As long as I have resources available to keep making for the small miners, I'm gonna. When solving blocks is the sole domain of rich guys I might just walk away from bitcoin entirely, but not until it becomes impossible. I've already had someone with money asking me (a month or so ago) about the feasibility of making their own chips and building miners for their own farm; said someone is interested in our miner designs and might end up contributing to the overall project. If it turns into a relationship able to sponsor chip fab (unlikely but not impossible), I could redirect our take from that work to use some of those chips for affordable and non-crappy miners to sell to whoever I want. That'd be alright.

Yes, it's not a problem to discuss the future of hardware in the hardware section. But it does seem off-topic to talk about stuff not pertaining to miner sellers trustworthiness in this particular thread.

I dunno. Maybe. If a revolution results from me doing what I want to do for folks, then yes. Otherwise, no, but I'm still gonna do what I want to do. I wouldn't take the same deal that was offered to Spondoolies because I think being a publicly traded company is stupid, and nobody will ever be able to pay for the right to make decisions about my company. I doubt we'd get to having our own chip fab anytime soon - if ever - because I'm unwilling to take in outside investment money, especially on things that aren't guaranteed, so I'll have to settle for buying chips from the big guys. But if we ever get to being able to mass-produce our own miners affordably you can bet the prices we offer to million-dollar farms will be the same as we offer to mom and pop. No selling out, and no favoritism for the rich. If that way of doing business becomes a revolution, the more the merrier. All I can guarantee is there'll be at least one outfit doing it.

But there's no real reason to clutter up your thread with off-topic opinions.

To be fair, the question was for the most part rhetorical, and a commentary on making yourself sound important by adding a lot of syllables to a really common task. I know they do a whole lot more, but to use that many big words to say "mining farm" is pretty clearly self-inflation.


Regarding Spondoolies, it's mostly from an engineering standpoint. They're the only company that's made a single large chip work well so far, partly because they built the darn thing to run at 120C continuous to avoid exotic cooling requirements. In general, I don't like high power density and the constraints that puts on a system. Tiny inefficient fans, really low intake temperatures to avoid cooling issues, stuff like that. I don't like BGA packages. I don't like that they require multi-phase 200A DC-DC converters. I don't like the nonstandard IO protocol with its own FPGA implementation. I don't like complexity because it adds cost and a lot of potential failure points.

I'm impressed that they've gotten the efficiency they did out of the Rockerbox and its regulator requirements. I'm impressed that they can keep a chip running that's dissipating well over 100W through about one square inch of surface area using only forced air and a standard heatsink. I also, as mentioned, have nothing to complain about regarding the effectiveness of their customer support - those guys are on the ball. But I would much rather see a more modular miner with a matrix of small chips. I won't say "Well here's how I'd do it if I was gonna do it" because there's enough of that in the thread where I am doing it. But I'll probably never build a miner around a Spondoolies chip if they keep doing chips the same way, even if their chips are awesome, because the complexities required to power and interface to them tend to violate our general engineering philosophy of simplicity and durability.

I also lean heavily toward supporting individual miners rather than large businesses. I will admit that most of our income from power supplies has come from bulk customers, but about half of that bulk business was resellers with more visible outlets than our own boring website and forum presence. I don't like supporting the big guy, and we got into selling server PSUs so individuals could get quality power for cheaper than the retail options they'd previously been stuck with. My hosting facility actually has a maximum per-customer power draw, not a minimum, and an open-shelving setup to accomodate any kind of hardware, because I don't want to share out our space to rich guys with their stacks of fancy rack-mounted gear - that's the whole reason we set up that side of the shop to begin with. So I know it's what literally everyone is doing, and I know the internally-focused economic reasons for it, but I also can't fully endorse anyone that bails on individuals in favor of catering to a handful of wealthy industrial customers.


That's my opinion. I'm well aware that my opinions are generally polar opposite to going trends. There's more Spondoolies stuff hosted on my shelves right now than any other manufacturer, so the customers have spoken for sure, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

If your computer is not on the 192.168.1.x subnet, you'll have to change your IP. There's instructions all over the forum for how to check on that and change it if necessary. It could also be a network topology issue (not plugged into the same router, etc). You haven't provided enough information for us to do more than guess at an answer.

How's $2.35 apiece sound?

We make our own cables from bulk wire and crimp parts.

Depends on length.

That doesn't actually answer my question.

But four things I love above all else are one-stop-shops (O Glorious WalMart!), publicly traded companies, management speak (like "leveraging" and "strategic partner"), and feigning approval in a highly sarcastic manner. Call me old-fashioned but I'm gonna have to pass on that one. To be completely honest, aside from their effective customer service, I pretty much disagree with most of the decisions Spondoolies has made so far.

So "BTCS is a blockchain technology company that provides transaction verification services for digital currency", doesn't that just mean "BTCS solves blocks"?

So, some updates. We're running low on everything except cables. 750W stuff is inbound, but we're getting pretty dry on DPS2K material.

Scrappy just got ahold of me and he still has plenty of stock of the stuff I sold him last fall for those Technobit Minion boards which never appeared.

So if anyone wants 750W stuff, please be patient. Anyone wanting DPS2K stuff, contact Scrappy Do. Anyone wanting mining hardware, probably avoid Technobit.

Oh speaking of mining hardware, I've been busy for the last month or so working on stuff for the Bitmain BM1384 (the chip on the S5) and hopefully in a week or so I'll be distributing some prototypes for testing and review for a USB stick miner I expect to run 8GH at stock power (2.5W) but capable of 16GH if you got a good enough hub. It integrates adjustable core voltage too. I know I know, complain about how USB miners never have an ROI (which is false, they don't have positive ROI and I twitch every time someone misuses that term) but this thing should be a really nifty and affordable way to learn the basics of mining, and the basics of hardware manipulation by under/overclocking and under/overvolting which can be pretty fun. The next task will be a two-chip stick miner designed to run at least 30-35GH if you have a really good hub (stock will probably be about 16GH) and then a full 18-chip board made to be run either standalone as a quiet desktop miner or four of them would mount on an S1 chassis and turn it into an improved S5 (with adjustable voltage so a better bottom-end efficiency).

But the point of this BUMP is to let people know we're running low on PSU stuff and Scrappy Do is selling off his dozen or so DPS-2000BB PSUs that are probably still in the box I sent them in last August so if you need 'em get 'em from him.

Meech, yes it'll have a flashy LED on it. There's a solid LED at power-on and a flash when it returns a share.

But the S4 sucks and everyone knows it. Those chips are a year old. Maybe they are a lot cheaper to produce in bulk so they'd rather run high-density old chips than high-density new chips (at reduced power consumption) but not adjust the margins accordingly? With 204 of the BM1384 in a 3x17 string they could get the same hashrate from less than 1KW wall. It is fairly impressive that they can get the efficiency out of the BM1382 that they have, but I'm not sure I understand what economical reason there is to pull up a new design with year-old chips and price it higher than people would pay for the same design with the better chips you brought to market four months ago. Why would anyone buy an S4+? How it's priced, it's actually better to buy nothing, even when no other hardware is available. And selling S2 kit is so much easier than building and shipping a whole new product - chuck half a dozen bare boards in bubble wrap, label it and send it out. DONE.

Possibly a post containing nothing but wink emoticons. Or are they not doing that anymore?

Also, AJRGale, for us the only difference between "planning" and "doing" is the availability of resources to go from "we have a working prototype" to "we have the money to mass-produce". I'm gonna build the TypeZero. I may not get chips from Bitmain or enough money to run a production batch, but I'm gonna get it all the way to working prototype anyway because it's worth doing. The stick miner is a test/dev milestone turned into an actual product because enough people want it. The Amita is a test/dev milestone that'll be a product if enough people want it. But the only reason this project thread exists is because I made up my mind to build the TypeZero and I'm doing it.

The idea of this USB miner isn't just to have fun, but to have a powerful and flexible tool for n00bs to learn the basics with and not have to sink big money on big machines and PSU hardware. And even then there aren't a lot of miners that allow you to play with under- and over-clocking and volt-modding from the get-go. Being the most efficient miner available, and the most powerful stick miner yet made, is only a side-effect from Bitmain having a pretty good chip.

Since I'm planning on sending out 8 units for review, not 3.

Still looking at the 18x2 string boards we saw in March? What's the issue you're seeing keeping them from being marketable?

Yeah, something like that would be good and is pretty much what I was thinking. The SP20 spam party was definitely getting out of hand, when about 30% of the first-page threads were all talking about the same product. I'm figuring on handing out 8 units total for testing, review and criticism, but I by no means want 8 threads all trying to do the same thing. Heck I'd be fine if everyone posted their reviews in here, but it'd probably be better to have a reviews-only thread for the Compac since this one will keep going on past it with Amita and TypeZero talk for the next couple months.

Just don't get too crazy, alright? I don't want this thing to turn into another SP20 Legendaries party and spam the whole front page. We might should start a unified thread for all reviews or something to keep information centralized and not obnoxious.

Yeah I um, I never played video games so I have no idea what you're talking about with that reference. But yeah, I was just describing to someone the other day the crazy advances in efficiency that have been made in the last few years with GPU and ASIC. When I went from 5770/5870 to Block Erupter was retarded increase in efficiency. It's fun to think, though, that from my best GPU to a block erupter was about a 70-times increase in efficiency, and from a block erupter to our Compac is still a 25-times increase in efficiency within the same technology.

Well, don't expect a batch to be shipping before June. It's minimum 3 weeks from now before we even start talking seriously about taking in preorder money. That gives time for proto PCBs to arrive, for us to in-house test, to get some to outside testers and them to report. That's assuming the proto PCBs work. If the design is solid and the supply chain is laid out, we'd probably take two weeks to gather money for a batch and then place orders for materials which would be three to four weeks out. After that, assembly and testing and shipping probably aroudn the end of June (at the earliest). There's plenty of time to gather hubs and such.