Bitcoin Forum

Hi,

I was wondering 2 things regarding FPGAs:
- What is their resale value?
- What can you do with these boards besides mining?

-Depends on board. If it can be used to something else then resela value increases, someone want to buy for other purposes than mining.
-Again, depends on board. For sure you may crack WEP,WPA passwords on every board. On boards with lots of I/Os routed to external connectors (like Icarus) you may develop many useful designs. Simple game console, intelligent home computer, web serwer, router and so on, and on, and on...

I got my hands on an FPGA just couple weeks ago. No experience before then. Mostly intellectual curiosity, which brought me to BTC too.
Anyway the description that made the most sense to me was to think of an FPGA as a processor with no instruction set, you design that and program the FPGA with your design. Where as a CPU, for example AMD Athlon, comes with an instruction set that's immutable/unchangeable.

Here's what I have gleaned regarding resale value of FPGAs, if the device has been programmed with an encrypted bitstream then only the original programmer can alter the design and so the FPGA has that limitation. BFL falls into this category from what I've read but not the other FPGA miners.

As for uses, they are limited by the device capabilities, as was said, and are practically infinite.

The investment payback is nearly 2 years on these boards unless I'm doing something wrong.  Seems nuts with Bitcoin's volatility....

Well, you could make an MP3 player :P (Expensive one, although!)

http://hackaday.com/2012/03/13/playing-mp3s-from-an-fpga/

Will all these FPGA boards run fine with a Pentium III system with 1.1 USB? I think my old P3S-1.4 is still around somewhere in the basement. The CPU according to CPU-World is only 30w.

BS. BFL and encrypted bitstream = not possible "for sure"

Also, unless they explicitly provide the special WPA cracking bitstream then they are useless.

I don't know how to make my own bitstream and I doubt many of us here do ...

Your asking the wrong questions.  The resale value of FPGA's is about 100% at the present.  If bitcoin were to self destruct then, it would go down to maybe 10% ;)

Nothing of significance can be done with FPGA's besides mine.

Quite false. FPGAs are not only for mining, they can be programmed to do (almost) anything you want them to do. Indeed, products such as what Ztex sells, and the Icarus board are designed primarily as development boards. Others such as X6500 and BFL are more suited to mining only, but the chip can do many other things once it has been reprogrammed.

BS to you. While we don't know for certain what chip is in BFL's product, that does not mean that all FPGAs are single purpose. Even if an encrypted bitstream is used, it is possible to flash the chip with a non encrypted one. The purpose of the encryption is to prevent others from copying the bitstream, NOT to prevent the chip from being used for other purposes.

Fine, write me a contract to buy all my FPGA boards for full price in the event that Bitcoin goes belly up.  

So try to sell a used GPU that you used for mining at full price, and if you can't, we come to the conclusion that a GPU can't  be used for other purposes besides mining?

Used GPU's do sell for pretty much full price.

Lately used GPU's have been selling for somewhere between the new and the refurb price.  Especially 5 series cards.

Excuse my ignorance.

FPGA is the best thing ever.

GPUs are for people that don't know any better.

Anybody that is buying GPUs right now is pretty short sighted. Even with free electricity you can already see the effects of FPGA.

Difficulty insanely high at relatively low prices and also I believe we will see a FPGA on 28nm that will make the GPUs obsolete just like CPU ( even with cheap electric prices ).

Buy them all !!!

And now the question: do you really think this will be true if the bitcoin goes belly up? Or even in the mining reward drops to 25 BTC/Block (given the btc price will not  rise)?

nope.  GPU's will probably drop to 50-60% of new price on ebay for a few months then rise back to 70-80%.   


Thats not my point, my point is FPGA's will crash to ~zero value, because they have virtually no other use of significance..

If anyone thinks otherwise, feel free to write me a contract to purchase my fpga's in the event that bitcoin goes belly up.

That's not exactly true.  As rjk already pointed out, they have virtually no other use of significance outside of bitcoin if they're attached to the PCB's that we're using for mining (with the exception of Icarus).  FPGAs weren't invented to mine bitcoins, they were just adapted for that purpose.  Oddly enough, being adaptable for various purposes is *exactly* what FPGAs were designed for.  Pop the spartan chip off of there and attach it to some other purpose built PCB with an appropriate bitstream loaded onto it and it's a completely different functional unit.

They may be useless outside of mining to *you*, but I guarantee there's a whole other industry out there who will find value in them for more than crunching hashes. 

You seriously think a once used BGA FPGA has any value ??

Name one institution/entity that will pay any signifcant sum for a used BGA FPGA that has already been soldered in place.

One of them would be fairly useless.

Take 100, or better, 500, and they can be desoldered with a rework station, reballed and sold in bulk.

I agree in lots of 100 they may have some value, but the cost of reworking them, along with the fact that they are old tech, and newer better FPGA's are arriving will drive their price down to virtually nil.

Obviously you've done case study on the resale value of second hand FPGAs, care to link me to it?

There.  one man's trash is another woman's treasure, or gold, or silver ....
http://shanghaiscrap.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/DSC05705.jpg

plus its only a matter of time before someone is able to decrypt it and get the bitstream

I believe the same is possible to determine which chip they are using

if it can be done it can be undone.

the bottom line is if you believe in bitcoin for the long term FPGA is a great investment

if you do not believe in bitcoin for the long term you have no business even considering buying one


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if you want more information on FPGA including comparisons of all the known fpga miners and GPU as well check out http://wiki.btcfpga.com

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True for a masked ASIC, hardly for FPGA.

Haha, old tech man, your 5series  GPU chips are old tech, they are never in production while spartan6 is the actual low cost xilinx line. If you study the fpga related discussion forums you will find that xilinx has a long time span between anouncing something and the first silicon you can get. So maybe you can get artix7 samples end 2012 ...

Your expectation of a 10% resale value could be good starting point for price discussion in case of. Of course we could negotiate a higher resale value (depends on FPGA-type, board type. time frame for the warrant etc ...). Of course not for free as there will be a lot of spartan6 boards for parts use will be on the market if the bitcoin goes belly up.

Fine we can go with your 10% resale value number in lots of 100.  As far as I'm concerned thats nothing of significance.

If you want to argue that 10% resale value is significant, were just gonna have to agree to disagree ;)

What do you expect as a resale value for  a FPGA glued on a PCB which is some sort of nerd toy? The FPGA will have to be pulled and  reballed and have to compete against grey market devices. Plus the need for a $3600 design software. If you have the ztex-board with RAM on it or Icarus boards i would consider more, even more for these

http://shop.trenz-electronic.de/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=1_65_185&products_id=1006
http://www.trenz-electronic.de/products/fpga-boards/trenz-electronic/te0630-spartan-6-series.html

as they seem well engineered and there are carrier boards avaiable which would have to be custom made (expensive) for the icarus boards.

The Terasic DE1 and DE2 boards sell for 50 to 80 % of the actual list price on ebay. Unfortunately the are not so well suited for Bitcoin mining ;)

Just out of curiosity, why do you have all these FPGA dev board makers (like Ztex and Trenz) in Germany and who are their customers outside of the Bitcoin world? I just can't imagine that they actually sold enough of these boards to make a living and pay taxes, company, etc... ? But then again, I know nothing about this market.

Ztex and Trenz are just examples, since i live in germany i am a little biased and they produce boards with the largish XC6SLX150. There are a lot of other companies making FPGA-Boards. I think most of the boards are used for education, R&D. As the Trenz modules claim indutrial grade quality, there may be a small OEM market. As Trenz is a GmbH (similar to a Ltd) you can get some business numbers at bundesanzeiger.de.

I get the feeling that a lot of people don't quite understand what FPGAs are exactly.  That aside, I'm thinking that the Ztex guy(s) don't do this as their primary source of income.  I'd hazard a guess to say that these guys are engineers who are doing this on the side (with the obvious exceptions).

Yes, and I also think a lot of people that frequent message boards don't use search engines anymore  ;)
GIYF "fpga applications"

Just from my own job: I'm in MRI Physics. Our MRI machines have numerous FPGAs in them each. Both for signal synthesis and processing. And I think GE is doing well enough with medical equipment? Our institution actually developed our own RF signal receiver and we used an FPGA that was originally designed for applications like radar. And the list goes on...

Because FPGAs were there before Bitcoin and because they are produced in sufficiently high numbers for industry applications, they are economically feasible for Bitcoin mining at this point at all. Not the other way round.

Edit: FPGA development boards by themselves would not be economically self-sustainable IMHO, they are there to develop a mass produced FPGA application. Bitcoin certainly gave the sales for those boards a boost.

I am glad you realized at the end that I was speaking about dev boards wogaut. It's exactly my point, I don't see how all these small scale operations can get by making only FPGA dev boards (without bitcoin), because there are already so many companies making dev boards...

dev-boards are build to make everthing possible, so they are more expensive
mining-boards are made for mining, no digital/analog in/output, no display, no whatever

ztex sells fpga boards in all sizes, he did that before fpga-mining was here

I would really like to see a miner try and sell his used FPGAs for some medical unit.

The types of people that buy FPGAs are industrial / enterprise and I bet they would not ever buy some random mining board without enough I/O pins but would go to Altera / Xilinx direct for a custom FPGA solution since the market is not that big.

Good luck getting rid of the FPGA paperweights after the gold stream dries up !

They are REALLY hard to sell off since nobody but a few applications use them.

@bulanula: Not some "medical unit". Biomedical research. And yes, people like me and colleagues use a lot of FPGA development boards. Generally medical research also has access to sufficient funds too. But of course as this being R&D, it is unlikely to have a chance for dumpling a few hundred of these things on an investigator team at once.
And they way funding is structured, it is indeed unlikely that university and medical research would buy them from a private miner.

And that option is mostly for development boards that are currently used as FPGA miners. As for the BFL FPGAs, these are really meant as encryption system, not development.

And crypto-currencies will not go away (even if Bitcoin fails). The "gold-stream" might dry up for those solely into it for profit, but there will be crypto-currency apps that I'm quite sure of. And as long as the FPGA can be reprogrammed, they will have work.

If you do not believe in the future of Bitcoin you have no business buying a FPGA miner for $600, when in reality the resale value of the chip itself is maybe $100 per chip (if you are lucky)

the rest of the mining unit has no resell value what so ever.

The GOOD news is - Bitcoin WILL SUCCEED and these mining units are VALUABLE because Bitcoin mining will go on for at least another 6-8 Years+  and that is what is going to give these units real value - their energy efficiency in Bitcoin mining.

Not to be too advertise-y but my FPGA mining solution doubles as a dev board or a ucLinux PC.

And nobody's going to decrypt an AES bitstream... who was it that said that...?

FPGAs are good and reusable, even already soldered in, that might even be helpful (depending on what pins are accessible and/or what it's hooked to on the board).

Making a bitstream ain't so hard if you learn an HDL and download some free software.

As for FPGAs being unusable because of their bitstream, that's bunk.  It's encrypted so you can't reverse engineer or steal it, but if you want to stick your own bitstream into the configuration PROM/FLASH/JTAG/USB-Blaster, you can go right ahead.

I warn you all I've been awake for 72 hours working on my thing, so if any information here is iffy, don't kill me for it...
 
:)