Bitcoin Forum

This thread is now defunct. See newer threads on Goliath, Cairnsmore2, Cairnsmore3, Cairnsmore4 and Cairnsmore5.

Re:  We wont release tech details, but feel free to speculate.

Achieving competitive hash rates with FPGA seems to be so unlikely that I can imagine the worst kind of speculation.  Not to mention how an assumed FPGA based system would compete with future ASIC die shrinks from competitors.

A complete lack of technical details doesn't inspire confidence.  What you are proposing should be believable.  Especially since you are asking for equity funds or a loan.

Hurrah for more speculation! Bit-serial GaAs hashers?

Could anyone ping bitfury for his guess? Anyone else wants to speculate?

Massive parallel vacuum tubes?

I'm not sure how small or large of an investor you're looking for, but I should be receiving a $8000 refund from BFL very soon.

If you could convince me that doing business with you is a better idea than buying an ASIC from another manufacturer, I would probably be interested. But of course, I need more details.

massive mining accelerator by hyperthreating of fpga cores?
 ;D

I don't know what you're going to do, but I've got several of your CM1s and I like them even with their usb problems.

I like them even more when I think of the way you made them, the openess in the process and so on.

So, if you're going to sell some goliath units, given that I'm a nerd at the core, I'm in.

If, OTOH, you're going to sell shares or something like shares, I don't know.. I like to own my own gear and I like to have it hashing and tinkering with it.

spiccioli.

ps. I think that right now enterpoint is the only trustworthy company in the bitcoin scene.

So, if you are going to suggest more valid questions (not my opinion, but I digress) why don't you answer them rather than being rhetorical?

edit
Regarding blind faith.  It's plain to see at this point many customers are not happy with purchases on faith to be delayed many months.  I think less of making purchase decisions without data or without accurate data would be a positive change.

As for me.  Pics or it didn't happen.

This is my personal opinion only but if you could offer a nominal trade in for CM1 owners towards this goliath so that there is a bit of love share wise compared to joe blogs in the $/mh shares then i'm in.

One last personal request is this time I would like a cuppa coffee while watching flashing lights on goliath for half hour just so I can feel like my money is invested in something my eyes can see even if my brain wouldn't know wtf it is lol.

Slipbye

I'm somewhat familiar with this type of deals. There will be no sales whatsoever. You could however negotiate a lease agreement. The equipment would have to be colocated in a secure datacenter (this means IBM, Experian, Wells Fargo, etc. datacenter; not Joe's Datacenter) and maintained only by an approved operator. You will however be able to see it, touch it and evaluate it using a mutually approved methodology, etc. Only certain failure/defect statistics will not be available.

Basically an appropriate operator and datacenter are assurances against reverse engineering and/or spying. This type of arrangements are not unusual in some markets. Think of them as a sort of "technology escrow". Operator assures that the technology vendor doesn't see the data you pass through their equipment and technology user doesn't open the box and reverse engineer it.

This is interesting point, if done outside of market hours where high-frequency trading goes on. In that case Enterpoint may just use an idle time on the FPGA trading machines. There would be no capital outlay for them whatsover, only the electricity cost.

Yohan,

I think Cairnsmore1 was a great product for the FPGA era and respect your ability with boards, etc.

At the end of the day you have some type of semiconductor chip to perform SHA2 hashing. This chip is either a standard FPGA, structured ASIC, eASIC, cell based ASIC, full custom ASIC, or something else.

What type of chip is by far the #1 consideration factor in determining the likely success and longevity of a project. I don't see how people could possibly evaluate the project's potential without this information.

For example: Do you have a wafer piggy back ASIC run available to produce 50 custom ASIC chips at 65nm, but not enough to sell? If so, yes I would be very interested in this project. Are you putting together boards with 100 FPGAs on them and making massive FPGA arrays? If so, no I am not interested.

Taking advantage of un-utilized FPGA time would have been great for 2012. However once Avalon sells batch #4 at end of 2013 and the network hash rate is 10x-50x where it is today, even free FPGAs will not break even. Just as free CPUs did not break even after GPUs became mainstream.

As per my note above, the type of semicon chip being used is by far the #1 consideration IMHO. Knowing this, and the source of the chips, is required to make a real analysis of long-term potential of the project.

I would want my own hardware, I don't want to screw around with buying shares or a lease agreement.

I like being able to work on my own equipment, if I wanted to buy shares of a mining company I can do that elsewhere.

@Rocks.  Enterpoint is surpassing lack of disclosure levels that we've seen so far with the likes of BFL.  They aren't offering any technical details.

Yes, a technical premise on which to judge Enterpoint's Goliath longevity would make for a smarter investment decision.  Yohan has basically said no.

What's even more interesting is how they plan to protect investment in the face of favorable competing technologies.  The OP mentions some sort of compensation based on one's investment duration if Enterpoint's Goliath operation becomes less competitive.  That kind of scheme shows they don't have a plan for that.

The best part about this is that you can really drive them hard, and even if you do have a hash collision or orphaned block it's not nearly as dissonant or annoying as it is with ASIC based miners.

Given you haven't provided any specs, details, anything it is just rhetorical/academic but please don't provide no worthless mining bonds (which seems to be what you are intended to offer).  I would point out to anyone who may not realize that with a mining bond one doesn't even need the hardware.  Just price them at a point where you guestimate the bond will be worthless long before you paid out more in dividends then you collected on face.  Given global hashpower only rises it is a pretty safe bet.

If you want to run a mining company then run a mining company.  i.e. a registered corporations with officers and directors on file (and subject to real prison for fraud).  Pay your taxes, open books, the whole nine yards.  You know real business.  Come up with a real business plan and at least a prototype which shows you can achieve the hash/$ and hash/J necessary to compete.

Anything less is just a tired scam in a long series of already been done scams.

I think you needlessly extrapolate the current FPGA technology used in the Bitcoin miners against the future process shrink of ASIC miners.

If Enterpoint has capital-outlay-free access to the most recent FPGAs (28nm) then I think they will be quite competitive with ASIC in 110-90-65nm range; based purely on the electricity rates.

What else could cause "unstability" in the Bitcoin market aside from part time operation? Pretend for a moment that Enterpoint had already delivered (and received payment) for a high-frequency trading hardware that is operated 5*4hours/week during the window where both NYSE and LSE are open.

Long term the type of particular chip doesn't really matter. What matters is the continuous access to the new fabrication nodes and ability to share the development costs between Bitcoin finance and the classical finance.

For a homorous take on a really-long-term prognosis, see the 2nd link in my signature.

As someone who used to be in both the ASIC and FPGA fields, and have done many many designs between the 180nm and 45nm nodes, my bet is a full custom ASIC at 110nm will be significantly more power efficient than a 28nm FPGA. The majority of the FPGA's electricity burn is related to routing logic, a full custom ASIC is much more routing efficient and will use significantly less electricity, even at 110nm.

The general run of thumb is an FPGA is 10x slower, 10x higher area (die cost), and 10x higher electricity.

Yohan needs some sort of custom chip if this project will have any legs now that I fully believe Avalon will prove legit.

This is a fair point. I don't have any hard data pointing otherwise.

I did however discuss SHA-2 implementations with somebody up-to-speed. His best guess was that the power-reduction factor will be 2.5-5 times. We've come to such conclusion after noticing that the SHA-2 has unusually high toggle rate  (especially in D-type flip-flops) and uses a lot of carry-look-ahead chains (in multi-level adders). Also, the sea-of-hashers (not unrolled) implementation would use comparatively little of the long-distance routing resources.

The area reduction should be easily 10 times, especially after realizing that neither JTAG chains nor even the reset signals are required in the optimized hashers.

The timing reduction should fall somewhere in between the above two.

Last, but not least, all open-source FPGA bitstreams were speed-optimized, not power-optimized. I don't know which optimization strategy was used by the Avalon group, but I'm betting that they've choosen the default (timing closure) due to their tight time-to-market constraints.

Sad as it may be, DeathAndTaxes view and statements make perfect sense. As they always do solong as I comprehend what he's talking about.

I dont see why your in here looking for investors, this kind of buisness belongs in banks and other financial institutions that some of us dislike and it's called a loan.

If you were to sell hardware I'd be onboard in a heartbeat.

Many people seem to think that any single entity controlling 51% of hashing power would make the market unstable. He said market, not block arrival rate.

BTW, how do I invest and what size investments are you looking for? Also how much hashing power are you targeting? Will the controlled release be in the 10-40% range?

Sounds good.

Yohan, I think you still don't understand how Bitcoin mining is supposed to work. There might come a day when a large government decides that it wants to shut down Bitcoin and they would have a hard time shutting down thousands of miners around the world. It will be much, much easier if there are only a few big miners. Bitcoin mining is meant to be widely distributed in order to be as robust as possible. Please sell your hardware to as many people as possible if you care about Bitcoin.

I actually agree with this.

Scenario 1

Enterpoint gets a conventional loan from a bank.  Mines bitcoin.  Private, centralized.  


Scenario 2

Enterpoint offers equity stake mining bond to community.  Dividends paid.  Capital risk hedged on the back of community if bitcoin tanks.  
Investors have little idea if the product can scale performance wise.  A privately controlled product developed on what effectively is a loan from a community of potential competitors.



Either way it's pretty shite.

It will happen anyways. He might as well give the community a chance to profit from it.

@ Yohan and Cunicula


I am going to refrain from giving my opinion on projects like this in the future.  I do agree this will happen regardless of how I personally feel, or many people feel, about it.


We'll all see what happens.

     Just what the Bitcoin Mining Community Does NOT need is a Multi-million $$ company taking more from Us little guys...Let us Individuals have the Mining and all you Companies keep doing the Hardware.  It's things like this that taking away opportunities for the Small Individuals that would like to have a Nice Hobby and Make a Little money as well!!   

This is just my opinion but it's this stuff that will ruin mining as intended when Bitcoin was Developed.  The people w/ big money Swallowing up the individuals.

He is just doing what BFL did Selling you a Idea but at least he told you in advance lol

Just do the project. It will be controversial, but you will get investors if you offer reasonable terms. Preferably equity in my view.
People may not want their investment status to be public. But they will be happy to invest in secret.
Plenty of people would love to get involved in mining via investing in a legally registered company.

I cannot even see this thread in the subforum without getting this song stuck in my head (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mm7C_9038Q).

Atleast w/ BFL and the other ASIC Companies you Can Buy the Hardware and can be Equal with the other guys...

+1  Yup

No, we can, he can't. He bought the "idea" too, but BFL returned the money he payed for a Jalapeño because they did not want him as a customer anymore.   ;D

A 51% attack can be defended with checkpoints, rollbacks, and algorithm changes. If Bitcoin is made illegal then mining will happen through TOR and there is a good chance that Bitcoin will survive. A public mining company would collapse like a house of cards when mining is made illegal.

Just do it. You are speaking sense.

Haha, I hate it when that happens  :o

Did I not see you crying about BFL in some other thread? Guess its just personal now lol

I'm not real interested in a Mining Bond myself. I really like my CM1 Devices and would prefer to have actual Hardware.

If you do loans or shares you need to register with the various UK & US authorities. You have tax / legal compliance issue for various countries. In the US if you get past a certain share holder count the SEC requires you to go public.

I would just sell the devices.

Yohan, not stating anything  is completely your preoperative, but I don't know why you're asking for my money then. :)

At the very least I would want to understand a few metrics in order to evaluate how this compares to what I think Avalon will bring.
a) Ghash/s per $ of capital cost
b) Ghash/s per Watt
c) Ghash/s per Total opex cost (server space, electricity cost, etc)


The definition of CPU, FPGA and ASIC relates to how the computation is performed. Not the fact that they are silicon chips. Sorry, calling a CPU an ASIC  is a pet peeve of mine, so please excuse the clarification.
- A CPU performs computation as a series of instructions, very inefficient
- A FPGA performs computation in logical LUTs, better than CPU but still inefficient
- An ASIC performs computation directly on transistors, most efficient


Designing PCB boards that house FPGA chips supplied from Xilinx/Altera is a completely different skill set than designing and fabricating an ASIC where you have to be first time right or all investment is lost. bASIC and BFL are learning this. Just because Cairnsmore1 was a success, does not mean the next engineering project will be. Again it comes down to how can I evaluate if you are capable of building this project, if I don't know what the project is doing?

One last thing that confuses me. You say that we will be able to measure the effect in the network hash rate prior to funding. But that would mean the project is already complete and working, which begs the question, "why do you need my money to fund something that is already completed???"

If this is a distributed cracking project, I may be interested. I need an AES-128 password cracked and my GPUs are tied up on something ATM...

If you are selling hardware, you better announce the specs/price/pre-order quickly, because everyone has already plopped down a big chunk of change for ASICs. I can't imagine there's a whole lot of money left in the bitcoin investor ecosystem after everyone buys shiny new ASICs. Time is of the essence for such a project.

Very fine verbiage. I'll bet the subtle difference between competative and competitive opens up some room for creativity should thing end up in court :)

Fair enough on both points. I look forward to the results when you are ready to discuss them.

My interest would be in a share based relationship, provided the performance numbers worked out. Not interested in loan relationships.

Stat's don't lie most people want to run the hardware themselves. It would be nice to have a no hassle offer of managing the equipment for other investor types.
Make them, sell them, keep some for management if you want.

Just don't take pre-orders.

Yohan, I like your CM1 boards, got a few mining away next to my HTPC. I always hoped you get into ASIC's. So I was happy about this news.
Since if I was to buy more for mining, it be with you. Not so happy about mining bonds however.

I know mining bonds are risky, but I did buy ASICminer, since I took a gamble they would be out first and make a big profit, looks like there is a chance of that. If you aren't first with a new technology, mining bonds aren't usually a good deal, so if I'm getting hardware I'd rather buy it.
Without any details, mining bonds don't seem like a good deal to me, I'd rather buy Goliath once I have the same sort of openness you gave us with CM1, where has that gone Yohan?

With a name like Goliath, is it going to be similar to the Merrick 1, with 100 chips on 1 board?

I always prefer to buy local, so like with the CM1's, I'll buy your hardware if it is available, as the only UK supplier.

I am always wary of these share/bond based projects, where the operator holds all the cards, and the 'shareholder' has no real legal claim should the operator suddenly vanish in a poof of smoke. I've yet to see any enterprise in bitcoinlandia where this has not happened in one form or another. ASICMiner is the closest, as GBLSE wasn't really their fault, but it was still a part of the set-up.

If there were some legally certified, punishment-enabled consequence-dealing body backing the deal I would be interested, as the opportunity to reap coins without having to secure the overhead on myself sounds attractive.

That said, we would of course need to have some written terms as to $/Hash, operating costs, and what cut would be taken for "admin" and what have you, as well as what future dilution might mean.

Too many people happy to go on a wing and a prayer, and the inevitable result is never good.

hardware in hand and under my ownership, or i'll pass. just my thoughts. i've watched the cairnsmoore development and such with much interest, and have significant faith in enterpoint as a company. i just prefer having my hardware at my site.

If goliath ever does come about can enterpoint please take cm1 trade ins!?! also if goliath is ever released as unit, please use a new company to get usb cables. thanks.

Same.  I want something I can tweak, pwn, and make my bitch.  Having it sit off in some data center and never even seeing it takes all the fun out of it.  I also want a conversation piece.

Similarly, I would never buy a gold or silver ETN.  I would only buy physical metal that I take possession of.  9/10ths of the law blah blah.

Contrary to most people, I would be okay to go with shares or loan notes, as opposed to mining with my own hardware.

But at one condition: that the dividends or payments are defined by a formula that matches very closely the theoretical mining revenues of what I would invest in. In other words, Enterpoint must eat the costs of any mining downtime, no matter what its cause is. If you are not willing to eat these costs, then ship me hardware so I can manage it and be in full control of my (very small) downtime.

so, to make sure i understand that correctly: you are currently not planning on selling anything, but are developing something for... self-mining? or something else?

What do you consider to be short term, and what kind of timeline are you talking about for a 100TH/s buildup?

Truly bad news for us small miners...  :'(

spiccioli

So... you decided not to take on any investors? Or you've already got deals in place done privately?? Or you are going to sell the Goliaths to individual investors??

I am still interested in being a possible investor/customer, just wondering what yalls plans are as of now.

I really must have missed something somewhere.  So are you selling anything at all?  How would you be competition to anyone if its a completely private deal?

EDIT: What is this some kind of freaky arms race? Or you just want to force a price decline for hardware?

a part of me is thinking "well, if it's either investor or nothing..." hmm.

Amen Spiccioli, it truely is very bad news for us Small miners.  The Bitcoin network will either Thrive or Die out depending on what us small miners, as a group, decide to do.  The Bitcoin network can not and was never intended to be controlled and possibly overwhelmed by these Hardware Companys mass producing and mining 5%-10%-20%- or even 30% of the Network individually. 

If no one has any faith in the security of the network, because it is no longer decentralized by the Huge number of small to medium size miners, than it will no longer grow and will wither away and die.

100TH/s is 10% of a 1000TH Network...way too much for any 1 entity to controlled.  I would think this would be obvious to anyone.  This is my take on it and everyone is entitled to their opinion but Do Not Troll me if you feel otherwise.

Same here, this was interesting to me and I was interested to ways to participate, but it sounds Yohan feels they are good to go on their own. (which of course is completely within his rights)

It's always nice to know our beloved bitcoin mining hardware vendors prior vendors gone private have an appreciation for the fundamental principles of bitcoin.



If I feel a small number of individuals are making 10x more than the average miner due to exclusive access to hardware I'll likely quit.

I wouldn't take what Yohan says too literally. While I don't think they're completely full of crap, they haven't shown anything to back up their claim that while they aren't using ASICs, their technology is ahead of anyone else.

Maybe they can pull it off, but until I see it hashing I'm not holding my breath.

Don't these idiots understand Bitcoin will die if there are only a handful of big players mining?

I goes completely against the principle upon which Bitcoin was built. Greed has got the better of people.