you could end up with the fastest implementation on the BeMicro.

I'm getting 380 - 400Kh/s with each of my 5850s. Using 12.8 drivers, 12.8 APP SDK. The only thing I can think of is that you may be using a low intensity associated with SHA256 such as 11. With litecoin mining, you should be using an intensity of 18, and move up to 19 and 20 if your card doesn't crash at these.

Actually you should be getting roughly 10% more Kh/s than Mh/s with scrypt.

These numbers are from bitfury somewhere in the forum here. While its not so easy to verify the numbers i think he is a quite skilled HW-Designer so i would careful with 'ABRACADABRA'.

http://bitfury.org/

Thank you.  I found this post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=98535.msg1081219#msg1081219 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=98535.msg1081219#msg1081219)

It's weird that he would say

The implementation of scrypt for Litecoin requires you to do the equivalent number of SHA256 hashes to the number of execution of the salsa for loop.  If the Litecoin implementation of scrypt includes SHA256 (the algo bitcoin uses) and memory intensive salsa stream cipher rounds, why would it be easier than just implementing SHA256?

I think that post is just (old) off-the-cuff remarks and has multiple errors (not fully fleshed out ideas).

learn to use google...(that magic thing you can Copy& paste sections of text into, to track down stuff)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=98535.5;wap2 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=98535.5;wap2)

But specifically  it is the 80% free I take exception to.

Anyway I finally received some 50A TI power modules, so I can run Bitcoin & Litecoin research boards together.

You will need to roll your own, the implementations are not too good.

Update:


The dev team is now getting on to our new project home with Atlassian, discussions are already flowing for hardware considerations to develop the ideal FPGA for Scrypt and an initial Git has been posted. We will be breaking up into specific teams in due time as everyone gets settled in. The project page comes complete with a Git repository as well for, as the intent is to release the client software as an open source package.

Meanwhile I myself am getting the home website up and running, with community forums.

More to come soon!

Operatr

Definitely interested! If things look like they'd have a good ROI term, would look at maybe 50-100BTC~ of pre-orders (if you have a pre-order newsletter list, please append me to it :) )

That is definitely a goal. This machine is to be specialized for Scrypt unlike other FPGA miners available now, which perform better for SHA256. While they can mine Scrypt coins as well they are not as productive as they could be. Though the power savings alone over running several GPU's may be enough  :)

Along with BTC, I think as a Litecoin mining device there will be an option for Litecoin payments too, and regular USD to appeal to those who want to mine coins instead of buying them (naturally they would have no coins yet).

As part of the web building I will be doing through the rest of the week, bi-weekly newsletter will be incorporated 8) We'll have Facebook, Twitter and some other things as well coming up to keep everyone updated in a variety of ways.

Operatr

Glad to hear that. Please notify us when the fb/twitter accounts are ready. Will you accept PayPal as a payment for preorders? Or you will accept only LTC/BTC?
Anyhow, count me in for the preorders.

PS: how about if you made a subreddit with "LTC-FPGA" that we can watch? Just saying..

I am hoping to have everything set up by the end of the week. Beyond FB and Twitter I would like to have an IRC channel, teamspeak/skype/vent options maybe, etc. BFL's problem is based around keeping their customers either in the dark or reporting conflicting information. Starting up this way hopefully will alleviate any "is Blockburner a scam?" posts in the future. All official announcements will be handled by me to ensure no one is left behind through a variety of effective public mediums. A subReddit is a great idea, I will incorporate that as well.

I am thinking payment options would include BTC/LTC, and USD, so Paypal would be an option. Diversifying  will allow everyone to pre-order no matter your currency of choice :) How best to mitigate crypto-currency holding price fluctuations are something to be decided a bit later.

Incoming subReddit!  8)

http://www.reddit.com/r/BlockBurnerFPGA/ (http://www.reddit.com/r/BlockBurnerFPGA/)

Cool, subscribed. Can't wait to see where this goes. I'm definitely in for a few of these units.

May I know the hashing power? 10 or 20 mg/s?

It is not bitcoin.. for FPGA it should be in the KH/s, even multiple graphics cards only give you low MH/s

We're working on developing FPGA technologies as well. We can collaborate if you'd like.

You need a good old fashioned email newsletter, for those of us who are not into fb/tw/reddit

Also we would buy about $3,000-$7,000 of equipment, provided the price is right etc. etc.

Unlikely to spend more than $500 on any pre-orders, you can thank those who came before you (and might deliver after you) for that.

Wrong. FPHA has nothing to do with it. It's because LTC is SCRYPT, and I am assuming the goal of the FPGA's would be to reach into MH/Sek otherwise why design them?

Will the FPGAs take more than a month to be completed? Is there a pre-estimation?

FPGA's are likely to continue to lag behind GPU for litecoin, currently there are no products I know of that can produce in the MH/s range for a single unit.

I.E a single GPU/ FPGA (even with multiple cores), and the reason to design with FPGA are numerous, I will give you two.

1. lower power consumption
2. Ebay scrap. (this works fine for individual miners, but not if you want to build and sell to the public.....)

So even if I cannot match GPU:FPGA on a 1:1 basis, I can out purchase on a 1:n basis

LTC difficulty is set to jump again in about 2.5 hours (62 blocks to go) and is currently skyrocketing, even to scale up and remain profitable GPUs become unviable at a point. They simply don't scale well from the massive power and cooling cost.

The only FPGAs used with Scrypt so far were available Spartan units, which gave decent performance. We are out to build a device with Scrypt in mind. We will not give any numbers until there is something concrete to report.


At this time we have no estimations, or even pre-estimations on any dates. The team is just coming together and we are still seeing what we need, but the groundwork and planning has begun in our JIRA dev site (if you are a mac/windows/linux desktop developer PM me!). We have no desire to be a shipper of vaporware or make promises we have no idea that we can keep in the end. As such, announcements will be made when we have real information. Talk is cheap in this industry, we are more interested in letting real results speak for us.

It is my own personal desire to see us have a production sample in our hands within 6 months. BlockBurner is only about a week old now, so we have a ways to go before I can say anything more concrete.  We are designing a ground up FPGA opposed to using off the shelf parts like FPGAs before it, so there are certainly some unknowns to overcome.


I will be creating a FAQ soon with the most common questions I am getting, stay tuned!

Operatr

This pretty much sums up my exact thinking.  These FPGAs need to be at an absolute minimum 1.5Kh/$ to even be worth it.  In addition to the points made in the quoted post, you also have to factor in that computer hardware can be resold more easily and GPUs obviously hold more value than a custom-made FPGA.  Yes, heat is an issue when running a sizeable GPU farm, but it's not that big an issue and is a little overblown in my opinion.

Heat and power usage are HUGE issues, depending on where you live.  I live in Japan -- I can basically support one single computer running up to three 7970's in my apartment.  That's it, for both power consumption and heat dissipation reasons (in the summer -- it's so cold in the winter time I'll just open the windows in the computer room and let the outside air do the cooling).

An FPGA, even if it were more expensive, could alleviate my issues significantly.  If the power and heat came down, I could run a far more expansive system.

GPU's certainly hold resale value to computer gamers, but FPGAs have resale value as well, arguably more as they can be reprogrammed to do other things.  I suspect most of the bitcoin fpga networks are going to get sold off and repurposed to do other things eventually as the ASIC devices take over the market and make them unprofitable to run.

No offense, but you're in the minority, not the majority.  Also, GPUs hold more value than FPGAs for one simple reason, demand.  The demand for GPUs is much higher than it is for FPGAs because the market is many times larger.

1. Do you think the market and community is ready for FPGA Litecoin?
Yes

2. Is there definite interest in FPGA Litecoin machines? Would you buy one if the price was reasonable?
Yes and Yes

2.3 What is reasonable?
Reasonable to me is around $300, (I blow that on a good weekend with the wife and kids), not too much risk for a device that may or may not exist, from a company that is just getting started, from someone that I personally do not know

3. Would you pre-order one to support first round funding for prototyping and first wave production?
Yes

It's true.  My accounting factors in resale value for the rigs I build, subtracting depreciation, it's a sizable chunk of change.  On the other hand Bitcoin FPGAs had a high resale value up to the point ASICs came out.  Now they are drastically depreciating.

And everyone's variables are different.  Like people in this thread have mentioned.  Some live in areas where electricity costs are prohibitive to mining others have offloaded the electrical costs to their landlords, employers, the parents they still live with.  We can't determine if the FPGA are viable just because its not viable to ourselves.  There will be a market for it.  People with high electricity costs will buy it outright.  Others like myself pay anywhere between .07 to .14 USD per kW.  I have to determine if buying FPGAs (paying the premium over GPUs for them) is better than the rates I'm  paying plus the additional investment in adding more service, or finding a location to run them from.


I don't think FPGA will break LTC coins.  I'm expecting that they will be priced factoring the electrical savings one would get and a premium to to their initial scarcity.

I understand your point of view.  I was thinking about the average American when I was making my points, not just myself.  Here in the US, electricity rates are quite reasonable for most people.  

I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say about the value of GPUs vs FPGAs.  The reason I think GPUs definitely hold more value than FPGAs is because of demand, not because of the items themselves.  Gamers create a much larger market for GPUs than the FPGA market that is created by miners (by miners I mean people who are into mining enough to buy a dedicated mining device like an FPGA, not people who casually mine with their GPU when they're not gaming).  Basically, there are many times more gamers than miners, thus allowing GPUs to hold their value longer.

Fpgas have value apart from being "mining devices". If they are being sold for more than that value, they are being sold for more than they are worth.

I may not represent you in the US, but I doubt I'm in the minority world wide. Most people in the world don't have central air and 200 amp home service.

Update

New FAQ on the home site (which also got some polish) -

http://www.blockburner.net/faq/ (http://www.blockburner.net/faq/)

We now have Facebook and LinkedIn pages in addition to our subReddit


The dev team getting settled in and the plan is being mapped out, stay tuned

Operatr

This may be true for 'general' FPGA's but the specialized FPGS's we are talking about that focus on LTC mining will have close to zero resale value over what they are worth for mining. And I would assume far lower resale value then graphics cards.

If you know what a Field Programmable Gate Array is, that statement doesn't make the slightest bit of sense whatsoever.

And GPUs that have been run overclocked and maxed for years?  I doubt they have a lot of resale value, if any.

I am very interested , but do not want to BFL this long of wait . This is a failed company .

I would prob argue that graphics cards can be resold just fine unless they are damaged, while a special built FPGA for LTC mining would be a different story altogether. Not that I or anyone really care, if you buy a LTC custom FPGA I would assume you do it with a ROI within reason and resale value not included. Otherwise you have to be nuts!

You should prob just leave and take some English lessons.

Well first off, it is not a LTC custom FPGA.

It is a LTC, FTC, BBQ, TBX capable FPGA and a possible incentive to think about getting merged mining implemented in the Scrypt-coin world too if you want to extend the usefulness of the device.

Maybe by the time LTC, FTC, BBQ and TBX are all far too difficult for the device to effectively mine they could all be merged together and some newer ones thrown into the merge too, extending the useful lifetime of the device.

-MarkM-

1) If it can work yes.
2) Always if there is money to be made.
3) Yes I"m in for some.

Our timeline in fact is shaping up quickly, though I cannot give specifics on the near future, I can say there will not be a year long wait without updates (because that is ridiculous). If everyone is still waiting a year from today for this device , I would be inclined to agree with you on our many failings.


Yes indeed, overall, just like Bitcoin ASICs are in fact SHA356 hashers that can work with a variety of altcoins, our Scrypt optimized board would work on any Litecoin derived coin. Scrypt is used beyond Litecoin as well, making this machine useful for a variety of cryptographic processing.

I'm interested in one of these, as long as it's easy to use. I would be able to pre-order one too.

Hashing scrypt efficiently is a useful capability.

There are other things an fpga can be used for as well.

Well, I am getting bombarded with messages! There is a little backlog for me to chew through but if you sent me something I will get back to you in the next day or two.

Overall incredible response guys, from well-wishers to the hardest core miners, we really do appreciate it. The team is off and running charting out hardware and developing our business structure. For only being about 1.5 weeks old, we have already grown tremendously.



For devs applying, frankly we have about 5x more than needed for the moment! As much as I wish I could include everyone that had interest in helping out, I simply can't. I had no expectation that we would have so many interested to be a part of this, which is both amazing to see but sad that I must turn the majority of you down for this one.

But, it is obvious that 1) There is serious passion around these boards and 2) You guys really want to be involved in a community project. So, dev applicants, though you may not be able to be on the core BlockBurner FPGA team (for now), I am thinking about doing something else. I will be getting back to all of you in time to get some feedback on this.


Operatr

I will vacuum the dev office for boards...

This looks to be moving along nicely :)  Since there are so many people volunteering to help out, maybe you should appoint a spokesman (or woman) that their only responsibility is communication to the interested parties.  I believe that you have been doing a great job informing us of progress but I know how easy it is to be consumed with a big project.  At any rate, I am excited for your progress and look forward to further updates as your team moves forward.

Cheers!
New

MarkM,
I am not arguing its a bad idea (hell I am super excited) or a bad investment. I am purely stating that a specialized scrypt solving FPGA would have less resale value for general purposes then a FPGA board with standard specs would, while GPU has 'gaming' to fall back on.

Super cool project and I would definitely be lining up to be part of pre order and development funding.

All I ask is make a new thread when it's time to order. Give us a heads up like " we will be taking orders in 2 weeks" it gives some people that don't have liquidity time to get some funds together and not miss the boat so to speak.

Regards,

I personally spent some time looking into the Salsa function and - $/# ratio as related to high speed transfer needed on RAM specifications:



And in the end i think the only way you will end up selling devices is on the Power Cost Ratio over Time equation - and Market Hype.

Don't take that as negative from me , (and for anyone reading this) ; this will probably just mean that a marketable device will be sourced from a mockup design, then built on order, for profit.

this is a net benefit, as it means your cost/margin as producer becomes prohibitive (if the market becomes adverse) therefore the proclivity to "design and mine" as with ASICS is lessened greatly , becasue your Net Risk is about as great as the general user.

Scrypt FPGA is a market risk but net power consumption benefit - and a net Benefit to users.  but they will cost a lot # wise , and i'll be interested to see what the market [Expects] as against the [#$ Reality.] upfront cost.
 

7990 - http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-hd-7990-malta-performance-benchmarks-leaked-crushes-geforce-gtx-690/

576.0 GB/s bandwidth.

its a high end card , but that's a high end FPGA - and can the FPGA compete with ATI productive to Scale power?

not saying it can't be done just saying [Watts and Space] - is the net benefit i see.

I hope we can say more about expected performance soon, though two of the primary benefits are certainly much lower operating costs and are way easier to scale up.

again the benefit is for those who pay around $.26 a kW and ti is cost prohibitive to run GPU farms.  It is for those who have low capacity, apartments, renting, or do not have access to high capacity power.  I'm grateful in that I'm not limited by those constraints but I welcome it for those who would like to participate but cannot.

I live in an apt, but pay only $0.06/kW and am honestly more interested in raw power then low power draw. I am of course hoping for both :)

any updates?

I would be ready to order once numbers and timeframes are released.

I would love to hear some kind of update on this project.   :)

Same here!

ditto ;)

Ask and you shall receive  :)

The hardware design is being discussed with some specifics locked down, still a ways off of the first prototype however but are moving quickly. This ends Week 2, for our short time in existence I think we have made a large amount of progress that is continuing at this pace.

We are being deliberately tight lipped until we have something concrete to report to keep our expectations managed as well as yours. I think we have all seen (in BFLs case) the end results of getting ahead of ourselves, and have no desire to go down that road. There are discussions and progress in mapping the plan out in our JIRA development site, a part of which we will likely make public when it is time, but otherwise unwilling to divulge more than we are comfortable with.


I have a personal announcement that I lost my meager meat-world job as of last Friday. As such, I will be running BlockBurner full time from now on through project completion and beyond. This does not affect our operations on a financial level, so all is good. If anything this is better in that I can now give my full and undivided attention the project and our supporters.

Operatr

I will probably invest as well

I am very interested in FPGA for scrypt mining.
- Keep me updated<3

Very keen on product and invest.

When a prototype is developed, would it be possible for those of us willing to accept the risk to buy a proto?

I would imagine not. Firstly we would only be generating a very limited number of dev boards, but I personally don't believe in this kind of "early access" or pay-to-win scenario. I think everyone should have a fair chance when the time comes. I have some other ideas to mitigate order fairness, as I see some clear issues the way BFL and others have handled their pre-order campaigns (or didn't handle depending on who you ask).


Otherwise, I have a newsletter in the works as well as our own site forums that expect to be alive within a day or two, and integrating the social aspects further so no matter your venue of choice, you can get updates directly from the source.


Operatr

Fair enough, was just a thought. :)

no offense , but I'm really finding it funny that people keep saying that,(or things like that)  i mean did you guys come down in the last shower, or is it just me?


woops BFL are just really , woopsy incompetent ! ...


{tune in Benny hill music}

{meanwhile at the BFL labs}.........

"wooh guys woops we lost another ASIC block! - dam slippery fingers Steve! - and Joe what are you doing over there ?  COOKING TOAST ! omg !  ha ha !

ha ha but we sure are making out with all the ones we are mining with hey guys???

Jenny the accountant lost ALLL the ORDERS AGAIN!,  oh Jenny have another drink !

Ha ha whats our # now......woooh better keep TESTING !! voltage problems and such , you know how it is..... ; ) "

{Benny hill music..fades...}


Que in alternate reality where BTC stays at our around $1 USD -   BFL running with stern Efficiency that makes even the strongest German stereotype's  green with envy, all orders shipped.

its called capitalism/freemarket, it really surprises me that you guys haven't quite, cottoned on to it ?

I am definitely interested in purchasing Litecoin mining units and/or investing in this endeavor.  Keep me on your interest list.

I am interested in pre-ordering to fund the cost of first production, once a proof-of-concept can be seen that your hardware is ready for pre-orders.

What is a reasonable price?  Depends on performance.  Maybe estimate it versus the cost and performance of a 7970 or 7950.

Thank you,

_theJestre

You'd better expect that until someone goes onward to ASIC, these things are going to need to be massively mass-produced, churned out in vast vast numbers... Way more than the puny few hundred a day that seems likely to make BFL take forever to deliver ASICs even if/when they do reach that imagined capacity.

Scrypt is fashionable! :)

-MarkM-

I'd sell neighbor's dog for scrypt fpga

mmmm yes give me please!

In the spirit of fairness; how about when the time comes you are accepting preorders you do it in sort of a raffle. I'm guessing the wave of people jumping at the chance to preorder one will be way more then whatever can be manufactured. Even if i was one of the many that didn't get a winning spot for a preorder i'd be fine knowing it was simply a matter of luck, and not because i didn't jump in on the first ten minutes of the announcement or because three guy ran in and ordered them all.

Yes I need a couple of FPGA for Litecoin mining. :)

My usual comment on the subject ...
Send one to me and I'll write a cgminer USB driver for it ...
...
PM me here or visit IRC FreeNode #cgminer to talk ...

Thanks Kano, I'll run it up the ladder


I had something like that in mind, in the way of raffle or randomized batches to eliminate any unfairness when it comes time to deploy. The problem when going a strictly queued route:

1. First in first out creates a rift between the first to sign up and the last, as those who came to the table late feel they are missing out while the initial adopters get theirs. I have a late BFL order, I know this feeling all too well (though it was a Jally so maybe not  8))

2. Allows people to sell their early pre-order slot on auction sites for disgusting amounts of money (leading to scams as well), which I think sucks.

I would rather do it in a way that disregards whether you were first or last to hop on, and clips the pre-order auctions at the same time since no one would know what order it would be in.

I am all for community input on this, tell me what you think would be a fair distribution system, I think everyone should have an equal opportunity   :)


When we have some units in hand we'll talk  ;D


ASIC for Scrypt would be a fair ways off as the FPGA stage is just beginning now, and Litecoin is more resistant to ASICs as well. It all depends on how much pre-order interest there is when it comes time for that step, in any case we will do our best to supply the demand with haste. I can't speak for BFL's process, though with ASICs there are many more design challenges to overcome as very customized hardware. FPGA's are better in this regard as the R&D time is significantly shorter as much of the hardware needed is available to us already. There is definitely no shortage of love for Scrypt coins  8)

 
Thanks everyone otherwise, your feedback is very important to us! At the moment we have been discussing the legal aspects of the business before we go much further in the design process, though the design process is very much active.

But in reality, this isn't how normal business is conducted.  Microsoft, Sony, HTC, Game Developers, etc. do not raffle pre-orders.  They have a set amount of say the "limited edition", the more abundant "regular" edition, and the super rare "elite" edition, or whatever.  If I was to walk into a gamestop say, and ask to pre-order a game and was told "you have to enter a raffle to even see if you're going to be able to," I would walk out immediately and I wouldn't purchase that game in retaliation to the ridiculousness that is the raffle.

Honestly if you're late to the game, then why should you get the same benefit as those who did their diligence.  I'm all for limiting the number that can be ordered per customer, so one can't buy 1000 units and make everyone down the line wait, but it should be FIFO.

Now for BFL, it was handled poorly, those who did pre-order way in advance obviously are at an advantage, but this is not the fault of the customer, more so it is of the company.  If for instance you have a 3 month pre-order wait time before release date, and you know you can produce 10k units in 3 months, then set the pre-order limit to 10k units.  After that you can either have another pre-order round for the next batch, or just have the item as out of stock until they arrive.

If you announce a pre-order in advance, then how is it not fair to everyone?  Everyone who is keeping up with this will be informed, and can then either purchase a pre-order when available or not.  If the pre-order units run out, that's just what happens, wait for the next time its available.

Edit: Also, if the pre-order isn't a crazy long wait, then auctioning wouldn't be near as big of issue as it is with BFL.

I wouldn't agreed to the lucky draw thing, it should be first come first serve and limiting to the number of unit a customer can buy, but any way we don't even had a working model yet or unless they is one that i wouldn't know? :)

While the goal that said raffle would achieve is all well and good it would come across as unfair and not a good business practice, I personally would not be interested if such practices were used.

First come, first serve, with a limit of 1 per customer, for the First production run, then with the following production runs and as more are available relax the 1 per customer rule.
This way no one can purchase a huge amount and have an unfair advantage, but yet rewards the people who follow this and are keen to put money down in the first place.

... and I will add that there are clear design considerations to take with USB ... to optimise software performance with the device ...
Different of these issues become more critical depending on the device performance.
This being FPGA, you would need to take critical notice of the similar BTC FPGA considerations ... that no FPGA device does optimally ... but some certainly do better than others.

1) Yes scrypt mining is pretty mature and popular. There are more than enough people investing in GPUs and tuning them to get the peak performance. If you made a good FPGA scrypt miner at the right price, people would buy them.

2) Just answered that. If your FPGA miner was well priced per hash, used less power per hash, and was neat and tidy to coordinate people would go for it.

3) Would pre-order to fund prototyping, but once you had development boards with guys like Kano who could review and give an opinion I would pre-order to help fund the building of a batch of chips and boards.

My reason for this point to pre-order:
-scam avoidance
-knowledge of a time frame and proven performance. Just look at BFL. Completely screwed up both the period of time to finish the design, then completely screwed up the time line to production, then completely screwed up on end performance. If somebody like Kano would turn around and say "boards look good for X/Y/Z performance software should be finalised soon and board designs look mature enough for production" then I'm happy to part with some cash.
-somebody else might come along with a better offer while you are trying to get to market. I'll hold onto my coins until I know I'll get the best product  in the short term.

Now if you went for a raffle - no way. If I front money right away before somebody else who waits til the week before shipping I should get my gear before they do. If that means the poor cheap risk less baby has to wait a long time, tough so did I from when I put in.
If you went for auctions- no way. Set a competitive price where you are confident you will sell at the rate you can build them, and let me decide if I see that as what I want to spend. I don't want to have to wait for ever until the cash up idiots out there have run out of life savings before I'm willing to spend a more sensible amount. No doubt Auctions are better for sellers when demand is hot, but it doesn't impress me as a buyer.
I would support a limit per customer would make more sense than 1. However you could always order via a friend's/family member's card and address to make more orders.

What would impress me as a price? Well you can get a 7950 for $300 which can easily hash at 600mhs, so that is 50c a mhs. You will still need a host system for a GPU as well as a FPGA board, just you can run more FPGAs per host ultimately. It is likely by the time these FPGAs launch that the 8950 will be out which promises lower power and probably a little more speed (I hear power is more the concern currently). So you would be best to target at most 50c per mhs.
Again a 7950 as the target means 250W for 600mhs -> 2.5mhs per W. You could assume a 8950 might be closer to 3mhs per W. So to impress me on the power front you'd want to be well better than 3mhs per W.

I like the idea of a FGPA with decent ram performance as it opens it up for other uses later. An ASIC could only be used for mining or scypt work, but an FPGA could be used for all sorts of scientific applications later and hence actually have some good resale later. Their flexibility and potential is far higher than low/no ram spartan boards etc.

good point...

Excellent points!

I had actually not considered the real problem with BFL was simply the length of the pre-order campaign. Ours would certainly not be running for a year, probably more like 1-2 months at most with a production plan already secured ahead of it, so once funds are secured production would begin immediately.

So, no raffles or randoms, we just need to be sure to keep the campaign short. BFL got way ahead of themselves that bred many other issues and a large amount of mistrust in that year long wait. We don't want that, you don't want that, which is why we're being careful not to go that route.


We are in fact talking to Kano  :)

There does exist a certain performance target in relation to GPU performance and price are aiming at. I won't say which just yet, but is definitely a large consideration.

I have an expectation of running a tight campaign that is not too long and is only happening when a fully functioning reference board exists as proof-of-work and not a moment sooner. It isn't fair (and in fact fraudulent I think) to be selling what you don't have. BFL sold theirs well before the design was finished and fully tested, which is BS of the highest degree. As a future Jally owner (assuming they ever respond to their support email! Another thing with them that is making their customers nuts...) I know this pain all too well myself. BlockBurner is holding to a higher standard, based on facts and not guesses.


The main site will be down for a bit as I rebuild it and email along with it for the moment, when it comes back later today there will be some new features  :) Stay tuned

good points hope you could get a working model soon, once you have tested and tweak you know where to send for mass production, ya.

you have my attention.

Well, since the Altcoin forum here has quickly outgrown this place, I have set up our own  8)

http://blockburner.net/forum/index.php (http://blockburner.net/forum/index.php)

You should continue to update this one... 

ya, i agreed

PM'd about admin capabilities and such :D

I intend to keep this thread updated, certainly.

The problem now is the Altcoin board here has exploded so this thread is getting insta-buried in it, and our own forums was a gimme anyway  :)

Operatr

In reference to pre-orders, what kind of currency are you considering as payment? Or maybe you guys haven't thought that far ahead. :x

I am not settled on that detail at the moment, but likely USD and LTC for sure, maybe BTC if I see a demand for it, but I would like to support Scrypt coins as this is a Scrypt device.



How would you all prefer to pay is perhaps a better question :)

Ill add this to our FAQ

I feel as though LTC should be the currency of choice. BTC owners will have no trouble transferring their funds to LTCs.

Really hope Operatr could give us a head start over Jasinlee fpga... I hope we are still leading  :)

1. Do you think the market and community is ready for FPGA Litecoin?
Market, maybe. Community, YES! If you can pull better numbers per joule and come in cheaper on hardware cost vs gpu, people will eat em up!


2. Is there definite interest in FPGA Litecoin machines? Would you buy one if the price was reasonable? What is reasonable?
Yes!
Yes!
Free! That will depend on the output. What suckered me into pre-ordering a jala was the price point provide a LOT of hash for the money... If possible, make em scale. There are a ton of people who want to get in on crypto currency because of ideals or greed and typically it's easier to get your feet wet on any endevour if it does not require a second mortgage to do so.

3. Would you pre-order one to support first round funding for prototyping and first wave production?
Thats a hard one to call. I think that would tie in directly to price. Same with answer 2, it was easier to take a chance on a BFL pre-order because it was not a lot of money. Will I shell out $15k? Not on your life. Will I shell out $200 to be an early adopter? Probably.

Some thoughts: I LOVE the mere mention of escrow for funds on a pre-order on your site. If you just manage to do the opposite of everything BFL has done with their ASIC offerings, you will do very well for yourself.

I wish you luck

This part (cheaper than GPU's for a given hash rate) is unlikely.  When it comes to scrypt(1024,1,1), a modern Radeon GPU (prior to the 7xxx series, anyway) very nearly is an ASIC already optimized for scrypt, and designed at optimal process node and with economies of scale of being a consumer product.  I've already given it a go with the Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA's surrounded by large quantities of DDR3 and tried a variety of approaches across the TMTO spectrum for the known methods of calculating scrypt, ranging from no use of external memory at all and pipelining the entire calculation, to replicating the way cgminer does it in OpenCL (with various lookup gaps).  In the end, the best use of the prototype hardware was actually to mine the heck out of Yacoin, since scrypt+chacha20/8+keccak(N,1,1) with N=32 (as it currently is for Yacoin until tomorrow) was almost trivial to optimize for FPGA's:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=203216.msg2127307#msg2127307 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=203216.msg2127307#msg2127307)

For the probable FPGA vs. GPU cost relationship to change, someone needs to find and disclose a method of further shortcutting the already-known TMTO of scrypt(1024,1,1).  And at that point, whatever that optimization happens to be, is very likely going to be equally applicable to OpenCL to speed up GPU processing of scrypt too.

What I have yet to see is either the BlockBurner team or jasinlee say "Oh yeah, we're genius cryptanalysts and found ways that scrypt(1024,1,1) can be calculated much faster and/or with significantly less logic than anyone else has figured out how to."

Yes, but just for fun

Fixed that for you!

That is a very well thought out and technical rebuttal to my pipe dream. Thanks for ruining christmas.

My (unskilled) thinking was that scrypt is ram heavy, ram is pretty cheap these days. Math, on the other hand, is not my strong suit. Thanks for the perspective and publically abusing limitless in that thread you linked to. ;)

Oh yeah, we're genius cryptanalysts and found ways that scrypt(1024,1,1) can be calculated much faster and/or with significantly less logic than anyone else has figured out how to.  :P Just kidding.

With enough whiskey, we can solve anything!

This is what worries me, and it matches a couple of other people's analyses -- people who I believe are very good at this kind of stuff.  However, if it can be done for the same price but much lower power draw, that could be a big help for those of us who have issues based on power availability.

Hardware's not my thing at the moment (it's something I want to learn in the future, but probably not for a couple of years).

dram size is cheap, sram is expensive, and bandwidth is very expensive.
GPU can easily have more than 300GB/s bandwidth, but FPGA less than 30GB/s.
IF there exists a FPGA can reach a bandwidth >100GB/s, I think we can do it.

There are FPGAs that can do it.  The problem is they cost 5k and up. 

What is the frequency and total data bits width of your DDR3  used?

I've spoken with Enterpoint, http://enterpoint.co.uk/ (http://enterpoint.co.uk/) and they have told me they are thinking about developing a Litecoin FPGA miner in the next couple months.

opps more competition, at the end is always who can finished the race faster..

I can't speak for Jasinlee beyond what he has publicly stated to the community, I have no desires to start a rumor mill. I hope they succeed as well, as it is only good for the network. It is great there are others taking the initiative. We'll let our work speak for itself :)


I find BFL's situation appalling, they are certainly a good example of what not to do ::)

When funding time comes we'll have a real number to hit to meet the requirement for a certain number of production units before receiving the funds, anything over would start the fund for batch 2.

We are eyeing a price/performance target similar to an upper end GPU, while being a lot less costly to operate long term.


We'll, I can say watching the devs chat is like a different language to me, even with my own technical background. Our design is in progress, much of which currently is certainly centered on the best route to take on many specific aspects in regard to Scrypt hashing. I'm careful to release more information that we should, but I'm dying to give a proper update  ;D
Well, anything for the cause  :D


We can always use more motivation :)



We now have Newsletters and Forums! Visit our site to sign up (http://www.blockburner.net)

Seeing that there is huge interest in this product and the interest in pre ordering,
Would it be wise to set up pre order registration?

Allow names/details to be put down, once pre ordering comes around, those people who registered for the pre order get first lash/ or are locked in pending their approval, and if the price is not to their liking, then they can decline and that would free up a slot for someone else, there could be a time limit on how long a person who registered for the pre order has to accept the price, thus making it so no one holds up the whole process.

Lets say your first production run goal is X, accept pre order registration for 75% of X, leaving a guaranteed 25% available for new comers when pre orders go live.

Pre Order Registration will also give you insight into many people are interested, and give you a rough target number for your first production run.

Looking at the over all picture, with my business experience I reckon the method will work great, plus it's used by many businesses, especially in the concert sales ticket industry.

Already Sold, would order now if I could.

Just my two cents worth, No doubt you guys are working on a sales plan etc.

In an industry riddled with scammers and liars we're being very careful with our pre-order plans, this is an interesting option to consider when it comes time.

The design only exists on paper, I will make no illusions of this fact. The dev team is starting to dig into the more complex aspects.

I have seen a prototype UI interface, though until it is actually functioning with cgminer at it's heart I won't be releasing any details just yet.


The software division has been formed consisting of Kano on cgminer support and programming, as well as babcoccl heading the GUI interface side.


Monday marks week 5 as we pile deeper into the details and becoming a legal entity in the state of Montana.

One detail that I can release today: I have decided a name for our new line

Welcome to Crucible FPGA  8)

Hi, Thanks for giving some insight about yourself. Great that you will move full speed a head on these projects. Looking forward to the FPGA Litecoin Miner soon  :)

I like to thank you for your sincere self introduction and your background. I feel that you are very passionate on things you work on as well as your involvement in your local community. I would like to said from that, I feel more confident how you approach things in general. Like to wish you all the best.

A couple more details-

My LinkedIn profile (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/adam-kares/45/aa/711)

http://www.blockburner.net/images/opr.png My real life face  :)

Operatr,
Thank you for taking the time to be as open as you are with your latest post, the community sincerely thanks you for that.

Regarding the "Crucible" can you comment on your expectations and goals?

In your OP and on the FAQ you state that you do not have any hashing details yet, but I and others here would like to know "Your" expectations and goals about the final design.

KH Goal: ??
Price per KH: ??
Any other goal details that you would like to share?

Not interested in a preorder, but I would certainly buy at least one if/when you start rolling out working units.

Would you guys consider a kickstarter project?

good idea with the kickstarter proj

I can understand your hesitation in an industry full of scamsters. Everyone who wants one of these will get one, pre-order or not  :)


It has crossed my mind looking at the various funding tools we have access to, though if we were going to go that route I would like to see it be a bitcoinstarter type of campaign. I havn't seen a platform for Litecoin yet (hint hint  ;D).

While it seems like an awesome idea...

No on all accounts.

Leave gpu scripting alone. Exploit another cryptoBTC currency. Script mining was damn near created to avoid fpga and asic. 

Trying to hold back technology advances for [insert reason] has never worked out well in the past for those trying hold it back.  An example of this is the horse buggy vs automobile transition.  Progress will be made and we will need to move on.  It may not be today or tomorrow but change will happen.  Embracing that change puts us in a better position.  I personally do have some $$ invested into GPU mining but am aware that I need to stay abreast of new technology or risk falling behind. 

Not saying I am happy/thrilled about change, but fighting it is almost always wasted effort.

   

As long as it's not ASIC it's ok. ASICs are game killers and destroyers of decentralized mining.

FPGA's never did a damage to Bitcoin mining, the best ones on the market are doing slightly more than usual cards. I can't see scrypt FPGA's breaking that ratio.

This is just the natural progression. Eventually difficulty hits a height in GPU power that it becomes very difficult to scale to stay profitable with ever hungry GPUs that also put out an insane amount of heat. There is no choice but to move on to something else that is more efficient and/or more powerful.

ASIC for Scrypt is a long ways off, and Scrypt is more resistant to ASICs anyway so we'll see.

Sorry mrkubanftw, this is happening ;D

If you can do scrypt with an FPGA efficient you can do the same with ASICs. It's only a question of the minimal volume you have to produce/sell.

Unfortunately this is true. You should keep asic on the table even if its cost prohibitive you would want to plan for 2 years away.

Definitely. In the progression of things FPGA is just the next logical step for Scrypt as GPUs get cost prohibitive with the growth of the whole network. ASIC Scrypt will come someday but will probably be a little while yet as FPGAs are just hitting the table, as they once did for SHA machines. Or maybe by then something better will come along, who knows  8)

And as id like to say to both your self and jasinlee  I’m not against FPGA , not at all , its the potential to centralize that is the problem, if the multiple goes way out the window, the producers will mine with thier own device , this is a net monopoly effect also a centralization , then the market with have a concurrent effect , it will snap back at you , so i'm telling people to be careful, ASIC will be the downfall of Bitcoin , you , and they just haven't perhaps realized it yet , (i suspect some of the smarter guys have)

what the market will do is find a novel way that an FPGA can't be reconfigured in an easy manner to adjust to , i don't decide this the market does, as i said open source C++ will evolve much quicker than FPGA and ASIC, so be aware of the risks, although i notice Jasinlee mining with his already, but that’s not a net negative you guys just should be aware.

i will definitely order one based on the cost # power ratio - but just be aware that if and when the market feels that the equation needs a balance , kiss it goodbye. if they spread far and wide at a market price then that may delay this effect, but that whole profit motive tends to work against you there, irrational exuberance and the rest.

As you may have read already, we do not plan on distributing massive amount of fpgas and we will in the end offer our design in open source. And per laseeks recommendation and our spitballing we decided it would be best to have a hard limit to how many we carry at any given time. I agree the danger of a 51% (even if we were only solo mining) is possible and should be avoided at all cost.

I've seen you mention this one before (recommending your FPGA design, if/when it happens, should not be used on pools), but I've had trouble following the logic.  If your hash rate per unit of up-front hardware cost is the same or worse than GPU's (and given my background on this topic, I have good reason to bet on worse), there's no particular 51% danger here.  Someone could equally well build a GPU farm for the same or lower cost if that was their goal.  Recovering ROI from lower power consumption over the long term for choosing an FPGA approach over a GPU approach would make no sense for someone attempting a 51% attack.

I think the only situation where there's a 51% concern from the general public's use of any hypothetical FPGA implementation (and not, say, a PayPal-funded 51% attack) is if you're claiming you have an FPGA approach that achieves a very high performance advantage over GPU's per unit of hardware cost.  I personally think you have an uphill battle even hitting the GPU performance/cost ratio.  Time will tell though.

I guarantee Sapphire, Gigabyte, EFX, etc.. will manufacture and stock larger quantities of boards containing Radeon GPU's than you'll likely have a market for in the Litecoin world!

Time will tell, but as for the 51% that is also time will tell as we have to see what the network looks by the time we release them.

To help everyone put this in perspective, to achieve >50% of the network hash rate while solo mining Litecoin, it would currently be necessary to fire up a GPU farm of around 23,000 Radeon 7950's.  Assuming 6 GPU's per motherboard, that would be around 3830 mining rigs.  So, the current bar for attacking Litecoin with GPU's would be around $6,670,000 for the GPU's alone before adding in additional support components or a facility and support infrastructure to house the operation.

Disclaimer - Someone willing to invest that amount would probably just fund the development of PCIe breakout/bridge boards that drive significantly more than 6 GPU's per motherboard though, so the motherboard count above is only based on off-the-shelf components and PCIe riser cables.  We prototyped a PCIe x16 to 16 PCIe x16 slot breakout board (only 1 lane actually connected per x16 slot) using an off-the-shelf PCIe bridge IC on a 4 layer board, and it didn't cost much to achieve operation of 16 GPU's per motherboard.  It certainly cost less than the extra motherboards/CPU's/RAM that would otherwise have been needed.

Note - The cost to design, tape-out a prototype ASIC, get in with a wafer aggregation service (like MOSIS) to fabricate a few dozen of your prototype dies, and have them diced and packaged, is well under $1 million.  If someone has a better approach for calculating scrypt that isn't bottlenecked on external memory bandwidth and were aiming at a business that would otherwise possess enough FPGA-based boards to 51% Litecoin, they would actually be way way ahead financially to go the ASIC route right from the start.  FPGA's are very costly compared to raw die area per unit of logic area, especially at high quantities.  Almost all the cost in developing an ASIC is up-front, after that it's dirt cheap to scale the quantities up.

i am very interested in the project and if there is a working prototype i am ready to preorder

hopefully it will be here before BFL since i am not counting on making any profit of what i purchased from them by the time they deliver.

you misunderstand , i'm not actually talking about a 51% attack, i'm talking about the loss of market confidence.

something that seems to be hard for people to understand.. (which is fine if you don't understand it)

but market confidence is the only thing that keeps any value in any entity / currency .

if the market expects "decentralized" and gets " 20 guys that own ASICS" or even "100 guys that own FPGA"  that is a doomed market.

the result is that energy does not die it just changes form = evolution = market regains confidence, = FPGA obsolete (if it's provable)

51% attack is nothing , if that entity dies , that actually helps the evolution , and speeds up the demise of the centralization.

jasinlee

Is in fact a more honest version of BFL in that those guys developed the device and are mining with it , but in cost return ratio , they didn't make out like BFL , because of the inefficiency of the sCrypt algo

also they didn't take customers orders , but just like BFL , they will ship when the benefit equation rests on them shipping, perhaps when a lot of the alts are dead and/or LTC drops in price.

if BTC dropped to $15 and stabilized , every BFL order would be shipped next week.

don't take offence to that jasinlee - you are just doing what benefits you , and that's a good thing , that is the free market.

This all helps the evolution of the entity .

Market confidence? Thats not going to happen. (Too many things coming out that will bolster ltc price/confidence) As for the mining, I dont know why you think I said we were mining yet...we arent. Engineering samples does not mean running a full mining operation. Just because we have scrypt running on an fpga does not mean we are done with optimizations. Ask blockburner I am sure he is hitting the same thing on his end. We have probably 2 redesigns necessary before we order a mass production of our fpgas.

As for the mining early, yeah I will be, who wouldnt want to be able to pay their employees, further development, pay rent, eat, etc.

But all that will be accounted for along the way, we are just making sure we have a product to sell before we go taking peoples money is all.  But dont worry I dont take offense, there is just a misunderstanding somewhere along the lines. :P

My guess is we wont be up and mining until between Aug-Octo. based on the lead times we have been given for the devices we are going to build.

I think it is way early to worry about anyone trying a 51% attack, as that would entail a single person or entity controlling over half of all available hashpower. In addition to all of the GPU rigs currently out there, we would be adding a new wave of hardware on top of it to a diverse pool of people. I don't think it's worth worrying about at all. FPGAs will strengthen the network with something better and much more efficient, in a way we're just part of a natural upgrade to something beyond hobbyist hardware.

Unless someone makes a $10,000,000 order....I don't think we have to worry lol. Though that would be pretty cool  :o ;D

Remember that these market caps are still microscopic in terms of the worlds GDP, assuming adoption starts to explode someday GPU rigs simply won't cut it as the backbone of a new "banking" industry because they just cannot scale after a point and remain viable. Difficulty will be extremely high the bigger the network gets. The only thing saving profitability are the coins themselves continuing to gain value in parallel to total network hashpower. Hashing is about to become some big, serious business, as will creating the devices we need to support this industry.

Jasinlee is correct, we will be going through several optimizations and a lot of testing ourselves. These are the first Scrypt specific devices, so it will take some fine tuning to get every last drop of performance out of them and ready them for production.

Operatr, how far are you with the proj? can we have an "alpha" estimate?

i'm quite interested - may drop a couple $k on this. Let me know how/if to invest in it

+1

Following because I'm very interested in this project.  Gl with it.

watching & also interested

I am hoping to have an announcement on Tuesday  :)

Thanks for your support guys!



The main website is currently being migrated but should be up soon on its new home that is much faster and better protected.

I don't have much in the way of a real update today, but I have done the most obviously important thing any startup can do:

I give you BlockBurner the T-Shirt 8) Next time I'll probably not stare directly into the sun for these shots... :)

http://www.blockburner.net/images/bbsh.png

how is the status of the FPGA? KnC is also builing one and is set to have it ready in the summer

Progress as of late has been a little slow with the Dev team being busy with real world stuff, like wives and jobs  ;D But we have entered the most complex design element of the FPGA which will take a while to complete. I myself am just getting us legalized in the US to do business. With a few other things in the works I don't mind a bit of a lull for the moment to catch up a bit.

I feel like a broken record in saying "updates soon", unfortunately we're just not far along enough to be comfortable releasing too many details just yet, even from the legal standpoint as we are not incorporated as of today either so releasing any of our IP would be reckless until that is 100% locked in. Unlike other companies this one started with the first post of this thread instead of just dumping a website out there first with a vague promise and a buy button. We are displaying things in real time and not on hypotheticals or guesses.

I had read somewhere that KnC was inquiring about Scrypt miners, though as they have yet to deliver anything at all I'm not overly concerned. They don't seem very organized, plus PG has been all over them finding the cracks in their enterprise which are everywhere. It would stand to reason they should probably just focus on the ASIC they promised first before starting another product line in parallel, though FPGAs are easier to develop than ASIC hardware. We will see, in the end whoever manages to release a product does good for the network. Assuming cryptocurrency goes mainstream worldwide, there will be plenty of room in the market for the makers of these digital cannons  :)

We have something a little different in mind than current offerings however, I will say we are not working on just a single little board for sale, but a complete product line  8)

I have sent off our legal paperwork today to form us as a real, legal business in Montana state, the details of which will be posted publicly (barring personal details of the members) as soon as I get the confirmation letter back.

We have had somewhat of a hold lately with meat-world issues for all of us personally, as well as taking this step before we proceed much farther with the FPGA design itself. We have developed a clear concept for the overall product design and the features we want to include in this time however.

As usual I can't say too much more at the moment, but for an idea, Crucible is not just a single device  ;)

nice1 Operatr, looking forward for more details.

 8)



We have our own thoughts for what kinds of features and options to put into this, though I value community input, so-

What would your dream device include?

If it ran on a proprietary mining application, it'd be great to have a monitoring tool for Android/iOS and be able to control it from there in regards to the pool its mining on etc.

I'm definitely interested and will certainly keep an eye on this.

I'd love to see a secure way to manage from mobile devices, such as iOS & 'Droid.

1. Manage things remotely (such as a web-interface, automatic reboots)
2. Ability to import/upload config files for easier deployment
3. Stand Alone - configuration is built into the device so no need to plug in via USB
4. Wi-Fi connection (after initial config) so I don't have 10000 cat6 cables running all over the place. Easier to just set up a bunch of WiFi networks + extenders in the area.
5. Ability to order from EXISTING stock and not pre-order with vague timeframes and delivery times :P... I like ASICMINER's process (only sell what we have on stock).

Dream Device :)

Since this is more a hobby for me than a major source of income, I like the idea of small-scale miner that can be used on a variety of cryptocoin, but will pay for itself in a month or two (or before the diff goes through the roof :).  I'm thinking one or two units sticking out of the USB ports I already have 'laying' around. My long-term plan is to move more effort to 'forex' than mining, but using mining to prime the pump while it is still feasible without running a server farm in your basement.

Q: Since scrypt is harder than sha, is it feasible to have an sha capability in the device as well? (not necessarily running concurrently)

it must be scalable dev, all the rest for the user

Exactly !!! Dream Device :)

Why the "Going Legit" in the title.  Was it not legit before.  Are you moving toward legitimacy?

He mentioned submitting some of the legal paperwork to operate above board as a "real" company, so I guess that is the reasoning.  :)

Legal legitimacy, yes. BlockBurner will very soon be BlockBurner LLC in my home state of Montana.

 It took a while to get to this point, but as a bunch of strangers at first no one was too quick to want to jump into binding legal statues. The project itself has been going since day 1 however, a lot of design work has been completed up to this point.

It may not be seen as something I really needed to point out, but I said this would be a transparent enterprise, and I meant it. This all started from the OP, you are watching the formation of a company in real time :D



That aside, awesome feedback! These are all great ideas we would be pleased to deliver. We have a fine balance of enough features to be good but not so many that we get bogged down in creating the first unit, some of these may need to be saved for future revisions. I really do like the prospect of remote/mobile management, as it appeals to the IT guy in me  ;D

OK. So I sent Operatr a PM regarding some FPGA 'tinkering' that I've been doing on my 'lame' AVNET Spartan 6 FPGA LX9 Microboard for scrypt mining.

See this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=220621.0

Basically, scrypt mining is very RAM intensive and you can currently get the best performance in windows utilizing the available host system RAM as the FPGA equivalent of CPU / GPU 'Hyper-Threading' / 'Hyper-Memory'.

I'm trying to find a perfect balance between hardware and software with my 'home brew' project, so that I can perhaps look to scale it up on bigger and better FPGA boards.

Operatr's response thus far has been 'nothing'. A simple not interested would suffice. However, I'm sure he is busy and this might just be an oversight.

Although, I hope this isn't going to be another BFL type project i.e. 'style over substance' ?

I think I'll stick with my 'home brew' project / boards for now and might look to sell them via ebay if they are worthwhile, cost efficient and stable enough. :)

Good luck anyway. It's an interesting project and I might consider purchasing one in the future.

Cheers

Hehe, in the early days he at least Emailed me a "not interested" response (and I *do* have working scrypt FPGA hardware, as evidenced by my scrypt+chacha implementation that mined huge amounts of YACoin while N=32, but have made no claims that they perform anywhere close to the price/performance ratio of GPU's for scrypt+salsa(1024,1,1)).

Guess things have evolved from there to no response at all!  :)

I PMed you early this morning BitcoinFX (Unless I forgot to hit send?...if you got nothing I apologize I did try earlier this morning  ???) I spent a while today getting caught up with the many messages in my various inboxes.


It is really with no offense personally that I must tip-toe around these kinds of questions. I hope it is understood we have our own IP and as such I cannot divulge certain details. That is not to say however I consider it a closed book.

As much as I appreciate offers to help us develop this product, there is a fine line in terms of having too many cooks in the kitchen so to speak. I already encountered that issue sifting through the many developers that applied in the beginning, unfortunately many more got turned down than got "in". I had no idea around 20 of you would want to be a part of it, which totally blew me away. Decisions just had to be made.

What I gathered from this is there are many very talented and passionate engineers around the boards with great ideas. I absolutely encourage anyone with ideas and implementations that can't be a part of BlockBurner at the core (at least not right now anyway) to develop their own efforts. All of it helps create a stronger network which is the more important part. I am doing this personally because I want to see cryptocurrency succeed.

Who knows what comes next. SHA already moved to ASIC, Scrypt is now entering the FPGA phase with a wide market to tap, maybe a third coin with a different hashing algorithm will come about that needs a special device of its own. This is a wild west industry, it is anyone's game  :)

I'm going to go out on a limb and say you guys haven't actually developed any IP yet.  Just a hunch.  I think one of the reasons for (more than one claimed FPGA scrypt development teams) not releasing any technical details is to avoid getting ripped apart by anyone with a better understanding of scrypt if you reveal any errors that shows you don't have anything.

A couple weeks ago, someone posted a solicitation for investors on his FPGA scrypt development project, which at face value looked legitimate.  People were waving money like crazy trying to get in on the ground floor.  But then he made the mistake of revealing just a little too much, at which point we laid in and ripped apart his technical understanding of scrypt, ultimately resulting in him reluctantly admitting he actually had nothing but a vague idea that maybe FPGA's might work for scrypt, and didn't even have an understanding of how scrypt worked.  It headed downhill fast when he started posting code from mtrlt's Reaper OpenCL kernel while trying to debate mtrlt himself about what the code even did.  It was a most joyous and fun thread, but at least it probably saved a lot of people with little understanding from losing money on it.




LOL, 2 developers on a closed project isn't quite a crowd-sourced effort.  :)



I actually didn't care one way or the other, as it quickly became clear you weren't pursuing any sort of open development effort and were actually just trying to base a business on the creative output of others without really having the technical skillset to contribute directly to development yourself.  But just as a point of curiosity, how many of the 20 interested developers had (or claimed to have) existing working scrypt FPGA implementations?  Or had ever taped-out a custom ASIC design?

If anyone wants an entertaining example of how *not* to scam people out of investments in an FPGA scrypt development effort, while also gaining some insight on why other groups are real tight-lipped about revealing any technical details, try this thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=215487.0

I jumped in at the top of page 3 and was the first one to call BS on whether the OP was legit, and it just got more and more entertaining from there as the OP dug himself deeper and deeper into his hole.

Looks like eMunie qualifies as the 3rd coin.

As for a FPGA for LTC I'm wondering how much one might cost?

 ??? Well, you are welcome to your opinions, which is all they are as you are no more informed than anyone else. I find most of what you posted out of context or just wrong and needlessly hostile, as such I will not entertain it further unless you want to speak on something specific that you feel we have done wrong. Everything you noted is already public record, so...

Or did I do something to offend you personally?



I had not heard of eMunie yet, I will check that out 

We don't have a confirmed price of any kind just yet, but definitely are shooting for devices that are no more spendy than their GPU counterparts for similar or superior performance. In terms of raw power usage they will be much better and much more friendly to scale up, so your ROI will be higher using FPGAs over GPUs either way :)

It's possible your dev team is somewhat less secretive about the project than you might be imagining.



I find the concept of crowdsourcing a closed project for your own commercial gain to be offensive.  While there's a couple different definitions of crowdsourcing, this section of the Wikipedia article on the topic regarding Hank van Ess's definition is apt:

I highly doubt that, please don't spread unsubstantiated rumors unless you wish to present some kind of evidence of this claim.



We have "crowd sourced" nothing as far as our design goes, so this doesn't apply. In a sense I suppose I did "crowd source" a team, but I could have done that on Craigslist as a job post. You seem to be implying we are stealing an open source design and selling it as our own without giving back, which just isn't true. It is a unique design from the ground up and not based on open sources. We are just selling specialty FPGAs of our own design optimized for Scrypt hashing, and thats it. We're not using open sources to solve major problems in the world the way van Ess describes.

If the tech came from open source originally, then yes I agree it should (and must) be "returned to earth" so to speak back to the community, as is the entire idea behind open source. Had we taken an existing design from open sources, changed it, and didn't return it and then profited from it, that would be wrong.

In fact the software we're developing to drive the FPGA is based on CGminer, and has a Java UI. As it is based on an open source software it will be released as such to the community as our own version of GUIMiner essentially (dubbed Igniter UI). There will be a customized variant with the device drivers included that will ship with them, but the core of it will always be open.




 

Hello,

I'm very interested by a FPGA scrypt miner.
 because mining alt-coins with GPU is a pain for environnement.

Kind regards

Hey WindMaster, Dial it back a wee bit mate.

WindMaster is probably the only forum member who has provided more technical understanding about FPGAs/ASICs and scrypt.  I would have expected the people that are developing the scrypt FPGA/ASICs would have a similar technical depth.

Thank you for your support c0inbuster! It is very true that GPU mining is not very ideal in terms of the wellness of of the planet at large, power efficient hardware is becoming a requirement to allow the mining network to remain scalable long term without a terrible impact.


Team members Cheshyr and Zalfrin are both seasoned professionals in FPGA design and integrated systems, both members of this board as well.

The fact I don't have enough technical training to develop this hardware from scratch on my own is not to say I have no understanding of FPGA's or Scrypt. My technical background is of a different nature by training and experience, but I think our combined skills compliment each other well. They have no interest in managing core business aspects directly, which is my role and responsibility to manage.

so one guy programming and the rest managing the project.  doing some due diligence this doesn't sound like a seasoned team of developers here. maybe just one.  not sure what to expect anymore.

 ok ahh - to Operatr and Janslee -

I just want to bring up something i  posted earlier  : -

I’ll summarize it :

" FPGA Devs and large potential buyers and others should be careful because C++ (and other codes) can evolve faster than hardware,  and markets generally find a balance that tends toward distribution in this evolutionary information environment"


and now eMuni is in its second Beta - so was I correct  ?

i guess we will find out , but if i was correct , it was record time , i'm usually not correct like this for years , but we do live in exponential  times ! : D

Operatr - i know by reading back to the thread that you were busy and missed my point and thought i was talking about a 51% attack when i said that so i thought i'd carify it and tell you i was talking about market forces and confidence.

Its Jasinlee not Janslee :P

eMuni hasn't been proven yet. Lets see it out in the wild being bashed by everyone then we may see whether it can compete or not. The thread has the OP saying something to the effect of "it does not have a magical algo" well I didn't read the whole thread, but I didn't see anything saying how the hashing/processing functions on the network. As for evolving faster than hardware.....how would we know if we haven't had a chance to toy with it? And who is to say the fpga we produce wouldn't hash faster on the network than any gpu could achieve? And to that point, who says I couldn't have my EE produce a kernel for EMU inside of a day to hash on a gpu or an fpga.

http://blockburner.net/info/

I don't understand statements like these when the information is readily available about the team (aside Zalfrin, still getting his bio, but he is the designer of the Scrypt implementation and FPGA core).

You seem to be assuming we're just taking an existing FPGA board and programming it, which is inaccurate. We are designing a fully custom FPGA and Scrypt implementation in the form of a complete device and not just a bare board.  And I say we, as we all have design input (you will see my mark as an IT systems guy on it, I am keeping large scale hashfarmers in mind with features not uncommon on a regular production server environment).




I apologize if I didn't answer your previous post on that  ???  I am scanning back through this for your original post (if you want to help me find it please do :) )

It has been my experience that hardware generally outpaces software by a large degree, but these are definitely not the usual desktop PCs and applications, so those rules are out the window. I think it is very difficult to say with any accuracy where this will all go in the near future

I'm not a c++ programmer so I won't assume too much on that front however.

Yeah Jasinlee I didn't see anything about the hash algorithm it will use or the mining (called hatching nodes I guess?) either, which I thought was odd.  We'll see what it does.

__________________________

To get back on track, I am still interested in your input for what kinds of features you would like to see implemented.

Hoping to update this week with more on the open source Igniter UI miner software package  8)

Yes ok guys , look I'm not trying to say I was correct or right , I know you may have invested time and effort into these things , I'm just saying that as a trend , this is way the evolution of an open market trends .

Scrypt itself was this evolution .

With regard to an fpga no it's pretty much impossible , eMuni , it's all IO , and mem speed , it's literally the stuff Joe average can buy at Wal-Mart.

And if the trust system works and a few quirks with DB , bots are out of the picture , so it could fly , it could crash we will see  but again you must understand , I'm not talking about just eMuni I'm talking about market evolution.

Having said that jasinlee < SORRY  , yeah if your costs are low and you achieved ROI why not do everything you can . Sure .

Operatr  you seem like one of the most up front and honest guys around here , if you get an operation going  , I really do believe you will have support .  As long as there is a market .  I think there still will be .

[reserved to explain how top of the line anything won't matter for eMunie]

I would like to buy few............. Please count me.

i am interested count me in

I wrote Enterpoint yesterday and they said they haven't worked more on LTC FPGA, but that they are adding a memory extension to their current FPGA's and that they will be able to mine LTC. :-)

Are they friends of yours or something? Why are you trying to quietly (sort of) drum up business for them in other peoples threads?

I'm ultra interested to see what they come up with .

No, I just email them. I figure that if there is any competition for a LTC fpga or ASIC it's going to be from these people so it seems to make sense to keep what they are doing in the loop.

As for drumming up business, the last quote they gave me was over 30,000GBP to develop something, so I don't think we are exactly their 'market'. If they do a LTC FPGA (which they seem to have their eyes on) I assume they will develop it themselves and then just sell individual units. They did make a Bitcoin FPGA miner. Why they didn't make an ASIC seems only because they are a real engineering firm and I suppose are more focused on their traditional clients.

Anyhow, It's not competition at this point. Blockburner seems the most far along, and certainly the most committed. Enterpoint is keeping track of LTC, but as an afterthought it seems.

I actually spoke to them myself before I started this thread, it was indicated to me they were pretty backed up on current projects to the tune of August being the earliest they could take on any more major productions, though I have no idea if that has changed since then.

______________________________________________

Well, in the interest of transparency as promised, I present BlockBurner LLC  8)

https://app.mt.gov/cgi-bin/bes/besCertificate.cgi?action=detail&bessearch=C238415&trans_id=besa1317115155909d500

This has been most of the block for us to continue on these last couple weeks, but no longer.

Now, this is my current home address, I do ask that it is respected as such. I intend the actual shop space to be located in Missoula, MT, which I will be speaking to my elder cousin Jimmy Caras of Caras Property Management about very soon. (Through an odd coincidence Kares and Caras are of blood relation  :D)

Joined the mailing list... definitely interested in this project!

Also very interested.  Been a while since i have seen an update.

+1

Put me down in the interested column.  Just joined the mailing list.

Forums look good; I'd preorder if it looked legit and if the price/performance was satisfactory :)

Count me in. Subscribed on the website.
Highly interested.

Well if you got a quote for 30k then their over quoiting you their miners are 24k for their  300 to 500GH units but thats for their cm3 line that their working on for ltc scrypt then maybe but still expensive.

I"m interested as well, I do have an idea: can you take bitcoin FPGA miners as part of payment or even somehow adapt them to be able to work with ltd?

Announcement

Today our embedded developer Cheshyr officially has resigned from BlockBurner due to personal reasons. I personally thank Cheshyr for his effort and support of the project since BlockBurner's formation and wish him the best in his own endeavors, as should we all.

Quite frankly some of this was due to a certain lack of development progress, and I myself had begun to question this.

As it appears, FPGA may not be an effective solution for Scrypt mining, as the proof from Alpha Technologies explains (http://alpha-t.net/blogs/news/8373831-litecoin-miner-development-update-26-07-2013). This document did raise in us serious questions about viability as we approached our own proof. Though FPGA's can certainly hash in Scrypt, the question is more in cost and efficiency of the resulting hardware. Our early projections pointed toward needing a device with multiple FPGAs to hash at a reasonable rate, though the cost of this would destroy ROI with the current valuation of Scrypt coins like Litecoin. So, while it can be done, it is not seeming worthwhile to do at this point in time.

Scrypt is a very different animal compared to SHA, and at this juncture we may see Litecoin mining evolve on a unique path to Bitcoin moving to Gen 3 and Gen 4 devices, which overall is probably a good thing as it moves toward its own unique economy of specialized Scrypt hardware and becomes fully divergent to Bitcoin mining in no longer parts of the same mining networks.

As of this moment, this project is standing still while the remaining members decide if it is still worthwhile to pursue.

What does that mean for BlockBurner?

Though the project we began with is nearing death, this is not the end.

Disappointing as this announcement may be, I do not consider it a waste of effort by any degree. As one of the first to begin trying to create a Generation 3 scrypt mining device, we have still helped to guide the industry where it needs to go by possibly eliminating an unreasonable hardware option. In a business we are literally making up as we go along, this is to be expected as new technology and solutions are investigated and ultimately put into practice or scrapped as unworkable or "not good enough". Hopefully on that note, BlockBurner remains a part of crypto-currency history, and I am proud of our accomplishments despite not delivering the product we had hoped to.

Regardless of where it goes from here, I still thank our followers for your support so far, the response has been mind blowing.

Where it goes from here

As BlockBurner is fully established legally and socially as is, I intend to begin moving it another direction. The mining world is rife with opportunity.

I have been laying down the ground work and crunching the numbers to move primarily into mining itself

Initial motives being researched-

• Mining of Bitcoin and Litecoin, possibly others as seen fit
• Hosting of mining devices for third parties
• Release of BlockBurner bond IPOs for hardware funding and operational expenditures. This would possibly include IPOs for core mining as well as specialized private pools.
• Operating investment funds in the form of combined mining bonds (it is not unusual in the traditional business world for companies to take ownership or stocks of other companies). I hold personal mining bonds that will be invested into BlockBurner officially to get started. This fund has in 3 weeks returned about 10% of the initial investment so far, and not all of them are generating returns just yet as their farms come online pending hardware shipments between August-November.
• Resale of mining equipment as a distributor
• Creation of production GPU based Scrypt miners based on existing hardware (in other words, industrial GPU rigs utilizing proper server hardware, possibly smaller units with the same features and redundancy). Since the hardware is already out there, the barrier to entry would be low aside sheer cost for the initial hardware. Whatever is built for our own mining operation may also be sold as complete units (not doing the breadrack with GPUs ziptied to it thing, this is not an acceptable setup to me)
• Other ideas to be determined

For those who would whine about mining ROI these days, I believe diversification of services is the key to a successful mining business.


Overall I find myself more comfortable with this direction personally, as noted FPGA and hardware dev is not my area of expertise professionally. However, operating and constructing large computer infrastructure in a datacenter setting is something I have much experience with, along with business consulting and strategy when it comes to doing business on the Internet. To that, mining would be right at home with my own tech skill sets, aspiring to create a highly secure and redundant mining farm along with other offerings to diversify the core business. Much of this is simply a matter of connecting with funding sources that I am also actively engaged in. Currently BlockBurner would have 3 main backers locally including myself, and will be seeking additional local investors.

Additionally, I have established an organization in my home state called Montana Bitcoin Exchange (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Montana-Bitcoin-Exchange/416004435184022), or MBEX, as a local driver to spur the Bitcoin economy locally which can only be good for BlockBurner at the local level as what is the first business of its kind and scope here as far as I am aware, and a launch platform for local investors to take part in the business and push local adoption of digital currencies overall.

So, BlockBurner will live on, but likely in a different form completely or at least working toward fleshing out other aspects of the business along with hardware development.


Again thank you all for your continued support as the gears are shifted, and sorry to disappoint those hopeful of better Scrypt hardware (though not entirely off the table just yet).


Adam Kares
Operations
BlockBurner LLC

Awww what's wrong with ziptied GPUs in a milkcrate!?   :D

Good luck on your future endeavors.  Sorry that the FPGA Scrypt Miner wasn't able to come to fruition.  Many of us doubted that it would, but it was good to follow your journey.

New day, new opportunity.  Thanks for sharing and good luck in your alternate direction(s)!  Will stay tuned to see how things develop.

Probably a smart move considering now as stated before that there are lots of ASIC companies in the field.


why does this matter:

1. BTC was a first of a first, it set the stage for ASIC in the market.

2. ASIC companies have sprung up .

3. ASIC (real companies) (not just scammers)

4. They will want to produce ASICs for profit as they have the specs and the tools set up now.

5. sCrypt ASIC will give a power/energy saving and thus the equation will be shifted to ship rather than mine.

6. companies like BFL will have killed their market in the future for Scrypt , so while they may have made a mint on BTC (with BTC) that could disappear if BTC goes under , and they now have a reputation of ripping people off.

7. although retards still order from them ? so you know...

8. but as a real ASIC market rises , sCrypt will be where it is at.

price etc will all balance it self and find fair value.

Thanks for the update Operatr, and best wishes for your future endeavors.

I was not much impressed by Alpha-Tech's report (http://alpha-t.net/blogs/news/8373831-litecoin-miner-development-update-26-07-2013), though I do agree with its overall findings. FPGA scrypt is not going to be significantly more cost-effective than the current GPU miners, though good luck to jasinlee over at the litecoin formum in his efforts.

If anyone is interested in open source code for litecoin scrypt using internal block ram (ie the existing LX150 bitcoin mining boards) I have some prototype code at https://github.com/kramble/FPGA-Litecoin-Miner ... its only giving around 5kHash/sec, which is pretty pathetic, but I hope to be able to push it up to 10-20kHash/sec with a lot more work. Not much, but perhaps an alternative to scrapping your rigs once they are only mining bitcoin dust.

Its perhaps a little cheeky to ask you at this stage, Operatr, but do you have any plans to open source the work you have done so far?

Actually, I suspect your implementation is probably further along than BlockBurner's implementation was.

We do not know where they are in development, no need to rag on the man.

I just reread that entire thread and I find your assessment to be unsubstantiated.  The OP in that thread freely admits to a mistake in his thinking and at the end he offers to return any funds.  You seem awfully judgmental in your assessment of others.  In the case of Nova! I think your indictment is unfounded.


edit:
And now you co-accuser (mtrlt) has been called a scammer himself:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279096.0

Thanks! It's one of those things that we just wouldn't know until it was tried, but the journey continues  8)

Nothing is wrong with zipties and milk crates, aside looking like a fire waiting for a place to happen :)


I think given current market valuation it will be some time before there are Scrypt ASICs, but who knows. It is possible that Scrypt coins could go a different path than Bitcoin did entirely, as Litecoin would not get the benefits of ASIC the same way Bitcoin has. If FPGAs are unable to give ROI, it is anyone's guess where it goes from here as Litecoin and Bitcoin become fully divergent into their own established mining networks.


Much appreciated!

 I leave any releases of the code up to Zalfrin as I did not develop it, last I knew he was working on the blockmix.

Hopefully your implementation can be improved upon, though ultimately this is why the viability of FPGA for the future of Scrypt mining is being called into question, either way good work  8)



I am pretty sure our implementation was farther along than yours. Why you insist on crapping up this thread with your negatons is beyond me.

 I did everything I said I would, have taken no funding from anyone, have not lied or misled anyone, and at least tried to get something together that improves the Scrypt network. I fail to see what your issue with us has been exactly beyond trying to get attention for yourself.

__

Moving onward I have begun the hunt for funding the construction of a proper farm and supporting infrastructure. So far BlockBurner does have a few local investors that I believe can be expanded without too much effort.

I've been working up a proper action plan and crushing ROI figures, hopefully this in combination with showing the business is generating income between a growing asset fund and re-built GPU miner (parts are inbound to build a more optimal setup) will grease the wheels to more investors and funding sources. Starting off the primary directive will be based in Scrypt mining and moving into SHA in time.

I will do what I can with what I have to start this from the ground up, which unfortunately isn't much in reality. Though I think many my age know this struggle well in having way more ambition than working capital to see those aspirations come to life as victims of central banks and criminal run governments. Though BlockBurner has failed in its first effort I am not deterred in being a part of this new industry, as I have never felt more at home in it. This is not just a business to me, in a way it is really my protest against a banking system that has destroyed the lives of many, including my own. I don't care if I ever make a dime as long as I can say I helped bury a system of rampant corruption and exploitation using our digital steam shovels. Plus, bitcoin is simply too damn cool to not be a part of 8)

I'm also taking local action with MBEX to be the Bitcoin social hub of my area. I am looking forward to conducting our first ever meeting to introduce my town to Bitcoin and begin running information campaigns in the very near future. The best place to start the revolution is in your backyard  :) The first initiative that makes sense is the establishment of the first Bitcoin ATM.

Though I won't ask for it, if anyone has been following BlockBurner and would be interested in being an investor to this new direction, please PM me. 

Unto the breach

Operatr

The problem there is the assumption that markets are both rational and not self fulfilling .

But they not rational and very self fulfilling .

Thus I believe the ASIC market has just begun , and SCrypt or a derivative will be its master.

Thus the market will balance , as honesty is repaid and  the equation balanced.

I don't believe these need to be faster or cheaper than GPU's
Simply need to use less electricity.

Even if they are more expensive they'd have the advantage of chaining many together without needing to build new pc's to house them in.

Of course they'd still need to be in the same ballpark price, if they're grossly expensive nobody would go for it.
It seems a difficult feat to make an inexpensive Scrypt miner

This project was shut down by Operatr, no need to necro this thread.

but since you did... how's your litecoin miner coming along jasinlee?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=368468.new#new There you go.