Seems likely, which is exactly why


An S1 board alone would make a good quiet desk miner, and four a sexy S1 upgrade. But the Prisma refit would also be a good blade in a larger unit, so there's also a dual merit to its design. But it's not priority. Speaking of priority, I might be back to Compac design tomorrow and will probably be able to get a finished first draft of the whole board.

Given that the flow of new coins is a tiny fraction of the existing coins (meaning coin supply vs demand is almost unaffected), the machines will likely turn off much more quickly than the price will go up. Mining profitability will take a big hit immediately, but overall coin supply won't change perceptibly so the market will be very slow to shift without manipulation and/or media hype - which we've already seen take coin up over $1100 for no apparent reason so it is possible.

About effing time. Alts have been a joke for years.

If we're looking at a 36-chip board (18x2 string) and 6 boards per S2, I think that's between $500-600 in chips. Since at those numbers an S5 has about $150 in chips and the thing costs about $350, less than half of an S5 is chip cost. However, for a lower-clock more chip-dense miner like the S2 it would likely be a higher proportion of the total price. And a much higher proportion of the total price if they didn't have to worry about literally anything except the PCB with chips on it.

My concern is more about the ratings on the PCIe connectors and pins than the wire of the cables. The PCIe connector on the Neptune might have 11A-rated pins, but most any cable will have 9A pins on it. Asking 11A (12V 400W across three wires) through a pin rated for a 9A maximum is pretty stupid. If one of those pins has a bad connection it'll force more current into the other two, sending it from 22% over max rating to as high as 80% over max rating (at which point resistive power loss [heat] is 3.3 times as much as at maximum rated current).

I had a hosting customer ask if I'd host a Neptune for him, and the only way I was going to do it was put it on my fireproof Prisma shelving with a thermal fuse wire over every connector that would automatically kill the PSU if it started burning. Even then it was iffy and I'm glad he didn't send it.

I've got some pretty good 2KW PSU kits which could handle a Neptune readily.

However, I have never and will never recommend anyone actually buy and run a Neptune - at least not at stock settings. The power draw through their SINGLE PCIE connector is on par with (if not higher than) the power draw for an entire S3 which uses 4 PCIe connectors. It's quite frankly a fire hazard, and the only way to run it with any semblance of reliability is to downclock it to under 300W per Cube. Preferably under 270W.

Oh. Well the problem with that is TypeZero boards in that size neighborhood would probably stock at 250W or so, and the S2 heatsinks are built for 100W boards.

The controller is a BeagleBoner so all it'd require is a different OS image to make it do different things, and the backplane is already wired up for blade comms and such, so an upgrade kit is really not that intensive to pull off. I was thinking about it for a bit but Bitmain announced initial info for their probably-already-completed design when they had prototype hashboards on display at the conference three weeks ago and some. Once all our other projects are done, if they get as far as manufacturing, I might look into building S2 boards with the next chip  - by the time we get to it someone will probably have released a chip better than the BM1384, whether it's Bitmain themselves, Avalon, a resurrected ASICMiner, who knows.

I know from experience how warm the terminals on a DPS2K can get when drawing full power through all EIGHT power blades. You're drawing how much power through four? I would not recommend what you are doing there, nor would I trust it to not be a fire risk.

Oh. Righto then. Our primary goal in this project is to make a set of boards which can be run independently but also mounted on an S1 chassis. A secondary goal is to make a board which would mount on a Prisma.
The stickminers are basically making a product out of stages we'd be at during prototype anyway, and also since our stick miners would be pretty nifty (which is to say, possibly the best stickminers in existence at present given the efficiency and feature set) and also not terribly expensive. But the primary goal is TypeZero boards.

A formfactor that would fit either is approximately impossible, or at best it would be heavily mediocre on both platforms. I'm hoping we have the resources to make Prisma refit boards, but then I'm also hoping we have the resources to make a batch of stick miners so who knows.

Prisma is on our list of things to work on, if we can get the stickminers and S1-upgrade boards going. How many Prisma parts you got?

Pretty unlikely since they already have them designed and prototyped. It'd be a FIFTH thing for me to work on.

But if they bail on the idea, I might look into it.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Please describe what you're thinking with a bit more detail (or a schematic sketch would be pretty great). Because if you're talking about forward voltage on the diode, then I'm pretty sure you're connecting a forward-biased diode across a high-current rail and expecting it to not immediately explode? If the IfVf curve I just looked at for the ES2A is accurate, there's an expected Vf of 0.8V at If of 2A, which means when the chips are running at top-end voltage on the TypeZero board we'd have  about 9W being cooked off in diodes. That's 5% of the machine's total power dissipation at that point, and at Tjc of 25C. I don't have a chart for 60C but I believe PN junction gain tends to increase with temperature, so just assuming at operating conditions it's 3A instead we now have 14W being burned off, so 8%.
It may be possible to find a part with a much flatter I/V curve, and shifted up the axis for generally lower currents in the operating regions we'll be using, but I'm not sure I'll ever trust a string of forward-biased diodes stuck directly between 30A power rails to not cause more problems than they solve. It might be worth testing, but probably won't go on at least the initial board design because I'll need to test the crap out of it to make sure we're not creating more fire hazards or wasting a lot of power.

What I'd rather do is grab a little SOT23-5 comparator and take a direct measure of the node voltage, and if it gets over a safety threshold I can use that to kick out the regulator. Ideally the chips and their associated capacitors will be fairly close to balanced, but if there's no provision to prevent runaway something could pop.

Any Prisma 2.0 questions I've had I directed to CrazyGuy. He's got some running, probably has a few to sell and can comment on their stability and reliability.

And if they do pull of what they're claiming they're gonna do, they're potentially trying to ratify bitcoin's death. If you centralise the vast majority of the network and then rent it out, you're only renting out the semblance of a distributed network while actually letting people pay you to wield dominance over the whole thing. A bitcoin monopoly should mean the end of bitcoin.

Though odds are a bitcoin monopoly will just mean a handful of people will ditch it on moral grounds and a lot of other people will keep using it because either they don't realize what's going on, or they simply don't care as long as they continue to profit. The "I don't care as long as I continue to profit" philosophy has brought the bitcoin economy a long way in the last two years.

I'm almost tempted to mine it now with a name like that. The only other altcoin I considered mining was Shitcoin and that's just because it was the first altcoin I'd ever seen that was honest with itself.

And always remember, the profitability from an altcoin always comes from the people being left with the bag when the pump ends. It's basically robbing a group of willing idiots whose timing wasn't quite as fortunate as yours. Go mine a coin with a value based more on utility than cleverly-played hype.

I'd be a little more worried about it if I'd heard literally anything past that press release from about five months ago.

Yeah I probably won't be quite as active with sharing fine details on the TypeZero (there's a few aspects of it we're gonna keep in our pockets until the official release) but we'll definitely keep folks posted on the project development as it develops. Without the community there's no reason to do any of this anyway. One of my goals, in general, is to run a business without being a greedy bastard and prove to greedy bastards that it can be done successfully. One primary aspect of not being a greedy bastard is deliberately not ripping people off, and deliberately avoiding scenarios where even accidentally ripping people off is possible or likely, so being simultaneously self-sufficient and fairly transparent is conducive to all of that.

Also, Novak doesn't really trust the stability of a single-chip-wide string so I think we're gonna put a per-node overvolt checker on the Amita that will keep track of each chip's Vcore and if it goes over a safety threshold (0.8-0.85V probably) will kick off the regulator and kill power to the circuit. There should be enough capacitance to buffer out momentary jitters but that should prevent it from going Full Prisma™ and blowing up. If it works well enough I'll probably figure out how to stick it on the TypeZero boards. It adds complexity to the system, which we're generally not in favor of, but adding modular complexity in a way that increases overall reliability (instead of decreasing it, as complexity tends to do) is not a bad thing.

[EDIT]

First look at the Compac PCB layout. I'm probably gonna have to adjust a few things because I just realized I forgot to wrangle the logic level shifter outputs, but other than that it's the entire adjustable VCore regulator circuit, both LDOs for BM1384's logic and PLL voltages, the oscillator, USB communication and some status LEDs in one square inch. Holy balls I hope it works. The top half will be much simpler, and almost entirely under a heatsink.

And people stop talking as soon as the prizes are claimed. I like how four of the replies are the same question. Gotta respect the honesty of the folks just in it for the .01 though.