Ah China, guess you can get everything from that whacky country these days.

Do you have enough space for all this? Not sure what your final power plan is, but these cells are rated at .613V, assuming you want 12V DC that's still ~20 cells in series, or 10' x 6" (you could make smaller panels and hook those up in series of course), 7kW (5000 kwh / month) of 12V power would require a huge number of 10'x6" strips. Unless you meant 5000 kwh / yr, which would definitely be more doable.

Not sure how many in this thread read the post referenced by OP, as most people are seeing "ASIC war!" but it looks like this is simply a result of ASIC stability.


Might be BS, or might be true, that it's simply a matter of the fact that 8 is more stable than 6, and that's why they chose to go this route, which will end up with some happy customers. Rather than being anything to do with outdoing BFL (though that doesn't hurt).

EDIT: Reminder though that chips were apparently literally dying at overclock speeds, so before you have wet dreams of overclocking, keep in mind the horrors of murdering your ASIC chip.

I don't really follow. $2 / watt is more than you would pay for a professionally put together finished panel. I'm not aware of solar cell wholesalers, so it's hard for me to check, but I've certainly been wrong before.

I suppose there is nothing really to prevent you from doing it your way, except material, time, tools and working space.

8.9¢ / kwh?

Hmm, so they are selling 72GH/sec for $1069.99 now?

Though I appreciate links, as I requested them (maybe you missed that post), neither of these fit any criteria of the quote.

Top line from The AMA post:

20GH = 20,000 MH; 20,000 MH / 10,000comps = 2MH/comp. Or roughly what you'd get out of an old crappy CPU. I did say in the quote that CPU mining is most likely of the unlikely scenarios.

For the symantec stuff, GPU malware != GPU botnet. Simply is one, low-risk (hasn't spread much) example of code that has that ability. No one is claiming that it is impossible to do, that isn't what we're discussing, so this is not a useful link. If it were a report of how it was a widespread hidden threat that would make more sense.


As to the other guy with the botnetter friend, well. I will just leave that conversation be then.

I think you mean did you pay for professional installation of the system? No one DIYs a panel, you have to buy one, regardless of whether it is second-hand, B-grade, or whatever.

It certainly is a lot of work though, that's why the panels themselves are usually only about 50% of the cost of residential installation.

Maybe I'm hanging out with different people, but no one I've ever told about bitcoin has ever asked about creating an alternative. And the easy answer is that like any industry, there is no reason not to make an alternative, coke has its pepsi, mcdonalds has its burger king, et has its cetera. They can both do well, and the mainstay will usually have superior standing simply by having been first, or more established, rather than by being better necessarily.

The question I get asked is the flip, when talking about alt currency, most people ask "what's the point of this?" and that's the real question, until alts offer some real benefits (differences in mining rates don't really count except to miners) they aren't much threat.

I would argue that "attacking" alts in order to maintain cryptocurrency monopoly would be more harmful than leaving alts to their own devices, in terms of attracting bad PR and generally making cryptocurrency seem immature and potentially dangerous (more so than people already believe).

Hmm, well it does seem to spit out more than a month at a time now, so I can't recreate that aspect. So ignore me there

I'm not asking for accurate numbers, I'm asking for any confirmed botnet reports, and evidence as to them being GPU based, as you so casually stated that they were.

What you are telling me is that because an automated system on deepbit, which admittedly catches many regular users (unless you are suggesting your friend is a botnetter) by its aggressive settings, is the only suggestion that botnets "might be out there".

That is hardly conclusive evidence of the roving bands of GPU botnets you claim.

CPU botnets are the most likely, and even those are not very likely, nor clearly are they being very successful.

Heat pumps transfer heat, what is the heat-source? It sounds like he will be in a cold-climate (winter time) which he is hoping to stave off via electricity, not ideal for having ready sources of heat to be moved in.

Interesting thought though, I wonder how the efficiency compares to BTC generation, taking into account initial price, if his climate weren't so cold.

Apologies, I was thinking along different lines, your numbers are indeed correct.

[/quote]

I see, you meant an entire revamp to the whole design, rather than a simple modification to the existing design. As to what the specifics would be PCI vs. USB vs. ?? I would not want to get into, but I still question the efficiency gained by this method. As I understand the mini-rigs are going to be something along the lines of the size of a large trash can? This obviously would be unattractive for the average consumer. A smaller design such as the FPGA would be more attractive, but lose some of the savings you imagine, by being larger/bulkier to ship, requiring extra superfluous parts (1 board with spaces for daughter boards, power connector slots, etc.), increased cooling solutions for the near-housing of units, and still needing to make a large number of housing units (say 5 daughter boards per housing?). I'm not saying there would be NO savings, but simply that I don't know that it would be game changing enough to make a company that went this direction the sole survivor in the competitive ASIC market.

I do indeed. I don't mind linking to other articles as an information resource about other topics (though linking 10 articles in one paper can be a little self-aggrandizing), however the stylistic choice is somewhat misleading. Perhaps an overabundance of Wikipedia-mindedness, but I expect that a hyperlink of a term (such as Bitcoins Savings and Trust) will lead to a very impartial explanation of specifically what that thing is/was, not another similarly styled wandering treatise on some event. He also uses his own writings as a 'reference' to back up the argument he is making in the current article.  It is poor form in my opinion to build an argument, then use that argument as evidence, without at least mentioning that he is citing himself.

I prefer the magazine style choice of: "You can read more about XYZ in other articles I have written about XYZ <hyperlink>here</hyperlink>" (or similar to that) if choosing to link to oneself in ones own article while discussing a topic, so that I clearly know what type of information they are presenting. Also I think it helps the author from over-linking, which can make the article itself hard to follow, as you split off into tangent after tangent.

Hope that makes my position clearer.

Well it happens regardless of the date, but sure.

If I leave the page at default and simply change:


the output becomes:


I don't have your code, but I believe that it uses the "Last re-target" entered in settings as the starting point, so that if you enter a later date into the simulation it assumes no retargets since that point (in this case, from 11-12-12 to 12-22-12 no retargets occur, when suddenly 72.6TH/sec comes online, rips through the remaining 400?-600? blocks, and calculates the retarget for 48 days of hashing time, lowering diff to 1.1M, which is then ripped through by 72.6TH/sec in about 30 hours, raising diff to 10Mil).
Which is why I said that I would need to calculate the last re-target manually (and potentially what block we would be on) to use this.

I don't want to burden the page with output, but any start/end date > 30 days apart will only output 30 days of simulation.

Yes? Can you link something to evidence the frequent action pool operators take? Article or transcript from pool operators talking about it? I'm curious to learn about this.

I prefer to just shoot down other peoples ideas because then it's harder to throw back in my face :p

But seriously, it is quite difficult to guess with change in tech and whatnot, so I will say that as a tentative estimate, I'm foreseeing a fast run up to 250TH, by end of Jan, then a steep decline in the rate of new power coming online. The next 250TH I'm guessing will come online over the course of 10-12 months depending on a few factors.

1) Price (up or down?); up boosts the curve, especially if we see an increase RIGHT after 25 halving. Even $15/coin would shoot up the rate at which ASICs are acquired

2) How fast ASIC 2.0 is released and/or if there are price drops on ASIC 1.0 in this time frame.

3) How quickly supply can meet demand divided amongst the suppliers

4) If suppy > demand by a significant amount, if a supplier decides that mining excess unsold hardware makes sense.

5) Reserved

BUT, assuming reasonable price level close to current ones, ASIC 1.0 being the only game in town for 2013, a reasonable rollout of supply, and no malicious suppliers, my best bet would that we hit 500TH around the end of 2013, if not later. For why, as I said, the initial burst of pre-orders will be the main thrust into ASICs, which will explode difficulty, late comers will be eyeballing price/difficulty/reliabilty, etc. and take a slower tack to buying. 500TH is roughly 8333 singles or ~10.25Million USD, close to the current amount of GPU hardware, which I think will take current users time to liquidate their GPU rigs, and decide if it's worth going into ASICs or buying coins.

Seems like it could be useful.

I find it a little bit obnoxious that I can only output 1 month at a time though, and if I want to look into the future I have to calculate for myself what the difficulty and retargets would be at that time, and enter it manually, or else the defaults give me things like:

Date      Network (Th/s)      Block      Own Rate (Th/s) (%)   Balance
2013-01-12   95.35         209553      1.5 (1.57%)      441.54
   Difficulty re-target: 758324 (2013-01-13 04:38:23)
   Difficulty re-target: 13770736 (2013-01-13 23:08:33)
2013-01-13   97.32         211685      1.5 (1.54%)      1,437.59

Other than that, perhaps take into account the loss of GPU miners at halving + ASICs coming online? (When 48THash comes on and 25coin blocks are here, a large chunk of GPU miners are going to go dark).

You have some contrary evidence? Or you just have no logical response?

My thoughts are that Vitalik is a very poor writer, which may not be his fault, he is russian or something? But the endless self-referencing is a bit annoying.

Sometimes articles prompt me to skip to the end based on their writing style, and this was one of them:


That's the gist of what I got from that article as its conclusion. "We dunno, but it seems like it should be ok".

Even if his numbers are wrong, he does get the general idea, which is good.


Again don't mean to be nitpicker, but it can't be "exactly" if the numbers are wrong, even if the idea is right.

Here's where I begin to question. Modularizability sounds great and all, but it's not really the "game-changer" that you make it out to be. As far as I can tell, the BFL singles (only picture of an ASIC device we have currently) is essentially a box around a heatsink and a PCB+chips. In essence, it is almost as bare minimum as you can get. Aside from being able to buy some sort of massive copper-block with slots to insert boards into, you're not really going to get much more efficiency from some sort of modular design (and that's not very efficient really).

As to the cryptocurrencies, there are already merged mining pools, so all the bitcoin forks do not need to covered by vendors, and the non doubleSHA256s can't work alongside bitcoin for ASICs as needs no explanation.