Eh, don't worry about it. Or if you insist on worrying about it, just drop it in my sandwich fund (1BURGERAXHH6Yi6LRybRJK7ybEm5m5HwTr).

Pshaw. Novak's the king of not sleeping. He has some pretty great stories of consecutive all-nighters and such. Every time I come in and say "yeah I was up until 2AM" he just kinda shrugs and says "I was up until 5".

Yeah, difficulty will only be halved if half the miners (which is to say, half the farms) turn off their machines when the halving happens.

I don't expect the halving to have much effect on the price either, given that it'll reduce the already fractional supply of new coins to a smaller fraction. The vast majority of trades are using extant coins, not new. Farms not immediately cashing out as much daily take might shift the exchange supply/demand curve a bit in the positive dollars direction, but given that 1600 coins per day is about a hundredth of a percent of the available coins it likely won't change things much. Perceptions and speculations will have a much greater effect on price, but who knows where that'll be in a year.

I think a lot of places will go under without seeking outside investments, so probably a lot of industrial hashrate will find itself on the secondhand market in the months immediately before and after the halving as some farms prepare for it and others react to it. It will have a good effect of redistributing the difficulty, which will probably go down but only temporarily as machines disseminate to the people able to keep their bills paid despite the drop in coin revenue. This might even end up having a centralising effect, unfortunately, as a few who were prepared enough to ride it out end up buying out some of the many who were not and consolidate even more hashpower under their various belts.

You should probably post this over in the Hardware Sales forum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=75.0). It'll likely get moved over there anyway when a moderator comes by.

Here's one. I believe there were two outfits doing similar things but I think the other one actually has discussion in this thread.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=948523.0

I bet the folks who bought in at $1100 a year and a half ago are pretty upset right about now.

I've been making a living for the last year and some selling power supplies and hosting services to miners. If the bitcoin economy disappears I'll have to find something else to do, but other jobs are coming in so we'd probably be okay for a while regardless. It'd certainly be a lot easier to buy gear for the museum shelf if suddenly it was all good for nothing but scrap value.

I actually need to spend a couple days on other things. Unfortunately I've been shirking my duties in order to put in those long hours because it's actually really fun. But my house is a mess and I have hosting customers waiting on router configs and... um... gotta sleep sometime? I'm most satisfied at work when I have a lot of different things going on, so the past few weeks I've been swimmin' in it. A lot of the last year has been spent toying with projects we wouldn't have the money to build, or waiting on customers to get off their butts and TCB, or boring but essential manufacturing tasks. I'm really glad to have a complex and entertaining project, and it's even more satisfying to see other people getting behind it.

I'd fetch a pair for the museum for $10 apiece.

I'm sorry, sir - but that comment was...

*puts on sunglasses*

...Unacceptable.

(nothing really meant by it, I've just been wanting to say that for a while because it's funny)

Okay, 13 hours is enough for one day for PCB design. Regulator test board is done and Novak might be etching tomorrow, so that's cool. And I've got almost one square inch of the stickminer laid out, which means the entire comms and Vcore regulator. Still got a couple LDOs to tuck in the corner but there's plenty of room, and then the actual ASIC and its associated parts. I probably won't get back to it until Monday night or Tuesday, but I should have enough info to spec a heatsink after a couple more hours of work.

This is probably the most enjoyable project I've ever worked on. We gotta have a giant cheeseburger party or something when we get working stickminers done. It's very exciting.

We have stock of everything right now.

I've been thinking about it for a while. The first shop we looked at last June had a nice dropoff on one side where we could have set up a pool and dove right off the loading dock. BUT NO.

I'd be more interested in heating a swimming pool in wintertime. I kept saying we need to get a pool for the shop and use a waterloop to cool hosted machines so we can go swimming but no, they wouldn't let me...

This is for the one-chip stick miner. Even given that the VRM will probably be at best 90% efficient, it'll probably be possible to get <0.4W/GH board-level at reasonable clock speeds. The stock setting I'm shooting for getting 8GH at 2.5W which is about 0.3W/GH board-level. I won't actually know how well the buck circuit performs until I've had a chance to assemble and test it, which will wait on parts so end of next week. And I won't know board-level expected W/GH until the week after when I have the BM1384 breakout board in hand and testing.

I'm verifying the PCB layout now. It's a lame-O 2-layer so not terribly dense but Novak'll be toner-transfer etching it and we're not quite magicians yet. Hopefully it works as expected when we get to testing it.

Thanks. I think I'm gonna toy with the regulator test PCB design today and see what pops out.

Yeah it's too bad there's no Avalon US reseller. The prices aren't terrible but the overseas shipping kills. If someone fetched in bulk and resold they could probably do good business. I've been wanting to grab one of those since the first pictures of innards were released but haven't been able to bite the bullet on it yet.

Also, suggesting SP20, S5 or Avalon4 don't really help with his desire for not using aircooling, unless you also grab kits and refit S5 on waterblocks.

Take a look at the AntMiner C1. It's got a similar efficiency as the Monarch, is built for watercooling on a main external loop, is probably a lot easier to set up, is probably a lot easier to work with, is probably more reliable in general, is probably a lot cheaper to buy new, and isn't being sold by professional Right Bastards.

But it networks directly so you'd need a big switch instead of a big USB hub and there wouldn't really be single-point control without a fair bit of finagling. Don't know if that's really a drawback or not.

https://www.bitmaintech.com/productDetail.htm?pid=00020150124112513358te42YNfK0683


I know that doesn't really answer any of your questions. But the best answer to anyone saying "I want to buy this thing from BFL" is "you should really do something else, because that's one of the worst decisions you can make with regard to acquiring mining hardware". Their Monarchs are overpriced and unreliable, and though they may be selling new orders from stock I bet there's still people with preorders 15 months old that haven't been delivered yet. BFL really seems to not care at all about servicing customers properly.

If watercooling isn't applied to the PSUs (which seems likely, if only for safety) the PSUs will have whiny annoying 1U fans. The absolutely worst fan on the super-annoying SP10 was the PSU fan. Not having a dozen of them will be nice, but there'd still be one per PSU.

I wonder if the dozen ethernet jacks don't all go to a control/management machine which then has one point of connection to the network. That keeps the system fairly modular but also doesn't require exotic cabling to do so (since data centers probably have boxes of little patch cables running around).

So far we've done all our assembly in-house, including the surface-mount parts. That is to say, I am our pick-and-place machine. We're saving up for a real one and hopefully we'll have it ready to roll by the time we get to assembling stickminers, but the parts count for the stickminer probably won't be more than our DPS2K board which means if I had nothing else to do I could probably still get most of them assembled in about a week. I really hope we have a pick-and-place.

Something we've talked about doing in the code (at least for the TypeZero) is an "auto-tune" feature where you set the voltage and an initial clock speed and it'll adjust the clock up or down until it's hit a stability threshold. I believe Avalon4.1 has a setting like that, and I've seen some for a Gridseed. It's up to Novak whether that gets implemented at all, and if it's set for the stickminer. I don't believe we'll be able to measure temperature on the Compac so throttling based on that isn't really a stock-circuit option.

I don't have dimensions for the Compac yet, but with the buck circuit designed I can start on an intial PCB to get an idea for it. We're shooting for about 1" wide, not sure on the height yet. The current plan is to keep all parts on the same side, and use a top-mounted heatsink that covers most of the topside of the board. It'll have to be milled out on the sides to allow clearance for parts that aren't the ASIC, and probably three screws in a triangle to hold it down because something stability something three noncolinear points to define a plane something something. The PCB will be a test design based entirely on assumption until we get the breakout boards back and test them, and I get the buck circuit prototyped, but if both of those things work as expected we can immediately send off for stickminer PCB prototypes and test the real thing. I'm gonna try to keep the final board design the same dimensions as the test design even if it requires revision, so I can get the dimensions to a heatsink manufacturer early on and get samples (if at all possible) to play with and approve for full manufacture.

Once we have a few working prototypes I'll probably send some out for review. I've talked to MrTeal and Philipma1957 about hardware testing, might send samples to a couple other folks. The earliest we're likely to even have samples is about three weeks, since we probably won't have our prototype breakout boards until the end of this week at the earliest.