Well none of my rigs have wallets, not sure why anyone would put a bitcoin client on their mining rig.

I don't claim to understand how it would work, I just seem to remember pirate suggesting this was a possibility when he first started this.

Video rendering is certainly an application which would be applicable. Especially for 5970's or other cards with 2GB of ram or more.

Has pirate made any progress on trying to get leased work for other applications beside bitcoin mining?

I really believe gpumax would take off if there was leased work for things like rendering, password cracking, scientific research, etc. it would also help people with large farms hedge if bitcoin ever had any issues.

Anyone wanting to sell a Sapphire 5970 please PM me.

I've wondered if FPGA's even make sense considering how rapidly they are developing. ASIC is surely an economic dead end for miners as p4man has stated. CPU's and GPU's are well established technologies which have not undergone gigantic performance leaps, especially GPU's when you consider the 5970 is only surpassed in efficiency by a 7970 and not by a very wide margin. We're talking a card which came out 2 generations before the 7970 and over 2 1/2 years ago.

Does anyone believe FPGA devices won't be far superior to current ones in even 6 months and at lower prices? Also factor in how easy it is to add an FPGA to a regular desktop as compared to tweaking and dealing with GPU's ?(overclocking, maximizing electrical efficiency, etc.) FPGA's are just so plug and play that someone with limited computer skills is far more likely to consider buying and installing one since they can just plug it into their home computer and go.

The electricity cost was a major variable cost which acted as a sort of governor combined with a mature technology(GPU's) that limited how many people could obtain, implement and mine profitably with it.

I can't understand how at the very least FPGA's and ASIC won't stall the total hashrate of the network at some point if people act rationally in purchasing these.

What is the current ROI on early versions of the x6500, icarus or ztex boards ?

How many of these boards can we expect to run on a single molex from an ATX PSU ? I have seasonic 1250 golds, so I hope they can run several of these plus a few 5970's. Could we expect to run like 3 5970's on the PCI E connectors and then 4-5 of these on the molex connectors and then maybe 2 on the extra PCI-E ?

I would like to run rigs with 3 5970's and 6-8 Quad FPGA's for a while, per rig.

Hmmm, 7-8.5 GH/s per rig at maybe 1100-1200 watts would be sweet.

This might get me to 40 GH/s...

I can't wait to get mine. I bought simply to support these guys because I think they are the most professional players in the FPGA market. I respect many other folks here for what they have done, but I just believe these guys are going to blow everyone away once they get a handle on bitcoin specific development.

Besides, they said June and they shipped one before June 1st, that is service.

Held for jaybones until monday 5/28/2012.

15 btc shipped would work. PM me if you want them.

I have a bunch of new and used PCIe extenders. I would like to just sell them for bitcoins to the people on this forum.
3 of these are shielded with aluminum foil.

For the regular x16/x16 I am asking 1btc for the extender and 1btc shipping. Of course if you want more than 1, the shipping will remain at just 1btc.

For the molex powered x16/x16 I am asking 2btc for the extender and 1 btc shipping. Same as above if you order more than 1 we keep total shipping at 1btc.

PM me if you're interested.

It just doesn't seem right to me that the market suddenly went stable within a 4.8 - 5.2 range over the past 4-5 months when it has NEVER been that stable before.

Something isn't right.

I agree with a modular design that can be sold and then upgraded or added to. The $15,000 BFL entry point is just focking stupid and actually it's bullshit because it kills the democratic/decentralized component of mining. You are now completely pushing out small scale miners and any form of ingenuity. This $15,000 bullshit is just a money box and will be worth .50 if bitcoin goes to shit. It's the nuclear weapon of bitcoin, once it exists you just up the ante too much and screw everyone who can't afford one.

If you guys can produce a 4-5 Gh/s base product which could be upgraded to 20-25 with additional modules added to the unit over time that would be ideal.

Please beat out BFL so we can piss on their poor business practices and customer service.  Mining is speculative enough without being forced to put out your money for months in advance and then still get delayed.

Got off the phone with support today and they said they were sending me a 5970 for my 5970 RMA, so hopefully this will be true for others. I'll follow-up if I actually get one.

Also, I realize difficulty doesn't effect supply as the same amount of coins are always created until reward halving occurs.

Just saying this can be a hell of a squeeze for miners.

FPGA's just don't make any sense due to how quickly the technology is developing. It has not even come close to being fully adapted for mining from what I can tell. So yes tech changes rapidly, but nothing changes more rapidly than it does in the very early phase. How much has happened to miners for gpus to increase gpu efficiency lately ? Not much because the people writing the miners have maxed it out..

I expect quad FPGA boards to be doing 1.2 GH/s and cost 700-800 bucks in 3-4 months.

This is bullshit, why the hell isn't bitcoin following the basic laws of supply and demand ?

What the hell is going on with the hashrate ? It can't be FPGA's yet and why the hell would people be throwing money at GPU's right now?

just weird.

Seems very odd though we are essentially stuck at $5. It's nice to see some stability, but it's kind of weird considering difficulty has gone up close to 50% this year. BTC is not responding to supply and demand curves...lol. Although maybe we have reached an equilibrium in the speculator market.

As a miner I'd like to see the coin follow economic fundamentals more closely.

I have to wonder what the logic is here. Have people done a true and thorough economic analysis on these? If you take into account their cost, salvage value and the rapid development of the technology, it looks like people are just paying to be beta testers.

It seems to me that newer boards are coming out almost weekly at this point and some obviously larger players are entering the market. On the current trajectory it looks like we will see boards with 4 chips doing 1000-1200 mhash for probably 600 dollars by year end. Considering the average ROI on most of these is around one year, won't the current boards be obsolete by then ? I can see boards in one year doing 3+ Ghash for around $1000.

Thoughts?

You can try, but you're unlikely to get an RMA from diamond. For sure I can tell you that if you registered it with them and put ebay as the vendor they will not honor the warranty. Ebay people who say warranty should get the scam label.

Also, diamond doesn't have any 5970's I heard they are offering a 6970, which is bullshit or making you pay for a 7970, which is also bullshit.

XFX gave me a 6990 which looked brand new for a 5970 I RMA'd with them.

I have a diamond RMA in  process right now and will post in this section when i hear back.

Thanks for the responses so far. I appreciate the dialogue to help me stimulate ideas.

It would be great if someone could provide me with some research level sources to help me back up some of these claims as there is VERY little research on the subject in traditional databases.White papers would be great as well.

I was hoping to get some developers to chime in or point me to some resources as this would help with the credibility of my paper. I'm not suggesting Hopkins is waiting for this paper to make any consideration of bitcoin, just simply that I'm hoping to do a solid job on the paper and it will be in the hands of a reputable economist(my professor). Who knows, if I do a decent enough job he might discuss it with his peers.

Well my deadline is mid June, so when I'm done I'll try to post the result.

Keep the responses coming!

Thanks again.

Thanks, but yeah I'm already stuck with this topic. So the key element is to discuss potential savings with bitcoin's low transaction costs. Also, to consider the efficiency for healthcare providers and especially hospitals or healthcare systems. It could be a tremendous advantage for hospitals to not have to worry about chargebacks, bounced checks, etc. Hospitals still take a considerable amount of payments by check and I know they get a fair amount of insufficient funds.

I see these aspects of bitcoin as major advantages:

1. Immediate payment - credit cards take at least 24 hours to clear
2. Reduced fraud - no fraudulent cc payments and the ability to possibly stop taking checks
3. Reduced fees - credit cards take a much higher percentage of each transaction
4. Reduced infrastructure - no more cc terminals, use pre-existing computer systems to process payments

Possible liabilities:

1. Security risk - someone gains access to hospital account or patient's bitcoin wallet
2. How much will bitcoin transaction fees rise and will this make smaller transactions more expensive?
3. Adoption - Will consumers adopt this system and can we make it easier for average users rather quickly if a large healthcare system wanted to use bitcoin?
4. Currency conversion - Hospitals will want to convert to local currency and I believe there are systems already which can calculate bitcoin value at the time of payment and convert instantly.
    Now what about consumers? Can they get the same service and simply have an exchange/payment system linked to their fiat currency account and make instant conversion based payments at current market value? Will bitcoin pricing stabilize enough that consumers would feel comfortable holding bitcoins? Will these instant conversion services raise the whole transaction cost past credit card fees?