In Denmark you see this in action in the telecommunications industry. A new company is started, is more adaptive to consumer needs, is more efficient, takes away business from the big players, and eventually sells to one of the big players for a lot of money because the big players are losing a lot of revenue. New entrepreneurs notice an opportunity and then does the same.
What would happen if all the big players said to every newcomer "screw you, we're not letting you connect to our network at all, good luck selling your service if your customers can't actually talk to anyone with it"? The newcomer wouldn't last long. This happened in the US to a certain extent, by the way, and is why there are telecom monopolies there. Fortunately, it appears the telecom industry in Denmark is quite heavily regulated. |
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The reason why I reneged on my original suggestion of using the FT2232H: there is a ton of free software to use the FT2232D as a JTAG interface. There seems to be little to none that uses the FT2232H, though. We couldn't use existing JTAG software with the FT2232H. At that time, other protocols in addition to JTAG were only being discussed as a way to read out the EEPROM, and I figured that could be done by bitbanging. But if you want to send workloads to the FPGA via I2C, then a dedicated MPSSE seems in order.
You sure about that? I know off-hand that at least the Dangerous Prototypes Bus Blaster uses the FT2232H, and it can be wired up to act as one of several common JTAG interfaces. |
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b/c that would be an international crime and as bad as they might be, i don't think they can afford to get caught stealing to accomplish their objectives. OTOH, if they were caught manipulating prices they could just write it off as "national security".
Except whoever did this did steal enough money to get themselves in serious legal hot water already... not to mention all the money they attempted to steal and give away at knock-down prices. |
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again, i ask the same question, why wouldn't the hacker just have changed the withdrawal limit to unlimited and just stolen all the wallet keys asap? he instead ignored the wallet, and manipulated the DB to sell the price down to 0 over a 30 min time period risking potential intervention by Mark. i think Kevin Day and others who were able to take money out are just red herrings.
Why wouldn't a government or financial industry attacker have changed the withdrawal limit to unlimited and stolen all available bitcoins ASAP? Crashing the price to zero was spectacular, but in the longer term leaving Mt Gox without enough bitcoins to back its liabilities would be much more damaging... |
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Now what if someone made a botnet generate addresses all the time, 24/7, and would import those addresses into a wallet.dat to try and see if someone else already generated the address, and has funds 'assigned' to it - essentially trying to find collisions? Wouldn't this be an extremely efficient way to generate addresses until an address was found that held funds, to then steal the funds on that address by transfering them elsewhere?
Not really. Let's try some really ridiculous figures. Suppose that everyone in the world had, on average, 1 million bitcoin addresses with money in. Further suppose that you control a billion computers, each of which can try a billion possible addresses a second. If my calculations are correct, you'd still only find an address every 6.6 million years on average. Edit: Or another way of looking at it: if you had a billion computers testing a billion addresses per second, on average you'd expect to earn one satoshi every 22 million years. |
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Most of those in the newbie forum were Goons who came here to troll, so they're actually right. The forum was created specifically for that reason.
Actually, from what I can tell the Goons are mostly sitting back with popcorn and laughing... and laughing, and laughing. The newbies mainly seem to be a mix of people who recently found out about Bitcoin - quite a few of whom invested near the peak of the market and got screwed, as is usually the way of it - and older users that just ran into technical issues or problems with an exchange. |
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1) Inflation is good for holders of debt. Nonsense. Inflation makes interest rates higher, which is bad for holders of debt. Inflation makes it harder for people who hold debt to refinance and makes creditors want their money back sooner, which is also bad for holders of debt.
I think you're confusing nominal interest rates with real interest rates. Inflation increases nominal interest rates - the amount of interest charged in terms of the currency in question - which matter to savers but not debtors. Debtors care about real interest rates - the cost of the loan taking into account both nominal interest rates and inflation/deflation - because that's their actual cost of borrowing that they have to repay. 2) Inflation gives people an incentive to spend money. Nonsense. Inflation means you can get a higher interest rate if you save the money, giving you an equal incentive to save.
Inflation gives you an incentive to invest the money rather than just stuffing it under the mattress, either directly, by sticking it in a savings account where it's used to make loans, or by buying something that will give you future benefits. 3) Deflation gives you an incentive to hold money. Nonsense. You can just as easily sell the right to hold that money and get its value today rather than holding it yourself.
Why should someone buy it for more than it'd cost them to get the same amount of money right now, though? |
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dupingcoins, I just hadnt tested whether bitcointools was working with a non corrupted wallet yet. I did and it was. have to go in and pull keys manually. bitcoin tools cant open it.
Eeeeh, I should've released a Windows version of my key recovery utility - in theory it can pull keys out of damaged wallet files, not just recover them off drives from which the wallet's been deleted, but I didn't think there'd be enough need for that to justify a Windows release. (For the record: you'd have to run "./wallet-recover <corruped wallet file> recovered-wallet.dat") |
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Good to see you have allowed 3% for interface changes  Worse, actually - 3% for adding an interface other than JTAG at all ;-). I figure that if it's possible to offer a choice between a decent selection of basic interface options, that'll be enough and anything fancier like Ethernet is probably best done in an external microcontroller. Of course, that's a big if! Edited to add:If you can compile for the XC6SLX150, can you just take any of the currently available codes and compile it with default settings? Even a not optimised result is better than nothing! We just want to know if the FPGA can run a fully unrolled core with more than 84MHz.
I've heard that with the default settings you can't actually get it to pass place-and-route. (The workaround is *probably* quite easy; modifying the Map settings to ignore user timing constraints and run in non-timing driven mode should work, though obviously I can't test this.) |
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I'm not quite sure, so eventually excuse me for wasting time. You filled in "109.29 MHash/s" although "Fmax=109.29MHz" was reported. (MHz instead of MHash/s). Or are they the same when fully unrolled?
The fully unrolled design does one hash per clock cycle, so yeah, they are the same. |
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I just realised something when I read makomk previous post (thanks for the info, by the way!): the unit MHash/s is not self-explanatory! To do one check if a nonce is golden or not, you need two calculations of a SHA-256 hash. When I gave my synthesis results previously, I interpreted 1Hash as one calculation of sha(sha(.)). Does everyone do the same or does your unit equate 2Hash to sha(sha(.)) ?
It seems to be standard to list the number of MHash as the number of total sha256(sha256(data)) operations just like you did - certainly that's what I've been doing. I get the impression this dates back to the early days of bitcoin. It's possible others haven't been doing it this way of course. Edit: Also, after a slightly tedious 4-hour build process, Fmax=109.29MHz and 97% resource usage for the fully-unrolled DE2_115_makomk_mod on the EP4CE75F29C7. Might be able to get it up to 110MHz with the right options, but I wouldn't bet on it. |
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To counter this, merchants might offer a 5% or 10% discount for payment in BTC (because hey, they prefer having bitcoin too).
That's the trouble - they don't prefer bitcoin currently, because their expenses are in USD or their local currency. |
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But seriously: isn't there someone who can give us some info on chip performance to wrap up this discussion? What I gave here is using different code and does not contain all chips of interest. Especially missing are the Altera EP4CE75F23C7 and the Xilinx XC6SLX75-3CSG484C through XC6SLX150-3CSG484C. The Altera and largest Xilinx are roughly comparable in price and the smaller Xilinx is the best that can be compiled with their free software.
I think I managed to compile a 100 MHash/s design for the EP4CE75F23C7, though no-one has one to test it on and the device was almost totally full so I'm not sure if you'd be able to fit any extra control logic in. Bear in mind that the last digit is the speed grade (lower is faster for Cyclone IV). You can try it for yourself - fpgaminer committed my modified version in projects/DE2_115_makomk_mod, just change which device it targets and the clock speed. If you're careful and do the design right you could probably build a PCB that supported both the 75 and 115. Edit: Also, Ok well if you need some direction let me say that unless you are choosing the largest cyclone iv or spartan 6 device you are probably wasting your time. You will need to put up with the issue that a license is required to perform compiles. This can be overcome by people with licenses volunteering to perform compiles.
The free tools support all Cyclone I, II, III and IV devices, it's just the other ranges of FPGAs that are limited. |
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There are basically only two reasons (on a macro scale) why a currency would undergo deflation You're missing a third one that's potentially very relevant to Bitcoin: the money supply decreases due to hoarders taking money out of circulation. Consider that in the first case, this is entirely normal and healthy! If the money supply is held constant, yet the productive capacity of the economy increases, there will be the same number of dollars chasing more goods. Inflation is the exact opposite of this, whereby same dollars are chasing fewer goods (or more dollars chasing same/less goods). Clearly deflation in this sense is beneficial for consumers. We see this taking place in the electronics industry which is largely free from government regulation and subsidies. When competition is fierce, the productive capacity of industry over-rides the inflationary aspects of our fractional reserve economy and we see prices come down as more and more electronic goods are produced more efficiently.
Debatable. IIRC the problems caused by this are partly why no countries are on the gold standard anymore. More unpleasantly, there's a really nasty catch in the "productive capacity of the economy increases" part, which I'll come to in a bit. So let us look at Krugman’s second argument that deflation makes debtors worse off. What is left unsaid in this assumption is that debt is a good thing, while saving is a bad thing. Does this make any logical sense to anyone? Consider that if money is undergoing deflation, SAVERS benefit. Shouldn’t the savers naturally benefit more than someone who is putting themselves into debt? Savers are forgoing pleasure in the moment for the expectation of even greater pleasure in the future. This means resources that could be consumed immediately for minimal productive gains are being put aside into bigger projects that could yield even greater gains in the future. Savings is what builds strong economic foundations. If the US wasn’t so wildly in debt at the moment we would be in a better economic position with larger prospects for growth!
You seem to have got this exactly backwards. Remember that money itself isn't intrinsicly worth anything, it's just a way of allocating resources. So someone that stuffs $1 million under the mattress for future use actually benefits the ecomomy far less than someone that goes $1 million into debt in order to start up a new business. Now, what you were saying would be true if savings worked the same way in a deflationary economy as in an inflationary one with the money saved being loaned out through fractional reserve banking, but they won't - that's why savers can benefit even though it harms debtors. But also let us consider the impacts of deflation on interest rates. People who lend and borrow money will know that money will be worth more in the future if the money supply remains constant (like Bitcoins) yet the productive capacity of the economy continues to increase. This leads to falling interest rates. Interest rates will naturally come down in a deflationary environment because savings will increase, thereby making more money available to banks to lend.
It may decrease interest rates in nominal terms, but in real terms - which is what matters to debtors - they will increase. If the real-world value of your debts increases due to deflation, that's effectively interest from your point of view, especially since your income will also be affected by deflation. Consider if you were in this situation:
Your employer gathers up all the employees for a conference and tells you that because the economy is so productive and that the value of money is going up so much, that he is going to have to furlough the workforce to deal with the appreciating currency.
From your perspective, you are getting more time off while your income remains exactly the same in terms of purchasing power. Who doesn’t want that? Further, consider that if you don’t get a raise every year, YOU STILL GET A RAISE! Employers don’t necessarily have to cut wages; they can cut hours or simply not give raises yet people would still be better off than they were the year before.
But let’s say the economy is so productive that money gains so much value that employers are simply forced to cut wages – if this was the case, would anyone seriously give a damn? We would be living in a nirvana society that had absolutely ridiculous amounts of abundance. Women could stay home to take care of the kids, one man could provide all the income necessary to take care of his family and still retire, kids wouldn’t have to work three jobs to put themselves through school, etc… etc… etc…
Less people would need to work in such an economy (like they did in the 50s and 60s) which would relieve the need of employers to cut wages.
OK, this is where things get nasty. You talk about productivity gains, but so far they've mostly happened through decreases in the amount of labour required to manufacture items; the raw materials and capital costs have remained substantial and often even increased. This means that wages have generally decreased far faster than the costs of items have - this is a problem even without deflation. So an increasing amount of the cost of goods and services is going to a handful of very wealthy individuals that control the resources required to produce them. While we might end up with ridiculous amounts of abundance, the vast majority of the population isn't going to see it. What's more, the gains don't happen evenly: the cost of producing shiny technological items has decreased massively, but the cost of essentials like food and homes hasn't. The other catch is that not all sectors of the economy benefit equally from this increase in productivity: in particular, for the most part service sector jobs haven't changed very much at all. |
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"The initial hype has sailed."
Are you kidding me? Everywhere i go (outside of the internet...) i try to talk about bitcoin, introduce it to people, so far i've not met a single person that has even heard about it.
Outside of the internet, there's probably not much of a market for bitcoins though. It's only really suitable for the technically minded right now... |
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I don't suppose the rules for generating a bitstream are documented?
I don't think it is exactly rocket science. It would be of comparable difficulty to writing a compiler. Obviously from the CPU time used, these tools brute force many possibilities.
Harder than rocket science, I think. Not only is the bitstream format totally undocumented, but the algorithms required to map a design to an FPGA effectively are apparently really hairy - which is why a the tools are slow and often tempramental. I hear simulated annealing is quite popular for the actual place-and-route stage... Edit: Oh, and of course if you generate an incorrect bitstream you'll probably blow up your expensive FPGA. |
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I'm sure that someone in the community would love to set up such a service, where you upload your design, get back the bitstream a couple of hours later if it succeeded, and pay per processing time. This kind of FPGA synthesis pool would make sense anyway, as you probably won't want to run SmartXPlorer on a single machine of your own and wait for days until you have a reasonably-optimized design. Parallelizing this and pooling it to increase usage/efficiency certainly makes sense.
There's already a company called Plunify that's in the process of setting up exactly this service. Last I heard, Xilinx were being annoying about licensing though - they won't even let them offer the free WebPack functionality, let alone anything more powerful. |
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My linear tech chips are running very hot, especially the one circled. Two of them are too hot to touch for longer than a second or two. Should I try to cool it off?
The hottest one is a Linear LTM4601V.
Hmmmm. The data sheet for that chip suggests that maximum safe case temperature is 100 degrees centrigrade and that it should probably be able to operate without forced cooling or a heatsink across the full rated amperage range at typical room temperatures, so I don't know... check the temperature and see, or just point a fan across it? |
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Source code?
Yep, follow the second link - it's in a git repository here (because I've set up so many of those by now I can almost do it in my sleep). A bit messy, but the code should be reasonably straighforward. |
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Can you send me that design? I'd like to validate it. I even failed with a singly-unrolled one on an LX100.
Nevertheless, even if it would run at 100MHz, that would probably not be worth it. Doubly-unrolled should be more efficient, as the price difference between LX75 an LX150 is way less than a factor of 2.
Hopefully this archive should have all the bits you need. It won't actually run like that, because there are no pin assignments and the PLL speed setting is all wrong, but with a bit of luck you should be able to coax it into doing something. Unfortunately it's rather dependent on the right build settings, and I'm not even sure if they've copied over from SmartXplorer properly, let alone to that archive. Edit: Oh, and don't try changing LOOP_LOG2 from 0 with that code; it won't work correctly. |
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