Bitcoin Forum

500 BTC BOUNTY OFFERED FOR OPEN SOURCE BITSTREAM THAT IS FASTER THAN TML

STILL OPEN

Requirements:

Must Make Each Spartan-6 Mine at a stable 250Mh/s or higher
Must be compatible with BFGMiner
MUST BE OPENSOURCE
Must work with ModMiner Quad before Bounty is paid


email tom@btcfpga.com

thanks! :)

reserved

Definitely plan to implement in BFGMiner if possible.

TheSeven suggested the current code could be opened as-is including the signcryption private keys, to get things going immediately (miners could self-signcrypt), and leave removing the signcryption to later assuming it's non-trivial.

Snip

I'd pitch in 10BTC

+10 BTC (all the rest is in ASIC :()

I was actually thinking of making a bounty thread for this to get done for us MMQ owners. I don't have nearly the amount as the other pledges, but I'll put 4btc towards this.

+10BTC for Icarus bitstream  ::)

I didn't do any calculation yet, but I would be happy to donate a reasonable amount if it gets an improovement over current hashrate. I'm running ~2000 FPGA on ZTex boards (~50 single, the rest quad). The only requirement is that the whole thing must be open-source, with no keys, sig, and various complications.

Well, this is the first I've heard of this.  Is TheSeven the one doing this?  He's who I've been emailing back and forth with.  As of yesterday he wasn't quite there yet, so I assume this has just happened in the last 24 hours.

It would have been nice if you had sent me a simple email before posting this "open letter" to the forums.  I'm quite happy to discuss this stuff in a reasonable way.  You and I seem to have lost contact two or three weeks ago although I've been corresponding regularly with TheSeven since then.



Great news!  Your customers should appreciate the 25% performance boost.



Well, first off, the signing servers don't send you stales.  They send you signed work.  Your pool or bitcoind is what declares submitted shares to be stale.

I get under 1% stales, so it can't be the signcryption.  If you enable the telnet status monitor (use -Dstatus_port=X and telnet to localhost:X) it will show you the breakdown of how much hashpower is wasted waiting for responses from the signcryption server vs. waiting for the pool vs. work rejected without a longpoll ("unavoidable stales").  You can tune the amount of pipelining used; the default is to always have at least one job pre-signed and ready to load.  With this setting I see 0.05% of my hashpower wasted on signcryption delays.

The image below shows a sample screenshot of the status monitor.  Each row is a board, each group of three cyan numbers is a chip, each of those three numbers is a ring, and the number is the clock frequency at which the ring is running.  If you hit "enter" it will cycle through clock-rate/error-rate/accept-rate on a per-ring basis.  The bottom line always displays the cluster-wide statistics.  The screenshot below is from my testing cluster which consists of the 12 poorest-performing chips out of the batch (one died):

http://www.tricone-mining.com/images/status.png

FWIW choice of pool does matter.  I have done 95% of my mining with Eligius, but recently (last four weeks or so) I've found that with EclipseMC and BTCGuild I get under 0.25% stales; I'm not entirely sure why this is.  X-Roll-Nonce helps a lot (which is why I favor EclipseMC over BTCGuild).

Also keep in mind that the TML host software will always submit a share, even if it knows in advance that the share is stale (due to a longpoll, a reject of another share with the same prevblock, or because the miner was working on stale work while waiting for the pool to return a new job).  So you should expect to see a surge of stales every time a block is found.  The "accept" number is what matters when comparing against other implementations.  The "stales" number in the screenshot above will fluctuate a LOT over a 5 minute window; for more accurate measurement of stales, use something like -Drecent_history_len=3600000 which will use a 1-hour window.



Ur…. I really need to resist the urge to get into an argument here.  In the aspects that affect performance it is more sophisticated than the other getwork-management (aka "mining host software") systems out there.  It carefully tracks each millisecond that a board spends without work to do (or with stale work) and "charges" those milliseconds to the appropriate cause (getwork from pool, signcryption, resetting board due to error, etc) which is where those detailed statistics above come from.  The clock calibration is at a 1mhz granularity and the software finds the optimal frequency using logarithmic regression, something no other mining software does.  And the mining software produces nifty charts (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49971.msg1034904#msg1034904) which are essential for troubleshooting cooling problems (or overvolting, if you're into that, but I don't advise it).

Maybe you're having problems because you've been using it for less than a day?  It also might have something to do with the fact that one of the most popular and quite excellent miners "mpbm" happens to be written by the same guy who wrote the TML's ModMiner driver for you. :)  There have been many reports of excellent resuts on other boards; see the "confirmed" links on this page (http://www.tricone-mining.com/tml.html).



I appreciate your generous offer, but unfortunately I must decline.

The TML is already available, today, for your customers to use.  There are no commissions until at least 07-Oct.

Can't say that I didnt try.

I have a great deal of respect for you for what you have created here, but please dont pretend like you dont know who I am and who my team is we have tried countless times to initiate contact through email (which you say you prefer) as well as your own forum thread and on IRC - and I have tried numeours times to set up some way to work together with you. listen I don't want to offend you, but the truth is I am 100% sure you will never make 400 btc worth of commissions from this and this bitstream will never have the impact it could potentially have if you just open source it. However I can see it would not make a difference if I offered you a million Bitcoins and had Satoshi himself write the mining software.

So Thanks for at least taking the time to respond to this post, it will really suck to see your bitstream become obsolete and fall into obscurity before it's ever really even utilized, but this is what is going to happen.

take care

Tom
BTCFPGA.com

???


And you have succeded!  I answered all of your emails promptly, including at least eight from TheSeven full of technical questions.  Seriously, is this a complaint?



What exactly does this mean?  You made me an offer and I declined it… please don't be offended by that.  But your latest posting is full of vague stuff like this.  Could you be more specific?  What are you unhappy about aside from the fact that I declined your offer?  If that's all it is, just say so...

I have not done any business with either cablepair nor eldentyrell, thus the following represents an outside, hopefully somewhat objective, point of view:

Mr. C manufactures and sells hardware without making sure that adequate software is available.

Mr. E creates very fast software for a large number of, but not necessarily all, platforms. Mr. C's hardware platform happens to be one of the few unsupported ones.

Mr. C makes Mr. E an offer to extend his platform support to Mr. C's platform, but Mr. E declines the offer.

Mr. C is now pissed off.

My recommendations:
1. Mr. C, suck it up and grow a pair.
2. Mr. C and Mr. E, please realize that FPGA miners will be made obsolete by ASIC miners in a matter of weeks, thus both of your efforts, while admirable, will soon be but a footnote in the history of Bitcoin mining.

I like how you used pseudonymous, but its not like everyone knows who Mr. C and Mr. E are.

Take a wild guess.

Cablepair
Eldentyrell

yes my post last night, I was obviously pouting that I did not get my own way :( ...

and I apologize to any ego's that were bruised during this experiment! :P


it just sucks not to get your own way after you kiss someone's ass so thoroughly.

oh well....


like I said - I tried.

:)

FWIW, someone else is considering writing an equivalent bitstream from scratch if that bounty is open to others ;)

cool!

Re the revised bounty: should clarify if the goal is TLM speeds before or after the future-fee is taken out.

I think the trick wasn't successfully, you use good words, like open source, contribute to the bitcoin community, etc, all in a public letter to force eldentyrell to accpept it or to seems an ungrateful. Having to thank you a donation of 200BTC, and now we face the truth, the was a hiding purpose, bussiness.

Now you pay the double for anyone to make the same or better job? A wolf under the skin of a lamb, maybe this algorithm that make your fpga get a 25% more of hash power can do your bASICS get better performance compared to the competence?

Money talks

What else? You mistake the arguments which were used to try to convince eldentyrell with the motivations which were quite obvious from the start and shouldn't need any explanation: make MMQ more profitable to users so that they buy more of them.
Reread the initial proposition, it was 200 + 200 = 400 BTC (200 out of cablepair's pockets, 200 out of BTCFPGA sales).
Didn't see any wolf but I smell a troll.

You are right, bu$ine$$ are bu$ine$$, sometimes I let go by utopias when I read a letter with such fair intentions.

Thank you for putting my feet on the ground.

Regards

You couldn't be more wrong about the whole situation.

This is not to get people to buy more ModMiner Quad's in fact I am no longer advertising them, and Highly doubt I will sell many more of them at all.

My customers are awesome, they have been very supportive since the beginning, I simply want to take a little of the profits and give back to them and make their equipment better.

There is quite litterally no possible way for me to make money from this, in fact I am losing money from this - but its not for me - its for the customers who already purchased FPGA and are worried about getting a ROI, my customers have been really good to me and I just want to give something back to them.

BTW bitfury has similar high-speed bitstream for XC6LX150:
http://www.bitfury.org/xc6slx150.html

300 Mh/s @ 240 Mhz @ 1.25Vcore for around 12W per chip. Not bad.

this is experimental stuff

we are not going to be messing around with VCORE's :P

although MMQ would be ideal if someone wanted to take one and test it out with this

we used almost exclusively the Industrial grade chips on them.

Out of curiosity, what MHz and Vcore do the MMQ run at currently?

In the area of 200MHz I believe. Not sure on the vcore.

mining software dynamically clocks the fpga's which is the proper way to mine with fpga for many reasons. Usually on the MMQ they run anywhere from 190-210Mhz.

As far as the vcore I dont know the exact number its just whatever the stock vcore is for the chip. We do not increase the amount of normal voltage to the chip.

Default vcore is 1.2v if that's what they are running.

Most rolled up (pipelined) hashing cores (like all of the opensource ones are built around now) basically do 1 hash per clock. so 200Mhz = 200MHash/s

Bitfury is "sea of hashers" style core. many many tiny hashing cores that each take somewhere around 66-70 clocks to finish one hash. So their relationship from clock speed to hashing speed is not as "direct".

Also their source (last time I checked) isn't open, so no way for anyone else to use their bitstream (also they used custom tools of their own design for placement and routing of the hashing cores in the chip).

My new HashVoodoo core for my bitstream is also sea of hashers design, very similar in design to theirs. But it's unfinished. I'm hoping to finish it very soon. When I do it will be an opensource bitstream hopefully capable of achieving similar speeds (but likely slightly lower than bitfury). I expect anywhere from 250Mhash/s to 300Mhash/s initially, with the ability to maybe push it a bit further than that with some optimization effort. But for now that's all speculation. I have to finish the damn thing first ;)

Also BTW, my bitstream is opensource. It currently only targets the Enterpoint CM1 boards, because that's all I have for dev on-hand. But I've already started talking to cablepair and the other involved parties about releasing builds of HashVoodoo for the ModMiner Quad boards too. MMQ uses different communications methods/protocols though, so It will take a bit of work to adapt the bitstream to play nice with the JTAG comms that MMQ uses. Then of course we'll need to get support for it in the mining clients added.

Please take into account Icarus boards too, since CM1 board is its hardware clone (the only difference is RX/TX lines AFAIK). Probably you can build all-purpose CM1/Icarus bitstream, where RX/TX lines direction will be selected with a DIP-switch or something else?

I have two bitstreams - one that gives 300-305 Mh/s with power consumption of 13 W per chip (that is first SERIAL bitstream) clocked at 240 Mhz.
and another one slower that gives 270 Mh/s with about 9.5 W per chip (that is second PARALLEL bitstream - 4 hashers), where rounds are clocked
at 135 Mhz while round expanders clocked at 270 Mhz.

Tools however for both predict much better timing - for first one - 337 Mhz for second one - 350 Mhz (the second one is actually failure to get more than 300 Mh/s by lowering power consumption - so my guess about power consumption was not right).

I would anyway disclose them opensource as soon as network hashing power will be more than 100-200 Th/s for educational purposes and for those who are curious. Also it contains elements that are useful for ASIC development (i.e. math optimizations). So - this is why I am not really willing to disclose it. As I would like first people to invest well into ASICs and then find that they developed obsolete hardware :-)

But - I can disclose parallel bitstream for 1'500 BTC and both of them for 3'000 BTC as now on "AS IS" terms - i.e. without bringing and testing them to your interfaces as I simply have no time for that, and I doubt that your offer could counter-bet conditions that I have now. So - it will be up to you to implement protocol communication part and run days thru compilation, and your/your engineers time used.

Please consider that 300 Mh/s bitstream is unlikely useful for you as powering this small chip with 13 W is a challenge, and looking at your hardware I suppose it would just fry chips :) But I wrote disclosure price, because rolled round approach is especially useful for ASIC devices, where typically with unrolled approach yield would be affected.

About price - if that is too much - then just please wait. You will finally get it anyway for free, when you would not be able to make money using it.

And finally - 2 Tyrell: - If you have objections against this disclosure in terms that it will significantly affect at this stage competition asic development, please stop me. No matter pay - if you veto this deal it won't happen. I hereby give you explicit right here. As potentially loss can be far more than these 1-2 kBTC. You have everything you need to estimate impact ;-)

For sure, I mainly haven't reached out to ngzhang yet as I have been busy up until now with CM1, and haven't had time to directly support multiple boards.

And yes it should be a fairly simple matter for me to support Icarus, and Lancelot with this bitstream as well...

My end goal is to have a single bitstream, on a central codebase, that is maintained by the community, and which can run on all the boards out there. Get good solid protocol in place, and get mining app support of that protocol. basically establish a standard.

Enterpoint supported me with dev boards, and kicked me a couple bonus "free" boards as well for my work, so of course I helped them out first. Now that it's stable, I'm willing to take my own time to port the bitstream to any other board where I can get the hardware for free to do testing. (in the case of MMQ I'm jumping the gun a bit as cablepair hasn't been able to provide a board yet due to stock issues, but the incentive of the bounty helps motivate in this case). But ultimately I need the hardware to develop for the board properly. So if ngzhang (or one of his customers) wants to provide me with a board, I'll take the time to port it actively. I will still port it to other boards later if I stumble onto "free" time. And of course the community is welcome to port it themselves as it's fully opensource :) But my time is valuable these days, so if I'm going to invest my time, I'll need at least enough support to make the job much easier on me (free board so I can dev/test directly on hardware).

Hi Bitfury,

No dis-respect  , but I dont see how an exta 70-105 Mh/s jump per chip is really this valuable? or this dangerous to Bitcoin that it requires this kind of approach.

Honest question here Im not trying to be a smart ass - maybe im missing something - can you explain this to me please?
Thank you
Tom

Glasswalker:

I actually do have the stock now to provide a dev board

see me about a delivery address and I will express overnight you one

thanks

Tom

I will explain. I expect that there's about 5'000-8'000 Spartans in circulation, working "on average" 200 Mh/s - that is 1 - 1.6 Th/s around. Giving it say 270 Mh/s would turn them into 1.35 Th/s to 2.16 Th/s. Say additional 0.35 - 0.56 Th/s to difficulty.

Current network average is about 20.5 Th/s - so added 0.35 - 0.56 Th/s would make +2.4% to 2.7% difficulty increase alone with such disclosure.
Which will cut also directly income from my existing installations of 300 Gh/s - that's DIRECT losses of 150 BTC to end of year :-) So in your offer component it can be reduced. Why I have to help competitors there ?

Then - goes about INDIRECT losses with ongoing ASICs - Tyrell one of not many who invented same tricks in bitstream as I am, he's very smart. But most actually not - i.e. friedcat's chip for example, and likely that BFL chip as well, as their stratixes would work better. So this disclosure would also result that they (and maybe you as well) can catch up and get extra 15-20% performance without doing much - i.e. just rewriting your top-level code and doing re-synthesys.

Then - gained income from today to end of year by Spartan owners by using this bitstream would be in range of 8'000 BTC to 14'000 BTC aggregated. So my offer of 1'500 BTC to 3'000 BTC looks like small share of it. And of course it will drop to zero once gain will be neglible at all and not revenues will be made from board sales anymore + people invest into backwards ASICs masksets.

BTW - also you can use signcrypted Tyrell module :-) He's almost not take charge for it - if I'd were him, I would charge 50% on additional mining generated as that would be more fair compensation. So I suggest to Tyrell to gradually increase commission to at least 30% of additional mining generated. This will be more fair to his efforts even to setup that tricone-mining servers/softwares.

Also - such disclosure would probably make tricone-mining obsolete, and that I don't like as well. He worked really hard on it.

So I think the discussion is quite pointless. As on this forum I see that people like to buy much more promises than real things. And I'm not seller of promises - sorry - you should go to BFL or buy some ASIC bonds :-)))))) Why you have to buy bitstream, if you can buy almost 0.5 Th/s hashing power with that ? :-))))))))))))))))))

If you finished nonce distribution logic and get/return work logic you may consider to release it now. With few cores just for test purposes. Those cores may be slow but have to return valid nonces. If you do that the rest of comunity may already start to design propertiary comunication logic for varius boards.

So let me get this straight: you've developed a bitstream for those Spartans, but you don't want to release it because if everyone else uses your bitstream, they (customers who bought Spartans) will gain between 8000-14000 BTC (your numbers) over the next 3 months, but drive the difficulty ~2.5% up in the process. In the process, you would lose ~150BTC from the increase in difficulty.

Umm, if you've been promised > 400BTC for releasing your bitstream, then why are you so concerned about losing 150BTC in mining?

So you ask why I am not doing disclosure for 400-150=250 BTC ? :-) quite ridiculous - I can just wait few days and get these 250 BTC :-) Why I have to bother with this deal at all ? Especially in its original sense where cablepair wants finished bitstream for these boards ? ;-)

And why do you think I may want to increase profits for those sparan-chip owners ? What is the reason ? If you find - I want vice-versa - who will increase my profits for free ? :-)) I really would appreciate :-) I have 200 gh/s and want very much 1.5 x profit improvement RIGHT NOW!!!!
Please please help :-)))))))) for free of course :-))) So I'll get all of profit from your help :) WAITING ..... :-)

I don't even have any FPGAs ATM, nor have I ever had any spartans. I just find it interesting that you would NOT release your bitstream for upwards of a 500BTC bounty, while still continuing to mine.

He's an elitist, he wants to have something that other people have so he has a "leg-up" on everyone else, rather than contributing to the community, making it better, AND getting paid for it on top of it all. That's fine, it's his prerogative as the creator of his particular piece of software.

I wonder if it would be beneficial to throw the 400(+ ?) BTC bounty into one bitcoin address visible by the community.

Personally, I wish I had the time to devote to this project.

Or into a multisig escrow.  If people are interested in that I can help set it up, and would be willing to act as an arbitrator for its disbursement.

This bounty is basically already claimed , the bitstream is nearly completed and will be available to mod miner quad owners next week.

SWEET!

Oh yes! I like that!

Yeah and the Bitstream is being made compatible with our current protocols so it will just be dropped into BFGMiner instead of our current Bitstream

all end users will have to do is upgrade to the newest BFGMiner and they will see speed increases up to 1Gh/s per board :)

Hey Tom, can you make sure you make the bounty address public? I don't know about the other posters that posted about the bounty, but I want to add the meagre 4BTC that I promised.

cablepairs website down?

This was a great Idea glad the something came from it.

Well, I'm glad that this is done. No more TML craziness. Pool TML guys... could have made a few bucks. lol.

Apparently the 1Gh/s core wont be ready for another week or so. (sorry im as disappointed as you are)

So the Bounty is Still open.

bounty has been upped

500 BTC BOUNTY OFFERED FOR OPEN SOURCE BITSTREAM THAT IS FASTER THAN TML

STILL OPEN

Requirements:

Must Make Each Spartan-6 Mine at a stable 250Mh/s or higher
Must be compatible with BFGMiner
MUST BE OPENSOURCE
Must work with ModMiner Quad before Bounty is paid


email tom@btcfpga.com

thanks!

Just going to quote myself here also:

what everyone fails to note is a bitstream can build a asic lol best bitstream builds fastest Asic..... just saying for those who do not know how that works. There are places that will copy FPGA = ASIC but is supposed to be 10-25% faster and 60% cheaper. So if you do make a bitstream make sure it is public!

FPGA -> ASIC is not really the most efficient process.  And its only cheaper in HUGE quantities.

I don't see how this is relevant to the topic at hand, though.

this has nothing to do with ASIC and yes one of the requirements of the bounty is that the bitstream must be open source.

My sole purpose for this bounty was to give my FPGA customers a boost and help them out in profitability for the last couple months before ASICs ship.

However if this bounty is not collected soon I will probably close it because it will just be too close to ASIC deployment and there will be no point

tbh, do you reckon it will work on those boards? is it different to the one we were talking about?  I wish tom had talked to you guys about the asic design... tbh it would even be worth him giving you 15%+ for help.

I have to say, as much as bitfury is teasing everyone, he is the real deal... and if he says he can do this, he can do it. he is also a pretty stand up guy.

I have been away for a while and thought I would see what you are upto mr fury :) didnt read the rest of the thread only his last post. sorry if this has been already covered.

have fun.

steve

EDIT: maybe you have been gone as long as I - next time I will check the post dates. :)