Bitcoin Forum

http://www.butterflylabs.com/order-form-bitforce-sc-jalapeno/

Is it a good idea to pre-order such a device? Is butterfly trustworth?
What type of hostsystem is neccessary to run this (hardware, os) device?

Sorry for possible double posting but i (as newbie) can not yet ask and reply to other forums.

Thanks
-pminers

PS: See also: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=106378.0

Seems like they are...and sounds like they come from the security/encryption side of the world and are applying their resources on bitcoin.  I read some reviews of their products and they seem positive.

other then an unsure release date and loads of pre orders (meaning ure far behind in the queue), ye they are pretty damn trust worthy :)

from what i have seen in months of lurking on these forums... They tend to be late delivering, and the product don't quite measure up to what they claim it should in press releases.

Still good, looking at their mini-rigs and other existing products, but not as good as they claim it will be.

*Shrugs*

true but they have also stated that if the product doesnt deliver what they say, they will reinburst there customers...
not a "fanboy" or anything, but hoping they are close to there estimate as im considering atleast 2 of there rigs to start with ;)

Oh agree, if they are wrong about their claims their track record shows the will try to make good.

But a reimbursement after months of holding your cash and delivering late isn't amazing in my book. Better than nothing for sure... But not amazing.

BFL is trustworthy.  Per-order is allot of what they do  :'(.  Host system should be any computer running CGminer or the software you are using to mine with now.  I have one on back order because I had the coins to do it when they came out.  Figured I would give it a try and I own their singles.  Good company but they are a small business in a very interesting market.  The current products work fine.

+1

Here's a dumb question.  How does a non-CPU, non-GPU, USB device show up as an available mining device in GUIMiner v2011-07-01 for example? (I think that's the latest release.)  I assume it would have something to do with creating a new "other miner" but how would one go about targeting the device from there?  And out of curiosity, what type of device does it show up as in the Windows device manager once it's installed?

given that version is over a year old, my first guess would be it doesn't :)
cgminer scans for and detects devices, some you need to tell it where to scan - its covered in the readmes :)

Doesn't BFL have their own mining software?

they do, but some people find other software works better for various reasons/needs /wants :)
there is a whole subforum of mining software :)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=42.0

As if nobody would dare lie on the internet. What everybody seems to forget to bring when supporting BFL is that FPGA tech was already well known and proven effective when they showed up, as where now your pre-ordering on a tech still in development. (with 0 proof at the moment that it will even work at the task at hand)

I dont mean ASIC's in general, but ones meant to mine.

Fingers crossed though as they have a load of my BTC on pre order!!  I may have to hedge at bets of bitcoin at this rate!

Wow, that's hardcore if they wrote their own mining software.  I suppose you need something tailored to the chips to test them but still, pretty impressive :D btw, is there a later version of GUIMiner or a faster or better software out there? Haven't really followed mining much since I stopped when I moved out to my apartment.  You know, shared electric with the roommate and a lack of sufficient daytime cooling and all.

I have some concerns over it.

One thing to uncross your fingers about is the alleged power ratings I hear floating around.  I don't think their own website said info either way unless I missed it.  Yeah it's USB connected but 3500 MH/s for 6 or less watts (max of normal USB) defies the laws of physics.  That's so far ahead of anything similar to it, it's just not possible.  It has to take an external power adapter of some sort, probably well into the 2 digits in watt measurement.  Plus, USB power wavers a lot even on pretty expensive boards.  It's affected my other USB peripherals half the time and typically leaks electricity into the sound adapters on the front case panel or even the onboard rear ones.  It's the worst possible way to run a chip like that.

By the way, can 3500MH/s worth of hash results be sent over USB 2.0?  Would it exceed approx 20MB/s?

Oh come now. Wikipedia and bitcoin.org can answer these questions, but for those of you who don't have the time and/or willpower:

No, that rate for an ASIC does not defy physics. Look up what an ASIC actually is (on wikipedia) for general information. A GPU is an ASIC. It will perform specific tasks very efficiently, but bitcoin mining isn't one of those tasks. Anyone with a GPU farm can tell you (heat).

No, 3.5GH/s will not be sent over USB. The speed is on the ASIC, not over the USB connection.

At the same time, I would rather everyone not order BFL's products. Anyone who pre-orders is in direct competition with me, and I need all the coins!

Incidentally, another option for some people might be to purchase GLBSE shares for mining farms. GIGAMINING seems promising. I have yet to purchase shares, but we that is always a possibility.

I have pre-order two jalapenos... At the end, I gave the purchase rights of one of them to one of my miner colleagues.

Many people think it is a risk to pre-order, as soon as the Jalapeno development is not fully finished. But, in order to have any opportunity with these devices I think it is important not to wait too much. The mining difficulty is growing very wast, and the reward is decreasing....  Mining with GPUs is not profitable any more... ASICs is the best opportunity we have now, however no one will become rich with this, But will enjoy. There is many people mining in the network, someones with big Farms!!  :D

I expect the Jalapenos are in their very last testing phase, hopefully in our hands before ending of this new year.

I see someone is trying to sell these on ebay, but they are not shipping yet?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/200820756784

Edit: just noticed they are trying to sell 'pre-ordered' hmm

Damn right I don't :-P I work 2 jobs lol.
It runs on...itself?  Oh no, I get it.  It runs on magic.  My MP3 player just hit 3 Dragonforce songs in a row on shuffle so I used up all my magic doing that, lol.
The first posted warning I saw about ASIC chip development was 1.7 years ago :P That's the definition of fair warning lol.
Oh that's what we need.  Risk of security flaws, 51% attacks, hacks, and other coin losses plus risk of prices going down plus risk of hardware failure (theirs) plus one more layer of risk in trusting another company with money that would go under at any time.  It's like a risk turkey club sandwich. OM NOM NOM!

Lets hope they come out with these. Make the chacne of 51% attack much less likely if a lot of people have access to asics.

Very good  ;D

A newbie figured it out  8)

Now to convince the other 20% who doubt it  :D

So the jaleps are not only profitable but the solution to stabilizing mining difficulty? Seems contradictory

a >50% attack would be extremely likely to backfire horribly in that it's almost impossible to make a profit doing it.  You'd have to change the ownership data on a bunch if bitcoins without hitting a single BTC that's owned by an exchange or their system would instantly shut down.  Then you'd have to sell them within like 15 minutes of stealing them before people notice and start alerting others, causing a massive sell-off.  Then there's only so many buy orders posted on the exchange anyway so that's all that could be stolen.  Then you'd have to initiate a wire transfer to a bank or some other withdrawal function before the exchange caught you.  Typically selling like a million BTC trips safety measures at MTGox that shut everything down instantly.  Then you'd have to have valid fake personal data in place due to the volume and somehow block them from following the wire transfer or stopping it before it executes, which I'm pretty sure they do manually.

So good luck with that :P The only reason to do a >50% attack is to destroy BTC so yeah, people want to do that but still.

I've got one on pre-order. I'm currently pool mining with several bits of crappy hardware at total of 16Mhash/s :P

Oh yeah?

There are 22 confirmed preorders for BFL ASIC Minirigs right now. The total hashpower of these 22 machines alone is more than current total hashrate from everything else currently mining. These things go online, BAM, they instantly control more than half the network.

Now to make it even more interesting: Do you know what code these things are running exactly?  ;)

Make it even more more interesting: BFLs owner is a convicted fraudster.

https://postalinspectors.uspis.gov/radDocs/PressRoom/nr110114.htm

Now put things together.

Wich is exactly what banks and governments want....

Thanks, it makes my 300Mh/s feel a lot roomier! I'm doing the same thing, but only looking forward to 11.5x performance increase, not the 218x that you will be getting ;)

You're right - those 22 machines are enough to mount a 51% attack but they're not coming out in isolation - the smaller machines, while having a lower hash rate, will also be providing a fairly significant boost to hashing.

Assuming there's 10x more Singles than minirigs, and 10x more Jalapeno's than singles - include the current hashrate of the network - and the impact of the minirigs is reduced to 41% of the network hash rate.

ofc there's a lot of finger-in-the-air with this and we've made some assumptions along the way - but I feel a majority of the community around bitcoin is for a long-term stable environment.  tbh there's probably more risk to the network from other vectors.

Pretty much what I was thinking :P


So in response to all 3 of those posts, here's a quote from BFL:

"Because of the potential for massive disruption that our ASIC units may cause to the mining ecosystem, we are instituting a 1/3 shipping method for our first shipment of products to individuals.  So that no single person or handful of people are able to gain a material advantage over any other, we will ship all our available units at the same time to as many customers as we can.  This means we will likely delay shipping on our first units until we have accumulated enough stock to satisfy a significant portion of our initial orders.  This ensures that as many people as possible who are early adopters are equally and fairly treated when receiving our product. To that end we will be shipping our first orders as such: 1/3 of each product line (Jalapeno, Single SC and Minirig SC) will be shipping to new orders, 1/3 to upgrade orders and the final 1/3 will be shipped to a random selection of orders from the first two categories (both upgrade and new customers) received in the first month of orders (From 23 June 2012 to 22 July 2012)."

and also, for some reason they removed it, but it used to say that they will do their absolute best to ensure that any order suspected of attempting to be used in a >50% attack will not be allowed.  There are at least 7000 pre-orders total, most of which I assume are Jalapenos so that's at least another 24.5k GH/s right there.  That slightly exceeds the rigs so let's say no GPU miners stop (yeah right) and the current network stays at its current 22GH/s, that's somewhat balanced.  Another $1.4 million in minirigs and you can outprocess everyone else :P Oh wait, they're carefully controlling who gets those minirigs and not shipping them out to everyone at once :P Hurray! lol.  It's not hard to imitate 47 different buyers but then you have to ship them all to a central location after that and then who knows how many more orders are filled or when you're getting your entire orders, etc.  Someone could end up with $2.5 mil invested in trying to destroy BTC.  A government would have a hard time getting that approved even in the FBI's budget.  Goldman Sachs has got money though, lol.  So there's only one thing left to do...

*orders more pre-orders* :D

Btw this fraud charge is very concerning!  How sure is anyone that this Sonny person is actually the owner of BFL?  The registration info behind their website is blocked by a 3rd party intermediary privacy service :( There are no "butterfly labs" on all of google maps.Their listed mailing address is a PO box in Kansas City, Missouri.  This Sonny Chris Vleisides person is "previously of Kansas City, MO" according to that press release.  That's the only link I can find.  Anyone got actual proof?

Btw, I found someone else on the web claiming that "I did a quick search on the Missouri Secretary of State website and I was unable to find any instance of Butterfly Labs or variant of. This leads me to believe that Butterfly Labs Inc may not exist as a recognized business in the state of Missouri.  Furthermore, the patent and trade office seems to indicate that no registered trademarks of “Butterfly Labs” or “Bitforce” are found. I've often read that these are registered trademarks of BFL."

That's concerning for a multi-million dollar chip fabrication plant (they claim).  Since nobody makes chips in the US, especially Missouri, I think they're lying and are just a distributor and the chips are made in Asia.  I think most Intel chip-making plants cot about $40 billion so most small companies can't just pull a chip-making plant out of their ass.

They obviously have shipped working products out to people in the past so they're not some ghost company but this does all seem really odd.

If anyone has received a direct reply from an e-mail to office@butterflylabs.com, look at the email file source and pick out the originating IP address.  It's not always real accurate but it'd be interesting as to whether it's an IP that resides in Missouri or not.  It'd be an awfully long drive to pick up their mail at that PO box if they're in another state but still, lol.

oh and that phone number listed on their site is a mobile number on the Sprint network based in Kansas City, MO. Somehow their fax number is also their same mobile number.  Dunno how they pulled that one off cuz normally you'd just get angry fax-data squealing in your ear if someone sent a fax to a cell phone, lol.  Must be some special Sprint feature that intercepts and digitizes it or something.

Of course, it's trivially easy for certain people to trace a mobile number to its owner.  Just sayin :P

Also remember BFL is not the only source planning to produce these high hash rate asic's.  For example:

BTC FPGA is planning one:
https://www.btcfpga.com/index.php?route=product/product&manufacturer_id=11&product_id=58 (https://www.btcfpga.com/index.php?route=product/product&manufacturer_id=11&product_id=58)

Dont let the page confuse you - it says in stock - but read at the bottom that they are not expecting to ship until late Nov/Early Dec.  And there are a few others.  I think High Hash Rate ASIC's are coming - but probably not as fast as the marketing spin would have us believe - so i think there enough other sources to prevent a 51% attach.

I think the real key here is - it is not as close as you think - if you read between the lines in the posts you can tell, these things have not even completed testing, much less any final fabrication process - so me personally - i am keeping on with what i am doing, and going to make a small investment into ASIC's so i am in the vanguard but not riding point.

Incidentally, to get an idea of BFL ship times, there is a thread in marketplace that people put their order and receipt dates of the BFL Singles:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77796.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77796.0)

and their order numbers for the asics and sizes - they are keeping a running total of TH/s ordered - not perfect but useful enough:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89685.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89685.0)

I will not deal with BFL. They have very poor customer service. I'd go for BTCFPGA's bASIC units instead.