Yeah, me too. Overall uptime will be less than that, obviously, because there's also internet connectivity downtime, maintenance/system upgrade downtime, cooling downtime, and operator error downtime to consider, but I think we can keep those four well under 0.5% total.

On the flip side, miners often experience additional downtime due to problems with the miner or problems with the pool. I've got a few ideas for things we can do to reduce those issues with local automated monitoring and rapid responses with staff trained for bitcoin miners. I'll give more details after we've built it.

Roadstress, that's basically what we're doing. We're designing our system from the ground up with bitcoin mining (and mostly SP30s, since that's what Mike and I bought) in mind. No generator, no UPS, very low PUE, enough cooling for extremely high density (50+ kW/rack), and designed to be run near full capacity.

The PUDs around here all are pretty good in terms of power reliability. Chelan County PUD informally cited a figure of around 99.5% for power uptime, and I think that Grant and Douglas are similar. A diesel generator might get you 0.4% extra, and UPS another 0.09%. Diesel generators cost a lot more than 0.4% of the price of a bitcoin miner per kW, and battery backup is even worse.

Power costs in Seattle, where DF is based, are around $0.068/kWh. The sub-$0.04 stuff is all in central WA, where Titan (Spondoolies's contracted datacenter) and I are. My rates in Grant should be about $0.023/kWh once I get above 200 kW load. Titan's are probably similar. That's probably much of why DF is pricier than Titan.

Hi guys, quick check-in. We're still building the datacenter in central WA for mining. However, we are no longer working with the ASICSPACE crew, so we'll be using a different name. Policies and prices will remain largely the same, with rates around $70 to $90/kW/month.

Current progress: We our first warehouse leased in Grant County with about 1 MW of available power at the service entrance. Electrical work has begun. At this moment, there are 3 guys from one of the local electrical contracting companies putting in conduit for one of our 500 KVA feeders. (I'll probably release the name of the contracting company later so you guys can call and verify our existence and capacity, but I first need to brief them on what information they can and can't divulge.)

We've had a few delays, so we're not nearly as far along as I wanted to be at this point, but I left enough buffer time in the schedule that I still think we'll be ready to accept customers in September, and possibly even a few in August. It will be tight, though.

More information will follow as we get closer to coming online.

Yes, we're at capacity currently, but we'll have much more capacity coming online in August, September, thereafter. Our web store won't list capacity unless it's immediately available, but we're also keeping a waitlist. If you're looking for capacity for September, we would likely be able to accommodate you. Contact support@asicspace.com.

Edit: Enough shameless plugging in SPTech's thread, I think. Any other questions about our hosting or anybody else's hosting should be directed to https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=622998.0 or to the thread in my sig.

Totally. We're all a bit busy at the moment, but we'll have more personal info up before we start accepting money. If you name something specific, I might be able to provide it.

Opentoe, we at ASICSPACE might be able to help you. Check the link in my sig. So far, most of the attention we've been getting has been from large to very large customers, around 0.5 MW to 10 MW. We'd love to have more customers on the 3 kW scale.

Uncertain. I've been thinking about this situation a bit, and I can see arguments in both directions. I'll talk it over with my partners, and we'll come to a decision at some point in the next two months.

Edit: I'm leaning towards "yes", though.

Thanks RoadStress, you beat me to it.

0.3 to 0.6 RMB (6 焦) per kWh is about $0.05 to $0.10/kWh. Electricity in central WA is around $0.02/kWh. You should host your farm with us, instead.

I was in Shenzhen from Feb through April, and I'll probably be back there later this year. If you're around in the late fall or winter, we should hang out.

I'll save Spondoolies some time and answer what can be answered based on publicly available information:

The first SP30s are scheduled to ship in July. The ASIC was taped out before or on May 29th. They should be getting their chips back from the fab pretty soon, but AFAIK they don't have silicon yet.

The new design, Rockerbox, is a relatively straightforward die shrink of their old Hammer 40nm ASIC down to 28 nm, and as such is unlikely to have any new major problems. It should use the same serial protocol as Hammer, so there isn't much risk in the new PCB designs either.

They have everything finished for the SP30 except for the ASIC. There are a few photos that have been circulated on this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=521520.msg7347228#msg7347228) with SP30s fully assembled except for the ASICs themselves.

No results have been published that I'm aware of except from the pre-tapeout simulations. Expect around 6 Th/s +/- 10% at 2.7 kW. Based on performance of the SP10s and the common design, the SP30s are likely to have better performance in cold rooms than in warm rooms, and to also perform better if they're run on 208V or 230V rather than 115V.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonferroni_correction

Eligius has several thousand active users. Let's say 1k users of medium to large size. The probability of one of those users having such extremely bad luck would then be 1000 times higher than 1/81,000,000, or 1/81,000. Still unlikely.

Excuse me if I'm being pedantic, I don't like seeing statistics misapplied in important situations. Yes, I'm often an unhappy person.

Since you guys are talking about datacenters, I'm going to shamelessly plug ASICSPACE, the one I'm working on:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=657461

We're still building it, and still working out the details on pricing, but I'm pretty sure our prices will be better than anyone else's by a very wide margin. Right now we're thinking $90/kW/month for month-to-month contracts, and around $68/kW/mo if you pay 12 months at once. No per-kWh usage charge, the $90 or $68 is everything.

We won't accept anybody's money until the facility is online or nearly so, and we can't currently guarantee that we'll be online in time for your preorders. However, I will state that I myself have quite a few August SP30s coming in, so I have a strong incentive to have everything running by August. If you're getting September SP30s and you're willing to wait until around August 1st before making a decision, I think we will probably be able to accommodate you. My guess is that we'll have half a MW available in September, with more to come soon after.

We plan to do a p2pool node. We'd prefer email-based pool configuration and overclocking. I'd like to also offer customers the option of port-forwarded access to their machines' web UIs or SSH ports if they can accept the reduction in security that comes therewith, but I can't guarantee that yet.

As Robert (ASICSPACE) said, we want to keep our facility's location and methods secret, which makes the above photo unfeasible. However, if you want to see our facility in the greater Portland area, that can be arranged. You can also meet one of our team members in person if you're on the USA west coast (especially if you're in Portland, Seattle, or central WA). We do Skype too. You will also find the identities of our team members are posted on the website.

Establishing trust is important for us. We recognize that the bitcoin world (and this forum in particular) is filled with scammers. Most reasonable trust-building requests will be honored. However, we have a strict no-photo rule regarding our facility.

Also, we're not done building it yet.

I am no longer associated with this company. My brother and I are still building the datacenter, but we have decided to operate it ourselves rather than have the ASICSPACE crew administer it.

Hi. I've been working with these guys for a while, and am currently their chief datacenter engineer/architect and one of their main investors.

I am no longer associated with this company. My brother and I are still building the datacenter, but we have decided to operate it ourselves rather than have the ASICSPACE crew administer it.

Most hosting companies charge you two fees: one fee for capacity (per kW per month), and one fee for usage (per kWh). The capacity fee at traditional datacenters is usually around $130/kW/month (charged per peak kW), electricity usage not included. The usage fee is usually the local electricity rate, maybe plus a cent or two to account for cooling power and non-unity PUE.

The datacenter I'm building gets its electricity cheap enough that we give it away for free as part of the package. There are a lot of other costs that go into a datacenter -- rent, insurance, security, internet access, cooling, maintenance, and amortized capital costs, to name a few -- and those tend to affect the rates more than electricity costs in central WA.

Pools don't have any incentive to get hacked by malicious parties, either. An attack has already been implemented (probably by a disgruntled ex-employee of CEX.io) which used ghash.io's hashpower for malicious ends contrary to ghash.io's own incentives.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1qqmr4/ghashiocexio_and_doublespending_against_betcoin/

Miners don't really notice as much as you think. Mostly, they do everything it takes to get their machines running efficiently, and then as long as they are getting a good hashrate on their pool and a good flow of coins into their wallets, they're usually more interested in fishing than in bitcoin network security. Many people are hundreds of km away from their miners, and can't readily access them to change pool settings. Most just don't care. If they did, ghash.io probably never would have gotten past 30%, much less 51%.

I agree that the logic would be best implemented in cgminer. Perhaps I'll see what ckolivas has to say about it.

It depends on where your home is. Over the next few months, I expect we'll see people in Europe (who often have electricity costs above $0.20/kWh and high VAT) switch to datacenters built from the ground up for hosting bitcoin miners (like the one I'm building, which should charge less than $90/kW/mo or $0.125/kWh). However, if you already live in a place with cheap electricity (like West Virginia, $0.06/kWh), and if you don't have to rent a place just for your miners, then running at home could be a bit more economical as long as you don't place a high price on having a quiet and cool home. You can't get that many machines into your own home, though, so the bulk of the network hashrate (and the eventual hashrate equilibrium, I expect) will be running at around $0.125/kWh.

Immersion cooling will, unfortunately, have high capital costs. I would be surprised if they can get the capital costs down to a level where it can compete with air cooling for commodity hardware, especially if you have good datacenter design and a cool climate.

Hey Spondoolies, I read this suggestion on Reddit a little bit ago, and thought it sounded promising as a method to reduce the probability of certain types of 51%-type attacks (*cough* ghash.io). The basic idea is to include a SPV client in the miner, and by default to refuse to mine if the pool gives a block header that isn't built on the longest published blockchain. I'd be curious to hear what you guys (especially Adam Beck and Zvi Shteingart) think about this idea in terms of the efficacy of this approach and the ease of implementation.

Obviously, this wouldn't work well for people wanting to mine altcoins like peercoin, but a simple checkbox could fix that.

Most miners are lazy and greedy, and just want to plug and play something that makes them money, which means they probably take care of the security of the blockchain unless their manufacturers do it for them.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2873ox/making_pooled_mining_immune_to_51_attacks_selfish/

I have not yet received my refund for the 15 shares I own. I am not the original owner of these shares (I purchased them from Lloydie). I suspect I might have gotten missed. I sent bobsag3 and thomas_s a PM about this, but I haven't heard back from either yet.