Thanks for the link.

They explain they wanted to rely on commodity computer processor cooling parts. "Commodity" is air-cooling and heatsinks designed for CPUs up to 100-150W, at most. A heatsink or water cooling block designed to dissipate 250W of heat is hardly "commodity"...

Heck, check Newegg: there are 27 products in the "water cooling system" category vs 300 products in the "processor heatsink/fan" category. And Newegg restricts the purchase quantity of most water cooling systems to 5 per customer. Found a model you like, and want to buy units to keep as spares for your Hashfast farm? Can't even buy more than 5 from Newegg! Have to resort to sourcing from multiple resellers, shipping hassles, etc... I get the feeling that HashFast is out of touch with the reality of what is a "commodity" part in computer hardware.

Yes the energy density is the same. But my point remains: it is technically easier to cool 4 x 63W chips than 1 x 250W chip. So I am waiting for Simon's reply... If my point wasn't clear enough: an air-cooled 4 x 63W-chip Hashfast Baby Jet could almost assuredly be designed and shipped before a more complex water-cooled 1 x 250W-chip system.

PS #1: the reason Intel doesn't use 4 sockets on consumer grade boards is because sockets are expensive (4 sockets at $10 each would double the price of a consumer grade $40 mobo...) plus space is constrained in a desktop form factor (whereas nobody care really if a 400 Gh/s miner delivered in October is 1U vs 3U).

PS #2: I also disagree with BFL's choice of the PCIe form factor. I am just saying it could be worse if they had decided to host a single 300+ watt chip on the card.

Simon, regardless of what you think is doable, you are taking unnecessarily high risks to develop such a high-TDP chip. It would have made a helluva lot more sense to go with, say, 4 chips of 63W each. The die would be 1/4th the size. 1/4th the cost too since you would have 4x more chips per wafer. A little more PCB space would be used (not a big deal). But this would have taken away a lot of the risk of cooling a single hot chip.

Bitcoin mining being an embarrassingly parallel algorithm, there is absolutely no point in trying to made a die as large / as hot as possible, when you can spread computations across chips with virtually no downside.

I see this as a very poor strategic decision made by Hashfast. (And Cointerra, and KnCMiner). Only BFL seems that they will get it right, since their 350W Monarch card should split the workload across 10-30 chips.

If I was an investor in Hashfast, I would have asked you "why do you take the risk of aiming at the highest TDP possible for your gen1 chip?". Please explain your choice.

Most likely then, this leak was about Alydian's order: 1+ million 65nm chips...

The price of BTC is irrelevant in making an investment decision between moving your capital to (1) BTC, or (2) mining equipment. This has been explained many times. If BTC gains value both choices bring more returns. If BTC loses value both choices bring less returns. The question is which one will make you end up with more BTC at the end. So the only part of the equation to take into account is how much does the mining equipment cost today (in BTC), and how much BTC it could mine in the future.

It does not have to grow exponentially forever. It only has to grow 60% per month for 12 months to make the Monarch unprofitable (per PuertoLibre's estimations)... And 12 months of 60%/mo exponential growth starting today is possible. In the past, we saw 18 months of 100%/mo growth between Jan 2010 and Jun 2011.

However nobody can tell for sure whether the Monarch is going to be profitable or not. Assuming it ships in Jan 2014, if the average growth will be less than 57-58% per month it will be profitable, if it is higher then it won't be profitable. My estimate from ASIC market research is somewhere between 40 and 60%, but nobody knows precisely.

Yes BFL's design is horribly inefficient. But no matter whether the design is good or bad, there basically is a straight relationship between feature area and power. This is true for large process nodes. This is less true for smaller ones (such as 28nm) where leakage becomes relatively more important as you pointed out.

So let's be pessimistic and let's assume that leakage causes a 50% increase in power consumption (1.5x), and let's assume BFL manages to merely decrease power consumption by 10% on paper by tweaking the digital design (0.9x), then:

3.1 (W/Gh/s at 65nm) * (28/65)^2 (theoretical efficiency improvement from 65nm down to 28nm) * 1.5 * 0.9 = 0.78 W/Gh/s

This is all back-of-the-napkin math, but again I don't see why 0.77 W/Gh/s looks undoable, even taking into account BFL's current horribly inefficient design.

I stop you right there. Bitfury has a chip consuming 0.8 W/Gh/s and it is 55nm. So it is beyond any doubt that a 28nm chip (theoretically 4x more efficient) can increase efficiency to at least 0.77 W/Gh/s (which necessitates only a 1.04x improvement).

You are off by 2x. A shrink from 65 to 28nm theoretically increases power efficiency to 3.1 / ((65/28)^2) = 0.57 W/GH. That's because power efficiency is inversely proportional to the square of the feature size.

(However leakage is a bigger problem at 28nm than 65nm, which is why 28nm GPUs weren't quite as efficient as AMD/Nvidia had predicted, but combined with whatever logical improvements BFL claims, a 0.6 W/GH number is totally plausible at 28nm. Heck Bitfury does 0.8 W/GH at 55nm!)

What he is saying is that just the theoretical power efficiency increase alone gained from 55nm to 28nm should guarantee 0.77 W/GH. But he also said they improved the design (maybe fewer transistors, a "sea-of-hasher" design like bitfury, etc), therefore it should be even lower than 0.77 W/GH.

That's a common misconception... You still need a noisy fan to cool down the radiator in a water cooling setup. Unless you have a fancy setup hooked to swimming pool or other large body of permanently cool water.

No. For the last time: FinCEN is part of the govt. BoT is not. How hard is it to understand the difference?

Err... you answered yourself a few lines above(!): because "FinCEN is not part of the Federal Reserve" (emphasis mine); FinCEN is actually part of the US government (Department of the Treasury). Understand that the Federal Reserve, like BoT, are weaker entities set up by the government, but not part of it, and strictly regulated by its laws.

I have very precise measurements with a clamp meter at 12V on 4 of my 60 Gh/s Singles SCs: each of them varies between 20.5 and 21.5 amp (246 to 258 watt). I run them on a PSU that is about 89% efficient, so I measure 275-290 watt at the wall with a kill-a-watt for each single.

Guidance is not law.

Besides, FinCEN is part of the US government, whereas the Bank of Thailand is not part of the government.

Viceroy, every single one of these articles you quoted has the "Bank of Thailand" as its source. And you completely missed the main point of this thread that the "Bank of Thailand" has no legal power to declare Bitcoin illegal.

Yes the media is wrong.  They are wrong more often than you think...

Chaang Noi, the post by Bitcoin Co. Ltd. is not a troll. Bitcoin Co. Ltd. merely reports word for word what they were told by the Bank of Thailand. Yes the BoT used the word "illegal" but I am sure that, just like you and I, Bitcoin Co. Ltd. knows that the BoT has no authority to declare Bitcoin illegal. That's why Bitcoin Co. Ltd. carefully titled the post "Trading suspended due to Bank of Thailand advisement" without trying to imply anything else.

The trolls are those on Hacker News and elsewhere who fail to interpret the meaning of that post, and who shout "Bitcoin is illegal!"

BOT merely provides "suggestions", or "advises" the government. See http://www.bot.or.th/English/AboutBOT/index/Pages/RolesAndResponsibilities.aspx

You made a nice map and you may feel good about using the full palette of colors of your legend, but until the Exchanges Currencies Act of Thailand is updated or superseded by another Act to prohibit Bitcoin, your map is spreading misinformation.

Correct.


Again, this does not mean BOT has power to make Bitcoin illegal. They can make "suggestions" to the government. They can "advise" them. But they cannot write laws. For example BOT enforces the Exchange Control Act (which was enacted into law by the government, not by BOT), and this Act, unless changed by the government, does not prohibit Bitcoin.

The day this Act will be changed, or another will be written, to prohibit Bitcoin, will be the day Bitcoin is illegal in Thailand. Until then Bitcoin is legal.

Bitcoin was not ruled illegal in Thailand. There is poor reporting and interpretation going on. The Bank of Thailand has no legal power. A few senior members of the bank saying something is illegal does not make it illegal. The Foreign Exchange Administration and Policy Department are merely departments of the bank, not branches of the legislative government of Thailand.

This is a scenario similar to what happened in 2011 in France: MtGox's bank closed their account saying that a Bitcoin exchange was "illegal/unauthorized". MtGox sued the bank. And courts sided with MtGox and forced the bank to re-open their account: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=41317.0

Same thing here. The Bank of Thailand saying "this is illegal" does not make it illegal. They are just an institution, who does not represent the government, who displays a hostile attitude toward Bitcoin. Nothing more.