No, it's a Model S.

However, I just saw this amazing device from some guy on eBay called a "BLOCK ERUPTER".  Looking at his projections I should be able to get one of those and then I can afford a Roadster by the end of the year!

UPDATE:
These services have now been shut down due to the cost of running them.

Here are instead the steps to create your own Azure gateway.

I'll show by example of how I would create westcoastbtc.cloudapp.net, port 8884 which connects to BTCGuild. My values will be within []'s. Substitute with your values when more appropriate.

1) Go to www.azure.com and create an account. You can get a free trial account
2) Enter the azure portal (on www.azure.com)
3) On the left of the portal, select 'Virtual Machines'
4) Click "+" at the bottom to create a new Virtual Machine
5a) Click through: Compute \ Virtual Machine \ Quick Create
5b) DNS Name = [westcoastbtc]
5c) Image = Windows Server 2012  (you can host on Linux as well if you're familiar with it. I'm not listing the instructions for that below.)
5d) Size = Extra Small (enough for 10 blades. You can upgrade later)
5e) User name = [shrek]
5f) Password = [donkey]
5g) Region = [West US]
6) Click 'Create a Virtual' machine and have a [beer] until it's done.

7) Click on your new server, and go to Endpoints
Click 'Add' to create a new endpoint
9) Add a Stand-Alone endpoint
10a) Name = [BTCGuild]
10b) Protocol = 'Tcp'
10c) Public Port = [8332]
10d) Private Port = same as 10c. [8332]
11) Click the checkmark to add it

12) Go to the DashPort
13) Click 'Connect'. There will be 2 popups, one from Azure, and one from your browser. Click 'Ok' on the azure one, and open your browser one (this is a Remote Desktop Client shortcut).
14) Enter 5e/5f from above for username & password

15) On the Server itself, go into 'Windows Firewall with Advanced Security'
16) Click 'Inbound Rules'
17) New Rule
18a) Port
18b) TCP
18c) Specific local ports = [8332]
19) Click Next
19a) Allow the connection.
20) Click Next
20a) Applies to 'Domain', 'Private', 'Public'
20b) Click Next
21) Name = 'BTCGuild Port'

It should now be set up. Create a batch file with a shortcut, and run the following:

start "BTCGuild Proxy" mining_proxy.exe -o eu-stratum.btcguild.com -p 3333 -gp 8332

(The 'start "BTCGuild Proxy"' part is just because I have dozens of these and I want to customize the title in the taskbar. You can leave it out).



I've set up a few Azure VM's and running mining_proxy.exe on it for Slush & BTCGuild.

The idea behind this is that if you run a ASICMINER blade or similar product that only supports Getwork and not Stratum, that you can connect it directly to this cloud-based mining proxy, instead of running your own proxy server somewhere on your premises. It thus should reduce your electrical usage.

This is a free Beta to test scalability. I reserve the right to cancel this service at any time. Leave me a message below or PM if you want me to PM you 3 days before I stop it/suspend it/take it offline for a significant period. You can also PM an email address to me if you want an email back. You're welcome to connect without letting me know, but I may yank the service out from underneath you and then you'll have a useless miner until you figure it out by yourself.

I got a performance increase from doing this. Please give feedback to tell me your experience. (Increase/Same/Decrease).

Some people have noticed a performance drop. I'd like to figure out why this happens - please don't just try and silently give up. Let me know your location so that I can see if I can get a server closer to you.


To connect, use one or more of the following servers.

All servers support both BTCGuild and Slush.

eastcoastbtc.cloudapp.net
westcoastbtc.cloudapp.net
westeuropebtc.cloudapp.net
northeuropebtc.cloudapp.net


They're located in Virginia, Washington (state), France and Spain respectively. Pick the one closest to you.


Ports:

BTC Guild: 8884, 8885, 8886
Slush: 8900, 8901, 8902
GHash.IO: 8904, 8905, 8906

The port choices are there to deal with the vardiff from Slush and BTC. If there are a lot of connections from the same port, due to multiple users, Slush & BTC Guild will increase your difficulty, which means you may have more rejects between blocks.

Unfortunately a bunch of slow miners is still considered fast... So let's say this. If you have one blade, just toss a dice to see which port to use. If you have multiple blades, spread them across servers and ports.


So e.g. in the ASICMINER blade config page, use the following:
Ports: 8884,8884
Server addresses: westeuropebtc.cloudapp.net,northeuropebtc.cloudapp.net
user:pass:  myname_worker:x,myname_worker:x


You can similarly also do a Slush primary/BTC Guild backup by setting it up like this:
Ports: 8900,8884
Server addresses: westcoastbtc.cloudapp.net,westcoastbtc.cloudapp.net
user:pass: slushusername:password,btcusername:password

Alternatively, use your own proxy server as your backup, in case mine goes down. I do have monitoring though, but I may not be able to intervene immediately.


Stuff that I think you should know (which other people call FAQ, but really aren't all that frequently asked...)

Can't you steal my worker username/password by connecting through your proxy?

I probably could if I wanted. Do you really care if someone steals your password and sets up a miner on your behalf? Make sure your password for your miners aren't the same as your account password and you should be safe. The password for all my miners are 'x'.


Can't you intercept a winning block and take it for yourself?

I wish! But no. You can't intercept a winning block if you connect directly to one of the pools either. The block being solved contains the pool's Bitcoin wallet address, so even if you were to intercept and submit it, the 25 BTC will still go to the pool owner.


How do I know you're not siphoning of hashes for yourself?

Monitor your own Slush / BTCGuild accounts. Slush / BTCGuild throughput should correspond to what you saw locally before or more. Compare your worker speed charts before and after. (Nice timing BTCGUILD for resetting our stats today! Grrrr.).  Let me know if you see a discrepancy (it most likely has to do with latency to my servers), and stop using the service immediately.

Do keep in mind though, that if you reconfigure an ASICMINER it takes about an hour to get back to 100% speed.


Is there a performance win/penalty for running the proxy over the internet

That's what I like to find out! At first I suspected there might be a penalty, but the cloud-based proxy gave me better throughput than I was able to get locally myself. I'm sometimes seeing 13.5 gh/s max on my blades now and over 12 gh/s average, which I've never seen with a local proxy. I suspect it's because the Azure machines are connected to the internet via gigabit connections, where I was sharing a lowly 30 mbps between both the Getwork and Stratum parts of the proxy.


Why are you offering this for free?

I tried it for myself as an experiment, and I got saw a surprising performance increase. Because of this, I'm now inviting other people to see if you get a similar throughput increase. If this holds true in general, I can turn this into a more formal service. Haven't really thought about a revenue model.


How long do you plan to run the Beta for?

Around 90 days unless it's starting to cost me 100s of dollars per month, or if I start offering another service. I might also reduce the number of servers if I see the backups aren't needed, or if I scale out using TCP load balancing instead. Do remember to send me a PM if you don't want to be surprised by me taking something offline.



Where is the service located

Now in 4 locations: Western US, Eastern US, Western Europe, Northern Europe.   I can set up East Asia & Southern Asia as well if there is any interest. Let me know. (Maybe for Russia?)


Can you do this for another pool? / Set a server up in another geographic region?

Let's see if these 2 work first, but I'm open to suggestions.

Unfortunately you can't just connect multiple user accounts over a proxy to Eligius - it will hand out difficulty 1 to everybody. But if you're interested I'll set up one-off Eligius ports for your. Let me know which primary & backup location, and how many ports you need.


This doesn't work!

Oops. Sorry. Post on this thread and I'll look into it.


I hate you!

I know. I'm used to it. I also drive a Tesla. Not a day goes by that I don't have to fight off at least a dozen trolls before breakfast. Knock yourself out.

You're right. I would indeed be shocked if a new player can come late to the market and manage to sell something at twice the price-point of their competitors...

VMC doesn't have any better technology than Cointerra or Hashfast. They just put a bunch of chips in 6 different boxes, but selling it as a single SKU, and now everybody is going all ooo and aahhh.

Are you using Slush's pool? If so I have the same problem for some reason, and haven't found a solution.

Point it at BTCGuild instead.

Only if you can get the asicminer farm for free, or close to it. At this point the absolute max you should pay per GHS is $40 / BTC 0.3.

Calculated.

To get to a difficulty of 2.5 trillion in a year (which is what 33% period-over-period implies), you need 20'000 peta hashes of computing power. With 5 ghash chips, you need 4 billion chips a year. Intel currently ships 1 billion chips per year.

Ok, but let's go for those big 500ghash cointerra chips that come out in 3 months, and say they can quad it to 2 TH within 1 year. (Keep in mind that Cointerra 28n/s technology is only marginally below state of the art manufacturing that is being used by Intel).

So that means someone still needs to manufacture, ship and sell 10 million x 2 TH chips within 1 year. And they will need to package that into a device and sell the whole thing for less than $13.5 each, otherwise nobody will buy it. (The whole bitcoin network just generates $750k per day - regardless of network size. So multiply by 6 months and divide by 10 million).

Those 500 ghash cointerra chips sell for $2870 each. It's not going to double twice in power and drop to less than $1 each within 1 year. That didn't even happen with GPU to ASIC, and that was a huge step-change in technology.


[EDIT]: Of course that won't stop BFL from starting to take pre-orders for it today...

This particular setup isn't any different than just buying 13 CoinTerra TerraMiner IV's at $13k each. That will set you back $169k for 26 TH, shipping in December.

The VMC Fast-One Platinum 25 TH will cost $353k (you need 6 expansion cases), and it also ships in December.

They must be targeting this at people who don't know how to use Google...


PS: Faster mining doesn't affect the price of BTC. 25 BTC's are generated every 5 to 10 minutes, regardless of the speed of the network. Fast mining just affects other miners.

Thanks for the help, but sadly, no.

I tried all 4 those addresses. The last 2 doesn't respond. The first two have the same issue with ASICMINER blade crashing.

It's closer to 23c a day, and ONLY if you plug it into a device that anyway has to be on. If it doesn't have to be on already, you're negative out of the gate.

I think the best you can do with 1 of these guys is form a solo miner and hope you get a full block payout over its life.

Odds are significantly against you (1 in 1000 if you leave it on 24/7 over the next difficulty period), but that's probably better than the odds of sticking $35 into a Vegas slot machine and hoping for a $3500 jackpot.  But even then it's only worth it if your electricity is otherwise already accounted for.

So you figure that a year from now there will be more ASIC chips manufactured in the world, than all other microchips combined?

I have a bunch of block erupters (on BFGMiner), that I point at Slush's pool, which works fine.

I also have an blade erupter running against BtcGuild using mining_proxy.exe. This also works fine.


I would like to move the blade erupter over to Slush's pool.

HOWEVER, when I try to point the blade's mining_proxy.exe at Slush's pool, the blade starts functioning erratically. Generally my blade get days and days of uptime, but on Slush it crashes every few minutes, or worse, hangs until I reboot it. It's overclocked to 13gh/s, but ventilation is via a wind tunnel in a cold room, so can't imagine it's that.

Switching the blade back to BtcGuild fixes it. Switching back to Slush, and I have issues again. Tried rebooting it a bunch of times etc.


Any idea what's going on?

I have an ASICMINER blade erupter that works fine against BtcGuild using a mining_proxy.

I also have a bunch of block erupters (ran on BFGMiner), that I point at Slush's pool, which also works fine.


HOWEVER, when I try to point the blade erupter mining_proxy at Slush's pool, the blade erupter starts functioning erratically. Generally my blade erupter get days and days of uptime, but on Slush it crashes every few minutes. It's overclocked, but ventilation is via a wind tunnel in a cold room, so can't imagine it's that.

Switching the blade back to BtcGuild fixes it. Switching back to Slush, and I have issues again. Tried rebooting it a bunch of times etc.


Any words of wisdom here?

BTCJam asks for quite a bit of personal information in order to join.

They can obviously create havoc with this if either they're malicious, or just have bad security around their site.

Does anybody else have experience with BTCJam? Either from an investor perspective or loaner perspective?

Seems like the BTC equivalent of LendingClub, which is great, if it's legit.

There's been a pretty substantial drop in network speed today.

We're at 591.60 as of this posting. We started the current period at 591.25! (Unfortunately that is still 35% up over average of last period. Oh well).

Not that this is a bad thing, but I wonder what caused this?

My theory would be that a mining supplier (BitFury?) was using new equipment to mine until the last day of the current period, and now that difficulty is about to increase, turned it off to send to customers.