Instead of escrow, why not use multisignature? Its easy to do on blockchain.info: https://blockchain.info/wallet/escrowNo risk of the escrow party running off with the money, losing his laptop or getting killed in a carcrash. You just need an independent third party to sign, and if all goes well, he doesnt have to do anything. |
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The golden nonce chip is able to broken into 4 pieces Now I'm no expert but that statement seems to be way out there. I'm sure if you slam it with a hammer you can get a hundred pieces. Or are you saying you designed it as some sort of breakable chip? Any examples of something like that currently existing? They are using 4 dies in one package. It would be relatively easy to add another product based on just 1 (or 2 or 3) dies. |
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There is nothing magical about today's price or $1000.
They are your coins, do with them as you please, but if you want to lock in some profits, my advice would be to sell proportionally to the price.
Lets say you have 100 coins, currently worth ~$350K. Pick some number you are comfortable risking. Lets say $200K. So you sell the difference, $150K worth of bitcoins now. If/when bitcoin continues to rise in price, keep selling so that your remaining coins are still worth $200K. That way, not matter how high bitcoin goes, you will never completely miss the boat, perhaps one day you will only have 1BTC left, but it would still be worth $200K. At the same time, no matter how low it drops, you would have locked in a decent chunk of profit.
ANyway, thats roughly how I do it, and have been doing since $100/BTC.
And sure, "had I known", it would have been better to keep those coins, but I dont regret my strategy one bit.
Absolutely. Please take the advice of someone who believes 350 * 100 = 350,000. Excellent Plan.  Right, so I missed a zero. That of course completely changes the logic  |
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There is nothing magical about today's price or $1000.
They are your coins, do with them as you please, but if you want to lock in some profits, my advice would be to sell proportionally to the price.
Lets say you have 100 coins, currently worth ~$350K. Pick some number you are comfortable risking. Lets say $200K. So you sell the difference, $150K worth of bitcoins now. If/when bitcoin continues to rise in price, keep selling so that your remaining coins are still worth $200K. That way, not matter how high bitcoin goes, you will never completely miss the boat, perhaps one day you will only have 1BTC left, but it would still be worth $200K. At the same time, no matter how low it drops, you would have locked in a decent chunk of profit.
ANyway, thats roughly how I do it, and have been doing since $100/BTC.
And sure, "had I known", it would have been better to keep those coins, but I dont regret my strategy one bit.
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BTW, if someone wants to sell me BTC at mtgox price via paypal, pm me.
No one sane would sell you bitcoins for paypal. THere is a reason you cant buy bitcoins for visa/pp. How would the seller know you wouldnt do a chargeback after receiving the coins ? |
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You should compare this to the price AVALON is currently selling it's four module miner 5.5 BTC for 110 GH/s at 750 W (twice as expensive for less hashrate and around 4 times the power consumption) No you shouldnt. I guess this is one of the great miner fallacies, comparing mining hardware to each other rather than judging it by itself on its profitability. Its not because miner A is an even worse deal than miner B, that the latter is a good deal. disclaimer: Ive not done the math, so Im not saying these modules are not a good deal, just that it being better than other worthless deals doesnt make it a good one. |
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Besides thermal issues, probably the main reason for the huge package is the requirement to reduce the substrate resistance as much as possible.
Just imagine the overall current flowing to the die (or 4 dies if you like) is easily above 120A (@ 0.7V).
If you want to realize a substrate voltage drop below 100 mV, the substrate resistance must be below 0.8 mOhm, which requires a lot of parallel copper connections (and copper vias) resulting in big substrate area.
You should have told that to hashfast a month ago |
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I know it's very late in this whole ordeal, but I can't find anyone else mentioning it in this thread: ghash.io shows the ongoing hashing of someone that bough GHS on cex.io. https://cex.io/faq - just check the first answer in Mining related questions. So labcoin just purchased 10,000GHS and made us believe it was their own hardware. And since today the hashing is 0, probably because it was sold?! I dont think so. I tried buying 1GH just to see what happens, it didnt show up as workers in the account page. |
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The risk of failure was certainly higher as it was with a lot of unknowns. So, how did Labcoin manage to fail?
You can wonder if it did fail. If your measure of success is alberto's wallet, it did not. Anyway, my best guess of what happened; howard wang really did have a design for a 180nm chip, it may even have 'taped out' at his university test fab, but it was a crappy design on an obsolete process, and even if they did manufacture some wafers, he chose an incorrect package (perhaps also packaged at the university?). Somehow Howard got in touch with Alberto and/or fabrizio who jumped on the opportunity to raise money for a 130 and 65nm variant without knowing a thing about the business and without really caring if it would work or not. Designing and deploying an asic is not a walk in the park, Howard didnt have the required skills, no experience with any process other than the 180nm, so they "hired" theseven, who doesnt possess the needed skills either. Alberto was told they needed a design kit from TSMC to do the physical layout for a more advanced process (130nm). TSMC doesnt just hand those out, they cost money and require signing an NDA by an actual company. Alberto tried using his brother in law's shell company for that, TSMC didnt buy it. Thats probably where they gave up and decided to IPO to get funds, buy some external hashing power and keep up the charade. Or perhaps that is where Alberto only really got involved, until then it might have been a bit naive but genuine attempt by howard and fabrizio. |
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people were calling AM scam at the very beginning
In fairness, AM could well have been a scam. The fact Friedcat was anonymous was one of the main reasons I decided not to invest longterm (I did flip some shares for moderate profit). That said, Friedcat already had a trackrecord on this forum managing other IPOs, his ID was verified on GLSBE, the businessplan he proposed was completely credible and demonstrated some competence, the amount to be raised was fairly humble. He was pioneering, not playing copycat. I always considered it one of the only bitcoin assets that, although risky, had credible potential. |
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Then just multiply your potential profit with the extreme low probability its not a scam and you can see why its definitely stupid to "invest" in it.
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I'm still not sure how relevant that is, as the heat dissipates through the entire die, and via the package and board, into the cooling system... so its the total heat generated thats important and I'm not sure how relevant the spot power is... though maybe I'm missing something. Silicon isnt the best conductor of heat (nor the worst); so yes heat spreads across the die, but its thermal conductivity is about half that of a cheap aluminum heatspreader and closer to 1% of that of a copper heatpipe. anyway, we talk in averages over the 'package' that needs to be 'cooled'... and an intel chip has a TDP of 125 Watts, which pretty much means that the entire package, at most, will generate 125 Watts of power (aka Heat) output, at its maximum usage... whereas these bitcoin mining chips (both hashfasts and cointerras) will generate 300 watts of power, ALL OF THE TIME. And if we overclock them, which I'm pretty sure we will all do, they will no doubt hit 350 or maybe even more watts per chip ! A bitcoin mining chip will use a LOT more power, and require much better cooling, than a regular intel chip.
even the heavily over clocked and over-volted intel chips that have been tweaked by enthusiasts, probably don't draw 350 watts of power, 24/7/365 ! thats my point. Sure, the total cooling requirements for the entire bitcoin machine will generally be higher. But the lower your thermal density of the chips, the easier it is to cope with that. Just look in the KnC thread; people are disconnecting the case fans and blocking half the chip cooler because for some weird reason, they perform better when running slightly warmer. But even without case fans, and half blocked coolers (which by default are running low speed fans), these 100-150W chips are running pretty darn cool (50-60C). If you'd try the same with an Intel CPU you would get a very different result. i also think its questionable whether there's any parts of an intel chip that will toggle faster, in a denser layout than a hashing core... as almost all of the core, toggles almost every cycle.. thus how does it get any more power consumptive than that? Im going to pass on this question, though I would be interested in hearing the answer. Fact is intel (amd, whatever) cpu's achieve a far far higher thermal density in their cores (especially ALU's and FP units) than any bitcoin asic. Part of this might be due to higher clockspeeds (and in some cases, double pumped alu's). Core voltage of CPU's is also higher, but combined Im not sure thats enough to explain the difference. So I do wonder if it is not a sign of better optimization. |
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i suspect bitcoin asics.. particularly those from cointerra and hashfast, will be amongst the highest wattage per mm that you would consider.. since they're both designed to be clocked at near the max... and scale up or down depending on thermals. they're both probably designed to have a TDP of 250+ watts !
Dont know CT provided specs, but IIRC, hashfast uses 4 ~80mm˛ dies per chip. ~65W per 80mm˛ die is pretty low thermal density compared to many cpu's and gpu's, and thats even ignoring the hotspot issue. Now I do wonder if this is because these chips arent nearly as well optimized as, say x86 chips, or if its just because of the workload, but as it is, cooling those chips is "simple" compared to the highend x86 world. |
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Actually, PC cooling is not designed to cope with maximum theoretical load. Its designed to cope with application loads. There is a substantial difference, and thats what TDP is for (or worse, ACP if you are called AMD). The maximum power consumption of almost all CPUs and GPUs is above TDP, but no real world applications will sustain this power draw and your system usually doesnt melt even when running a thermal virus (think furmark) because the CPU/GPU will throttle if need be.
A well designed bitcoin asic would act much like a thermal virus, running as close to maximum power draw as possible, yet throttling a bitcoin asic is about the last thing you would want to do, except when there is cooling failure.
That said, per watt, cooling a bitcoin asic is in all likelihood, easier than cooling a highend cpu or gpu, because the thermal density of hotspots is substantially lower. A typical desktop cpu will have hotspots consuming 80-90% of the chip's TDP in an area no bigger than ~5% of the die, think needle tip.
While bitcoin asics overall may have a comparable "tdp" per mm˛, the power consumption will be much more homogeneous across the entire die and hotspots will have a far lower thermal density than CPUs.
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This is sad even at almost $400/bitcoin you barley make anything, completely retarded to buy any of these overpriced pieces of shit.
WHAT? You must be doing something wrong then.... Ive been hashing the 3 saturns since september 15th,*edit.. (one on the 11th, two on the 18th)which is just over three weeks, and they have Produced enough BTC to buy 2 Nov. Jupiters, which is about 150% more hashpower than I currently have...IF they are still 550GH/s devices... which I'm sure they won't be. If you can get more hashpower than the diff increase, your income will grow instead of diminish.... I still have a week left to hit the one month mark, which is about how long it has been taking for the diff to double... and right now, the diff increase is stalled! So I am Way ahead of the game so far IMHO. Out of curiosity, have you sold every bitcoin you mined pretty much instantly at whatever the price that day, or is your revenue still in BTC and its dollar value purely theoretical, based on current/future BTC exchange rate? |
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People shouldn't assume it is a slam dunk super duper money maker.
Cooling aside, don't forget the infrastructure side of things. Assuming the plan is at least half baked and nothing happens to Bitcoin, this will be a super "super duper money maker". The first system is tested with gen1 blades and basically just sits there waiting for something more powerful to come up. When AM gets new hardware, they can simply deploy the new boards where the 5000 gen1 blades are now sitting, the doc states they can handle the power and heat. The factory is probably a stone throw away from the farm. They don't even need to touch a power supply or LAN cable. That's how cloud hardware should be built IMHO. If truly mobile, they could populate the farm at a factory and move it to the data center without work being done there. Or just park the container near a power feed and plugin an internet connection. This process can be repeated as many times as needed till the end-game. Not sure on the 40nm or 28nm specs, but if it would be anything like KNC Jupiter (4 boards per 550GH/s unit?) they'd be replacing more than 5000*10.7Gh/s with over 678,500 GH/s within a matter of days or even hours (assuming they have enough Chinese factory workers to stick 5000 boards into backplanes). They don't even need to install a single power supply or LAN cable, it's already there. Who else could do that, and how? As the document said, "its implications go beyond this simple description". I think the question is not if it happens, it is when it happens. For all we know, if the container means anything there could be multiple locations doing the same thing at the same time. You make it sound as if plugging in power supplies and lan cables is the tricky and expensive part, while producing 28nm chips is the cheap and easy part. You may want to rethink that. To answer your hypothetical question: KnC could do that, their datacenter is right next to their assembly plant, Cointerra claim they will be able to do that. But even if the datacenter is at the other part of the globe, you are only shaving off a few days, possibly weeks of deployment time, while AM is many months behind the competition. |
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The only accurate calculators are the ones that tell you how much you will mine at current difficulty.
They are accurate for about 5-6 days on average. If your investment horizon is that short, by all means use them. After those 6 days, they are far more inaccurate than all the ones that predict eternal exponential growth. |
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Nice, you can do something like cex.io.... since cex.io KWH price is way higher then yours... you should be more profitable ...
At this point, IM not interested in offering such a service. Investment in mining equipment would be huge, full of risk and I dont believe it to be profitable. So either I would have to take a huge financial risk myself, or sell 'preorders" of something that I believe will be a net loss to my customers. Once the network stabilizes at least somewhat and mining becomes more predictable, mining hardware more readily available, I may revise that, and offer hosted hardware (that is ready to hash in the datacenter), but certainly not right now. |
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Next gen will have to be cheaper and waaay faster.. . Its not going to be cheaper for them to produce (per GH), but thats not needed yet either. Bulk silicon cost for 28nm asics <100mm˛ is ~$7-8 (multiply x4 for 4 dies per chip and a few dollar for packaging). Marginal production cost of a 20nm wafer is likely 2-3x higher, so even per GH, its probably roughly the same, perhaps even more expensive. But at those prices, its easy to make it "waay faster" and still have stellar margins, by just including more or bigger chips. Key issue IMO is power efficiency. Those finfet transistors appear to have great potential. If they could double power efficiency (compared to undervolted 28nm chips), it may be worth the NRE. Simply put, with half the electricity consumption per GH, the network tolerates twice as many GH mining at marginal profitability. |
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Almost got a heart attack when my (watch only) wallet showed 0 BTC
but this error flashed by
"Error Contacting Server. Using Local Wallet Cache."
Something down?
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