Bitcoin Forum

EDIT:

Full disclosure and humble pie time.

Thanks to a very kind forum member who actually works in chip fabrication and has contacted me with some crucial information, we have to withdraw this. We've been told some wrong information, and by more than one source.

I would just delete this post immediately but that would be dishonest obfuscation. Not what we're about.

The app will still do plenty of other distributed computing tasks on PCs (as it does now) and on mobiles, but mining BTC on mobiles certainly won't be happening in 2014 and possibly not at all.

Apologies for the cock up. It was an honest mistake and we were acting in good faith. Hopefully this public retraction demonstrates that much, at least.

Cheers,
Mark

PS: For the sake of those seeing this for the first time and wondering what it was, it was an invitation to join our startup's Series A investment round, as we're growing quickly and raising funds to scale up.

Part of our startup's roadmap is a mobile version of our volunteer computing PC app: www.charityengine.com

We planned to use next-gen mobile SHA-256 encryption hardware - that's supposedly coming to mobile devices - to mine BTC. Wouldn't make much per device, but would be very efficient and we'd already have lots of mobiles running our app by then anyway. Hence we thought the BTC community might be interested.

That bit isn't going to happen. However, we are now looking at adding a scrypt multi-miner to the mobile version. Won't earn much per device compared to what they'll already be earning (distributed web-crawling for us, mainly) but, if it will work, we will certainly include it.

so u will make a cellphone ming app and run a pool? and it will go to charity ?

Will go to charity?

Only few will.

wait do you expect us to pay you a minimum of $250,000 to take part in using "borrowed" hashpower from a project that doesn't even exist yet?

Besides, just how many phones do you think are needed to even generate 1 GH/s?

either i really don't understand your post or you must think the people around here are crazy.

I would say an iPhone 5 probably can do between 10-20MH/s, so if the got a million of those hooked up and mining, it would be about about 10-20 TH/s

That's a tall order though...

Some misunderstandings here - when the mobile SHA-256 chips arrive, a single phone will do well in excess of 1GH/s. They will be effectively little 14nm (or less) ASICs in their own right.

iOS cannot be used. (At least, not yet.) The mobile app is based on the Android version of BOINC - which is already coded and in use. With almost 2m Android devices being activated daily, the potential hashing power is way beyond terascale.

This is not "just a mobile mining app", far from it. It's an existing - and successful - global grid computing platform which is about to expand to mobile devices - and which will be harnessing mobile SHA-256 chips as soon as they arrive, creating a significant mining operation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17995888

Cheers,
Mark

Definitely seems interesting and I hope to read about your future success!

My pockets are nowhere close to being deep enough to invest though :D

Thanks, much appreciated.

It is a shame we cannot accept smaller investments. Issue is simply logistics - we would have to do due diligence checks on everyone and, even if that was doable, hundreds of shareholders are a whole lot more work than half a dozen.

Plus, it would put institutional investors right off. It's not the done thing until a company goes public.

We do intend to IPO in 3-5 years though, so watch this space!


PS. Is that the Dude? Sweet...

I definitely will be looking out for the IPO in the future.

The dude abides...

 :D

Pipe down and see here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=124441.0).

You are assuming what we have and haven't thought of - or, more accurately, what the BOINC team at Berkeley University have or haven't thought of. That's the software we use.

Only the mining app is waiting for the mobile SHA-256 chips, the Android version of BOINC is already live and working on many distributed computing projects.

The software waits until the battery has charged first and doesn't run 'full tilt'. It does not harm the battery at all - although it does warm it very slightly, that's true. However, the effect on battery longevity is negligible. You wouldn't notice its effect for many years, long after the phone will have been replaced.

The default setting is only activate when plugged in and only use wifi - if you don't mind it running on battery or using your mobile data allowance, then yes; you can run it 24/7 by all means.

However, most people do mind. The majority want an app like this to be totally invisible and unobtrusive.

I'm not sure i understand.  Why are you linking to a one-year-old article?  Are there SHA256 asics in cell phones?  What is it that they do for cellphones? 

Not yet, but they are coming.

They will do hardware-accelerated encryption. It's become such a common requirement for smartphones that custom silicon is the logical next step.

You miss the point.

Custom SHA-256 encryption chips are coming to cellphones. Millions upon millions of them.

Yes, those chips will also make ideal USB miners, but that means buying chips and making (and selling) USB miners. We have absolutely no need to do this.

We will be harnessing the exact same chips with a free-to-download mobile app, in numbers we could not possibly achieve by selling USB sticks.

Plus, the grid is far more than just a mining pool. Please read the pitch deck, it explains.

What, exactly, will the SHA256 ASICs do in the cell phones?  Hardware-accelerated encryption?  RU serious? What does the linked one-year-old article have to do with this?
What is happening to my forum?

*looked at your "charity" site.  LOOOOOoooOoooollllz!!

"How we raise money for great causes -- and the prize draw

Charity Engine takes enormous, expensive computing jobs and chops them into 1000s of small pieces, each simple enough for a home PC to work on as a background task. Once each PC has finished its part of the puzzle, it sends back the correct answer and earns some money for charity – and for the prize fund. (It also earns more chances to win.)

Where does the money come from? Science and industry. The grid is rented like a giant supercomputer, then all the profits shared 50-50 between the charities and the lucky prize winners.

Charity Engine typically adds less than 10 cents per day to a PC's energy costs and can generate $10-$20 for charity – and the prize draws – for each $1 of electricity consumed.

It is the most efficient way to donate to charity ever invented."

D00d, ramp up ur game!  The people who would fall for your scam are too dumb to have any money :D

Crumbs - we are not a charity. I did say that (twice, for emphasis) in the OP: we are a regular UK company. CE is our app.

The app already exists for PCs. It's based on BOINC.

CPU power draw isn't linear with usage. We run idle CPUs up to the 'sweet spot' of 60% max usage, which only uses about 8% more power over idling.

The extra energy draw for having the CE app as a background task is therefore typically less than 10W. But for those 10W, we effectively get half of a full-fat CPU.

That's why it's so efficient, and why we've had industry recognition like this:

http://www.isgtw.org/spotlight/greenest-volunteer-grid-them-all
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft-green/archive/2012/09/28/this-week-in-sustainability-federal-agencies-use-information-technology-amp-charity-engine.aspx?Redirected=true

PS. Those nine charities are official partners, too. Oxfam's due diligence took over a year, for example: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/get-involved/how-your-company-can-partner-with-us/Charity-Engine

PPS. There is actually an error on that page (profitshare is 33-33-33, not 50-50), so thank you for pointing it out. Fixed.

PPPS. The MIT article was linked to because it describes how custom hardware SHA-256 chips are coming to mobiles. I could have just said so, but figured a source would be useful.

You are mistaken. Please follow the links in the OP.

Thanks for the links.
I'll contact Josh Henretig (the blogger on msdn) to find out the source for that article.  I'll also contact OXFAM (this will be a bit more tedious, they're big, don't know how quickly they reply to emails) to find out what your connection is.
This is hilarious.
Thanks again :D

You're welcome. Here's some more coverage of us:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17995888

http://www.careinternational.org.uk/how-you-can-help/change-how-you-live/charity-engine

http://www.amnesty.org.uk/ways-to-give (scroll down)

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679116/charity-engine-the-ethical-supercomputer-that-can-win-you-10000

http://www.talkincloud.com/charity-engine-the-even-cheaper-cloud-supercomputer/

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/23/spare-some-idle-cpu-cycles-for-charity-this-season/

http://boingboing.net/2012/04/18/grid-computing-turns-your-idle.html

...and although this was more about how Facebook's dodgy dealings nearly put us under, here's us on prime-time UK TV News: http://www.channel4.com/news/facebook-fake-likes-online-business-charity-engine

It's very real, Mr Crumbs. Has been for a while.

what mobile sha256 chips are you referencing exactly? as far as i know, sure some modern smartphones have dedicated hw crypto engines, for example with iphone - aes & sha1 for key derivation, boot-chain verification and accelerated, transparent encrypt/decryption and data protection

but these are not 'asics' in the sense we are usually referring to and you cannot use them as such, you can't make any sort of app which would pass apples approval process & it's not like you could even jailbreak your phone and access the engine from userland, you'd need a low level exploit from kernel, iboot or bootrom to try and talk with it in any meaningful way,,really you'd be limited to using main ap, jus compiled arm

I'll wait to see if my emails will be returned by tomorrow, and make some phone calls if they are not.
All the links you have given are over a year old, just like the cellphone article you've linked to, and none offer anything more than what a good PR girl couldn't accomplish in 3 days of cold calls & Press release spamming.  Got anything more recent?

I'll check out your desktop app on a junk drive & see what it does when this gets tiring.  What's it do? :D
P.S:  Could you give me a hint about the right person to contact at OXFAM?  I'm afraid that the emails i sent won't get a quick response, and we do want to clear this up, right?

P.P.S:  Could you give me a list of your current "ethical" clients, or does your app add new zomblers to an aging botet, so u can mine some dust?
(but better still, just GTFO my bitcoin)

I deliberately chose older coverage to prove we're not some recent invention. I don't know how you reconcile the 'PR girl with three days of spamming' being able to go back in time to do those stories, either.

More recent stuff: the Channel 4 News TV piece was 9th August of this year: http://www.channel4.com/news/facebook-fake-likes-online-business-charity-engine

Other stuff from 2013:

http://europe.nxtbook.com/emp/outsource/Outsource_31/index.php#/72
http://www.angelnews.co.uk/article.jsf?articleId=15050 (click the link in the article)
http://exhibit.hpcexperiment.com/resources/charity-engine/

We are members of the International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF) (http://desktopgridfederation.org/members) and the Cloud Advisory Council (http://cloudadvisorycouncil.com/members.php).

We have EU science funding as part of the IDGF Support Project and we've been invited to several international conferences including TechCrunch Disrupt (NYC), NAFEMS (Boston), TNW Amsterdam, the International Supercomputing Conference (twice) and most recently the Dublin Web Summit.

All this is a matter of public record and easily found on Google.

Our contact at Oxfam is quoted - and named - in one of that previous list of articles, by the way.

PS. I appreciate the burden of proof is on us to show we are genuine. But equally, it is completely unfair for you to decide - and declare - otherwise without even waiting for the results of your own inquiries.

Apple's not in the picture, for the reasons you describe (and others). It's Android-only for now.

The mobile SHA-256 chips are not in production cellphones yet - but they will be by the end of 2014.

The article linked to in the OP is what first alerted us that mobile mining could become more than just a pointless afterthought, thanks to these new chips. We have since confirmed (as best we can) that they will indeed be accessible and usable for mining.

Would you mind giving me the name?  I have already got a "Dear Supporter" form letter telling me to expect a personal reply within
2 working days :(

Regarding your absurd mining cellphone idea:
1.  What makes you think that SHA256 ASICs will be incorporated into cell phones by the end of 2014?  Be specific.
2.  What would these chips be doing in the cell phones?
3.  If these chips are x10 more efficient than current gen chips, how long do you think a cell phone battery would last while hashing at a meaningful rate?
4.  Perhaps offer a list of your current "ethical" clients.  Being mentioned in blogs and human interest stories doesn't lend you much credibility -- all of them sound like filler copypasted from a PR release.

Your idea is inane.  It is no more interesting than a kid mining dust with a botnet.  Sure you can distribute an app to jailbroken old phones, but who cares?  Your entire botnet won't mine a tenth of what a single current gen (at the time) miner would.  Pointless waste of battery life.
Now go away. >:(
 :D

article does not really say much, do you mean like airmont, cherry trail etc?

Consider us gone away.

The overwhelming obstacle here is electrical consumption. I imagine that bitcoin mining on a mobile device will be incredibly taxing on the battery of said device, rendering such an activity very hard to perform when the mobile is not docked to a charging station. If this is the case, then the mobile will be at best a USB miner that you can plug in for 8 hours at night when you sleep.

Edit: Also, it would not be unfair to assume such laborous usage of your mobile's battery will lower its life expectancy in the long run

Not sure if it's part of them. All I know is that it's additional custom silicon, specifically for SHA-256, for hardware encryption/decryption. Not that much different from any other common task that ends up being moved off the main CPU - graphics being the obvious example.

They won't be able to earn much per cellphone (the SHA-256 chip will only pull a fraction of a watt), certainly not enough for individuals to bother running a miner. But they will be more energy-efficient than any ASIC, because mobile chips are always the latest process, and en masse they'll be able to earn quite a bit.

And that's where the CE model comes in: we make it a prize draw, but also give half the profits to our partner charities - so it's a worthwhile exercise even for those who don't win. Result is a (virtually) free, totally automated, never-ending charity fundraiser and series of massive prize draws. All from idle computing power.

The default is only activate on charging and only use wifi. It also waits until the battery is charged first.

It won't be mining on the CPU, only on the dedicated silicon. Difference in power usage will be an order of magnitude - perhaps 0.5W as opposed to 5W+ if using the CPU full-tilt.

It has to be gentle, you are quite right.

You have not left or answered any of my questions.  Red text above.  Go.

Why is bitcoin suddenly attracting the lowest rang of scammers, the "it makes you money while saving kittens" bottom feeders? 
WTF is wrong with us?

Because bitcoiners don't understand finance?

Anyway, some interesting thought.  I don't know if I have enough info/background to make numerical estimates, but I imagine this is what their per-customer margin looks like:

bitcoin dust
less: marginal cost of mining servers/generic work servers
less: marginal cost of advertising (acquiring customers)
less: marginal cost of promotions (avg lottery payout)

The dust revenue is just so, so low do you think that you'll be bumping against problems with just the marginal cost of having a constant connection to a server and getting new shares?  The cost of one network connection to one mining pool has got to be incredibly tiny but so is the revenue you're making from dust.  Bitcoin mining is both your most reliable source of income but also your most server expense-hungry and concurrent network connection-intensive choice.

Advertising: really tricky as you're still being trapped under the upper bound of your dust revenue.  How do you keep your average cost of acquiring a customer that low?  I guess raising tons of investor money in a formal investment series gives you a pass here for now.

Finally, I don't think non-bitcoin sources are going to be moneymakers for these guys.  People who need scientific computing aren't known for their deep pockets - they are funded by grants.  The web scraping thing makes it sound like you've already got a customer which is cool, but I don't see the sustainability for that business model (and I don't know who would pay for it in the first place).  People scrape the web so they can store, index it and query it at a later time.  Your army of smartphones is only going to give you a small bandwidth saving compared to downloading the pages yourself.  Does the cost of outsourcing it to a 3rd party with an elaborate system to manage its workers (aka higher per-scraper cost) going to work out financially?

I was planning on going to sleep but had to step in here. My personal opinion is that this is either a scam or a VERY misguided individual/group of people.

What SHA-256 chips are you talking about? And why are you referring to them as chips? There is little sense in having a separate dedicated IC in something as compact as a phone.

The article has no mention of SHA-256 chips in cellphones. Why would a cellphone even need an SHA-256 dedicated IC when they already usually have that capability built in to the same die the main processor is on?

Are you saying the ic will be more efficient than current miners? Where are you getting such information from? TSMC? Qualcom? If so, you are horrifically violating NDA.

So you have an app already up and running as a demo? Give some specifics, how does android support such functionality?

Your language is very vague and unprofessional. Your claims are extreme. Your minimum buyin is 250,000 friggen grand. Why on earth are you doing this on a bitcoin forum? Go find some proper venture capital angels. Keep in mind that to have someone invest in you from the USA they need to be an accredited investor.

OP are you sure you understand the motivations of bitcoin miners?  Hint: it's not charity.

A few key points here, I'll try to address them all...

The obvious one: mining BTC doesn't pay nearly as well as scientific and/or commercial computing. Nor is it what CE is designed to do (as I said, we're a computing platform, not a mining company). And yes, those guys are often on tight budgets. But that's great, because our platform is basically the cheapest computing you can hire - approx 10x cheaper than Amazon EC2, for example.

It's not as flexible as the likes of AWS or Azure, but for pile-it-high-sell-it-cheap raw computing you cannot beat volunteer-based grids like ours. We sell computing time for 1c per typical core/hour, and we also do massively distributed storage now (think RAID 10,000).

The distributed web-crawling is the stalking horse, perhaps even more so than the mobile mining, because mobile devices on wifi can web-crawl pretty much as well as any PC. It's a very CPU-light task. In fact, it's about the best possible use for a distributed grid of mobile devices.

The money in it is huge: Google alone spends over a billion dollars per year and uses 500k+ servers just for web-crawling. They have no choice if they want the search engine to stay up to date. Even back when they invented it, Brin & Page knew a distributed system would be the most efficient method but nobody knew how to persuade the public to participate (see 2nd para, 9.2: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html )

Lots of other companies need web-crawling, too. From seeking out phishing websites to scanning Twitter for stock market 'emotion' keywords, it's not just search engines. Plus, a distributed grid has the huge advantage of every node having its own unique IP address. Facebook, Twitter and many other sites restrict visitors to one page per second per IP address, just to foil crawlers. Doesn't affect us.

Website diagnostics, pen testing, anything that really just needs bandwidth and lots of nodes: also ideal for a grid of mobiles quietly working at night time.

(Mobiles can also compute, of course. They're nowhere near PC level, but they are virtually free to use, power-wise, and a quad core 1.5 GHz chip with 2GB RAM isn't useless by any means. Especially if you have a few million of them.)

Mining on our grid will only be a big deal when these cellphone SHA-256 chips appear, because by then we'll have been running the CE Android app for months anyway (mainly web-crawling), and should have some big install numbers. And although we've no idea what the little things will actually earn, we do know they'll be the most efficient chips out there. Samsung and friends don't do last-gen processes.

Cheers,
Mark

In that article:

"Columbia’s Sethumadhavan says custom ASICs may soon face a challenge from chips for mobile devices with circuits dedicated to performing encryption operations. These chips, expected next year, will probably be designed to a standard higher than the miners can reach and could be used to build powerful mining rigs without ASICs."

We already have VC angel financing, and we're getting more. The reason for posting our pitch deck here was mentioned in the first line of the OP: this could become a significant BTC grid.

Apologies if it seemed vague, I can't put forward every last detail in a forum post - hence the link to our pitch deck and the invitation to email for further info. Which five people have already done.

You are quite correct about the US and accredited investors, I'll amend the OP to reflect that.

How to harness it? ● Offer to buy the surplus compute power ● ● ● Been tried, doesn't work for home users – a few pennies per day doesn't impress anyone PC power only valuable en masse, not individually Ask for volunteered resources ● Only works for popular science projects ● Growth is flat; all the science fans are taken ● New projects dare not compete for volunteers

-quoted from your pitch

so please eli5.

home users don't care for a few pennies a day

if you add up a billion of them not caring, this makes you how much?

edit~: you'll lose less money for investors than i first thought, because Samsung et al. won't sell a billion high end phones with 'asics' in for a while yet

We're specifically NOT seeking bitcoin miners - or even techie users.

We're seeking the non-technical general public who don't give two hoots about mining, protein-folding, web-crawling, molecular modelling, climate simulations, CFD, rendering, etc - and persuading them to compute for it anyway. They make up the vast majority of device owners.

I don't understand the question, sorry.

If you mean 'how much would we make with a billion users' - it would be huge, of course.
If you mean 'how much would we make if nobody cares to join up' - it would be zero. But we have several thousand users already.

Never-ending random payouts, constantly raising money for charity, free to download – what's not to like?
Even if the user doesn't win a prize, they're always computing for good

-quoted from your pitch

no one in their right mind buys a lottery ticket

you already said no one cares about computing for good, well maybe several thousand yip-de-do

don't be obtuse. you can't persuade enough people to buy a high end phone and join your club

anyone with a good phone would mine for themselves, then choose which charity to donate to

if they could mine with a phone

Hi there.

To counterbalance the healthy skepticism of some and frankly rude behaviour of others, I'd like to say that I find your idea very interesting. Unlike others, I can see what you are aiming to achieve here and think it could really work.

I'm also pleased to see a British company taking steps towards innovation in the bitcoin world. I don't have  early enough money to take part in this, but I wish you the best of luck. If you succeed, it can only be good for bitcoin as a whole.

You're not understanding the concept.

There are 2 billion PCs and another 1 billion smartphones already out there. Nobody has to buy anything. Even the app is a free download.

Not enough people care about computing for science projects - far more care about computing for the chance to win massive cash prizes and constant charity fundraising.

As for the phone mining - just like the PC computing, it can only earn pennies per device. Not enough to make it worth doing UNLESS there's some other motivation.

Like being in a series of massive prize draws and constantly raising money for those nine charities, for example.

Hundreds of millions of people buy lottery tickets every week, by the way. Not sure what their state of mind has to do with it.

Hmm, now I see it all. Quite brilliant.

I offer you £24.99 a fiver for 51% equity.

Thanks. Never had to use the ignore button on a forum before, but hey.

I'm all for healthy skepticism, not nearly enough of it in this world. Could live without the paranoia and insults though. Two minutes on Google and it's completely obvious we're legit. Our PC app has been out for two years!

Cheers,
Mark

Very gracious. I'll put your offer to the shareholders.

Can we get an estimate on total hashrate in an optimum situation in your mind? How much electricity would this farm require vs competitors? Trying to get a better understanding of the plan.

It won't be a farm as such, merely a network of idle charging Android devices all around the world. The more people run the app, the greater the hashrate - so number of users is the limiting factor.

The more people have the app, the more it earns, the bigger the donations and prize payouts - which encourages more people to get the app, etc. Scale is everything.

Actual hashrate per device is unknown. All we know is that custom SHA-256 silicon is coming to mobiles, and smarter people than us are adamant they will be more efficient, pound-for-pound, than ASICs. (We have that in writing.)

Electricity usage will also depend on user numbers, but mobile devices always have the lowest-energy chips with the lowest nanometer processes. For each individual contributor, it will barely be noticeable. A few hours per night using a couple of watts, maximum.

As for us, we could admin a million nodes with two racks of servers.

It's not that costly if you don't have to pay out 97% of the earnings, like every other pool does.

We need investors to expand the company, not just for the mobile app. Read the pitch deck. The PC app is earning nicely, thanks.

Then explain. And less of the insults, please. If I'm missing the point, tell me.

Why won't smaller, more efficient chips be usable as miners?

We have a professor of Comp Sci who says they will be. I'm quite open to hearing why you think they won't.

I'm aware they won't be as powerful, per unit, as mains-powered ASICs. (Although they will be more efficient in hashing per watt.) They're mobile chips. That's not in debate.

"Columbia’s Sethumadhavan says custom ASICs may soon face a challenge from chips for mobile devices with circuits dedicated to performing encryption operations. These chips, expected next year, will probably be designed to a standard higher than the miners can reach and could be used to build powerful mining rigs without ASICs." http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508061/custom-chips-could-be-the-shovels-in-a-bitcoin-gold-rush/

(Sorry, he's actually an Assistant Prof of Comp Sci. My mistake.)

EDIT - we are not just going by this one MIT article. We followed it up.

How on earth is a 14nm general purpose SHA-256 ASIC going to be more efficient that a 14nm ASIC designed specifically to mine bitcoins?

What you are saying makes no sense.

That article was written over a year ago, on December 5, 2012.  It was wrong then, and now it is verifiably wrong.  Don't try to bootstrap your scam on top of another man's mistakes.

Many here think that you are clueless, giving too much credence to the adage "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Not I.
You're here to con and bilk coin.
Monumental stupidity required for your scheme is not realizable within the constraints of spacetime as we know it.
Bitcoin is not a playground for failed scammers.  It is not a nursing home where burnt down scams come to die.
Pool's closed :)

Er, it wouldn't be. I never said a 14nm would be more efficient than another 14nm.

But it will be more efficient than a 25nm. Or a 20nm.

The point is; whatever is the cutting-edge process at the time (14nm, 12nm, 9nm, whatever) - that's only in the mobiles, stamped out in their hundreds of millions.

You can't afford the latest process (or even obtain it) for small production runs, eg. BTC ASICS. They will always be a couple of generations behind.

They're not "just measly SHA-256 instructions", they will be hardware. Yes, I understand that BTC ASICS are doing the exact equation and I'm sure the mobile chips won't be. But there is more to it than that - and I don't just mean process size (which is a huge deal, and the obsession of every chip maker out there, including the ASIC guys). Indeed, if you've heard of 40nm ASICs beating 28nm ones (really?), then you've already alluded to this.

A handful of bootstrapped ASIC makers has nowhere near the chip design expertise of the multi-billion-dollar mobile industry. Cellphone chips have every energy-saving optimization trick in the book. ASICs don't.

ASICs are getting more efficient, sure, but that's down to the process size and not much else. They're certainly not designed to be mobile. Even the USB ones only just scraped under 5W.

So yes, I do get your point: these things won't be true 'baby BTC ASICs', but they'll still be ridiculously energy-efficient and kicking out well over a GH/s per Watt.

And more to the point; there will be millions of them just sat there every night doing absolutely nothing but watch a battery charge - and some web-crawling. We'd be crazy not to tap them for mining as well.

Or maybe I just didn't get what you meant because it wasn't what you said. That's the first time you've even used the word 'hardware'.

I thought you meant just an extra set of CPU commands or something. In fact, it's blatantly obvious I thought that. Hardly worth a shouting fit.

Anyway, as you're losing the ability to have a civil conversation, let's leave it there.

Just get out.

You are not so much dealing with raw stupidity as much as a lazy scam.  It's pointless to offer logical arguments when you're engaging someone like that.
After his arguments are conclusively shown to be meritless, he refuses to concede.  There is nothing else you can do.

Posting gifs used to help, but now the animations don't work  >:(

Yes, I wasn't aware an extra set of CPU commands automatically means additional silicon. I thought it could be emulation - which is what I thought you were referring to. Alert the Washington Post.

I'm a CEO, not a chip designer. That's why I took advice from a professor.

EDIT: Well, well, well. "In traditional CPU design there have been two common approaches: hardwired logic and emulation. The 80x86 family uses both of these techniques." http://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/www.artofasm.com/Linux/HTML/CPUArchitecturea3.html

If you do not know WTF you're talking about, the smart thing to do is STFU.

Mark is an ex-programmer and professional writer, who invented Charity Engine as part of a sci-fi novel, figured it would really work, so stopped writing the novel and started the company.

Yup. Best way to predict the future is to create it. Surprised you didn't post the link where that's from, though?

You know, the one that also says this about me and our company http://www.svc2uk.com/100club/ceo-profiles/ :

"The SVC2UK ‘100 Club’ is a group of individuals who we believe to have the most innovative, high-growth ventures and who show the greatest promise to become future serial entrepreneurs and investors themselves. The Club is rigorously handpicked by SVC2UK experts via a multi-step selection process, and consists of CEOs likely to build global businesses worth £100 million in the next three to five years."

FTFY

Read the same press as you.  
The company's financial model is a flop -- hence the panhandling on this forum.
From the tech perspective, Charity Engine is no more interesting than a kid with a botnet.
His new scheme is nonsensical and technologically without merit.
The "charities" angle is a con to avoid having to pay people for their proc time.
Charities Engine name in itself is deceptive and misleading -- Charity Engine is a for-profit corporation.
As a con, its as lowbrow as it gets: "Win money for free while donating to charities."
Nothing new here, other than the level of laziness.

Hey crumbs - just so you know, you've been on ignore since page 2.

I've no idea why you're so infatuated with me, it's very flattering but I am taken - and also not gay.

Do please feel free to keep shouting at the walls if you like, but Elvis has left the building.  8)

^^
Feel free to follow in his footsteps :)

Why do you think anyone cares what praises an organized circle jerk has made about itself? Contrary to what some threads on this forum might've lead you to believe, Bitcoin isn't suitable for this sort of nonsense. That you continually have to appeal to the "authority" of "professors" and whatnot exhibits quite plainly that you're out of your depth. Go back to my original post here and read the damned thing.

Seriously how dare you even do anything bitcoin related without the all mighty mr popescu's permission. If you aren't going to pay 30btc to signup for mpex you can fuck off.. /sarcasm

Any chance that this causes a phone to overheat/catch fire, or a battery to explode, killing some kid with the phone plugged in beside his head while he sleeps, resulting in you getting sued back into the stone age?

Not being facetious here, I'm just curious if there is a non-zero chance of this happening.

** I just ask because if one of these type of incidents occur, its going to be you and the phone manufacturer arguing over whose fault it is, and Samsung's lawyer army won't lose.

That's an interesting question! Unless the phone is very faulty, the chance is zero. We won't even be stressing it.

And whenever a phone overheats/explodes/catches fire, it's 100% the manufacturer's liability (unless the user was putting it in a microwave oven or something like that). Their hardware, their negligence. We wouldn't even be involved in the case.

Was that MPOE? He's been on ignore since page 1. Damn those "professors", hey...? ;)

EDIT: okay, jumped the gun there. Unblocked. MP isn't remotely like crumbs, he does know his stuff. (As does pankkake, to be fair. Just wouldn't be civil about it.)

All-pro PR campaign.
After being shown to be clueless, OP parries with "I'm a CEO, not a chip designer!!1!" and proceeds to brag about all the people he put on ignore :D

That assumes a million online at all times.  Likely each of those will only be online for a few hours a day max.  Anyone on an iPhone would need to run the app, it wouldn't run in the background for very long at all.

I agree, but even thinking along these lines is ridiculous.
("if everyone in the world sent me a penny, they wouldn't even miss it & I'd be a millionaire.")

Yes, we're only expecting 4-6 hours per day from each unit (activates when plugged in, but after the battery has charged first). But we'll be getting way more than 20MH/s per unit when this new mobile silicon arrives.

Android-only for now, Apple doesn't allow any app that can download other executables, which is obviously what a distributed computing app does. BOINC (the software we use) is already coded for Android, too.

Full disclosure and humble pie time.

Thanks to a very kind forum member who actually works in chip fabrication and has contacted me with some crucial information, we have to withdraw this. We've been told some wrong information, and by more than one source.

I would just delete this post immediately but that would be dishonest obfuscation. Not what we're about.

The app will still do plenty of other distributed computing tasks on PCs (as it does now) and on mobiles, but mining BTC on mobiles certainly won't be happening in 2014 and possibly not at all.

Apologies for the cock up. It was an honest mistake and we were acting in good faith. Hopefully this public retraction demonstrates that much, at least. I've amended the OP to say the same thing.

Cheers,
Mark

PS. As it's kind of pointless now, I've asked the moderator to delete the thread. But I wanted to set the record straight and apologise first. Sorry guys.

Hey good for you. It is so easy to get caught up in a good overall idea, and not research the bejasus out of each and every part yourself.
Now for the paranoia bit: are you quite sure that chip expert didn't pull the wool over your eyes?
Don't delete this thread. It's a record of how you did at that time. Can you now adapt? Do it differently next time?
But first, rtfm (mpoe told you so)

Quoted for lulz.

Thanks railzand. The mobile mining was never a core part of the business model in any case (we only started looking at it when we first read that MIT article - and by then our PC app had been live for a year), so it means we've only lost the 'unexpected bonus', as it were. Unfortunate, but not game-changing. The chip expert checks out completely, by the way.

We can certainly adapt, sure. We're now looking at what a scrypt multi-miner could do on mobiles, for example. We know it won't be that lucrative, but as the app will already be doing the web-crawling and internet diagnostic stuff anyway, and it's really no trouble to add other functionality, it's worth doing even if each device can only earn a few pennies per week. We'll see.

Amazing company!

Thanks! It's got the potential to become one, anyway. Still lots of hard work ahead.

That work will pay off -- I'm sure of it!  Just remember, if you can make your customers/investors happy, then you will be happy too!  Also, if there's anything we have learned from Labcoin, is that you will have a lot of people behind you and plenty of support, no matter what!   ;)
I'll even lend you some money, and you can pay me back whenever you want..

Ah, I see... In that case, how about we flip a coin and either pay you back at 1000% interest if it's heads - or not at all if it's tails. The coin flips, sorry... the coin flip will be filmed and then released on YouTube, so it's totally fair.

You are a kind and noble gentleman. Our BTC addy is below. ;)

Dunno.  Sounds as legit as the rest of your offerings, so why the sarcasm? :-\

"This user is currently ignored."

 ;)

Like having a stalker.

A famous stalker, too: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=311309.0;topicseen

Oh .. I was being serious.. okay, nevermind

Really? I had to Google Labcoin (not been following it at all) and first thing I found was a Reddit thread saying it was a 'mega-scam that nicked 7000 BTC' - so that seemed to suggest you were being sarcastic, and calling us a scam as well. Which was a bit of a downer.

But hey - really sorry if I got the wrong impression there. I confess I don't know anything about Labcoin except a glance at that Reddit thread.

Cheers,
Mark