My guess is it won't just be $1-2 per month. I could see $2 per month per device, and they're going to want you to have as many devices as possible. If it's ten things per household (the router, the TV, the DVR, the other TV, both game consoles...) that's $20 per month. For some people that adds half again to the power bill, and it yields them what, $10 in coin disbursements they can use for spamming the blockchain with microtransactions for 21e6-sponsored value-added services? And that's $10 now; in a year they'd still be spending $20 but the yield would be more like $2 in coin (unless the exchange rate starts going back the other way, so maybe $3). Sure it decentralizes the network, but it decentralizes the network in such a way that everyone mining mines at a loss and 21e6 takes all the coin.

It's definitely possible that a lot of people will find the "services" favorable and will jump on the bandwagon of BTC-enabled household devices. But it's also possible that a very wealthy entity will have no qualms at all about increasing its profit margins by convincing its customers that they're getting a good deal while actually making things worse for everyone.

I won't be too surprised if they allow you to turn off the mining functions. I won't be surprised if the device with this option costs more than without it. I will be incredibly surprised if they don't charge even more for a device that also allows you to pick your own pool.

My guess is they're looking for the most profitable way to recover money they invested in a pretty good mining chip. They figure self-mining they have 100% of the expenses and 100% of the revenue, but if they ship them out with their plan, they have 0% of the expenses and 75% of the revenue. Especially if they sell "services" which get them most of that last 25% of the coins. I'm also assuming the person buying the router pays the extra $8 for the chips.

I wonder if they'll include options to turn the miner off without having to power down the entire device. If that option is not present, and they also run the software-locked pool, then the user really does have no control. Unless you put it behind another router that redirects requests from their pool to your own? But that's kinda stupid to have a mining router behind a router. Just get a miner.

So what happens if the probably fee-free microtransactions from every device in every household flood the network with garbage data and never get processed? Or do get processed, and flood every node's storage space and probably require a protocol change to larger block sizes to keep the list of pending transactions from being weeks or months long?

Speaking of, if anyone knows someone with Dragons, I might know a guy with a cheap electrical location...

When it comes to tanks, don't forget the S1. I just turned off the last of mine a month ago, and that was because I didn't feel like undervolting them again to run fanless at 0.8W/GH board-level. It's too bad the S5 doesn't work properly when undervolted. One of these days I'm gonna have to find time to test that and see if there isn't a solution, because those things could be run around 0.3W/GH instead of 0.5W/GH and extend the service life substantially. In theory.

I uh, I prototyped a USB stick miner a month ago that's 60% the per-unit power of an S5. ASICMiner tested a chip whose full-range efficiency was about 20% better than Bitmain's chip before Christmas. Bitfury claimed 0.2W/GH about three months ago, SFARDS' dual-miner chip on SHA256 has at least a 20% better bottom-clock than the BM1384, and Bitmain's approximate six-month cycle for new chips is coming right up. Spondoolies is overdue on their next gen, whose previous gen (released five months before the S5) was competetive with S5 clock/volt setpoints, and let's not count out Canaan-Creative probably cooking up a fifth-gen Avalon chip. There is A LOT of room for improvement and A LOT of it is happening right now.

I sell 750W server PSU kits for $50 that would run an S5 - not as efficient as gigampz's Platinum unit (from what I understand it's pretty sexy) but still pretty decent.

Also, a lot of miners get resold to people with cheap power or poor math skills, so that's one way to recoup the cost.

Consider that network difficulty will go up over time, meaning your share of the take will reduce.
Consider that in approximately one year the block reward will be halved.
Consider that, within a few months, there will likely be mass offerings of miners much more efficient than the S5 is currently. The chips on the S5 itself are actually already running at almost the least efficient operating point possible, so there's plenty of room for improvement even without the next generation of chips three or four manufacturers are probably going to be releasing this summer.

I'm getting along fine with the '94 Jeep and sleeping on a couch lifestyle. Bein' a millionaire isn't worth also being a globally-despised assbag.

So when was the last time this award might have been valid? Were they already pretty overtly crappy this time last year? Because KFC did get off to a really really good start. They were the Spondoolies for a while there.

Haven't some of them used their scammings to hire bodyguards? I think I remember reading on here somewhere that one of the more well-known scammers was usually seen in the company of at least one large protective thug. Could be wrong, but I don't really doubt it.

How BFL-ish (literally everything they say is either outright lies or, at best, heavily outdated information that may have once been technically true) are their ads already, and how much will this "meaningless" award add to their ability to make themselves look artificially good? Any positive publicity toward an evil or duplicitous company is a bad thing.

Do they really have to though? If they can talk other people into paying for the chips, and other people pay for the electric, does it really matter what they spent to put the chips in there? All they have to do is get reimbursed on the chip cost (by selling the product with a slight markup, easy to do when you can capitalize on trends) and then sit back and watch while every customer sends them free bitcoins. A 50GH miner next year won't be bringing in near as much as a 50GH miner today, but if it's still running in a year (on someone else's dime) and their costs on it are breakeven just by selling it, diminishing profits from day one are still profits from day one.

If by "focus on the project" you mean "sleep in and play baseball", then you're mostly correct.

Friday I noticed that part of the speed issue I was seeing pool-side from the seriaL-board on the S5 controller was rejected shares. I had about 25% rejected, which accounted for the ~4GH (of ~16GH) missing poolside. So I swapped the paralleL-board onto the S5 to see if it was a hardware or software issue. I immediately started seeing 25% rejected shares, which snuck up to about 50% later in the day. Right now the ~17GH poolside is from the 50% non-duplicate shares on the USB controller and the 50% non-rejected shares on the S5 controller. One of these days we'll have software capable of doing something right, I promise!

Today I'm gonna test out some ideas for cleaning up the Compac regulator output. If we can get a functional design this week with a low-noise output prototyped I'll probably send off for proto PCBs end of the week. We'll have 'em in hand for testing a week or two later. I also should have some more heatsinks inbound, samples of the final version which I can attach to some Compacs if they work and get 'em out to my testers. I also have to focus on some hosting stuff at least one day this week, and actually next week I'm off for two days (yep, vacation - first one since Christmas week when I didn't come in to work for a couple days because of debilitating illness) so hopefully I can make progress before Friday. But the weather was really really nice all weekend and it felt like a waste to spend it working instead of out running around doing fun stuff since it's not like I get paid anyway.

Also, and I'll be honest, my weekend slacking was somewhat motivated by the knowledge that, even if I made progress, I had no means by which to report it.

I remember about a year ago there was an outfit advertising they were working on a neural-net hardware for bitcoin mining. Had a big ol' website talking about how much faster their chips were running in only a few weeks of learning, with extrapolations for the future and looking for investors to help them expand the operation. I really hope they didn't make much money off that scam, since there's pretty much no way (by design) that a complex hashing function can be reduced to recognizable patterns optimizable by a neural net. Were that the case, basically all encryption from the last 30 years would be useless.

The L-board over there on the left. We call it the L-board because it's a three-chip breakout board so the chips make a right angle. Like the letter "L". The first chip will always be the first chip, but you can put a second chip either in parallel (alongside, as in the previous picture) or in series (above, as in this picture). Two power inputs, one for Vcore and one for 2x Vcore to be split by the string configuration. I also wired up the LED circuit from the Compac design onto it so I can see the flashing LEDs. Whoever said that was a good idea was right. Except that something with the 3.3V comms on the S5 controller sorta prevents the LED from working properly, or it strobes so sporadically I don't wait long enough to see it.

In any case, I rewired the schfifty-three to output 0.8 to 1.3V so I could safely take the string voltage up from safe-for-one-chip-if-something-is-very-very-wrong to can-operate-at-150MHz-at-half-this-voltage without anything exploding. I just checked the per-chip voltages in operation with my trusty crappy DMM and they're within 2mV of each other, so that's a pretty good split (less than half a percent difference). I did light this up on my bench supply to watch the power consumption and the power draw profile on chip init is pretty cool. It goes from very low to full in about a linear sweep of several seconds, which tells me they coded the init to ramp up the power slowly to avoid severe imbalances. If that works how I think that works, I could probably pull the 1800uF cans off the board and it'd still be alright. The S5 has 100uF tantalum per 2 chips in a node, and I have 200uF ceramic per one chip node right now, but the U3 init (expecting parallel chips, no balance needed) was way too abrupt and the first chip was very much outpacing the top chip until power was so out of whack that they both shut off - in well under one second.

So, for now I have two working two-board setups, one a standard parallel on a USB adapter and one string on the S5 controller. Novak's in command today, and will probably be figuring out what the heck all the code's doing so we can try and get some Compac- and Amita-specific drivers going in cgminer.

I'll probably be spending the day odd-jobbing and trying to cut down the noise in my Compac regulator. Hopefully I can work out some simple changes and a fresh PCB layout we can prototype in-house and not have to waste more time and money on prototype PCBs that don't really work. I won't be able to run out full Amita prototypes until we know what node-level capacitances we'll require, which looking at the init power profiles, will definitely require some working driver to test.

Even the "optimism" and "entertainment" factors are negated when you have automated and probably unconfigurable hardware ("boring") that pays you only a quarter of its meager earnings ("depressing").

If everything's working proper it should level out around 16.5GH. I don't have remote access to the stats page (shifted it off the VPN-capable subnet so Novak could play with the code more readily) to verify it right now, but I am admittedly disappointed in the 3-hour average currently presented. It's been running at speed for right around 4 hours. Of course, 16GH on a min-diff 128 makes for some pretty gnarley variance. The 12-hour should look much better.

Hopefully tomorrow early I can get the string L working, swap a fresh chip on and get the 3.3V RX back up. If it ends up working like I'm pretty sure it should, all I need to do after that is iron out the Compac regulator noise issue, get some solid numbers on minimum node-level capacitance to maintain balance during a two-chip initialization (testing so far indicates it's somewhere between 200 and 2000uF) and lay into some PCB redesigns. Heck, if the Compac gets to working, the Amita should be a single revision because the chip extension is pretty trivial compared to the friggin' month I've lost to regulator issues.

Well, my string L-board worked pretty well. The 3.3V RX for some reason decided to crap out pretty much without ever actually working, which becomes a chip problem. All that left me was a 1.8V RX, which was fine for the CP2102 adapter into cgminer, which so far doesn't work with dual chips. The S5 controller uses 3.3V logic, so I needed that 3.3V RX line. Feeding it from the 1.8V RX line gave it enough, apparently, to know there was a board attached with some chips and to start mining but I never saw any recorded hashes. And then the 1.8V RX started wigging out, possibly an internal high-tie resistor on the S5 controller. So, technically, the board worked - but now I have to replace the first ASIC in order to make it work for real.

I refit the schfifty-three regulator to run 0.8-1.3V and tested balance on the board. It was pretty good. And then when the chips start to initialize, the bottom chip kicked up first and drowned itself out with the 200uF node-level caps I had. So I slapped a couple 1800uF 6.3V cans on there and that gave it enough buffer to fully initialize. But that's gonna be seriously annoying if I have to do that on the Amita.

Anyway, it's about lunchtime so I'm gonna head out. The parallel L-board is hooked up on the S5 now, back how it was this afternoon, and running at the 1BURGER if anyone's paying attention to that. I had hoped the string L would work and I could leave it going, but it won't be worth messing with until I get that chip replaced and figure out what went wrong with the RF line hosing up my 3.3V RX.

Oh, also, when it was working briefly off cgminer and the USB adapter, I was seeing about 800mA off the 5V line into the regulator and should have been getting 16.5GH so that's pretty balls. That 800mA is surely not accurate (20 year old analog gauge), but it was in the neighborhood.

My vote is utility. Ease of transactability hopefully will get noticed, and that ease would increase the number of outlets willing to exchange bitcoins for goods and services. Volatility of the market right now is impeding that willingness, but hopefully increasing the proportion of the market based around goods and services, reducing the proportion based on speculation and margin trading, will help that out.

(how to get away with theft)

The how wasn't too difficult, with a shear and an hour with the soldering iron. The why is because it's a simple regulator that'll take in 5-12V (so I can test with USB or 12V power) and output 0.6-0.8V at 30A, which is really handy for testing miner chips.

When I have a final manufacturable design that's independently proven to work as advertised, and when I have secured a chip source. Not before both of those conditions are met.