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Multiple reasons.
1. ASICminer is a company who wants Fiat. That is why they exist. They have been the primary source of the coin dumping, as they take the 50% of their mined coins and sell them. The ASICminer shareholders also probably are selling their dividends.
2. BTC was artifically high as people had to buy BTC to buy avalon chips, ASICminer products, etc. As mining difficulty skyrockets (ASICminer going to add 800-1000 TH/sec ALONE by the end of the year, Avalon chips are 300 Th/sec, KNC miner is another 300TH/sec, BFL is god knows how much, at least 200 TH/sec, maybe up to 1000TH/sec) and the price drops, less people spend BTC to get mining gear, so the price drops even more, causing a vicious circle.
3. Combined with #2, there's no good reason to buy BTC for goods and services, only artifically BTC-only products were keeping it up
4. Regulation has literally come outright and stated that MINING = Money transmiter (i.e. illegal to do), if not using the client outright being money transmission. California especially
Unless something absolutely dramatic changes, this downward turn will not end. And ASICMiner will continue to drive it to 0$ as fast as possible as they dump coins.
Now add in the only way to ANONYMOUSLY mine is via solo block mining through Tor, and that nobody can reliably solo mine a block in less than a month's time except ASICminer, and you've opened yourself up to MASSIVE liability
Now that you can no longer mine without spending thousands and thousands of dollars for what is looking to be a "never-meet-ROI" investment, BTC has fundamentally changed from what it once was, to a centralized, psuedo-controlled beast. ASICminer will have enough power to take 70% of the hashrate soon. All they can do is sell overpriced hardware, but knowing how much AM has and what they are doing to the exchange rate, you'd have to be mentally deranged to buy anything at any price.
BTC has basically become Gold. Completely infeasible to mine it on your own, you have to buy it from other people. And like gold, it's value is currently dropping, but unlike gold, it has no reason to bounce back. You now essentially have to go through government controlled systems to accquire the coin.
You gave AsicMiner a rope and they hung you with it. I hope your share prices were worth it, they will drop as the exchange rate drops.
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Sorry, they'll be needing your order money to pay their fines and bail
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Their FCC compliance is likely also fictional
Could very easily happen in the USA as well!
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Also a friendly reminder there is a massive target on the back of Asicminer for any government(s) that wish to take a bite out of bitcoin, especially in china where bitcoin is illegal
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This explains why LTC hashrate is going up by Several MegaHash Per Day And Shows No Signs Of Stopping
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Based on the rapidly balooning hashrate for litecoin, and the facts that
1. 95% of GPU miners switched to litecoin weeks if not months ago (as it has _LONG_ been more profitable than BTC for GPU miners)
2. Only a complete idiot would continue buying GPUs to mine anything
it's possible that someone has developed an FPGA or ASIC for mining scrypt coins, but is adding hashrate in such a way as to disguise this fact. It doesn't make $/kWh to buy GPU miners for scrypt coins anymore.
Completely untrue at current profitability rates. At current rates, mining LTC, a GPU will pay for itself in about 6.5 months. Since people aren't exactly rushing out to buy GPU's at the moment and ASICS is a remote risk, we can expect the LTC network to stay at about the same hash rate / difficulty for an extended period of time more than sufficient to recoup any initial investment. And GPU mining profit is WAY above the power cost. Just run a calculator: https://give-me-ltc.com/calcJust absurd to suggest that, at current levels, LTC mining won't pay for the power. Prove your claim. And if true, why is 20 gh/s being thrown at LTC and clones ? As for ASICS, good luck with your BFL pre-order #2,124,123. Have fun mining with that once it arrives in 2040. And for FPGA BTC mining good luck competing against the ASICS that have shipped and the hordes of them being run by the manufacturers for easy mining profit You forgot to double your electricity costs in summer  Diff going above 1000. Asics/FPGAs for scyrpt CONFIRMED. TRUEFACTS: 2000 khash/sec 1200 Watts 1000 Difficulty AND RISING RAPIDLY. 0.12 c/kWh x 2 (Cost to remove heat!) 2.62$/LTC AND DROPPING QUICKLY Profit is less than 1$/day and when you double elctricty costs YOU'RE LOSING 3$/DAY Now to watch all the """"'unused"""""" 5xxx and 7xxx GPUs hit ebay and see the price of a 7970 hit 80$ used. |
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Its not that the chips are available tomorrow. There is still enough time to revise everything. That doesnt need weeks.
We are getting close to the point where assemblers with multi week lead times need to place orders for components (especially for PCB manufacture at economic prices). Apart from the PICs at 2 weeks, there are no components like this on the assembly (besides possibly your heat sink solution and the avalon chips themselves ofc) you don't need 4 weeks to get an "economical" PCB. You only need more than ~1.5-2 weeks if you're going for absolute lowest price possible for mass production |
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Also - Open challenge to anyone capable of it
If you really want a coin where GPU mining is optimal and ASICs will never be produced for it -- please create a cryptographic hash function based around the rendering of Crysis
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You've just nailed my biggest fear exactly. If, due to lack of understanding, malice or unwillingness to learn, CA legislators found that the client is a basic tool of transmitting electronic funds which have the single purpose of converting to fiat then they could rule that everyone using a client is a money transmitter. Because of the high cost of entry (licensure) Bitcoin would become illegal for all but the wealthy. The EFT subset called ACH itself isn't fiat but it represents fiat as a system of credits and debits transmitted electronically. It only becomes fiat at the end of its journey at the other end of the transaction. What would happen if they look at the system and say, "well you have just invented another version of ACH and you need to be licensed for that. We believe that's stupid because we see the small economy and that we can buy something using only Bitcoin so it's distinct from a fiat transfer system but what will legislators believe. The bad news is that even this community values Bitcoin against the US dollar and is fixated on "what Bitcoin is worth today."
The fact is this may happen. I personally don't think it will but it might. We should prepare for it just in case. Ruling that Bitcoin client is illegal or whatever would result in the same as ruling BitTorrent clients are illegal or whatever. People would just laugh. Bittorent doesn't transmit money, it transmits files. If they want to they can rule * Anyone using bitcoin is a money transmitter * Anyone who mines a block assists in the transmission of money |
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Altcoins have a great purpose : Do you think the bitcoin blockchain should be responsible for EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION ANYONE WANTS TO DO ONLINE?
If you're moving 50 cents worth of coins, it's a waste of blockchain space to do it on bitcoin. And some day transaction fees might make it a bad/dumb idea to move small amounts of money when the TX fee required is large
to this end there is purpose for at least one alt coin.
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Why don't you let the free market decide?
Where did I call for the government to ban any coin? "Free market" doesn't mean "freedom from criticism" or "freedom from backlash". I am calling for members of your beloved free market to give the public proper information. not possible.
every asic owner would continue hashing sha because of their investment cost. and we all know asic hash > gpu hash.
who would mine the scrypt fork if they're already doing ltc? "If necessary" means "if SHA256 is completely broken to the point of not securing the blockchain" which is the only real reason that one would desire scrypt. ASIC owners have no ROI if Bitcoins are worth nothing. if sha 256 is broken. the the blockchain unsecured. then the coin is dead. nobody would even bothering forking it to scrypt if there is already an existing alternative that is exactly the same but not broken and without any early adoptee incentive. You're absolutely right. All of the merchants, users, miners, and holders of Bitcoin, a currency with more than a billion dollar market cap, will just say "It was a nice try guys. It's a shame it didn't work out." instead of making a simple and easy change to get the blockchain running again. Don't be silly. It's more like "What do you think the value of gold would be if Alchemy was real and you could turn lead into gold" 0$, because it has no scarcity. |
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What the hell is a "System Administrator of a virtual currency"
Do they mean to say the developers?
"Those who are intermediaries
in the transfer of virtual currencies from one person to
another person, or to another location, are money transmitters that must register with FinCEN as
MSBs, unless an exception applies"
So that's exchanges.
Nothing about miners. Nothing about mining. Nothing about selling coins for USD$. Absolutely zero technical knowledge, merit, insight, or intelligence. Exchanges are regulated and fulfill the KYC/ etc laws.
Lots of Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse, though.
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Even for slightly interesting coins like PPC and LTC, any improvements they make that prove to be useful can be implemented into Bitcoin if necessary.
How do you think you'd implement scrypt in bitcoin? |
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Based on the rapidly balooning hashrate for litecoin, and the facts that
1. 95% of GPU miners switched to litecoin weeks if not months ago (as it has _LONG_ been more profitable than BTC for GPU miners)
2. Only a complete idiot would continue buying GPUs to mine anything
it's possible that someone has developed an FPGA or ASIC for mining scrypt coins, but is adding hashrate in such a way as to disguise this fact. It doesn't make $/kWh to buy GPU miners for scrypt coins anymore.
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Wow... sorta stunned that Avalon is gonna send out the chip orders before their 3 month delayed batch 3. That's incredibly lame. I thought it was a no-brainer that they would ship stuff out in the order that they received their orders. I wasn't really too upset with the big delay shipping batch 3, the ROI still looked fine, and delays are what make ASICs ASICs. But now that my ROI is pretty much sunk...really sucks...while folks ordering months after me at the same company are in a better position   Avalon isn't assembling anything with the chips. They ship directly from TSMC (or the packager) to whoever ordered the 10k batch. It has nothing to do with and does not tie up Avalon's own PCB assembly production for their Miners in batch #2/3 |
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I bought a number of extra PICs just in case and possibly for future builds.
For DIY users i can provide some PIC16LF1459-I/SS if they cannot source it
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I am worried with the availabilities of microchip PIC16LF1459-I/SS. Microchip information PIC16LF1459-I/SS Estimated Availability: 05-Aug-2013
I think we would have to consider the possibility of alternatives or change package.
You can also use the PIC16LF1459-E/SS. The only difference appears to be wider operating temperature range. (-55C to +125C v.s. -55C to +85C) BkkCoins has also promised a QFN version of the board which will use PIC16LF1459-I/ML. But you're right, the PIC is going to be the big bottleneck in this operation. With the number of chips ordered from Avalon, if only half get used in K16s, we're looking at a need for 14k+ PICs. That's not a huge volume to the manufacturer though, it's just up to whatever their lead time is. Also - is there any (practical) limit to how many k16's can be chained and controlled by a single computer running cgminer? |
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Hello BkkCoins
I am worried with the availabilities of microchip PIC16LF1459-I/SS. Microchip information PIC16LF1459-I/SS Estimated Availability: 05-Aug-2013
I think we would have to consider the possibility of alternatives or change package.
What do you think?
Thanks
Cheers!!
I ordered this from the manufacturer about a week ago and the lead time was 2 weeks For sure board price is connected with size.
Not that drastic though. What about adding another regulator and keeping everything else the same? Seems to be the easiest, all the supplies are tied together, right? Well correction, the easiest is just populate ~14 of the chips and make more pcb assemblies. |
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I am an engineer with a background in aerodynamics/fluids and am capable of performing Heat/CFD simulations. Is there any way I can contribute to the heat sink/dissipation design. I can't promise anything but I can try if I had more understanding of what the goals/design are.
Goal: Keep shit cool, lol. Im sure you could grab the component measurements off the net or make a rough estimate based on the PCB pictures shown in the thread and make a rough, scalable design. I need to know how cool. I need estimates of heat generation of the chips (at least) and possibly the other components on the board. Fan or no fan? Stock components or custom (for the heat sink)? etc. Only the Avalon chips should require heatsinking. They are QFN chips with a thermal pad, each generating a few watts of heat. The pad solders to a PCB pad with many thermal vias, and then the heatsink is mounted on the opposite side. The general plan i have seen from all PCB assemblies is to use one heatsink that covers the entire or almost the entire board. I don't think any of the designs have needed fans thus far but i'm not sure if they've actually been tested I don't think any stock heatsinks work with this, but it might be possible to find one that fits the square area and then CNC drill (or by hand) the 4x mounting locations for the K16 board. I'm trying to figure out a good way to do heatsinking as well, it's currently a single point of failure with sourcing (oh, and the thermal resistance to the top surface of the chip is massive because of the insulating material in the chip/carrier, so adding heatsinking onto the chips themselves wouldn't help) |
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