Excellent post as usual Teal tx.
It may be some while yet before we have real power consumption numbers from ASICMiner or BFL and until then Avalon is at a perceptual disadvantage due to being compared to theoretical numbers. Time will tell I guess.
Avalon is know for having inferior hardware. I wouldn't say badly designed, just older crappier tech. Even assuming that it isn't some sort of scam I don't see how they'll be able to take their small scale operation and grow it into making cutting edge product without taking venture capital. It really doesn't matter if we talk in exact power consumed at the wall or in hypothetical power numbers when it comes to comparing 110nm to smaller silicon the smaller is always going to result much less power consumption. It's just physics. |
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He took your money and fled. That's my thoughts on it too. |
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I would like to know as well, I am assuming they are in-route and held up for CNY. Deadline mentioned is for Batch #1 being fully shipped.
I hope they would release the code on a convenient date compared in an inconvenient date. Do you need to state that now? Again this bickering out the source code sounds like people are having hurt egos because they can't force a little company that is juggling many balls to do what they want, when they want.
As someone's who has no vested interest either in Avalon or Kano, being that I never ordered an produce - and frankly think Kano's an ass - I have to say the following: The fact that they haven't released the source in a timely manner and are violating GPL by withholding it (yes, I actually agree with Kano on this one)... should be raising alarm bells like crazy... You're talking about running a few scripts to remove debug related code. doing a test compile and publishing. That should literally take one coder a couple of hours tops... and that's if they have to manually locate everything they'd want to remove. If the code is at all decent they'd have it tagged already so it could be removed much more quickly. This whole discussion indicates that something isn't right. I have a feeling I know what it is... but choose not to speculate here. Let me just opt out of ever being a customer of Avalon right now.
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I'll take whatever you have left for $55 each.
Just let me know when.
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Just as an observation from a pool owner:
The majority of botnets are mining on pools. They get tossed around [banned] from one to another like a game of hot potato due to how much load they put on the server vs how much they actually contribute. And yes, they are definitely afraid of ASICs. I've had two botnet operators beg to be not be banned again because they were getting banned from every pool and they didn't have much time left to make any money now that ASICs are coming.
If they managed to build botnet, why they can't manage to build own pool(s)? Botnets are easy to make. You can buy it for almost no money if you know how to spread it yourself. Additionally, pools that can handle a botnet are significantly difficult to make. You'll run into significant scaling problems trying to support a botnet. Additionally, botnets tend to be only 5-100 GH/s. Very few have ever grown much beyond that. It's much easier to join a pool and just get regular payments than run your own pool, especially when there are so many options/backups to use. managing a botnet pool shouldn't be anymore difficult than a normal pool imo... but then making it difficult to track down would be the trick... all the more reason they'd be using p2pool. |
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You guys are thinking about this all wrong.
It's not really about ROI or even about rate of return.
It's about creating wealth in a form that isn't taxable.
If you were given the choice between bitcoin mining with under a year ROI (and that's all in bitcoin)... vs a typical investment where you pay capital gains tax... Which would your prefer?
Nevermind that bitcoin mining is going to spank the rate of return of any traditional investment.
At the place you're talking about (where the asic market is saturated, and it comes down to power consumption) then all you've got is a tax evasion plan... not an investment.
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My friend tried the USB-over-cat5 solution and did not have good results.
Agreed. I'm not sure why changing the cable type would increase the range (unless USB is designed to use spectacularly craptacular cables). Though it does knock things down to USB1 levels presumably because of that. The USB over IP avoids that issue but is a little more expensive and requires drivers etc. However, it might mean that you can run the control from anywhere in the world (though you could do the same with VNC or RDP in any case). I don't recall if Mac drivers were available either... There are some usb 2 solutions that run over cat5/6 - but those run in the $200 range and I'd wonder if it's really needed for this application. I was unable to find any usb3 extenders - as far as future proofing, I'm thinking that the over-ip might be the way to go... at least from a 'reduce the points of failure' perspective. |
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Did I tell you to shut up?
BFL can plug into a OpenWRT device LIKE one in AVALON. Even an Android phone would work.
Your question is does Raspberry Pi gonna have enough bandwidth as a host? Fck yes, it also shows you know crap about this.
Avalon engineered the OpenWRT solution to work effectively. I don't know what they had to do to make that happen, but I know that you can get away with using a low computer power single purpose device if well engineered to the application. Everyone in this thread seems to be suggesting the end consumer should slap some 5W toy device called a "Raspberry Pi" into their BFL miner. My experience tells me this is not a real solution. What operating system and mining software should they install on it? What optimizations should they perform on the OS build to ensure the bitcoin miner is not interrupted by other processes? If BFL isn't going to provide a mining controller, then most users will end up using a real computer, not a "Raspberry Pi." You should be more realistic. In addition to that - serious miners are already running a beefy system as a host to control mining equipment... the simple fact is... unless you want to be physically close to your mining location, you need a machine to remote into and control your power switches and other gear. If you're running a big enough farm - it's also going to be your bitcoind node. Slapping openwrt on a device doesn't make it easier to administer remotely - why expose your avalon (or any mining machine) to potential intrusion via forwarded ports? It makes no sense, you'll have a secure vpn link to a machine on that local subnet. |
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Let's assume Jeff isn't in on it.
That still doesn't mean it's legit.
He's got a box with spinning fans - that he's pointed at a pool or bitcoind somewhere... whats to stop that machine from relaying this information to an fpga or gpu farm in wherever and them turning on the mining for him.
Sanity requires additional verification from multiple sources.
Until we ~300 users saying "hey I got mine and it's working right now" the jury is still out on Avalon.
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The interesting thing about this whole thing to me is... Serious miners don't care about Avalon.
The simple fact is, the power consumption is just too high.
Based purely on the power being drawn... it may very well be hybrid design using fpga or maybe existing sha2/3 chips in large arrays to produce the hashing. Nothing wrong with it as an offering... But it is what it is... inferior technology. I for one won't be buying any.
The other option is that it's simply a scam in the sense that they're losing money on each unit... in which case, they'll release 1 test box - claim the rest are delayed by CNY then accept orders for the second build (only in bitcoin) and harvest a million or so in orders for batch 2 before rolling up and vanishing.
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Mining is my incentive to not care what happens with fiat.
Yes hyperinflation and the depression that follows would suck on the micro economics perspective. But since I'm mining for a living - it would be a good thing for my personal economic outlook. I can always sell bitcoins into some other (more valuable) fiat then convert it to local fiat by more traditional means coupled with a reduction in prices for good locally... I could a real world fortune off it...
Unless of course the US economy crashing effects the global economy to the point to cause a global depression... but I think that's unlikely what with china owning most of our debt right now.
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Price is going to rise. People who are acquiring it to use as currency give little fucks about what the price is now since they are going to spend it. If they need $100 worth, what do they care if a coin is $20, $50, or $100?
+1, Exactly my thoughts. People conducting trade in bitcoin will be in and then out, price dont matter to them, they will just buy w/e fraction of a coin is needed for the deal. Meanwhile the blockchain is being proven as a good value store constantly increasing the price of a whole coin as more people place wealth into the chain. Exactly right. But being a miner I'm selling them as fast as they come in right now. But I'm actually keep a large amount of fiat (large for me anyway) on some exchanges to re-buy after the asic induced crash. |
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If it reaches parity - I'm going to divert some mining 'profits' into buying silver. When we start talking about real world wealth accumulation, having pounds of silver in my safe will make me feel great =P
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Charts are great - but we aren't in a bubble here - This is the expected result of the block reward halving should level off at some point soon (between 24 and 30).
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It depends on how active you want to be with bitcoins.
If you plan on continuing to mine... then I'd advise you to sell them now and use that money to purchase an ASIC product as soon as anyone ships one.
If you'd rather not mine and are thinking of your bitcoins as an investment, then your best move is to forget about them for months or years, on a long enough timeline they'll do nothing but increase (at least for the next 4 years).
If you'd like to speculate and as someone else said "doubledown on bitcoin"... sell half right now, then re-evaluate every week or so until you start to see indications of a price dip... then dump whatever you have left... if you wait for the big crash that follow asic release, you'll have a chance to buy quite a few more bitcoins at ~25% of the price if you time it correctly.
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This is going exactly as most miner thought it would go.
The rise form 10 to 20 is simply a result of the block reward havling. Anything beyond that is actually growth of the bitcoin economy.
The simple fact is - miners have bills to pay - ever one of us that's still mining saw a 50% reduction in income when the block reward halved. Most of us held on and sold off bitcoin reserves to make ends meet. We've been playing chicken against other miner's bitcoin savings. The price adjusting now indicates some combination of two things:
1. some miners have decided they aren't making enough profit and have shut down (most likely gpu miners).
2. the bitcoin savings of the remaining miners are either tapped out or they've made other adjustments to reduce operating costs and have stopped selling saved bitcoins.
The basic support level hasn't increased much, but the supply has been cut in half. It's driven the price up accordingly -The next thing we'll see is continued slow rise followed by fast (but relative small) corrects repeated until asic release. Once that happens we'll see some wobbling and then have some steep crashes... but after the initial profit taking from that new equipment and difficulty adjustements, we'll see a relatively fast and steady rebound since those miners won't need (or want) to sell at the crashed rate.
At that point we'll see some price stability that follows the rate of growth.
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Dear Tyrion: I have consulted my coven of personal witches, and they have all agreed to curse you for six years each (there's six of them total, so you do the math). They have hidden spell passed down by the ruler of Keimos, and they have agreed to invoke the powers within it's sacred texts to remove their curses on you for a donation of 15 BTC payable to the address in my signature. If you refuse, you can expect to experience some rather nasty curse effects, including but not limited to:
- Male pattern baldness
- Drowsiness
- Diarrhea
- Dry mouth
- Erectile dysfunction
- Pink eye
- Croc flu
- Tennis elbow
My personal witches learned the secret arts of witchcraft and general voodoo-ry from the advisors of the late Papa Doc himself, so you know they mean business. Please consider a donation so that you may avoid their inconveniences.
I really have no interest in your fantasies. Every second you spend attempting to mock me is just another second that the curse will wreak its havoc. I'm surprised that you are not taking this seriously given the very real impact it is having on your pocketbooks, but children are renowned for refusing to listen, aren't they? As we suspected, since he already has all those conditions... he's unaffected. |
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I'll go 250 each and I'll pay the shipping.
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So I'm doing my normal January thing and going over my investments... Turns out I've got some ~25k laying around doing nothing.
Since asic's haven't released and I've budgets some outright purchases of sc rigs in case they'd been released on time...
I'm now in the market for between 1, 2, 3 or 4 fpga mini-rigs. I'm willing to negotiate on price.
Can pay in btc or by wire.
Drop me a msg if you've got any you need to get rid of.
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