You can also be more efficient, or use resources more efficiently. That energy that used to be wearing down rocks (a noble experience no doubt) or heating your attic in the summer (and thus your house) can be redirected into something that makes money like a bitcoin miner like a bitcoin exhaust fan system or a peltier turbine and a penstock pipe.

Back in the day my joke was to build a heating element for a 40 gallon water heater out of bitcoin hashing engines. 2,000 or so watts of power being used to heat the water in your house. Why not bitcoin ASICs, who cares if they are block erupters? (Technically the better answer is a solar domestic hot water system if you have electric heated hot water, but that is a digression).

Solar electricity is cool, but solar is only 17% efficient at light---power. SDHW is 50-70% efficient. So you have a certain amount of roof space put the hot water system on first, then the electric for bitcoin miners. Unless you have natural gas.

But on a less serious note, if you have an abandoned/beaver dam sitting around what's the harm in diverting .00001% of the water into a 4 inch pipe to a small turbine, 2,000 watt alternator, a bunch of miners, and a cheap-ass 4g plan? What else is the water going to do? :-)

Solar is pretty lame. I probably generate 5kw a day on my system, which a 1kw farm can chew up in 5 hours. Helps a bit but you have to consider you could have sold that power back to the utility.

The way to go is micro-hydro. Really, find a stream on your property, install a 1,000 watt alternator/peltier turbine and you're in business 24*7*forever. Now for a real win, finding an abandoned dam and installing a turbine, miners (hey, all that water is FREE COOLING!) and a cell phone for internet and you're all set......

Arrested? Hah!

Executed.

Always remember: It is easier to pull a fluid (in this case air) than push it. Set your fans and such to pull the air.

This will also fix the problem of air pushing against the lowest miner (closest to your fan). Pulling will not be a problem as the fan speed on the top miner will limit the amount of air pulled through it.

Or better: Line your miners up on the sill with the exhaust fans pointing straight out. Also functions like a nice whole house venting fan.

Simpler than that: Someone just pissed off one of the Elder Gods.

Sure, but if you're hashing at the minimum rate it means that while a share will drop off the chain half the time, you will get two shares the other half of the time leading to an average of 1 share. That's the whole thing about luck, it's... well luck but approaches the optimal payout value for how much you hash unless the pool is rigged.

Power equals current times voltage, or P=I*E. Mmmm. Pie. What this means is that in Eurpoe the voltage is doubled but the current needed is halved. This leads to some nice things (less power lost in the wires due to heat) and not-so-nice things (getting shocked by 240v hurts more than 120. Don't try this at home).

But the power from the miner's point of view is constant.

This after blocks appeared upon us like showers of gold.

Does anyone else think that arrow image looks like a giant cock?

Nothing like a coin being up-front, I find that refreshing.

Yup, and the smallest mistakes can provide all sorts of hilarity. Part of the reason I prefer using R(ds) for overload sensing, DCM is great for sensing power through the choke, but that RC circuit can be affected by noise, component layout, and doesn't tell you if the FETs are cutting through. But who wants to spend the money for an op-amp limiting circuit on both sides of the push/pull? Not to mention the fun that happens when the voltage drop from the left side of the chip to the right side of the chip (500 amps, .6 volts...) causes problems.

The off-shelf stuff is great for testing, but very expensive to use for mass production. And in Alpha's case I wonder how stable it is when half the engines are running light power pulls while farting with the memory and the other half are pulling full current for the math engines. At random across the die of course, this is a tougher problem. So they ran everything at full current and now the chips overloads the power supplies. Yep.


Yeah. There's a lot of weird pressures and unbridled optimism in some of these mining firms. This is complex shit, and happy pony magic doesn't work well when the 600amp IGBT goes foom. Building this kind of stuff right takes months/years, not "wave wand and it works in a week".

Ah well. They fucked up.

Developing power supplies for Bitcoin miners is in a class of problem called "bitch on wheels". This however is not an unknown issue, it has buried a number of other companies over the years and anyone who has designed high power supplies knows the joy of watching smoke and plasma balls rise from 300 amp IGBT circuits.

I think however that people designing boards tend to be simply willfully ignorant of the issues of providing 500 amps of power at half a volt and thus they screw up the same thing over and over again. At least on a SHA256 chip each engine is pulling constant power through the hashing cycle. I wonder if a scrypt miner pulls varying levels of power depending on where it is in the computations, and that power variance fucks over any attempt to provide a constant level of power to the engine with 500 other engines on the same chip bitching and moaning as they vary their requirements from cycle to cycle.

It could explain the complete graveyard in the Scrypt space. That could also move the level of "hard" from "flaming levels of difficult" to "fuck, we have a chip and can't make it work! And here comes THE NOISE FAIRY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

True but if you can just hold your gut in you realize it's variance. Sure he could miss a good run, but it's exactly as likely that he will have triple the number of shares when the next single block is found (thus evening it out).

p2pool's problem is that there are two dimensions of luck (shares and finding a block) but really over the long term it is exactly the same luck as say Eclipse or whatever. Now the perception is your's screwed if you are a small miner, but that's only looking at the short term.

A feel-good fix would be cool and might reduce small miner variance, but isn't that what operators like nastyguy do? Provide a place to mine and get more steady payouts while still on the p2pool concept?

Also in order to do p2pool right you have to run the stupid blockchain and a p2pool python thing. That's another problem: The dumb-ass blockchain node needs to be kept up to date and fast otherwise you will lose out with a high stale count. Blah.

Yes, luck is luck, but really: Lady luck and her friends are having a good time on P2Pool this week. Another 3 blocks in a 24 hour period....



Enjoy while it is here.

Now for the big question: Is it possible to put that sort of community *into* your money/coin?

Torture. It's much easier and quite legal these days.

Solution: Use torture-resistant encryption.

Standard exit fraud. Cue violins.

One of the funny things about combination game theory is that in a 2 person prisoner dilemma playing a single game the dominant strategy is to fuck each other over. This is why people form communities, to keep from getting fucked over.

Now, when you play multiple games with the same players, the best option is tit for tat, highly cooperative. But if there is an end limit to the games then defecting on the last round is the dominant strategy. And if you defect on the last round, why not the next to last? And so forth...

Which brings you back to the classic equilibrium of "fuck everyone" as the dominant strategy. FC and Asicminer (and just about every other mining company, cloud mining company and "investment bullshit" system) are just following a strategy.

Which sucks donkey cocks. This is a problem IMO.

You need more than chips to make a miner. Power is the killer; designing .6 volt or less supplies at 1,000+ amps is a bitch on wheels. BE got around this by doing a lot of small chips with a lot of little power supplies, but as they cranked the density up this could have caught up with them.

Serious bitch on wheels. Moreso if you have to have 50-100 of them on a board to support 50+ hashing chips. Fail one shorted and unit shuts down with a flaming boom.

Showers of Gold my friends, yes P2pool is the home of golden showers.

(no gif)

Ignorance=bliss therefore dumb=beautiful. :-)

The proper answer to this is that mining is a form of perfect competition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition) and it is IMPOSSIBLE to make economic profits in perfect competition. Bitcoin mining is proving this to a "T".

Maybe, but even if it was .25w/gh (twice the efficiency of 28nm) you're talking 10mw of power and heat. Should be able to see that from space.

Time will tell.