Power cost and use is key. The current state of the market favors miners with low power costs. If you have free power, then efficiency is less of a concern and you can buy up cheap, but power hungry mining gear. If you have more expensive power, you want more hash/watt efficient gear, and FPGAs deliver that.

Only in the crypto world is an ROI in under a year for equipment "too long."

Exactly. When an ETF backed by a solid "old school" finance firm with a long track record that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) trusts comes to play with the full solution, which includes insurance and custody, there will be a nice swing. Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) plus VanEck plus SolidX has the best chance of approval of any ETF application submitted so far, especially given the changes in the regulatory environment for crypto-currencies.

Additionally, when you get a company like Northern Trust interested and talking with hedge funds about crypto currencies, then you know that there is a market shift/transition in the works. Northern Trust doesn't like risk, and they don't deal with tiny two-bit hedge funds.

It's all about time horizon. Short time horizon price is most important. Long time horizon, price is less important.

Right now if you are a short-term investor you have to be ultra price-sensitive and good at scalping regardless of long position or short position. Market timing for trades is king for short-term investors.

I don't think so. Silent for ~7 weeks and counting.

Proton is no longer ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3067114.msg36205654#msg36205654 ). Higgs ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4111619 ), the successor to Proton is no longer ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4111619.msg39760681#msg39760681 ). Phase (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3067114.msg41307888#msg41307888 ) is the evolution of the Proton/Higgs project and is actively being moved forward by members of the Proton/Higgs project/team (plus new members) left after the coin founder left the project.

Phase thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4579271.0

If you want to keep your Proton/Higgs coins and move forward with Phase, follow these instructions:

I guess in the crypto world we have become used to how the various ASIC miner manufacturers have done their pricing for pre-orders, and consider that "normal." Given that the ASICs are not particularly flexible in what they can mine, perhaps it's necessary to even out the order flow and entice new orders to keep the manufacturing lines busy and the coin rolling in.

Seems SQRL has opted for a different approach to pricing their offerings. Time will tell which method is the right one, or if there is room for different pricing models based on the flexibility of the mining hardware being offered for sale.

Mmmmm, Word Salad. My favorite! So delicious and filling, but with zero calories. Please mum, can I have some more?

That may have been true shortly after the fork and then the switch to the new wallet with the new masternode requirements, but the network has been pretty stable for quite some time now. Both my masternode and cold wallet got stuck a couple of times due to old versions of nodes on the network. I had to re-index and block/ban the bad nodes as they were connecting to my wallet or masternode, but all is well now.

This one is working for me: http://80.211.25.138:3001

What we have now is that in many cases, the coin dev teams work with one or more of the prominent GPU mining software devs to get the new algorithms into the GPU miners so that there is new software available on the day of the fork. In some cases this involvement begins weeks prior to the fork to allow the GPU miner devs to optimize their code.

FPGAs will be here for the foreseeable future. They may be visible, like the VCU/BCU1525, Acorns, and others, or invisible like the FPGA miners developed with private money and not publicly available. For the publicly available FPGA miners, I think that coin devs will probably start to collaborate with the FPGA bitstream devs in much the same way as the con devs now work with the GPU miner devs.



Honestly, at the risk of sounding like a SQRL apologist, I think they were overwhelmed with the demand and the complexity of multiple payment options and ordering paths, and it's "all hands on deck" to get the orders and payments sorted out and processed. As Phil and other's have experienced and documented in this thread, there have been some issues. I guess I was one of the lucky ones in that I ordered early enough when SQRL was accepting BTC or ETH for payment, and I experienced no problems with my order processing.

Having been around for the dot com boom, this reminds me a lot of the then "new" internet retail companies opening for business and being so overwhelmed that their web sites crashed for days/weeks and they couldn't keep up with orders when the web sites were working. Some survived, but most perished. I think SQRL is going to make it, but I'm sure that the learned a lot this time.

There is always a newer and better thing coming along later. The question is how long is the wait, and how much better will it really be? Is the guaranteed wait for the potential newer, better thing worth the lost opportunity of using the current thing?

Now mind you, you are worrying/wondering about the next version of something that doesn't even exist in public yet.

To Phil's point in the previous message, the cost of a Nest x2g and two acorn 215+ FPGAs costs about the same as a brand new name-brand 1080Ti in the US. Since the two acorns are estimated to hash at approximately the same rate as that 1080Ti running the ethlargement pill it makes that set-up somewhat interesting. The proof will be when the acorns are available in the wild (expectations are later this month) and independent verifications/validations show the real performance.

How about you read the first post in this thread and see if it gives you the answers?
I'll give you a hint: It does.

You're welcome.

Read the fine website: http://www.squirrelsresearch.com/acorn-cle-215-plus/
scroll down and read the table.

You will need to use your google-foo to locate hash rates for the various GPU cards listed, then it's simple math to figure out what you can get.

Read the fine website! There is a table below the Acorn products that tell you what kind of gains you might see.

If you are ONLY mining ETH, then the CLE-101 is the Acorn for you. And what it does is not so much give you huge boost in your hash rate, but reduce the power consumed.

http://www.squirrelsresearch.com/acorn-cle-101/

http://www.squirrelsresearch.com/faq/

On both pages above, scroll down for the details. On the first link, there is a table with info about hash rates and power use. On the second page (the FAQ) there are some answers about how many Acorns you would need based on type of card (low-/high-end).

Early on, before the Nest boards were announced, the only way that a quad M.2 riser board would work with the Acorns was if the BIOS/MB supported bifurcation of the PCIe bus.

Because the Nest boards have an on-board PCIe switch, bifurcation support is no longer needed, which is why the web site says "without any special motherboard requirements."

There was a lot of discussion in the discord channel regarding bifurcation, and what MBs supported it, in the last few weeks leading up to the product release.

so I've been thinking more about interesting use of Nest X2G...

What it you used this MB: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182968
Populated the 7 PCIe x16 slots (configured as x16/x8/x8/x8/x8/x8/x8) with Nest X2G
Filled the four Nest X2Gs with Acorn CLE-215+ (total of 14 Acorns)
and then used the risers (yeah, yeah, I know...) to host RX570 GPUs (total of 28)

The target here is mining X16R. When used with RX570s only 42% of the CLE-215+ capacity is used, so you can boost two RX570s with one CLE-215+ and still have 16% of the CLE-215+ capacity available. If you are OK with slightly less boost, you could use CLE-215 (non plus model) for two RX570s.

Assuming that my math is correct, that config would be like mining with 70 RX570s, but with an approximate power cost equivalent of 32 RX570s.

Google tells me (for whatever  that's worth) that with an 8GB RX570 Nitro+ you can get ~6.7MH/s, so that's ~469 MH/s in this franken-rig.

The thing that concerns me is the spacing of the PCIe x16 slots. Not sure that there is enough space for the Acorns with their heat sinks. Now if you could find an x16 to x16 riser that wasn't a cable... throw in four of them to stagger the height of the Nest X2Gs...

OK, time to go get some grilled beef, and deep fried chicken.

EDIT: Ignore my bloviating. BIOSes limit to 13 GPUs max. Per GPUHoarder from just a few minutes ago on discord channel when I asked about this config.

https://store.squirrelsresearch.com/acorn/acorn-nest-x2g/


Based on that information, I would say yes.

heh, been thinking about that already Phil.    Not actually a two card nest, but hey... hobby miners got to play, right? 

Nest X4 w/ 4 CLE-215+ in an x16 slot, plus the two 1080Ti hybrids each in an X4 slot, dual-mine ETH (acorn/squirrels miner has ETHLargement pill built-in) and something else, until ETH really, really goes POS. Unless I can score some super cheap Vega FE cards, in which case I'll build a 2nd miner leaving my 1080Ti hybrids doing their thing on X16R coins.

Interesting quote I gleaned by reading the earlier posts (this one came through at 1:15am UTC-4) on the #gpuhoarder-products channel in the FPGA discord:


I believe that was in response to someone who had observed that lots of prior posts were talking about monster MBs and CPUs, specifically the new threadripper and Epyc ones.

The Nest X4 has a PCIe switch so it eliminates the need for the MB to support bifurcation to share the power of the acorns.

From what I understand by reading the info on the squirrels web pages and reading the discord (before the message traffic went crazy, mostly with the same questions over and over), the CLE-215 and CLE-215+ consume up to ~15 watts each.

So your proposed scenario of 2 card nest would consume ~30 watts. The question then becomes one of what the hash rate of the CLE-215+, the only one so far that GPUHoarder and team say can mine stand-alone, would be on X16R. The stand-alone mining numbers have not been released yet, but should be coming Soon^TM.

When a CLE-215+ is used to boost a 1080Ti in a 1:1 configuration, you get a 76% improvement (1.76x) in hash rate on X16R, so the 20mh of the 1080Ti alone becomes ~35mh when boosted, and the combined total power is 216 Watts.

Additionally, it appears that using a CLE-215+ can allow dual mining. If I understand correctly, the CLE-215+ handles/shares the core heavy algorithm while the GPU handles the memory heavy algorithm.