ASIC =

Generally people ship them to their homes but I guess if you work in a datacenter there is no law saying you can't have your ASICs shipped there. 

Serious note the only ASICs you should be buying should look like the photo above.  If you had to ask the question in the OP, buying any other ASIC is likely going to end with you losing a lot of money/coins/sleep/wives.

Was about to ask that.

Yeah I think we are going in circles here so I will opt out.  If you are asking can you run a business and pay people in Bitcoins?  Well the answer is sure.  What would make you think otherwise.

Miners are compensated with both tx fees & the block subsidy (new coins).  As the block subsidy declines tx fees will become more important.  "Mining", block creation and verification will never stop.


No.  Bitcoin is a public ledger.  Every coin ever created is known any unknown coins would be rejected by honest nodes as invalid.   It is very likely Satoshi mined a lot of Bitcoins, how many is subject to some debate however for roughly the first year the hashrate on the Bitcoin network was very low, even a single average personal computer could have mined a small fortune.

Yeah that's not decentralized or a corporation.  I never said you can't run a business and use Bitcoins.   You asked about "completely distributed corporation".   Maybe those words don't mean what you think they mean.

Sole proprietorship =/= corporation
Registered with state =/= "completely distributed"

You could probably make a "distributed business" but it wouldn't be a corporation and you would have no protection under the law.  A corporation is a legal entity, it doesn't exist outside the law and the state defines the parameters of that existance. You can't just say "we have formed xyz Inc".   When you file incorporation documents (with a state) the state creates xyz, Inc to be a separate entity under the law.   So if you don't do that no corporation exists, and while your business may operate outside the state YOU (as a potential owner, employer, or investor) can't operate outside of a state.  Maybe someday but not today.  No matter where you are YOU fall within the scope of a state.

Why does that matter?  Corporations (and other legal constructs like LLC, limited companies, limited master partnerships) exists to decouple the business from its principals (owners, investors, etc).  The incorporation process creates a new entity (hence the term corporate personhood) and this entity legally distinct from its owners.


Why would you want to decouple the business from ownership of the business?

A corporation can file its tax returns, own assets, incur debts, be sued, etc separate from its owners.   That is the whole point of a corporation.   If you own shares in google and google doesn't pay its taxes you as a shareholder have no direct liability (although the share price might decline).  Google is a distinct entity from its owners.   Now on the other hand say your "decentralized company" doesn't pay its taxes.  Under the eyes of the state the "decentralized business" doesn't exist.  YOU own it, YOU (well all owners jointly) are liable.  The same thing would happen if customers sued "the business".  Under the  law the business doesn't exist as a distinct entity.  The lawyers of the customers would sue YOU personally which means all your personal assets remain liable.  If the "company" borrows money well in reality as an owner YOU are borrowing money.  When the company defaults on a loan, the creditors will sue you directly.  Starting to see the picture. 


Simple version
1) States makes laws
2) Laws are what make a corporation.
3) Corporations only "exist" with #1 & #2.
4) If no corporation exists then law will simply see the business and the owners as the same entity.

Not sure what you mean by decentralized, but corporations are artificial legal entities that doesn't exist outside the law of a state.  This is in contrast to a "natural human" which exists materially exists regardless of the laws of a particular state. 

In this respect every corporation has a "center", a home, where it is incorporated.  Corporations are institutions of the state, they are created by the state, the exist at the will of the state, and they can be ended by state.  Two examples of the latter would be a corporation being dissolved because the corporation didn't pay taxes, or piercing the corporate shield to make operators of a corporation liable in the case of fraud.

Well that is an interesting way to look at it.   It isn't balance against anything except money it created out of thin air.  So yes they create money from nothing and then use that to buy stuff.  Not sure how the buying stuff from money they created on a whim suddenly makes it better.

They create money from nothing, trade if to for assets and now there is more money in the economy.  More supply, same demand, the purchasing power of your money declines. 



I would love it if I could create as much money as I want when I want.  Don't worry I promise to buy lots of stuff with the money I create.  How many D&T dollars would you like and what asset do you want to trade for it.

Your "projection" was "based" on Hashfast cost.  It was at the top of your chart.  When asked to back it up you say you aren't interested.  Didn't you ALREADY do such an analysis before coming up with $250 to $50 per TH/s or were those just random numbers you made up?

Still $50 or $100 or $250 per TH/s is just as utterly silly for any vendor, any design, any configuration, anywhere in the world.  It is like saying you will make a clone of an iphone.  Can you do it for $100 maybe, maybe not but if you come in here and say you can mass produce iphone clones for $3.20 ea well it is just laughably dumb.

IIRC the power converters on Bitfury board are about $12 that is in bulk (i.e. 1000+ units).  Just the power regulators are $12 for 40 GH/s. = $30 per TH/s just for one non ASIC component.  Avalon board level BOM is open source (very similar to ASCIMiner who is very hush hush about components) and runs ~$10 per board (excluding ASICs, PCB and assembly).  That's $50 per TH/s for just minor components (crystal, resistors, capacitors, connectors, etc).

You can't get a pcb (no case, fans, cooling, heatsinks, power, host, etc) for the prices you claim even with free ASICs. Just once again to illustrate how silly $50 per TH/s is.  You say Bitfury is the answer to lower cost, at $50 per TH/s that is $2 per board for the overclocked version with higher output power regulators. All PCB production cost, all components, ASICs, assembly, testing, yield losses, etc.  $2 per board.   $2 a board for a 5" by 6" PCB with over 100 components.   I mean it is hard to point that out with a straight face.  Even if your board was $2 power, cooling, open racks, etc have a non-zero cost.

You say quality power isn't important but even at $500 per TH/s & $0.08 per kWh power is about half of the total one year cost.  Using 70% efficient PSU means 30% higher energy cost so robbing Peter to pay Paul.  The junk PSU you listed have horrible voltage regulation and were never designed for high current electronics so what happens when your piece of junk PSU destroys your ASIC.  Is that in your $50 per TH/s target?

So which payment processor accept IXC?  Oh yeah none.  Why would Bitpay for example take the risk on adding a currency that no merchant is asking for?  Especially a small one with low liquidity.  How is Bitpay going to accept an arbitrary amount of ixCoin and pay customers with a 1% spread while managing risk?

It is the other way round. Merchants were asking for an easy low risk way to accept Bitcoin and thus Bitpay saw the opportunity for profit and created the service.   

Well quoting a poorly regulated, low efficiency (70% ouch that is going to hurt power costs) junk PSU, unknown radiator as a substitute for complete sealed waterloop, and "all fans = $0.60" doesn't help your case.  Lets ignore the fact that the site you linked to is notorious for bad prices.  Ask for a firm quote and see how the prices magically change.

Still lets use your imaginary parts:
Junk PSU: 4*10 = $40
Imaginary complete sealed watercooling system: 3 * $20 = $60 (w/ pump, radiator, lines, waterblock, shipped ready to install yeah right.  you pointed out a radiator is $12.  Show me where you can get a pump, reservoir, tubing, connectors, copper waterblock, and assembly for $8 more).
Case: $6 (you don't really believe the listed price on alibaba do you.  Ever asked for quote on a specific model?  Suddenly the $10 special disapears marked up 300% or more)
Fans: 8*$1 ea (its 8 not 2 2 per radiator plus 2 exhaust)

So just these 4 junk components puts you at $74.  A $50 per TH/s target gives you only $60 for an entire system.  Your already overbudget with just the non-electronic components. There is still the ASICs, minor pcb components, pcb manufacturing, pcb assembly, major assembly, and testing.  This also assumes 100% yield, no fixed costs, overhead, taxes, salaries, etc.

Like I said my guestimate of $1000 per system was just a start.  I even said you likely can cut that by 50%.  That is a huge difference from saying you can cut it >95%+ to meet some silly 650 PH/s estimate.

Thanks by your own junk part links you just disproved $50 per TH/s nonsense.  You know it and I know it you just can't admit how utterly silly your projection is.   If you can't source the basic non electronic components (power, case/frame/rack, cooling) for $50 per TH/s it is utterly pointless to show that as a projection.  Moore's law isn't going to make a PSU or case or fan drop 50% in price this year.

Probably because if they do ship earlier than Dec he will sue for having his hardware "stolen".

I like the approach taken but the scale is simply unrealistic. For the sake of the argument lets assume the chips (silicon & packaging) is possible at $0.20 per GH/s ($20 per TH).  Small runs (less than 1,000 wafers) at 28nm are probably more expensive than you so raw silicon is probably close to that and multi-die package with high TDP and high ball count BGA design aren't cheap.  I think >$0.30 per GH/s minimum (excluding NRE and other fixed costs) for chips on a reel is probably more realistic.  However foundry prices are subject to NDA and often opaque so lets make it simple and assume the cost of a chip is $0.00 per GH/s and look at the rest of the system.

For example lets try to guesstimate the balance of the system (everything but the ASIC) on a Sierra.  Here is my guess what is yours?
case: $30 * 1 = $30
watercooling: $80 * 3 = $240
case fans: $10 * 2 = $20
power supplies: $150 * 2 = $300
PCB (both PCB manufacturing and assembly):  $30 x 3 = $90
DC regulators (12V to ~0.8V 200A output ea, 2 per board): $30 x 6 = $180 (probably more KNC uses >$300 per 400 GH/s system)
minor components (connectors, capacitors, etc guesstimate 100+ components per board): $50 x 3 = $150
labor (post PCB assembly, testing, packaging): $50
Balance of system (excluding ASICs) = $1,060 or ~$900 per TH/s.

That is nothing for fixed costs, markup/profit, yield issues, customer support, shipping losses, warranty, etc.

Now let say you could cut that roughly in half to $500 per TH/s.  Your "end game charts" start at half that.  $250 per TH/s might someday be possible but that is a lot of cost to remove from my guesstimate above.  In either case $50 per TH/s is just silly.  Might as well draw a line which shows the end game of $1 per EH/s. $50 per TH/s is $60 per Sierra.  If you think other designs are cheaper to build (excluding chp cost) that would be $25 per KNC Jupiter or $20 per Bitfury-400.  Say I gave you 1.2 TH/s (or 0.5 TH/s, or 0.4 TH/s) of free chips show me how the balance of the system can be made for those prices.  Seriously I would like to see the break down, even a crude guesstimate which gets you into that range.  Pay close attention to DC regulator (VRM) costs and power supplies they are more expensive on a $/GH basis than you might first think.  

Even a generous (I would say unrealistic) scenario of:
8 cent per kWh
20% cooling overhead (PUE 1.2),
no real estate overhead,
$500 per TH hardware
1 year break even for miners
-----------------------------
= network equilibrium at ~225 PH/s.

So it is more like "end game" of <225 PH/s (eventually) at current exchange rate even if my hardware cost is double what is possible.  It kinda shows how silly projections of >650 PH/s in less than a year really are.  Don't feel bad I have seen projections as high as 20 EH/s.

Ytterbium,
Thanks for the correction on rounds (65 vs 80) and for the link.  Link saved.  I assumed 80 because SHA-2 is a 80 round cipher they must do some preprocessing or optimization which makes sense and it roughly fit with likely frequency range.

As aerobatic stated the GN die efficiency is 1.23 GH/mm² (nominal), 1.66 GH/mm² (overclocked).

Saying Bitfury has a theoretical speed of 5 GH/s is kinda pointless, it was the design goal but never acheived in real world not even once under lab conditions.  Real world Bitfury is more like 1.5 GH/s (nominal), 3.0 GH/s (overclocked)*.  That gives Bitfury (@55nm) a die efficiency of 0.10 GH/mm2 (nominal), 0.21 GH/mm² (overclocked).  You stated 40nm but Bitfury is actually 55nm, and the efficiency (both GH/mm2 and J/GH) are impressive for 55nm**.  The numbers might look low to some reading but that is the power of a couple doublings.   To show you some bad efficiency BFL for example is 65nm but lets boost their stats by 40% (65^2/55^2) to put BFL and Bitfury on the same 55nm process node.  BFL's die efficiency is 0.062 GH/mm2, with a 40% boost for 55nm vs 65nm for apples to apples it is still only 0.087 GH/mm².  Now that is with the chips overvolted and driven pretty hard and hot.  Ouch BFL.

So how would a Bitfury @ 28nm compare to HashFast Golden Nonce?   Note: this shouldn't influence anyone purchase decision as we don't even know if Bitfury plans a 28nm, when it will be released, if they will hand place it, and if these theoretical gains are possible.  With that caveat, a die shrink from 55nm to 28m means 4x the transistor density (55²/28² = 4.0).  Lets be generous and say 50% higher clocks are possible (real world is probably going to be less than what raw capacitance and switching time would indicate but I am trying to err towards the upper limit)  Between clock increase and transistor density performance is likely going to be capped at 6x.  A theoretical "Bitfury28" would be ~0.60 GH/mm² (nominal), 1.26 GH/mm² (overclocked).  This is with no architecture changes just same design and smaller features (the "tock" in Intel's "tick tock" strategy) and scaled out parallel (more cores similar chip dimensions).  There are power issues which prevent Bitfury from achieving the 5 GH/s (420 Mhz) design spec at 55nm.  If they were solved efficiency would be higher.  This is somewhat academic as the 5 GH/s spec was simulated due to the highly efficient use of hand placing.  However hand placing has a lot of pitfalls and Bitfury fell into one making real world performance lower.  "Bitfury28" while having the same general design may not be hand placed.  It is time consuming and more risky.  At 55nm it didn't pay off all the extra work and effort produced a chip which is roughly what we would expect from a cell library design.  Still to be totally exhaustive if the Bitfury had performed as expected it would be 5 GH / (3.8mm * 3.8mm) = 0.34 GH/mm².  With 6x performance improvement that would be ~ 2.00 GH/mm² with a more realistic 4x performance improvement ~ 1.36 GH/mm².

To add to what Aerobatic said about Bitfury being a hand placed chip, this has some implications going forward.  Very few designers hand place large ASICs because of the increased time and cost.  Cell libraries are used to assist with the feature change size, without them you are essentially hand placing a new chip at each process node.  While the design may be exactly the same, the position of each transistor is going to change.  One also needs to consider risk vs reward.  Bitfury's power issues stem from the fact that design was not capable of delivery the power intended, without the intended power the intended clock frequency couldn't be achieved.  The chip "worked" but had to be clocked slower.  It is possible this type of error could have been avoided using a cell library.  So had Bitfury used a cell library maybe they would have got 4 GH per chip, less than what hand placing could do in theory but more than it did in reality.  In mid 2013 Bitfury mistake wasn't fatal.  BFL was not delivering, margins were massive, and other competitors were using much large process nodes.   In 2014 the scenario won't be the same.  A similar mistake would make an offering less attractive than competitors.


*Based on reference design of ~25 GH/s per "H-board" with 16 chips.   A few higher clocked variants (like S-board project) have pushed that to 42-45GH/s.  Assuming I am missing some marginally higher clocked board I optimistically used 3 GH/s as realistic overclock limit.


** Moved this down here because most people probably don't care.  A side note, it may seem I am critical of Bitfury but I am not, I am just interested (obsessed maybe?) with finding good data.  Hell IMHO it is impressive that Bitfury is even still around.  Right at the point where they had perfected their FPGA design (better than anyone else on the same hardware) and were looking to mass produce (summer 2012) BFL began the obviously false campaign of "ASICs in 3 months".  Remember when BFL was going to delivery ASICs by fall 2012?  BFL may be crooked but they are smart.  By offering upgrade value on their FPGA and over-promising ASICs almost a year early it killed the rest of the FPGA market while still keeping BFL FPGA sales alive (they could be upgraded).  Many startups wouldn't have survived seeing their entire market disappear with no revenue potential for a year.  It was unfair, dishonest, and a sucker punch but it wouldn't have surprised me if BFL had killed Bitfury.   Instead the Bitfury team transitioned their FPGA design to a hand placed ASIC in a short period of time, delivered solid performance and did so without the ability to collect (and sit on) preorder money in 2012.  So I am impressed by what Bitfury has done but that doesn't diminish the impressive die efficiency of the Golden Nonce processor.

I will gladly bet against you.  Even money difficulty remains below the "projection" you posted.  We can do 1 bet for each month Dec, Jan, Feb, Mar.

Let me know how much per month (same amount and you have to bet for all months) and who you want to hold the escrowed funds.   I can match your bet today so hedge away.

So you really believe the network will be 14 PH in Dec, 30 PH in Jan, 80 PH in Feb, and 160 PH in Mar?

There may be legitimate complaints but when you start posting nonsense like that it is hard to take you seriously.  If that difficulty schedule is correct then no miner from any vendor which isn't already in someone hands and having earned 70%+ of its purchase price will ever generate a return.   In other words if your "projection" is accurate it doesn't really matter if HF is late.  You were looking at a 70% loss even if they shipped a week EARLY.

It is 700.  With Bitcoin there is no way to know the "meaningful" tx.  Both the "real" tx and the change are simply outputs.

Nobody is saying BTCDD is a perfect measure it is just one insight.

It is possible.  Nothing in that explanation as to why it can't be done makes any sense.  

As for why not? All Scrypt coins (to date) are just pump and dumps or "no fair GPUs are too powerful I want to get rich with my CPU" = LTC.  Nobody has cared enough to implement it.  There is also the issue of "who is the master".  In merged mining (or at least as implemented via Bitcoin) one chain is the parent chain.  One or more child chains are mined off the parent.   I can imagine the little kid sandbox fight if four copycoin "developers" came together to implement merged mining.

Bitcoin is a currency.  M0 is more applicable.   If there are fractional reserve banks using Bitcoins then there may be a M1/M2/M3 that is higher but the M0 will always be <= 21M BTC.

tacotime please get a clarification because you may have just kicked over a hornets nest and if it is simply a miscommunication it might be a good idea to post a retraction.