Whether you do it or not, I have a perfect name for your project:

cracking_pots@home

.

I'm not really buying the "it does work" explanation. This is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_gate topology, the equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_base for BJTs and common-grid for vacuum tubes.

The technically valid applications of this topology are extremely rare. By pure probability the more likely explanations are non-technical:

1) designer went mad
2) unintentional mistake in the schematics
3) intentional mistake in the schematics (to confuse copiers or to track the copiers)
4) some other things that I can't think of right now

All of them are more probable than a valid technical reason.

Ok, so I have bad memory for names and faces, but reasonably good one for acronyms. Check out "NEBS Level 3".

I'm going to give just a Wikipedia link for starters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Equipment-Building_System .

Please read that and if interested follow the links. You'll find plenty of examples of no-bullshit ways to rack up electronic equipment meant to be operated continuously. I understand that Bitcoin mine is not the same as telecommunication central office. Anyone reasonably intelligent would be able to decide for themselves which of the telco requirements don't apply to coin mine.

Its not just Paypal security that's wrong here.

Think of MTTR, Mean Time To Repair/Replace in case of any equipment failure. How many screws need to be untied/tied? Is it possible to replace just a single unit without taking offline the whole shelf?

It seriously like anti-engineering as far as cost of operations.

Thanks for your help.


Yeah, money laundering through terribly overpriced network installations is still the thing. It used to be done mostly by reshipping unused obsolete (or nearly obsolete) Cisco equipment with the original price at the time of the technology introduction. At the low end of price spectrum I remember Cisco color-coded Cat5 (not Cat5e) 1 meter patch cables for approximately $25 each. Nowadays Cisco is actively fighting those dodgy resellers.

They are now transitioning do doing dodgy billing on digital audio-video installations. Some of those examples ultra-neat cabling jobs shown in magazines are in fact not computing installations but A/V installations serving digitized movies locally for residences or production facilities.

I wish I had better memory for people names and faces. But the sales commissions for the people with right connections are awesome, e.g. from 50% to 75% or even 90%.


I'm not trying to begrudge you of your markup. You are free to charge what the market bears. I also understand what were the NRE costs for the ASIC versus NRE effort for your cases. The ultra-neat-freak segment of the custom hardware installation market is such an obvious place for various frauds. Maybe the manufacturers aren't the most interesting, probably the buyers and the salespeople are. Just don't be surprised if some investigative journalist shows up near your production facility.

The bottommost picture, with 20 racks in the perspective view, reminds me of strikingly similar interior photographs from some bankrupt datacenter facility financed with securities fraud. The pictures I've seen were much less uniform with the contents of their racks, meaning that racks were filled with a variety of equipment, but only 1/3 to 1/2 of the each rack was filled. I also remember that yellow circle with the pipe pointing down in the far view. Is this type of the arrangement some industry standard for the datacenter equipment?

I can't recall the company name. Maybe someone here saw it too and could refresh my memory?

I wanted to return our attention to the issues in this thread: truthfulness of the posters and the sanity of the posters. This thread seems to be mercifully free of any obvious attempts to scam/defraud. And the whole Bitcoin mining milieu is mercifully free of the dangers of physical harm

The "face to face" isn't like some dive bar with everyone drunk and armed. It is more like a courtroom "face to face" when the truth is most likely to win. Modern courtrooms are increasingly even using transparent barriers to allow the sides to speak the truth without risking physical harm.

The difference with the courtroom is that this board is anonymous. We don't get the benefit of a background checks for the prospective business partners. All that's left is hunches about the sanity and trustfulness.

Please everyone don't let themselves get intimidated with threats like "You wouldn't say that face to face!".

The skillful scammers are mostly gone from the Bitcoin mining, what we have now is a wave of unskilled desperadoes and self-deluded dreamers.

The opening post of aliashraf is a great modern example of a dreamer, very much like the 17th century Don Quixote "who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his sanity and decides to set out to revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world." All you need to do is replace "chivalry" with "Bitcoin" and "distributed". The main difference was that the original Don Quixote had his own horse and a down-to-earth servant named Sancho Pansa. aliashraf doesn't own a horse and is looking for at least five servants with their own horses.

The boisterous posts of Mr. Kashif is a good example a desperado, somebody who already tried and failed at getting technical education and relevant employment. His greatest motivator is probably shame he feels towards his parents who paid for his schooling.

To recapitulate and summarize: please don't let themselves get manipulated into not asking the important questions. But at the same time don't ask stupid questions. This isn't a real courtroom where everyone will be excused for asking an explanation of unfamiliar term. Here the conversation isn't live, anyone can put the unfamiliar term in the search box of their browser and skim first couple of returned results.

I want to sincerely thank you for the offer. Unfortunately for me I'm preoccupied with relocation and it is rather unlikely that I would be able to go to Santa Clara,CA,USA on the short notice.

It is too bad that as a senior technologist in storage system you are not allowed to discuss openly the write amplification issue that is affecting the modern file systems and DBMS a great deal. I do understand that those discussions could really be conducted under NDA or while maintaining an anonymity cover like Satoshi's Nakamoto's.

Uh, oh!

Apparently the SSD technology (Solid-State Drive) is still affected by the SSDD phenomenon (Same Shit, Different Day). I don't think you consciously bullshit in your post, you don't seem like a SSD salesman. You seem to be unaware of the fact that SSD devices are affected by almost exactly the same phenomenon: the write block size is smaller than the erase block size. I'm not going to get into details, just give the link to Wikipedia's writeup about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification .

I measured write amplification with some older release of Bitcoin on a range of storage devices. It was as high as 128. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to write a backend storage for Bitcoin with lower write amplification.

As far as commercial products the good way to start with open source is to research Linux's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Technology_Device . On the closed source front many products that ostensibly support only FAT and exFAT filesystems have appropriate optimizations in the code path that handles preallocated files of constant size.

The reason I'm writing all this is to see if there's any intelligent life left in Charles' Hoskinson's organization. I clearly can see that you are intelligent, if somewhat not-up-to-date. The question is still open about his org: it seems that it is just a marketing organization with absolutely no technical background. Lets see if they can post any intelligent followup.

How about a decent writeup for the technical and other knowledgeable people?

I took a quick look and it looks like some sort of confused mishmash:

1) authenticated data structures for local, private database? Why? The left hand doesn't trust the right hand? Multiple personality disorder? Just sensible error detection scheme should be enough to verify the database integrity.

2) it seems to have some optimizations for flash backing storage, but does it through a file-systems with unspecified limitations. A lot of flash-optimized software takes advantage of the fact that one way of writing (e.g. from zero to one) is very cheap whereas the opposite change (from one to zero) requires time-consuming block erase. Are you doing that? Explicitly naming the constraints would be very helpful.

3) Lost interest in further reading after the two above drawbacks.

There's an user here "jl777" (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=177323;sa=showPosts) and on other forums, that has a competing idea of database explicitly oriented for cryptocurrencies. He calls it "Iguana," but the problem is that he works alone, produces extremely hard to read code, and is in general hard to communicate with. Therefore he mostly gets ignored, both here and elsewhere, despite showing very promising results.

Are you similarly sponsoring financially a lone genius coder?

How about producing a couple of pages of introductory whitepaper, written at the level of B.Sc. or similar, that would explain why your mousetrap is better?

So what is the point? It is neither inverter nor amplifier. To convert push-pull output to open-drain output? Connecting that open-drain in series with the push-pull output? What for?

Also Q1-Q4 are two inverter pairs. They legitimately convert single-ended output to the balanced outputs. But they only have active pull-down. The pull-ups are resistors. Why using resistors instead of normal CMOS inverters with both pull-down and pull-up active?

I see signal integrity issues with all of those five elements. And they seem destined for off-board routing through a connector. Is that some sort of weird ESD protection by using cheap discrete transistors as sacrificial to protect rare/expensive integrated circuits?

Edit: spelling and US/English terminology fixes

The schematics look like art project, not a technical project. It seems like the preparer wasn't understanding what he was doing or for other reasons made strange mistakes. E.g. there is an n-channel device Q5 with gate tied directly to +3.3V.

I've seen electronic schematics prepared around 1960-1970 by a school dropout who was dictated by an engineer who was injured and blinded in an accident. They had similar completely incomprehensible mistakes. E.g. no sane technician or engineer would consistently spell "nM" for "nanometer".

It could also be a joke, because "Bitfury" is consistently spelled "Bitfurry".

I wish both of you (kilo17 & sidehack) all the best, but you've only expressed your intentions.

AFAIK kilo17's professional background is MD (medical doctor) in the USA. If that is true, then this is the most over-regulated and over-protected of all professions. You probably have very little experience in unregulated business and with sharks preying there.

I did quite a bit of consulting for the electronics companies set up by cardiologists, and let me pass to you advice of one of them: "admit to yourselves that we've been mollycoddled by the AMA and we have much to learn from those who work in other fields in the USA. Or even the same field, but internationally, with much less regulatory oversight."

In my opinion you (kilo17 & sidehack) need to obtain services and advice of some civil contract lawyer and private investigator. Lawyer would check the contracts and agreements you enter into. PI would check the background of the prospective partners and important customers. IIRC both of you already have experience with "promise and don't deliver" businessmen. That was comparatively cheap lesson compared to other "promise and steal" or "promise and sue" business operators.

Your good intentions will not protect you from scammers and extortionists.

Edit: cypherdoc is no longer posting on this forum. After his brief involvement with Hashfast he had to settle the lawsuits against him. You'll have to research this yourselves, I cannot post links.

It is good to have somebody knowledgeable post here about SDN. My comment to the above is that SDN is to the large extent a fancy packaging of the old-style GRE tunnels (Generic Routing Encapsulation), so the devices not explicitly supporting SDN can still be made to interoperate with them, because GRE was rolled out in late 1990-ies.

But I posted here to somehow constructively close this derail. The original problem was to have disjoint IPv4 subnets on a single LAN segment. If this LAN segment is under single administrative control it is best to support that using IPv4 aliasing. Windows fully supports it since NT4. Unix-like system supported IP aliasing even earlier, review the "man ifconfig". Depending on your actual configuration you may need to review and hand modify your routing table ("route" and "netstat -r"). Also be aware of possible ICMP redirect packets that could install temporary routes. With some careful configuration done you can even have more than one DHCP server running on the same LAN segment. Various DHCP exclusions/special identifiers will need to be set up to make that work correctly. Again, read the docs.

In the SOHO (Small Office Home Office) market segments using VLANs is really risky. The problems are:

0) previously mentioned botnet-hiding tricks in malware and various workarounds for those attacks in networking equipment/software sold in the SOHO segment.

1) lack of full hardware support for VLAN-tagged packets in many cheap network switches/routers. They tend to support VLANs through software exceptions that make them work much slower. The cheapest devices tend to have firmware/hardware cheats that not even fully work but pretend just enough to pass the "Compatible with Windows" tests administered by Microsoft.

2) color printers/copiers/scanners on the segment with VLAN tags are your worst enemy. Those devices always have secret police firmware to prevent printing/copying banknotes, not even the printer manufacturer has the source code and they cannot fix all the bugs.

In my experience helping various part-time small-network administrators IPv4 aliasing is a safer choice than VLAN tagging. If you insist on using VLANs then buy some old Cisco IOS router/switch just for the purpose of using it in debugging and troubleshooting, not in a normal production/operation. Cisco IOS is extremely complex but also there's lot of information for it available for free on the Internet. It is also extremely well debugged and has extremely good debugging/logging tools available.

Understood, VLANs aren't really rocket science. But they are also nowadays a history. With the exception of the USA true IPv4 globally-routable addresses are in acute shortage. Modern ISPs rarely provide "the Internet" with plain IPv4 technologies. Nowadays it is a mixture of PPPoE (8-byte tags instead of 4-byte tags in VLAN), MPLS (variable tag sizes) or by tunneling IPv4 in IPv6. So adding 4-byte VLAN tags to the "Internet" side is really pointless. It is much better to understand what is the "native" transport layer on the "Internet" side and configure everything else accordingly.

The reality of 2016 is that VLANs are now mostly botnet-hiding trick. Most of the past users of VLANs moved on to the more general and flexible SDNs (Software-Defined Networks).

I think that these days advising someone to learn configuring VLANs is like advising necromancy.

I now have a standard answer to those "one-man company" arguments. It is a old poem by some Russian poet:

Quote A lonely sail is flashing white Amidst the blue mist of the sea!... What does it seek in foreign lands? What did it leave behind at home?.. Waves heave, wind whistles, The mast, it bends and creaks... Alas, it seeks not happiness Nor happiness does it escape! Below, a current azure bright, Above, a golden ray of sun... Rebellious, it seeks out a storm As if in storms it could find peace!

Quote Белеет парус одинокий В тумане моря голубом!.. Что ищет он в стране далекой? Что кинул он в краю родном?..   Играют волны - ветер свищет, И мачта гнется и скрыпит... Увы, - он счастия не ищет И не от счастия бежит! Под ним струя светлей лазури, Над ним луч солнца золотой... А он, мятежный, просит бури, Как будто в бурях есть покой!

Perish the thought!

VLANs aren't a consumer-level concept. I would argue that they even aren't business-level concept unless the business has several hundred employees or at least one CCIE (or equivalent) network administrators.

They are also emerging as a new way of hiding malware botnets, several better network security devices (both high-end and low-end) are flagging VLAN-tagged traffic as intrusions.

Also, VLAN-tagged frames have unfortunate property of causing crashes or malfunctions in otherwise quite reliably working network hardware. This includes Intel which was co-architecting the current VLAN standards! Some people more paranoid than myself even have an opinion that the malfunctions/crashes/malware flagging is the tactic to increase sales by "planned obsolescence". From my recent memory the business class Samsung printer/copiers/scanners have particularly nasty bugs cased by the presence of VLAN-tagged frames.

Secrets?

Ultimate answer is "semi-smart contracts and SADOs"?

Wrong!

The Ultimate Answer is 42.

I haven't looked into details, but this device doesn't look like it would be suitable for coin mining. In this application the key functionality is asynchronous notification from the device to the controller that the golden nonce has been found or that the nonce range search has ended. It is non-trivial to do it fast, reliably and correctly. I have no experience with this particular interface, but I've tested many, many similar ones over the years. Few of them meet the the 3 requirements stated earlier. Most of them are barely working as event inputs and require tight polling loops. They are typically designed for output or for bulk streaming input.

Interestingly the various "trigger" devices used in music production work very well, I guess the musicians are particularly sensitive to have the computer really work on a cue from a human, not vice-versa.

Interestingly, bitfury who is an excellent engineer, proposed earlier an IP-based mining protocol that was susceptible to exactly this failure mode. I'll add a link once I find it.

Edit: I've found it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=84791.0

I'm reading this post as implicitly stating that you are going to have some people helping you with procurement, manufacture and distribution. So it won't be "sidehack"-alone project, but some other folks will be working closely with you.

In that case get one of those people interested in verifying how to apply regular bank financing in your project. The regular way for small businesses to manufacture made-to-order stuff is via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_credit . The buyers will not be able to gratuitously back out of orders and you will be able to order parts and components on the regular commercial net terms instead of prepaying for them.

The Wikipedia article I linked is not a good description of the concept. It is best to find somebody who isn't afraid to step into the branch and directly talk to somebody in merchant services. I presume that "GekkoScience" is an actual proper registered business entity and not just and expense code on sidehack's personal bank account. Also, the letters of credit require funding, which would fall onto hand of the group buy organizers, but it is much easier to set up than receiving and holding letters of credit.