What's the typical power draw for a consumer-grade router? A couple watts? Probably 5-10 I'd guess, which probably means one good chip added to that could about double it. What's the power cost vs expected yield (or 25% of expected yield) for a 5W chip getting say 50GH over a three-year lifetime?

Are they advertising a service based around microtransactions? How do they propose to solve the problem, as mentioned earlier, of microtransactions overwhelming the protocol?

What service are they offering that is inherently benefited by integrating a hashing chip that pays the customer a fraction of its yield?

Novak and I both really don't see what they're doing that's actually any good, which means we both don't like it. Which, statistically, means it's going to be highly profitable for them.

That's great, for the phone where you get a ringtone out of it. What about everything else? What gimmick do they feed you to double the power consumption on your new wireless router?

I agree there needs to be a change toward decentralization and mass adoption. That's good for everyone. But I don't see the practicality in charging people extra money to integrate miners into their devices and then pocket almost all of the returns. That's not actually decentralizing, it's just a new centralized model. I mean sure it distributes the hashpower, but one entity still controls the majority of the coins generated. Without user-configurable pools and payouts, they'd be supporting the economy more effectively by just buying that many dollars worth of existing coins instead of that many dollars worth of added mining chip and electricity cost.

That right there makes the whole idea pretty much a disaster for any consumer, especially ones capable of simple math.

Surprisingly enough, this works perfectly.

What we have is our L-board, with some modifications - 5V is now tied directly to 3.3V, reset is now controller-driven and the whole UART level shifting is jerryrigged. The thing is powered off a hacked-up BTCGarden AM-V1 VRM, which is also forwarding 12VDC into an S5 controller board. I've had to hack up the cable a bit to make it think there's a proper board plugged in, but the thing no mines away just fine in standalone.

I've got to assemble a couple more L-boards (one for Novak to use for software testing, and one with series chips so I can get that ironed out) but for the time being I'll just leave this guy mining. First fully successful test of a two-chip mining board. If I didn't care about the extra couple percent efficiency boost of running series chips instead of parallel (or the necessary dev step of mastering string'd comms and power) this could become an Amita. But the point of the Amita is to demonstrate string topology.

Tell you guys what, if I wasn't doing stickminers and went straight for the TypeZero it'd probably be done already. I never expected to have lost so much time figuring out particulars for that daggum Compac. Hopefully I have a final design done for that soon.

Looks like a protocol issue. I currently have my L-board working off an S5 controller, spitting out 16.5GH at 150MHz with, so far (17 minutes) zero HW errors and a butt-ton of accepted shares on a low-diff pool. I'll shift it over to the 1Burger Eligius account here in a bit and get some good stats visible.

I'm not sure what the U3 code set the baudrate to, but I know the S5 runs 115200. The pulses coming back off my chips for submitted shares aren't triggering the LED flash for near as long, so depending on what we do for a final cgminer driver I might have to tweak that circuit a bit.

Novak's looking at code now to see what the differences are between S5 (BM1384) driving and U3 (BM1382) driving. I'll continue dev on the L-board using an S5 controller because it appears to work. I need to work up another L-board with the second chip strung instead of parallel, and if it works we basically have the layout for the Amita data-wise. I'll also need to do some more tweaking to the Compac regulator design and see if I can't knock out some of the noise.

I had those PSUs running two Prismas each for a couple months without issue, but that was on two cables each. 16AWG, yes, I wouldn't knowingly sell someone smaller wires than that.

Past my bedtime here. k3nnyx, hope you get everything up and going. You're in good hands on this forum.

If it's set up the same way it was here, he's got 8 boards per DPS2000 PSU, which ran fine on the shelf for about seven months.

Board 6 looks to have a few chips out. If you reset or power-cycle, they might come back up. It could be a heat issue residual from them being overclocked. Glad things are going for you.

The black knob on the boards is fan speed for the PSU fans. If the fans were plugged into the 4-pin headers (near that knob on the boards) you could adjust the speeds up or down. If you're running them in a potentially toasty environment where noise isn't a concern, running the fans at full speed is probably a good idea, but if you want them slower/quieter that's how you do it.

He bought these from one of my hosting customers, and they were all tested and ran overnight before packing for ship so they went into the boxes working. I hope there are no dead boards.

Though I didn't think any of them were set on 300MHz; stock is 270MHz for the Tube. Maybe he changed that? Taking them back to stock (or lower as suggested) would be good to rule out some possibilities while getting them going.

Sequential addressing will also help locate problems.

Unless they make open pool choices, they become number 1. If they don't make open pool choices, they then have to convince everyone to spend that extra $8 initial and $1 per month in exchange for almost exactly nothing in return.

So, we did some more checking with the L-board (two chip board) and it looks like the comically high HW errors being reported is because of duplicate shares cgminer tallies as errors. I was working on getting the thing to light up off an S5 controller to see if it might be software-related, but was having no luck. I can see a brief TX signal sent to the L-board, and a flash on my LED indicates it briefly responds, but I see no evidence of an attempted initialization. Could be a wiring issue or who knows what else. I see zero chips displayed on the stats page.

I did, however, figure out some ways to get my CP2102 RX and TX down to the BM1384 logic levels better and using fewer parts than are currently on the Compac. I need to work on cleaning up the regulator output and redesign the PCB with regulator changes and I'll toss in those comms changes as well - they're currently implemented on the L-board and hashing away.

Hopefully we can figure out if it's a hardware issue or software issue causing the duplicate shares. The two chips on the board should be addressed differently, and it enumerates in cgminer as a U3 which is a 4-chip device, so unless Bitmain changed how work is divided amongst the chips between BM1382 and BM1384 protocols, I don't really know what's up. I'm really hoping it's a software thing, but until we get it figured out that stalls Amita and TypeZero dev.

Or not burning $10M for the benefit of himself - just, not spending it at all. Decentralization is easy, but it depends on wealthy entities not buying up the entire market. Which is fundamentally incompatible with human greed. It doesn't require anyone to be particularly generous, just for rich people to not be particularly greedy - very likely negating the attitude which made them rich in the first place.

Someone actually prioritizing decentralization over maximized profits could do pretty much the same thing 21e6 is working toward without claiming all the block rewards, and being honest about educating consumers about the true costs of the things they're buying. Same argument behind selling mining hardware fresh off the line instead of self-mining during the prime months and reselling it when it's running breakeven. It's all a matter of what you think is important - support the network, or raid the network. You can't do both.

For any smart consumer, it would lead to devices not specifically designed to turn electricity into heat for some productive purpose being turned off, or the hashing functions disabled when additional heat is not something you specifically want. Decentralization is great, but a million people spending out of pocket monthly to help "maintain the network" while funneling the resources generated by their efforts into the coffers of a multimillion-dollar corporation is silly. Asking someone else to pay the electric bill on your money-printing press (that prints less money than it costs to run, if not now then within a year or so) and then generously offering to pay you one fourth of the money you printed for them really can't be painted as a good deal to anyone except them and the electric company. I just don't see the numbers in it, especially if the block rewards are hardware-locked to the chip maker. Sure it gets visibility for bitcoin, but all your PR is centered around tricking people into giving you more money - which, to be honest, is actually pretty standard.

Zero OpEx because it's all shifted to the consumer, who is seeing at best a fraction of the revenue and footing all of the cost. Count me out, pretty much forever, on any mining device I can't configure the pool for and any mining device which I can't turn off.

Unless they integrate hash cores into the processors already built into the things.

Several people will make issue, but how many of the Wal-Mart electronics consumers actually care to do market research on the crap they buy? How many folks will just buy what's cheap and meets their needs (wants, more likely) without caring about the underlying technology or why they're being exploited? Probably "almost everyone", even if it's almost nobody represented on these forums.

Some of them are expressed in Bitmain's announcement thread for the PSU.

Probably what they'll end up doing is getting chips integrated into internet-connected stationary household devices without telling the consumers - or at best, put it in the fine print that nobody reads anyway. Maybe add only a few watts to power dissipation, something most folks would never notice. Keep it passively cooled. So someone buys a new Tivo and gives away 25GH to 21e6. The smart fridge has one, and the TV and DVR both have one (in every room), and the XBox has one, and pretty soon your house is secretly giving 200GH to 21e6. Sure they only make a couple bucks from your house, and you won't really fight it because it increases your electric bill by about $3 a month, but when ten thousand people are all doing that, 21e6 now has a 2PH farm at their disposal with zero maintenance cost. Keeping 75% of the earnings you know about isn't near as profitable as keeping 100% of the earnings you don't.

Sure this sounds like a conspiracy theory, and it very much is. But I don't trust investor-driven profit-driven big businesses (with who knows how many hundreds of millions of dollars already driven in with the expectation of boundless returns) to not screw people over as much as legally possible, and then get laws changed when they run out of loophole room. And trusting that most people who like to jump on fads don't take the time to consider the actual cost.

Mostly sadface. Check the speed (http://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/userstats.php/1BURGERAXHH6Yi6LRybRJK7ybEm5m5HwTr) - it's running the same as a single chip. I don't know if it's a hardware or software issue yet (I need to log the cgminer debug and see if Novak wants to look at it) but it looks like the second chip's output is pretty much entirely errors. I'm hoping it's a cgminer thing and not a hardware thing.

Oh, maybe I should see if I can't run the testboard off an S5 controller with the proper code for those chips. Right now it enumerates as an S3. I don't know if they made any protocol changes from one chip to the next that might alter how upstream shares are packaged. Be pretty cool if that works.

I like to think we have the best jobs. I was just asked last night, if I could do the same job for a big private company and get paid a heck of a lot more, would I? Heck no. Right now I don't get paid for crap but my bills are covered so it's enough. The real benefit is I get to work on things that I think are awesome, instead of things that some old fat guy in a suit gets told is awesome by people with too much money. (And then he gets paid 500 times more than I do to make those decisions - seriously, median US CEO wage is approximately median US household daily income per minute)

The lousy part of the job is not having the resources to do things bigger, or faster, or sometimes (as the case with some upgrades and new designs for our PSU boards), at all. But that's coming. We're free, and the future is bright.

Also, I don't think "too cold" is really a thing. This past winter was pretty mild by my standards, but the winter before it got down to about -10 for a week or so. The average winter where I live now is actually less cold (and a lot less snowy) than I'd prefer. The summers here are way too hot (100F and 90+% humidity isn't uncommon). I'm physically optimized for cooler weather. Novak, however, is definitely built for more tropical climes. Grumble grumble compromise...

Well, the error rate was stupid high again and poolside looks like garbage so I'm gonna call that experiment a failure.