Seems like the difficulty implementation of Stratum is causing slight problems with BAMT. Is this due to multiple miners running under the same worker name? Does Stratum know there are more that one worker per name? Just trying to figure some things out.
ckolivas hope all is well now. Glad to hear you will be implementing Stratum. BTW just saw your sig line for the first time. That's some funny shit!
Any success? are you using phoenix? |
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WARNING
BFL CUSTOMERS The CEO of Butterfly Labs is a convicted felon (25M USD worth of mail fraud.) BFL hid this fact from its customers. (As they knew how the silly internet would react to this information.) The information here presented would predictably make it much harder from BFL to acquire huge amounts of money through pre-orders. (Yes, they have successfully taken in huge amounts of pre-paid pre-orders on untested, unreleased products, as can be easily verified.) This post aims to collate the relevant, publicly available information and present it in a concise, readable format.
A concise summary of evidence:(1) Chris Vleisides is the President/Director of Butterfly Labs Inc:
(2) Mr. Vleisides and associates orchestrated a massive mail order scam that ran from 1990 to 2006, causing a loss of at least 19M USD out of the ~25M USD invested in the scheme:Sonny Chris Vleisides, 39, previously of Kansas City, MO was arrested in 2007 and held two years in Italy before he was extradited to the United States. Vleisides was sentenced to 14 months in prison followed by three years supervised release after pleading to one count of mail fraud. https://postalinspectors.uspis.gov/radDocs/PressRoom/nr110114.htmSonny Vleisides is associated with BFL and it's the same Sonny listed in the case documents. He was involved in off shore gaming in the capacity of selling and providing software engineering to companies that did the actual offshore gaming (there is even a US patent application for the process). The industry came under attack (as we all remember) around that time, and Mr. Vleisides was caught up in the process as well as a good portion of the industry based in Costa Rica. Although this may be cause for concern to some, the fact is that we're a robust company with 22 employees. One of them has a colorful background in offshore libertarianism. If I thought there was even the possibility of something unsavory going on within BFL, you can rest assured I would a) not be part of it and b) would let everyone know it. The reality is, we are legitimate, we have released revolutionary products and we are going to release more revolutionary products. I was made aware of this back story prior to my employment and I evaluated it and concluded that it was immaterial to the business at hand and thus joined BFL. There was nothing hidden from me and Sonny has always answered questions and been completely open about his past, but I think we can all agree that it's not something you just announce to the world. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=109349.msg1202784#msg1202784Inaba is an employee of Butterfly Labs Inc, who posts on these forums under the names inaba and BFL_Josh. (4) The mechanics of the scam, per DOJ Agent testimony: A joint investigation involving the IRS-CID and the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), revealed that from at least 1990 through July 2006, SONNY VLEISIDES, James Ray Houston, Dennis Emmett, William Cloud, Henry Walther, Scott Henry Walther, and others committed a massive international lottery scam using the following company names: Shamrock Agency, German Swiss Group, World Expert Fund, Mutual Medical Insurance Co, Old Amsterdam Trust Co, Euro American Fax Co, European Union Commission, EU American Payment Co, Global Search Network, North American Foreign Payments Services, Wor'dwide Verification Service, and others. VLEISIDES ran the scheme along with Houston and Emmett. VLEISIDES, Houston and Emmett, who were all located in Costa Rica, worked with mailing houses which, at the direction of VLEISIDES, Houston, and Emmett, sent out tens of thousands of mailings to victims in the United States, many of whom were elderly. The mailings contained false statements, half truths, and omissions, and induced the victims to participate in various international lotteries, falsely stating that if the victims participated, they were guaranteed to win or had a very good chance to win. The mailings directed the victims to send their money to Ireland, at d the Netherlands, among other locations, where William Cloud had set up addresses with commercial mail receiving agencies and individuals to forward the money, eventually, back to the United States. After receipt at the commercial mail receiving agencies, the victims' money was sent to Henry Walther, who, along with his son Scott Henry Walther, deposited the money into various bank accounts and then distributed it as directed by VLEISIDES, Houston, and Emmett. Some of the money was spent on furthering the criminal activity. Some of the money was paid out to victims in small-dollar checks that the co-schemers misrepresented to be lottery winnings. The rest of the money was paid out to the co-schemers and others for their own use. VLEISIDES and the other defendants did not buy any lottery tickets, and the vast majority of the victims lost the money they sent. The total loss from the scheme is in excess of $19 million. ... An analysis was done on approximately twenty of the bank accounts established in the United States at the direction of VLEISIDES and his co-schemers. The analysis revealed, in summary, that the victims' money was first deposited into accounts established by the co-schemers at numerous banks in accounts with names that sound like official lotteries: SHAMROCK AGENCY, WORLD EXPERT, OLD AMSTERDAM, GERMAN SWISS, and EUC. (Hereinafter, accounts at this first layer will be referred to as "Deposit Accounts.") The co-schemers obtained over $19 million from tens of thousands of victims and deposited them into these accounts. After the co-schemers deposited the victims' money into the Deposit Accounts, they transferred the money to the next layer of accounts, hereinafter referred to as "Payment Accounts." These accounts were in names that included NORTH AMERICAN PAYMENT and EU PAYMENT SERVICE. From the Payment Accounts, the co-schemers wrote checks represented as winnings and sent them back to the victims. The amount of the alleged "winnings" was far less than the amount the victims sent in - for the over $19 million going into the accounts from victims, only approximately 20% was sent back to victims in the form of "winning" checks. The co-schemers transferred some of the money from the Deposit Accounts and Payment Accounts to the next layer of accounts, which will hereinafter be referred to as "Syphon Accounts." The co-schemers wrote checks (or used wire transfers) from the Lottery Accounts and the Payment Accounts to the Syphon Accounts, which were in names that included WESTERN INTERNET, BUTTERFIELD, CARNEGIE and HENRY WALTHER ATTORNEY WIRE ACCOUNT. Money from the Syphon Accounts was used to continue the scheme by paying scheme expenses, as well as to provide benefits to the co-schemers. The co-schemers also took money at each layer in the form of checks to cash, checks to themselves, or checks to the payment of personal or scheme expenses. http://www.scribd.com/doc/106417808/Affidavit-for-Extradition-WarrantSeptember 15, 2010 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. SONNY VLEISIDES ... The defendant is hereby placed on supervised release, effective immediately, for a term of three years under the following terms and conditions: ... The defendant shall not engage, as whole or partial owner, employee or otherwise, in any business involving loan programs, gambling or gaming activities, telemarketing activities, investment programs or any other business involving the solicitation of funds or cold-calls to customers without the express approval of the Probation Officer prior to engagement in such employment. ... All fines are waived as it is found that the defendant does not have the ability to pay a fine.... As directed by the Probation Officer, the defendant shall provide to the Probation Officer: (1) a signed release authorizing credit report inquiries; (2) federal and state income tax returns or a signed release authorizing their disclosure and (3) an accurate financial statement, with supporting documentation as to all assets, income and expenses of the defendant. In addition, the defendant shall not apply for any loan or open any line of credit without prior approval of the Probation Officer. ... The defendant shall not transfer, sell, give away, or otherwise convey any asset with a fair market value in excess of $500 without approval of the Probation Officer until all financial obligations imposed by the Court have been satisfied in full.... Upon a finding of violation of probation or supervised release, I understand that the court may (1) revoke supervision, (2) extend the term of supervision, and/or (3) modify the conditions of supervision. http://ca.findacase.com/research/wfrmDocViewer.aspx/xq/fac.20100915_0004129.CCA.htm/qxThus, it can be seen the CEO of Butterfly Labs is likely * in violation of his parole. * (Unless given express prior approval from his probation officer on a number of counts.)
To return to the first point, the CEO of BFL is a convicted felon and a scammer, as should be evident from the above. I sincerely hope BFL is not simply a preorder scam, and I hope BFL does everything in their power to show that they're in fact not. However, alarm bells should be ringing, and red lights flashing all over the place. This could be the biggest, and by far most professional scam yet. For the time being, and under the weight of the public and indisputable evidence presented above, it seems prudent to say: Do not order ASIC "Supercomputers", or other unreleased products from Butterfly Labs Inc.This post summarizes what is known at the present time. This thread will be updated with new information as it becomes available.
Notes: (1) This summary was originally posted to: Bryan Micon's List of Bitcoin Scammers, Shills, and Users Not To Trust IMOI as a BFL customer do not care about the past. I only work for the future. BITCOINed |
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F@H requires too many floating point operations and probably way too much RAM for FPGAs (very simple lattice folding models could be used but this is pure theory , no applicability). Smith Waterman (alignment, but preferably of nucleotide sequences not proteins) could run efficiently on FPGA. I see a project probably related to that on BOINC "Superlink@Technion" but I guess it would be much better to come up with our own project that fits FPGA much better. We could think about something like this and maybe even get some funding [probably realistic in EU or USA, but not cross continent].
Maybe we could discuss potential projects here.
That would be something worth working towards. |
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Are the disconnects still happening? I had to do a couple restarts (a few bugs in the difficulty adjustments) during initial deployment, but everything should be stable now.
My FPGA farm is currently showing 0 failures in the last 1h 31m (and has been adjusted to diff=4).
If you're still getting disconnected, please look at your proxy and see what happens immediately before the disconnect so we can find out what error is happening.
A possible fix: Try downloading the latest proxy (links are on the beta stats page).
I did that before I posted. Used both links and same results. I start getting rejects and then the worker moves onto the next pool on the list. Still is happening. Using windows proxy. |
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I have just restarted the Stratum beta pool, enabling the new dynamic difficulty adjustment. The new system should drastically reduce overhead for large mining farms.
The target rates for miners are between 1 share per 3-10 seconds. If a miner goes beyond 1 share per 3 seconds (during a 5 minute window), that miner's difficulty is doubled. If a miner averages less than 1 share per 10 seconds (in a 5 minute window), it will be halved. A "miner" is defined as a connection to the pool, not an individual worker. In the case of very quick miners, there are shorter time frames (as small as 10 seconds) used for difficulty adjustments, but these require bursts of speed that could not be explained as simply lucky.
The target share rates are still extremely fast, meaning variance should not be adversely affected by this new change. The only issue you may run into with large farms is the per-worker speed (on the BTC Guild website) may vary heavily. However, your total mining speed should stay very close to your actual speed.
EDIT/UPDATE: Another quick restart. The pool now makes sure to send difficulty=1 on a new connection, so a disconnect/reconnect (pool restart for example) scenario doesn't have the miner submitting high diff shares and only getting credit for diff=1.
Now since Dynamic Difficulty adjustment went live my workers keep getting disconnected/reconnect and only do about 10 or so tasks and then randomly jump to next pool in list. |
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I guess it makes sense right? 7970 x 4 ref fan speed at 55% Voltages at 925mv Also how do I make it so I can copy and paste what's in the black box w/o taking a screenshot then uploading it online?  Whats the power draw at the socket? Kill-o-watt? |
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I will tell you why we didn't "come forward with all this information before" when you can tell me why you think it's relevant? Please explain how the past affects the products you've already received (because you have received products right? I mean, you're not here just complaining and you aren't even a customer, correct?) and how it will affect the products in the future. If you can explain that, then I will explain why the information wasn't disclosed before. Otherwise, it has absolutely no bearing on whether or not BFL has produced and shipped products in the past or in the future, does it?
1) It's relevant when taking pre-orders. Had this information been known before Singles shipped, what do you think the investment would have been? (I.e., that's fraud.) Had this been known up to the point where BFL had a reasonable percentage of space parts on hand, the FTC would happily have gotten involved and shut down the company. It has nothing to do with how it affects the products received afterward, because it's still nearly indistinguishable from a Ponzi. (I *love* that this is a valid argument on this forum.) In fact, it's a "ponzi" run by a convicted felon, not just someone who was charged with passing bad checks. Do you see how this looks? Every single offering that is of more value than the previous just increases the correlation with "a classic ponzi," even if it's natural company growth. BFL has created suspicion and doubt through its failures to meet its promises. This information makes it seem as if it was part of a scheme rather than through incompetence or inexperience. 2) Is Inaba the "I only speak for myself so I can be an ass to customers" identity or do you actually speak for the company in this persona? What does BFL_Josh have to say about this? I like BFL's products once they get dialed in (even if they're ghetto right now), but its customer relations are really, really bad. They've only gotten more adversarial since you joined the company. Is it worrisome that the owner of BFL has a sorted past? For myself it does add a bit of concern over my investment, but I will reserve judgment until such time as it is clear they have delivered or defaulted in some way.I enjoy supporting companies and teams that enrich the BTC community. Do not forget that other enterprises promising ASIC's designed devices will be soon released for use in the Bitcoin network. Hopefully in the near future, BFL will be as successful in introducing their ASIC offering as they were with their FPGA powered devices. |
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lol so pretty much if u dont get one of these ur out the mining game? difficulty level out the building. everyone w max cards n using max watts gonna have to retire.. hope they broke even. ive been on hiatis last 8 months with some bullshit glad to be back just in time to strike these coinz.  hopefully this is the peak of this technology for a while... im all in. Not really, there's a bunch of other ASIC manufacturers coming on stream, I'll have 87Gh/s of capacity ordered by monday  You could maybe add 30% more to that 87Gh/s by the time those 2 devices get to you. Based on what exactly? Cablepair's bASICs are predicting November (just like BFL) and the Avalons are due February but are cheap and effective. Cablepair's bASIC's are 27Gh/s min so you could expect a little more output from them. Maybe 20% by the time you get them. As for Avalon's if they go for power conservation then it may lower the guaranteed 60Gh/s however if they opt to increase the speed over the guaranteed 60Gh/s at the cost of power efficiency then + 10% more. |
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To be honest, I don't really care much that they are going to do this, but they could mine against a p2pool that is modified to not submit the winning block, and simply log the success. This would mine on mainnet and still be verifiable.
Alternatively they could mine the coins PPS into individual wallets and sent a printout of the private key import details. I get the feeling that this isn't the same as the cars because those cars weren't driven to the financial benefit of anyone. If you found out that the reason the odometer was 300 was because Ford was renting the cars out on a daily basis and pocketing the money, then you might be less happy about it.
But ultimately I don't really care. I just want my ASIC to arrive working.
True that. If they're throwing ASICs at the main block chain, then it means...ASICs exist. They may even end up in people's hands! +1 Please gentlemen can we please cut the bullshit?
I mean seriously, this argument is pointless.
If BFL Is mining with ASICs on main-net its for one reason and one reason only.
To make an incredible profit.
It would be very simple for someone to make an alternate "testnet"
that way BFL could test their asics without disrupting the difficulty of main-net or test-net.
However it would be INCREDIBLY profitable for someone like BFL to "test" ASICs on main-net and this is the reason they would do so.
Then again their may be others that will put their systems on main-net with out us ever knowing. However if you were one of the first to purchase your SC's using BTC valued at 4.6 - 6.4 USD then this could be a slap in the face... |
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BFL, Inaba, hugs and kisses to both of you.
But Please.
Do not you dare test a difficulty changing amount of hashing power on mainnet.
THIS IS WHAT TEST NET IS FOR.
USE IT.
+1 or if you must.... the 1T units consider contacting the recipient of those units and use their credentials for that 24hr period However... If we tested on testnet, it would make testnet useless, since it would spike the difficulty to unmanagable levels.
Regardless, we aren't testing any ASIC equipment on the live network either now or in the past, so it's pretty immaterial. We already have a plan, which I explained to several people at the Bitcoin conference on how we are going to handle the live testing when that time comes.
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lol so pretty much if u dont get one of these ur out the mining game? difficulty level out the building. everyone w max cards n using max watts gonna have to retire.. hope they broke even. ive been on hiatis last 8 months with some bullshit glad to be back just in time to strike these coinz. hopefully this is the peak of this technology for a while... im all in. Not really, there's a bunch of other ASIC manufacturers coming on stream, I'll have 87Gh/s of capacity ordered by monday You could maybe add 30% more to that 87Gh/s by the time those 2 devices get to you. |
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So far I havent heard of anything newsworthy from the conference. I think nothing else will come off it. Some nice lectures for the attendees, yes; but nothing world changing.
Disclosure: I solld all my bitcoins just now
LOL Yeah, I always go all in with my trades. Dont really see the merrits in wagering only fractional amounts. Because I feel the little rally that preluded the conference was based on rumor about some "exiting announcements" on the conference and a huge 1,5M USD BID wall that pushed price up at a crucial point where it could have instead broken down to 10$, I think its saver to wait for that potential correction to happen (current support at 10.50$, weak support at ~11.90$) or jump back on the up trend if we break 12$. I still think ASIC demand will make btc value to go up as people use BTC to barter with rather then speculate with. |
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Would you be willing to escrow a bet amount at 500:1 odds? If so, how much are you willing to risk?
Inaba it's an unfair bet  |
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now lets wait for INABA to come back with my answers (to questions i gave him weeks ago) about company details, which should be public record and has no reason to hide.
Just wanted to state that I am perfectly fine waiting until BFL's Team is comfortable with the reasons they have stated for when they will released product "equipment". EVEN if I may not be part of the initial shipped orders. Since I have ordered the best integration of ASIC's offered by 2 companies (will be 3 on 9/23) I hope to be one of the first to see whose product we get to test first. Edit: excluding software developers as they should be the first to get working "test" modules. |
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Great News!
Hope that the pre-orders get filled!
So we can't pre-order until the websites up?
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So far I havent heard of anything newsworthy from the conference. I think nothing else will come off it. Some nice lectures for the attendees, yes; but nothing world changing.
Disclosure: I solld all my bitcoins just now
LOL |
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I have also moved a few Gh's for the effort.
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Another claim of ASIC with no proof of anything shown that is taking pre-PURCHASE (not pre-order, there is a difference) far in advance of any deliverable hardware. Great. I'm so excited, please take all my money.
The Custom Hardware section is starting to remind me of another section of these forums where some guy found a way to get tons of people to throw coins at him. Then other people saw what he was doing, and decided to do the same thing, so they could get coins thrown at them. Look how that worked out.
I'm not saying anyone is intentionally misleading customers (although it is completely possible), but if you are handing someone money for a device that may exist sometime in the future then you are letting them take advantage of you. You're taking the risk for their business, and they will be making the profit off of you (twice). You're an investor that is getting a negative return on your investment for months (years?) until this hardware gets delivered. You are being blinded by your greed. Look how that worked out for all the people in the long-term investments subforum.
You should take a close look at kickstarter http://www.kickstarter.com/. Its much the same "business model" as you are commenting on. Customers fit the bill for development and manufacturing @ 0% and then get promised product at a offered rate. |
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I think it will drop the price as people who purchased Asics, which only have a practical use as a bitcoin miner, will try to dump as much btc for cash as they can to repay their bitcoin mining investment. Subsequently btc mining profit will drop from where it is now and competition will be fierce.
A lot of people are thinking the opposite, but I see no reason that ASICs would decrease supply while increasing demand., thereby raising the price.
Putting my money where my mouth is, I'm investing heavily in litecoin whose algorithm is designed to be difficult for FPGAs/ASICs and which uses much more power than bitcoin to mine with a GPU.
For now.... |
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