Bitcoin Forum

Last edited:  June 9, 2013 (refresh to check for update)


Ready to DESIGN, NOW seeking advice on development boards for a litecoin mining FPGA.




Now Recruiting a DESIGN Team

It appears the ASIC race just ended and Avalon won. Avalon shipped completed 65GH/s mining units and has taken orders for at least an additional 50,000 of their 282 MH/s bitcoin mining chips.  Butterfly labs has shipped their very first 5GH/s unit with more anticipated to follow.  The difficulty curve is about to jump to 140,000,000 and soon thereafter rise to 700,000,000 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178051.msg1901817#msg1901817).  At that rate my personal (theoretical) 3.6 GHz farm produces pennies a day and the cost of electricity is far more than I can generate in coin (assuming a $100 valuation for Bitcoin).

-- to keep the thread readable, please minimize your use of the quote function --

So, what's next?

I have come to the conclusion, as many others have, that the future of Bitcoin died with the shipping of the ASIC.  Satoshi's original paper starts with a description of a peer-to-peer currency yet the ASIC mining solution destroys the peer-to-peer methodology and places all the power of printing Bitcoin into the hands of a tiny group of companies who have the capital to produce a massive farm.  To compete against these farms you need even more capital.  

Per the calculator, if one bitcoin is worth $100US then:  

@140,000,000 a 1GH/s miner yeilds $0.34US per day before electricity
@700,000,000 a 1GH/s miner yeilds $0.07US per day before electricity

So what can be done?  What if I can build a farm that operates at 1 tera hash per second?

One Avalon operates at 282MH/s so I need about 3500 chips at $20k+ (plus the multi-thousands dollar PCB design/production).  Or I could buy 15 prebuilt units at for approximately $200k.  So if I budget $250,000 to a tera hashing solution and plug it into the calculator I find:

@140,000,000 a 1TH/s miner yeilds $333US per day before electricity (~$500)
@700,000,000 a 1TH/s miner yeilds $72 US per day before electricity (~$500)

Gee, this isn't going well is it?

So what can be done?  What if I can build a farm that operates at 1 peta hash per second?

We need a whole new animal to get to this level.  We'll need about a billion transistors and our cost to develop will skyrocket to $50 million minimum... Intel spends BILLIONS developing chips like these.  I don't think your average miner is going to get there.

And this is why Bitcoin will die.  

What we need is a new crypto currency based upon the Bitcoin design which does two things:  
1) the coin needs to work based on an algorithm other than sha256 since ASICs do the sha256 proof of work amazingly well.  
2) the currency should show transactions more quickly than bitcoin.  (Can you imagine paying for something at a store and needing to wait 30 minutes for the cash to end up in the register?)  

I propose, because miners can no longer mine with their personal computer and miners are the heart of the currency that wise miners will migrate away from bitcoin to litecoin because it solves these problems.  Further I think cryptocurrencies are still in their infancy with mass adoption still several years, if not decades, off.  So where is the opportunity?

I believe in bitcoin for a variety of reasons and I am long term bullish on crypto currencies.  But I also believe people will continue to migrate to scrypt based currencies because their fancy GPU mining hardware is now useless in solving the sha256 proof of work.  So I would recommend to anyone they point their gear at litecoin (though that doesn't help me).   Then we get into a theoretical question about scrypt.  It is designed to be ASIC hostile to twart groups like Avalon from centralizing mining solutions.

So I'd like to begin a discussion about building a device that solves the scrypt proof of work.  And so we need to start with a rudminetary understanding. Here it is in all it's wikipedia glory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt)

"The scrypt function is specifically designed to hinder [brute force attacks] by raising the resource demands of the algorithm. Specifically, the algorithm is designed to use a large amount of memory compared to other password-based KDFs, making the size and the cost of a hardware implementation much more expensive, and therefore limiting the amount of paralleling an attacker can use (for a given amount of financial resources)".

So where is the opportunity?
Who wants to help me try to CENTRALIZE the scrypt mining process?

-- to keep the thread readable, please minimize your use of the quote function --

note:
At this time this is a volunteer effort, nobody is getting paid for anything.  
We are seeking engineers and mathematics, coders and builders.  
We are not seeking investors, though we invite them to watch the process.



The original Scrypt whitepaper:





    


    


older notes that led to this conclusion:

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Recovering Investment:

Analysis of Difficulty curve (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178051)




You may be right, but until I have a delivery schedule and actual price in front of me I am betting there may be a market.

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Costs & Cost Reduction:
I've sent off the Open Source FPGA Miner HDL to analyse it and determine a cost to produce it as an ASIC.  I recognize that changes need to be made to convert it but I don't posess an ASIC RTL at the moment so this is the starting point.

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Collaboration:

From the Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner project:
https://github.com/progranism/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner/blob/master/projects/DE2_115_makomk_serial/fpgaminer_top.v
https://github.com/progranism/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner/blob/master/projects/DE2_115_makomk_serial/sha256_transform.v
https://github.com/progranism/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner/blob/master/projects/VHDL_StratixIV_OrphanedGland/sha256/rtl/sha256_pc.vhd
https://github.com/progranism/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner/blob/master/projects/VHDL_StratixIV_OrphanedGland/sha256/rtl/sha256_qp.vhd

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Technology:


Happy to consider ANY technology that will deliver what BFL has not.  If you have directions to build a quantum computer please send them my way   :)

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The Manufacturing Process:

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About Viceroy:

I am a computer scientist educated at a University.  I am not an electrical engineer and do not have the ability to develop this chip.  I do, however, have decades of management experience with and around engineers.  In terms of project management I have designed and managed an online database of Dept. of Education data through four revisions while operating as a strategic revenue sharing partner with several major universities and several non-university online publications.

Come on Inaba, it's ON (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=181098.msg1898125#msg1898125)!  

Well... that was fast...  Glad I didn't "bet".  

Here's the latest news: Coding In My Sleep Receives BFL on 420 2013 (https://www.facebook.com/CodingInMySleep)

This is a significant event and, ironically, I think it spells the end of Bitcoin.  What it will do is force the 'average user' to migrate to a currency like litecoin where the miners work based on scrypt instead of sha-256.  Now the problem, and the opportunity, has realistically just shifted to scrypt mining.  Your 'average joe' will no longer mine bitcoin and it will slowly fall out of favor.

Disagree?  Opportunity?

Thank you for that.  I agree 200% as well.  Another nice thing about litecoin is that the transaction takes 2 minutes to verify as I understand it... not 30+ so real merchants are more likely to adopt it (imagine waiting 1/2 hour to pay for gasoline!).  Finally they offer more coins with 84 million total compared to the 21.  (I think I would have chosen a much much higher number). 

So if you guys are all in let's start figuring out what a scrypt miner looks like....

Whoa slow down there, camper, let's see what we're gonna design before we come up with a way to sell it.  ;-)

While I actually support a project like this and I hope it (or something very much like it) succeeds, I find it somewhat funny that you claim to be "ASIC HOSTILE - Decentralized mining is the only workable solution" in your signature while also proposing building a mining ASIC along the same lines of Avalon and BFL.  Cognitive Dissonance much?

I disagree with your for two related reasons:

1) Crypto-currencies that are most efficiently mined with ASICs are actually more secure because general purpose computing equipment can't be re-tasked to attack the currency. Once Bitcoin is mined with ASICs, retasking a botnet to attack Bitcoin will be hopeless.

2) Crypto-currencies that are most efficiently mined with ASICs can only be attacked by people who have a significant investment in equipment whose value is directly determined by the value of the currency. Those who can mine Bitcoins efficiently will be those who have invested heavily in Bitcoin itself and will have the most incentive to preserve its value.

There are a number of possible attacks on Bitcoin based on having lots of mining power, but the fact that it can be heavily accelerated by ASICs actually *increases* the resistance to them.

How then does the 'average Joe' at home get involved without needing to buy specialized hardware?  doesn't forcing people to buy asics destroy the decentralization in favor of large farms?  do you not expect these now burned early adopters to migrate to another algorithm and start spreading the word of a better/faster crypto currency?

And is my math right?  we need a billion transistors and $50 million to build a terra hashing sha chip, right?

sure a litecoin project interests me. With the latest developments, switching over sounds a good idea. You make some very good points as well.
Regards,
Brian

yes but 3 only works if 1 and 2 are true.  is there something wrong with this line of question in an attempt to learn?

They don't. But nothing stops the average Joe from buying specialized hardware.

No. Small farms can use ASICs too.

If there's a better/faster crypto-currency, then Bitcoin deserves to lose to it. However, ASIC-based mining is a strength, not a weakness.

I haven't done the math, but that seems reasonable.

It should take 10 minutes with a transaction fee that isn't too low and with a few measures* instant 0-confirmation transaction can be relatively safe and used for transactions of, say, less than $1000 (given the resources required to double-spend if appropriate precautions were taken by the merchant, accepting 0-confirmation transaction for low-value goods can be safe).

*connections only to previously whitelisted and known honest nodes, no outgoing connections (UPnP off), etc.

Not sure where you are from but 10 minutes waiting at a cash register is unacceptable in American commerce.  So if you are third in line it will take 1/2 hour to buy milk.

Lets not forget the other strength of scrypt base crypto called litecoin. The difficulty re-target is much more quicker. I always have seen litecoin as the little brother of bitcoin but if this hypothesis is true then litecoin could be come the new bitcoin. I can seethis happening if the barrier of asics not being able to mine litecoin is circumvented. Litecoin was considered gpu proof at one time.

I don't quite get the point about why ASIC's kill bitcoin. Mining was always going to trend towards being a razor thin profit business where only the largest make any sort of real profit (once the price of bitcoin stabilizes-  if it goes to $10.000 each then these calculations are a little off  ;D)

Its true there is a big opening at the moment for ASIC companies to centralize mining- and they will indeed. But companies like BFL seem like they are focused on getting as many ASICS into the hands of the general public as possible. We all knew that ASIC's were only printing gold if you were the first one to get one. GPU farms prior to ASICS managed in some fashion to centralize mining. Someone with a thousand cards made far more then someone with ten. But it didn't stop anyone. Now we just all have to buy asics and we have to give up on the argument of "if bitcoin fails at least you have a sweet GPU for gaming).

I don't see how things have changed. The landscape has restarted and we all need to buy ASICs. I surely will, even if it's not the money-printer I was hoping that it would be.

Building ASICS for Scrypt is interesting, and it's only a matter of time (if litecoins price rises at least). I'll stay tuned.

Not sure where you are from but reading doesn't hurt ;) For low-value transactions no waiting is necessary.


Are you sure it's worth it? I like scrypt but it is still relatively new and I wouldn't be surprised if someone found a flaw in it that would render it less safe, after all it is as old as Bitcoin (created in 2009) and also created by only 1 guy (although Satoshi did use some other peoples' ideas and consulted them). If the flaw requires a change of an algorithm in Litecoin, all those expensive ASICs will become useless.

It will be a long before it will be worth to invest so much money to design & manufacture an ASIC for scrypt.


+1
As Bitcoin gained in popularity the barrier for 'an average Joe' became too high already without any ASICs. Until recent price increases a lot of people wouldn't have been able to afford to mine with their electricity costs and often hardware costs (in US GPUs are cheap, especially 2nd hand). Difficulty is growing and when it stabilizes with price, only those with the best economies of scale will remain in business with profit margins decreasing.

Experience.  "Bitcoin transactions are instant - the confirmations aren't. It usually takes less than an hour for the first confirmation."  There is no such thing as a "low value" transaction... Milk is NOT free and if buyers use bitcoin you are asking the merchant to risk being robbed... else hold his customer for an hour.


It's CERTAINLY worth having a discussion, yes.  Particularly about this:   



As a "rich American" I find this troubling.  People who cannot (or will not) afford ASICs will STILL want to mine.  Crypto Currency is about MASS adoption.  If only Vlad is mining then everyone else will migrate elsewhere. So Vlad mines Bitcoin and the rest of the world moves to some other currency they *think* cannot be beaten with an ASIC.

I did the math above and can't figure out what a "small asic farm" is.  How many GH/s?  Or do we need to "bank" on btc shooting to the moon?


I think this is wrong.  This is a flaw in the fundamental design which forces centralization to "industrial bank-like entities" where decentralization and every person in the world mining on their own system should be the driver.  Let me ruminate on this a bit.

/me turns to the peanut gallery and whispers
I'm TRYING to figure out a "play" here.  I believe that miners, like me, will conclude that LiteCoin is a better bet for them and further I believe that people will be driven away from BFL.  Avalon is amazing and I can't wait to see what people do with their 450,000 chips that just went to press but I think the small guy will NOT buy into the ASIC concept if Inaba remains the voice of that solution.  Building an ASIC solution is simply out of the question at this point, just go buy the Avalon chips if you think that approach makes sense.  That assumes you are less well capitalized than Intel.  (Watch Joel's answers... he's smart).

It will be long before we can expect people to use Bitcoin for groceries, but setting this aside, given precautions I mentioned few posts above the risk becomes largely mitigated and acceptable for low-value transactions (I can be struck by a lightning any time I am outside, does that mean I shouldn't leave my room?)


I wasn't clear enough, discussion, sure, but do you really believe it's worth to design & build an ASIC for scrypt in the foreseeable future?


Gold is used widely in the world and people still use it despite the fact that only a few can afford to mine it themselves (nothing stops people from buying it). Bitcoin will someday (hopefully) become widely used like paypal but already now people who use Bitcoin actually buy it (or offer goods/services for BTC) because not everyone wants to bother/can afford/has time/is technically knowledgeable enough with setting up a mining operation (like with gold). Bitcoin, like gold, is used due to its advantages over fiat, not because ''it's a money-making machine''. The ''money'' part is only there to secure the network, Bitcoin is about financial independence from the state and middlemen.

Interesting thread. I had a brief look at the original Scrypt paper (http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf) (which is quite old), but it was not obvious to what is meant with making memory intensive tasks more expensive. I'd like to see this quantified using numbers with today's memory technology. In addition it was even stated in the paper that one of the limits were based on 2-dimensional memory ingots, which we know will change in the next couple of years, to become 3-dimensional blocks of some electro-optical substrate. This is will have to effect of increasing memory size with x³ instead of x² for the same price. Now, if there's another way of mining that we could think of, that could avoid the mining growing pains into adulthood, that would be very interesting.

I could design a cool looking rig if needed, depending on components I could design to help airflow and other features needed. Below is sample of my BitPhantom mining rig design concept, I am currently working on a more lightweight consumer version. http://www.owenprescott.com/blog-bitcoin-mining-hardware.php (http://www.owenprescott.com/blog-bitcoin-mining-hardware.php)

http://www.owenprescott.com/blog/bitcoin-mining-hardware/bitoin-mining-hardware-02.jpg

Thank you for that post E3V3A (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=179033.msg1905946#msg1905946)!
Beautiful design there owenprescott (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=179033.msg1905983#msg1905983)! 
Welcome, welcome one and all!

Another, perhaps more philosophical question. Should we really be using "mining operations" that require wasted energy? It just doesn't seem to make sense to make zillions upon zillions of calculations, just to be able to create a quasi-physical (here crypto) currency to put into circulation... Is there really no other alternatives or ideas how to go about this?

>Should we really be using "mining operations" that require wasted energy?

From a system builders perspective, yes.  Building a machine to solve this puzzle is fun and conceptually interesting.  Keeping an overheated computer running is a challenge, and one that I think people enjoy.  Part of my point is that as we move away from these PC's and make this a specialized game we lose a large part of what bitcoin really is (a bunch of geeks mining coins and selling them to people who want to pretend they are anonymous as we await real adoption by a real retailer).  That idea is what brought me here and losing that idea will drive me away.  So whatever you design it sure as hell needs to involve a geek and a computer.  (I like FPGA solutions WAY more than ASICS because you are still dealing with an individual geek... as opposed to having to deal with Inaba's ego.).  This is just my opinion and I may take it down in a bit.  I am really here to learn from others... not tell the world what I think.  I'm not about wasting energy.. I just like what bitcoin has been for me.

I don't know much about embedded/FPGA/ASIC, but I could help out with higher level tasks. testing, Linux things, automation, coding...  and i always wanted to get into hardware hacking... so this is a good opportunity.

I missed out on the whole bitcoin wave, and since last few weeks I have been procrastinating on the concept of crypto(and p2p) currency -- not to get rich quick or something... but more so for political reasons.

Will watch the progress of this project for something I can contribute.

^^This is exactly what I'm talking about.  Nobody here, other than Inaba, would suggest Turtle needs to buy an ASIC to play... right?

Who says the "average joe" at home needs to be mining? There are tons of other ways to get involved with Bitcoin. And I don't know that an scrypt-based solution will be much better. The problem you're trying to solve is not one of "off-the-shelf" v.s. "custom," but one of "capital" v.s. "no/little capital." Even under scrypt, the wealthy will have an advantage and will eventually squeeze out the "average joe."

On top of this, you seem to be overlooking the fact that almost 100% of the mining hardware, pre-FPGA, came from AMD. That means AMD was basically the central point for the Bitcoin mining community, just as Avalon and BFL are now, except AMD never had any kind of stake in the fate of Bitcoin...

You are right, I favor AMD to BFL.  I favor a useful tool like a GPU to a dedicated tool which has no other purpose.  I am not convinced, though, that big money can win against scrypt so easily but I've only begun to read it (http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf).  How are you proposing we get Turtle involved if he cannot do it with his home machine?  Is the Only answer to BUY something from Avalon?  There is no longer a solution for the average joe?  I think there must be a way for Joe or we are always at the mercy of the "richest" guy (who I'm going to fantasize is Vlad).  In the end when bitcoins are worth 1 quintillion dollars US each are you going to let Vlad be the only maker of coin?  Isn't that what we are trying to avoid here (a centralized bank)?.  Out of curiosity I wonder if anyone has actually gone to AMD or NVidia and made a pitch.  Honestly a company that size is the only who can create the next level ASIC as best I can tell.

I believe greed is the variable you guys are trying to control here. Just because the rich can do it does'nt always mean they will imho. If its not worth their time. However we are seeing bitcoin going from a hobby to a business now. So the players motivations are changing. This is the problem you guys need to address here.

Look at how actual agricultural farming has evolved and is it any coincidence that terminology is being used for coin mining now?

Q: Has anybody designed/tried to design an FPGA to mine LTC yet?

i say that. first of all amd gpu can be bought almost everywhere today. asic can not. second: security of btc is in numbers of people mining not just th/s. asic will consolidate miners, few large ones will remain, and that makes network weaker. ultimately if there was just one miner left standing, would you consider btc safe? no? even if he had gazzilionH/s? still no?

even if there will be 1000 asic miners left which i doubt it would still be worse than ltc network with 10000 gpu miners.

the point of crypto currency is decentralisation. asic is the force to the opposite.

definitely still interested in helping out as much as I can!

Hey there was a governing effect that gave value to the crypto currency which involved the price of electricity. It could be argued that by using asics that require less electricity to create more hashs it devalues the bitcoin. Even though the amount is finite. This is the reason why gpu's are leaving in the first place.

Eventually a 600W ASIC device will only mine several dollars worth of bitcoin per day, barely pay the electricity, but by that time the amount of people who are mining might be magnitudes higher than today

It is difficult to follow the hardware trend, eventually people will just buy coins and leave mining to a couple of companies to handle the infrastructure of this payment network

Sorry I won't I might as well trust the bank.

The whole wealthy vs joe blow is extremely hard to solve without creating a managed crypto-currency. Even if you control technology progression, the wealthy can build a bigger farm and push Joe out by the sheerness of difficulty.

The only solution I have come to is to tie the price of the currency to the difficulty itself, so as difficulty goes up so does the price equally. What this would accomplish would be fixed profitability. By price in this part I mean the exchange rate to other currencies.

For example a 5gh/sec machine will always produce the same income. The next problem is how can you control the price against other currencies? I guess the only way to acomplish this would be that the currency itself is also a decentralized exchange.

So the crypto currency quotes the ask and the bid not the buyers and sellers. Basically the ask/bid would always be the same on any given day, and people can only buy and sell at that price.

So the Rich guy can buy more machines to make more money if so he deems, and Joe can make the same income. These are just some thoughts on re-writing the abilities of the currency.

At the end either way you look at it bitcoin or lightcoin or any current coin will become centralized because of the opposite things outlined in this post. The only time that might stop is if transaction fees are high enough to make it worth while for avg joe to run.

If you even reply to this, make sure you read each point slowly and re-read it, I'm re-reading it now and new ideas and thoughts are coming to my mind. I will sit down at a later time and work on this some more and improve upon it, as there are many more questions. Such as how would the above said coin work if becomes a world currency and replaces other currencies or makes then absolete?

I guess then goods and services would alter their price based on the daily value of the currency all done automatically of course. I will post this to a new thread later as it will hijack this one, I am going to sleep now to tired to keep thinking about this hopefully it doesn't keep me awake lol

To add to this a good solution to decentrilization would be insanely low energy as it run off a solar panel type of energy, at least if the operational costs are none or almost none. Either by free energy sources or the operational costs are covered by the transaction fees in the end, once all coins are created. Then people will run the miners to support decentralization.

In the end though the ideals of bitcoin or even our above fantasy coin will falter and die. What bitcoin, through the idea of de-centrilization stands for is freedom. Absolute freedom, the highest form of morality. Freedom from fiat. Freedom from the machine of debt and inflation which destroy wealth. Freedom from enslavement. Freedom of life! This freedom is very dangerous to the "Vlad" (The elite in this definition). As we move toward a new world order, a world of fascist enslavement. The "Vlad" will corrupt the ideals of bitcoin into a centralized one world currency. The transactions will be encrypted for the masses, but not for Vlads centralized monotoring system. Encrypted, Centralized, and controlled for the benefit of the Vlad. Meanwhile the masses, will without question blindly accept the corrupted ideals under the guise of "safety and security". Through the corruption of their souls, their only goal will be self preservation, they will easily give up the ideal of freedom.

 No one will care about the dream that once was and will never be...

I have to crash too, but I'll sleep on this.  we need a solution from now until the end where the miners are always decentralized and always reasonably compensated.. else it's just "vlad the mining empire".

How about limiting the ghs/ip and/or ghs/pool/ip's connecting to it. The ip is the only local denominator here. So that brings another limit. Unless there is a way of spoofing ip addresses then its a no go.

I really don't want to go into licenses as that becomes taxable although that would make the currency legal and most would hate that.

However if you could make this p2p to generate temporary tickets according to locations it would be harder to spoof. I dunno I guess people would see they can't expand and stop mining.

// end rambling

i have access to at least 8192 different ip addresses from at least one /19 sub. you see this will not work.

Even after NAT?

Yes there have been those that have tried with their own solutions. Not many people have gotten it to perform adequately because everybody wants BTC right now.

Many modern FPGA's would be just fine at mining LTC, however it just takes dedicated coders to actually develop the Verilog for scrypt on FPGA's.

As far as building ASIC's for scrypt goes, it would require the understanding that developed through SHA256 with bitcoin and FPGA's first. So essentially the same evolution of hardware.

Litecoin is def. The way to go if you are going to invest that kind of money. Litecoin is bitcoins baby brother, I think the bitcoin market in a year is going to be so saturated and difficulty so high you ill literally need hardware thats 100x as fast as today.

You really don't make any good points as to why average Joes need to be mining.  We're talking about 100,000 ASIC miners by the end of the year with Avalon and BFL both likely shipping as well as whatever ASICMINER puts out on top of any another companies that come out between now and then.  Your fears of "one miner standing" are highly unfounded, the pool will be smaller than if "GPU mining only" existed but still large enough and continue to grow.

GPU miners are not the backbone of bitcoin as much as some of you in this thread seem to think you are.  MINERS are the backbone of bitcoin, whether they be GPU or ASIC based does not matter to the overall success of the coin.  It's adaption by vendors and users, two groups which have no need to do any mining, will determine whether or not it succeeds.

I disagree with you sir. That was one of the fundamentals of bitcoin as it has slowly eroded to satisfy peoples inability to compete.

Your argument falls flat on it's face when you look at bitcoin becoming globally accepted.  How do people in other countries "compete" when they cannot even afford simple GPU set ups many miners currently use?   Mining was always going to be a highly specialized field, not the "everyone who uses bitcoin also mines for profit" utopia you seem to envision. 

Honestly reading through the replies this just seems to be alot of sour grapes that the boat is passing them by, those that can't afford to get in ASICs see their potential profits being taken away and are understandably upset.  There will be alt coins for GPU miners once enough ASICs go online and "price you out", but bitcoin will continue to be a thriving cryptocurrency as long as vendors and users keep joining.  Be thankful you were mining on a GPU when you were and made what you made, many didn't even get that far.

Sour grapes? Woh! I have no skin in this game. I'm presently in litecoin. I'm not arguing I'm putting my opinions out there and it seems to not to be your liking. I sense a bit of elitism in your tone.

You seem to have forgotten one thing and that is people will lose interest in a game they can't win at. How are you going to have the global population adopt something they can't afford? Asic's may be affordable now they will eventually be more and more specialized and less people in control of it. You think everyone here would be interested in asic's if they first came out? No it was mine on your CPU and get rich.

Now its if you want to stay in the game you need to buy this product that does only one thing. I'm mining litecoins and will until I can't make money after that I'll do something else other than mining and guess what happens to my wallet? Then guess what happens to many other wallets. This is just a scenario. One scenario you refuse to see.

In the end unless people mine it they won't use it. The rise in price is only due to speculation and the miners need to profit for their work. Less miners and you get less people using the money. Unless the government adopts it and makes it legal and tax it. Then businesses will adopt it and it becomes what we hate now the reason why we mine bitcoins in the first place DECENTRALIZED CURRENCY. Then who will want bitcoin? maybe a few but it will just become what we are running from.

centralized and dominated and controlled by the few with too much.

This is my opinion

OP deleted posts to clean up the thread. Not to silence you.

Again you are assuming people have to mine to use bitcoin, which is just flat out untrue.  There will always be enough miners to keep the system going, as the orders for ASICs have shown us.  There is no shortage of people willing to pay the costs to continue to mine bitcoin, it will just be fewer than were able to when GPU mining was profitable.   More and more online vendors are taking bitcoin every day, and they have no need whatsoever to even think about mining a bitcoin.   Miners are important, they aren't the only part of bitcoin however.

Maybe that's how litecoin works, and if so great we'll have litecoin be the "miners only" cryptocurrency.  Bitcoin however has bigger goals with broad usage among the developing world being a primary one.  These users will never have a chance to mine even if mining stayed GPU only, but will have a chance to reap the same benefits all users of bitcoin as a currency enjoy.

Question are you willing to be taxed for using bitcoins? Mining it tax and spending tax and transfer tax.

Lets not kid ourselves here, you want bitcoins to be accepted by government right? and most important of all Vendors as that seems to be you're most important player in the game. Before all vendors accept Bitcoins with all its disadvantages government will need to regulate it for the security of the economy and global markets. Then the internet will require less anonymity to access and conduct affairs for business.

Just want everyone to have this reality check.

This is the way forums are. Let them bicker until they realize they're getting angry over practically nothing, or at least until you give them beer ^_^

The way I see it mining BTC isn't dead to the average user, or the GPU miner, or anyone. Just the ability to make a large amount of cash based off our our current understanding of the trends in the market. Our GPU rigs may be powerful, but they suck up massive amounts of energy and produce a lot of heat. Those with FPGA's will just see the declining profit margin and may never be able to achieve ROI.

However mining won't die unless everyone gives up.

Remember - cryptocurrencies were created for lack of government regulation, and in this case our profits and the market is being regulated by the creation of these companies like Avalon or BFL. Any currency is dominated by the people who want the most out of it.

Surprised at my own ignorance and the apparent lack of reaction of knowledgeable readers of this thread, I found out about PPCoin (PPC (http://www.ppcoin.org/)). Apparently PPC tries to solve the mining HW race problem, by not only minting by proof-of-work (which is HW minable), but also by proof-of-stake (which allows for long-term average-Joe profit). They have their own forum HERE (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=67.0).

I strongly recommend everyone to have a look at the following 2 papers:

1. "Synthetic Commodity Money (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2247703_code758931.pdf?abstractid=2000118&mirid=1)" [George Selgin, 2013]
2. "PPCoin: Peer-to-Peer Crypto-Currency with Proof-of-Stake (http://www.ppcoin.org/static/ppcoin-paper.pdf)" [S.King and S.Nadal, 2012]

After having briefly read the above articles, I am more convinced of the decline of Bitcoin as described in the OP. Although, Bitcoin may very well be a great currency for the next couple of years, the number of miners will steadily go down until we are eventually left with commercial mining operators (like already mentioned) and a small hard-core group of amateurs, mining mostly out of academic interest and not-for-profit. Therefore, it seem fair to say that a crypto-currency based on a more evenly distributed minting process (e.g. as proposed by PPC) will eventually take over.

For a complete list of other crypto-currencies look HERE (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0).

nope. bitcoin was developed from the idea that most users or shall i say all users mine.

just like with bittorent all users serve files. again strenght is in decentralization. your notion of professional miners runs against the idea of decentralized - distributed transaction confirming network. it is against the original bitcoin idea. but hey nothing here is set in stone right?

i can afford an asic. in fact i bought one. so from my point of view i still can make some money. but still i don't think asic is a good idea for bitcoin.

That IMO is a impossible idea to achieve as the vast majority of the world does not own a PC with a GPU let alone an entire rig to "compete" with what most miners pump out now. Mining will always be specialized when taking the "bigger picture" look at things.  Bitcoin mining has always been the more power a user can produce the more they can mine.  It's just operated under the assumption that enough people will be mining so that one person can't take over the network, which so far will continue to be the case due to the vast number of ASIC orders from just the initial batches alone.

The network will still be decentralized, it will just be on ASICs instead of GPUs so the pool will shrink at the start.  As you can tell as someone who's bought a ASIC, it will not just be centralized groups, it will still be individual miners such as yourself.  That pool could easily increase however, if the price of bitcoin increases as the difficulty goes up making ASIC mining still profitable for those who get in "late".  All of the charts currently projecting ASIC ROI vs difficulty all assume a stable price(which has already increased to 139 as I type).  If enough venders, buyers and speculators continue to adopt and use bitcoin we could even see GPU mining continue some profitability regardless of the drastic difficulty increase.

Of course the reverse could happen, and BTC could crash and become worthless thereby making ASIC purchasers SoL.  It's a risk that's debatable whether it's still worth taking, but sometimes with big risk comes big rewards.  I just feel the position held by the OP that the ASICs signal the death of bitcion is far fetched, and you've done little to sway my opinion.  Bitcoin has always been something that will either turn out to be huge, or end up worth nothing.

Once again, since you keep deleting my posts, let me make this clear.

Your ambitions on building a "next-generation" crypto currency mining machine will simply not work out. How many people would you actually expect to help out on this project? It takes millions of dollars just for the R&D phase, let alone assembly and whatever else.

Who will provide those millions of dollars in capital? How can people trust you with what minuscule credibility you have? People want to see someone that has real experience in logic design and that they know what they are talking about. You have shown nothing.

In face, you have shown yourself to be unable to be respectful to others in this thread, instead you even continually insult and delete my posts as well as other posts that are perfectly fine, which you should have no reason to.

Why not accept well-rounded criticism to your project?

inb4youdeleteitagain.

As the ABOVE posts, Viceroy deleted EVERYONE's post to clean up the thread. NOT to Silence you

Well, it would seem as though were posts were quite informative, yet he still deleted it. Meanwhile, he did not delete your previous reply. What does that say about that?

I already know he is being ignorant towards others.

Apparently there's a lot of other "useful" information that you did not delete. Looks like you need to learn better use of your thread moderation powers.

Also, if you don't mind me asking, why delete useful information? That would greatly benefit people's learning and background of your project.

because people can't digest 20 pages of nonsense.  I'll take what I need from the posts and then modify the OP.  Then I'll erase all the posts and see what people think of my edits.  I think I can manage this thread, fwiw.  ;-)

what do you mean? what I said has nothing to do with nat.

Indeed, your original post is in great need of revision. It's hard to read the wall of text, and you should instead format the sections differently. I think instead of using rhetoric you should focus more on separating into different sections, especially the beginning.

I'm assuming you mean /19 network as in PRIVATE. It has everything to do with NAT if that is the case. because when you send data outside your broadcast domain NAT happens via default gateway

And if you want people to read what you wrote you should learn better use of the "quote" function.


Well, sir, feel free to contribute useful walls of text.  The OP is the first major revision which was made after the realization that the ASIC war appears to have ended.  Prior to that revision this was a post about potentially creating the chip that butterfly may never deliver.  Now that Avalon appears to be shipping and has sold more than a half million chips the question changes and so I removed ALL sub-posts and started over.  Which I intend to do again shortly though I've been busy with more pressing matters.  So don't be surprised when I pm you again to tell you I've removed all the posts.

Interesting.

I think you bring up some good points Viceroy, but to assume that ASIC mining will consolidate itself to the hands of a few is flawed logic IMO. This might happen if the market were not free (ie governments/corporations passing laws monopolizing the mining process) but the market is free for the forseeable future. Even if huge ASIC farms spring up, average Joe will still compete for his share of the pie as newer, smaller, and more efficient consumer ASIC solutions are marketed. Miniature ASIC mining devices and pools are going to be everywhere.

You also assume no new technology will ever trump ASIC, which is also flawed. Next year, ASIC will be the new GPU, and there will probably be faster tech on the horizon. Yes, difficulty will rise to meet ASIC hashing power, but it will not skyrocket beyond our collective reach until the next new tech emerges.

Your scenario might play out if the big players started lobbying to have laws passed on their behalf in order to monopolize the mining market. Don't give them any ideas :)

the marijuana industry is brand new in Colorado, it's only 4 years old and new laws are being written right now.  you might never imagine that the large stores are putting pressure on the state to craft a law that favors the big player.... these are tree hugging hippies!  it's amazing how quickly peoples interests turn into a legitimate lobbying force.  but I digress.  I'm trying to understand what comes next and how best to hedge the bet.

At this point I predict people will migrate en masse to a scrypt (or other) based solution as soon as they can no longer generate any meaningful income against the ASIC army.  The estimates (see my sig) have been daunting with difficulty tripling in the next three months and difficulty quickly raising to 1 billion.  The only reason your (brother,father,mother,son) knows about bitcoin is because of YOU.  And you probably do or did mine bitcoin at some point, or perhaps a miner turned you onto it.  And that doesn't even touch on the philosophical question of who controls the mining process and the danger of centralization.

Mining is the core of bitcoin.  What is the future of mining?  Or does ASIC spell the end?

If YOU evangelize for some-other-coin, IT will become the 'next best thing'.  I see no alternative.  Educated people are NOT going to purchase a BFL if Inaba remains the voice of it.  Avalon has no idea how to manage media and cannot possibly win the hearts and minds of the average joe miner.  There is an opportunity in this chaos.  What is it?  Is it making a scrypt ASIC miner before Inaba?  Is it making a sexy case for a bunch of Avalon chips?  Is it making a supercomputer?  Can you even make money mining bitcoin at all and if you can how long will it be until you cannot?

so many questions 

I believe the evidence of Viceroy hypothesis is being manifested ig the rise of new crypto currencies. Those are a result of the people leaving bitcoins and thinning of the base of miners that were in bitcoins. Now if you want to argue that the base has not left and its a natural expansion of the idea of a decentralized currency it still shows that miners are choosing other currencies other than bitcoin.

Still not a good trend imho

I'm seeking a handful of EE's to sit down in a google chat and talk about steps needed to draft an RTL for a scrypt mining FPGA -> ASIC?  Mathematicians, Coders, Designers, Inventors are all welcome... but this is SPECIFICALLY to talk about Developing an RTL; if you do not have that skill set you will not be helpful.

Who is qualified to design a full RTL and interested in this conversation, any readers here?  

Please post below or PM me if you can add meaningful dialog to such a conversation.

(1) space reserved for EE Doctoral Candidate.
(1) space reserved for chip designer with 0.18um specialty.

Ignoring the suitability of that board for mining, it's about 3x the cost of the comparable DE0 board.

http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=139&No=593&PartNo=1

If you just want to buy something to learn with, I would go with the DE0.

BTW: neither of those are good for running the existing open source bitcoin miner.

any news and update?

I am a C# developer and would like to get involved with this, I have *NOT* read the entire thread yet but will do so now.

@viceroy have you seen this:
http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Catalog.cfm?NavPath=2,400&Cat=10&FPGA

It sure is a very interesting website..

Don't want to steal the thread just referring to a new idea below: Bitcoin is the first real competitor to the banking system but there will be others. I am collecting support and you can join the group https://www.facebook.com/groups/creditsystem/doc/580888151936183/



Overview / Executive Summary / One sentence explanation
==================================================
The Credit system is the complete opposite of the Banking System where a single entity, the banks, create money. In the "credit system" proposed herein, whenever new money is created to the “Credit” Money Supply, all new money is equally distributed to all participants in the system, avoiding inflation, debt and money-monopoly.  The initial money creation is assigned to every person that is born according to the current volume of money supply.

In the beginning of the system, everybody participating in the system, on a national or global level is assigned 1000 Credits. An initial exchange rate to the banking system is created at 1 Credit equals 15 EUR. Therefore everyone of us who is born, immediately is now assigned 15 000 Euros in “Credit Money”.  ( NOTE, I AM NOT SURE IF THERE WILL BE CONVERSION TO FIAT MONEY, CONVERSIONS HERE ARE GIVEN FOR REFERENCE AND REPRESENTATION ONLY)

The actual conversion rate between credits and EUR/USD/GBP/etc. doesn’t matter because it will be adjusted on marketing principles when trading houses are opened later in the process. In fact considering the current levels of bank money printing and the lessons from Bitcoin, it is safe to assume, that within 2 years of  starting up the credit system, 1000 Credits can easily be worth 150 000 EUR since the starting of the System. And that is credit you get “immediately”.  The system is therefore “anti-debt” and a democratic one.

Here is the problem as I see it in regards to all of the digital currencies that have sprung up over the past couple of years, BTC included.

[1]The current world population of ~5 Billion people aged 18+ all have a need/desire to make and receive goods and services; The easiest method invented so far beyond barter is to use a fiat type system of physical or digital currency (cash, debit card included but excluding BTC and the like).

All nations have some type of currency, but now we are speculating on a world currency, to me this means that the total amount of currency in the system needs to be larger than the actual population, No? and if not then why?

I did not major in economics but this right here seems to be the biggest overlooked fact of wide spread and immediate adoption throughout the world of a truly digital currency ala BTC.

Can any economists in here please join in on this thought?

This is why we are seeing people hoarding their BTC because it has a tiny tiny float of only 21MM, to me this is clearly not enough to sustain a global economy.

Using the above numbers:
5 Billion people able to earn and save BTC / 21 Million BTC == 0.0042 per person.

This is clearly not enough currency to go around and we haven't even begun to include corporations...

[1] http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/idb/worldpop.php

In the future we well not see BTC as the standard unit, people will talk in Millibits or whatever the correct terms are. Essentially one day we could be talking about 0.001 as if it were 1BTC, i think once Bitcoin starts to hit 1k people people will be requesting lesser amount making BTC requests rarer and perceived as large transaction then they are now. I do agree though, having to move into decimals will take some getting used to.

The position of the decimal is arbitrary since bitcoin is based on whole numbers of satoshi (the atom of the bitcoin universe).

Our scale of dimensions reference is colored by the block reward as being 25 "units" which we are calling 1xBTC.  In the future when the block reward is significantly less... our frame of reference may have matched (if bitcoin appreciates like many hope it will).  Maybe folks will still mine when the reward is significantly less than 1xBTC because the frame of reference will be significantly different.  The question is... what will a block reward buy in terms of real good (or currency) in 20 years (assuming 5 more currency halfings - and the reward is .78125).  Will we be thinking that the reward is really 781.25 uBtcs?

Instead of building a better miner... why not build a better coin.

These coins have a horrible setup that cripples them, the more they are used. Many design flaws, that we just live with, at a cost to the network they run on, and to those who actually use them. (As opposed to hoarding them, keeping them off the network.)

First flaw...
- Rewards are a gamble. They should be directly related to actual work provided, not a pot-luck. This has been reduced by pooling, thus making the programming of the "gamble", a useless component. (Wasted processing and effort. Overhead.) Blocks should have difficulty that increases with "transactions", not processing loads. More transactions = more processing = more payouts = equal distribution of work, not a fight for work. You take any available transaction that is not claimed, and build until it hits a target difficulty. Your reward would be a direct fraction of the processing reward at the difficulty. Not a set reward, that excludes others actual work. That is just dumb, and as stated, already countered, thus, just leading to ASICs dominance. Eventually leading to one singular controller with the biggest asic-factory.)

Second flaw...
- Poorly structured "tree branching", leading to 51% attacks. Though it can be corrected, it can not be avoided, and thus, 50% of this effort is wasted, and can lead to reversed transaction confusion, as "invalid transactions" get removed by the "corrected blocks". At minimum, no single entity/pool should be able to reach 33.333333% of the load. At the current time, pools are allowed to expand to 100% if desired. There should be a MINIMUM of 3x 33.333333% sections available for pool polling. Thus, always 3 separate entities, that can be confirmed, and can not "merge" works to become a 66.666666% pool, by obtaining two portions of the workload.

Third flaw...
- Poor database structure and management. The "user", will eventually be burdened by a 385TB DB of transactions that only contain 1MB of transactions that relate to them. What are we at now, 9GB+ after 4.5 years, and growing exponentially with each transaction. (Users should only have to download transactions that pertain to them, and no more. Starting from the point at which they get that first transaction, and ignoring any other blocks that do not have transactions that do not pertain to them.) Adding note: Using an online service exposes the users to additional risks, and REMOVES the many "distributing blocks", that individual users would be distributing on the network. Thus, leaving 20 "wallets" for servers (from the wallet services), which limits transactions, and places ALL users of that servers single wallet at risk of being lost or stolen, and potentially unrecoverable.

Fourth flaw...
- Lost accounts. There is no method of recovery for lost accounts. There are tools to assist with a recovery of a partial loss, if you have data to recreate it... but that only helps recover up to 100 keys beyond the point of where it can restore. Since, for some reason, new keys ask the network for the next 100 keys, instead of generating them sequentially, and selecting valid ones from YOUR selection, not asking the network for 100 more keys that you could never "guess", once a wallet is recovered. If it is ever recovered.

(NOTE: It is suggested that brute-force should be used to recover a partial known lost wallet. However, the fact that brute-force can be used on a users wallet, indicates that it can also be used to open any other users wallet that is on the network. Which it can, because the entire transaction history of events are there, on the network, which can confirm the "cracked" wallet contents, when it is cracked.)

Fifth flaw...
- Burden of load that does not expand, will only diminish in time. A diminished burden of load will result in failure of the network, as machines become fast enough to handle all transactions at once. Thus, leaving only one operator running the whole show. In the advent of ASIC's, it will turn the 30,000 GPU load-balanced network into 1,000 ASIC operators, which will fade into 10 Super-ASIC operators, which will end-up as 1 Super-Super-ASIC operator running the trillions of micro-transactions, and thus, not be able to "keep-up" the burden of the load, while manipulating the entire market that still exists.

Conclusion... Build a better coin. Otherwise you are just adding to the future problem, creating a super-asic.

NOTE on the 4th flaw...
Eventually the "fixed coinbase" will be dwindled down to nothing, as more and more coins become lost forever, if they are not recoverable, destroyed on purpose, or stolen and can not be used. Thus, the fixed level of coins is already inaccurate, as many funds have been reported as unrecoverable and lost and destroyed.

I find it interesting that when I bought it last year my BFL single made $3 per day.
I asked my wife to check it today, it still makes about $3 per day.
Value of bitcoins went up from $10 to $100 as the difficulty went up and the reward was halved.
No one could have predicted ASICs hitting within a 1 year period of the block reward being cut in half.

This tells me that there is actually far more money missing in BTC than people currently realize.  Otherwise common sense would kick in and you would see these older wallets being spent.  Fact is they aren't.

So many of us in the beginning saw it as a fun experiment then walked away and forgot.  We wiped our drives, sold our computers, upgraded or just got bored and deleted the little client and it's wallet. 

There will be a time in the future where it will be worth while to invest a million or more dollars in simply breaking bitcoin keys for these older wallets.  When they fall, someone will have an overwhelming majority of coins.

If I were a bad actor, I would actually create a botnet and task it with generating random keys and comparing it to those older wallets, as time goes on the keyspace decreases, eventually with enough bots you are going to hit one or two of these old dusty keys and literally strike gold. 

I'm not a bad actor, I have no plans to do it, but it is one attack against bitcoin no one really considers because they look at it as intractably safe.  It is and if you are looking for a single key your odds are astronomically against.  But the required keyspace divides in half for each key you are looking for.  There becomes a point at probably 2^32 where this is no longer an intractable problem.  You would in the space of a year with a botnet the size of say Srizbi, be all but guaranteed of hitting at least 1 key of value within the space of a year once there are that many keys in play.

Also several keygen algo's use the current unix time as their random seed when generating keys.  (I know mine did anyways).  Thus if you posses the same random generator and use the same seed factor you can reduce the key search space a bit by picking a number between the creation of the genesis block and today and using it as a seed to random.  Good chance you would hit a key again because you have restricted the search space. (This fact is probably arguable, but I do see this as a potential attack vector)

Mining for keys, is unfortunately one thing that bitcoin cannot guard against.  Even if they change the keysign algo, they do have to honor all the old keys generated since the beginning of time and there is no difference between the key and it's owner by design. 

Flaw #5 is only serious one as with centralization of mining resources the whole point of network currency fails as ultimately there is no network. On top of that thinks about this: what is the point of paying a block fee in the first place?

Well the point is to achieve the initial currency distribution so that many people have it and will spend it and therefore start an economy. Having most of the newly issued currency end up in the hands of handful big asic operators goes against that principle. And will consequently work against developing Bitcoin economy.

Fees should pay for mining not block reward. Block reward serves the purpose of initial currency distribution.

Other points regarding gamble, chain forking, lost wallets cannot be efficiently mitigated unless one gives up some of the privacy and this is a no go tradeoff. I'm struggling myself to find more efficient ways of doing things. Those that you mentioned I don't know if they are fixable.

There was a guy (not a very pleasant type) who would at this point say: oh, just one more thing (tm) :

Initial Bitcoin paper calls for distributed = non centralized peer-to-peer currency. There is little of "crypto" in Bitcoin design other than public/private key scheme for wallets which I guess any serious e-currency had and will have. However Bitcoin and it's derivatives are sometimes commonly known as crypto-currencies solely for a reason that they use some or the other cryptographic hashing function as proof of work.

It is a choice of convenience not fundamental design corner stone. Crypto functions are well studied and have properties which make them suitable for proof of work. Namely it is hard or impossible to fake it. There is no known way today to solve a block other than to simply try out billions of noonces and hopefully finding one that matches the criteria, that is difficulty.

But at the same time some crypto functions like SHA256 can be efficiently computed with custom hardware, those are ASICS. Unfortunately these ASICS are not available at any local store with undesirable consequence that average Bitcoin user has no practical way to mine Bitcoins.

However the protocol itself can be modified to use some other proof of work algorithm which would not allow for ASICS to have such and advantage over general purpose computer. Litecoin is an attempt to do just that.

.

I'm ready to design a prototype scrypt mining FPGA.  I need a development board.   I was thinking of this:
www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/EK-K7-KC705-G.htm

Are there better choices?

Someone rang?


In the Decrits proposal, people only create currency when it is profitable to produce the currency--there is high demand. The security of the network is separate from the monetary system. Security is paid for by tx fees. Coins are created as a block amount based on network activity, with each person wanting to mine part of the block "bidding" for it by producing small proofs-of-work. To reduce the "hardware tax" of the incentive to create ever more efficient hardware that ends up being more costly in the end (as explained by this thread), many coins are given freely away as a result of minting, via tx activity and account interest.

As these coins are given away, the incentive to continue creating coins quickly diminishes. Producing ASICs would quickly ramp up the difficulty so that ASICs are no longer profitable, and unlikely to ever see a return on the initial investment to create them, rather than the sunk costs of using a GPU. And new blocks of coins cannot be created unless there has been sufficient tx activity, so ASICs attempting to inflate the supply will quickly run into a wall where they can no longer mint until tx activity catches up.

It requires people to embrace the idea that using wasteful proof-of-work can not be the security of the system.


There is no competition in Decrits for who decides the network view. Shareholders stake the ability to create the network view with decrits. If they create a malicious view, their decrits can be destroyed, thus making it difficult to repeat the action. Each shareholder has a 10 second window where it can add transactions to be added to the chain. As long as the chain is relatively unbroken, small transactions can be reliably confirmed within 5-15 seconds.


Decrits uses an account ledger that is updated by the consensus of shareholders every 10 days or so. Transactions after a set time are no longer necessary to maintain the state of the network. This limits the size on disk to the number of accounts times the number of bytes for an account. Somewhere on the order of 100 bytes. So even 1 billion accounts is only about 100GB. Additionally, because of the consensus system, "lite" clients can verify small blocks of accounts with only 50-100MB of data transferred per week in a network with millions of participants.


This is a software problem, not a network problem. Deterministic wallet addresses created by using personal information that is hard to obtain (good security questions) plus a sufficiently long password that must be securely kept, no one could lose their money due to a hard drive crash. Strongly enforcing this provision in the software is key to making this work.


"Handling" transactions is only a matter of bandwidth and CPU time. ASICs do not handle anything regarding transactions, only finding a nonce for proof of work. It is not required at all to secure the network. In decrits, as transaction volume increases, transaction fee receipts increase which encourages decentralization because to get paid, you only need to invest decrits into the security of the network, or you can also get paid by being a transmitting node. The Decrits proposal, coupled with its account ledger, will be highly bandwidth efficient, and the CPU time required to verify transactions can easily scale with home PC processing power.


See my signature for a link to the decrits proposal.

So does anyone have any feelings about the dev board at the top of the page for a scrypt miner?

good luck.  I'm assuming you are buying it for the onboard DDR RAM.  You will not be able to get and FPGA that will match a GPU using DDR.  You need to utilize on die memory.  On die memory is very small,  your next best bet would be to get a board with  QDR or SRAM but the price points on those would make a marketable unit useless.

If this is for academic reasons then it should work fine.  If you have cash to burn and want to work with QDR or SRAM you can get one of the Altera Stratus V boards.  ($10k to $12k each).

The cash is not a problem, I'm going to make it back with my superminer in a day an a half anyway, right?


Send me a link to your favorite board and tell me what you like about it as an FPGA scrypt miner.

not really.  the performance gain from an FPGA like this will be nominal.  You are stuck between many rocks and a hardplaces.  The larger the memory the further away from the processor it is.  If you want to scrypt mine with it you will have to code as many threads to run concurrently as possible.  That eats up a lot of RAM.  Using DDR RAM it has the most space and plenty of bandwidth but to run concurrently its slow.  Using QRD or SRAM you get faster processing but it is fractionally smaller so you won't be able to run as many threads.  You can't physically get the amount of SRAM available to you.

If you want to play aroudn with the just get any Stratix dev board.  Bitware and Nallatech are good choices.

http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/kit-dev_platforms.jsp (http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/kit-dev_platforms.jsp)

I think ASICs may actually help decentralize mining just as the development of ICs and PCs brought centralized mainframes to the "periphery" (the consumer). ASICs make the mining rigs smaller, more attractive, more efficient, less expensive. The key is acceptance... as market capitalization increases, BTC will become more valuable and people will not mind being able to only mine .1 - 1 BTC per year (when 1BTC = $100,000). Mining units will become more user friendly requiring minimal setup - maybe plug and play

1 BTC already reached $1000. Of course, it crashed down and is now somewhere in between. When 1 BTC = $100,000, then I wouldn't mind mining 1 BTC per year either.

That is, if I can still do it at home.