First of all let me tell you that it's a huge mistake to build out a mining farm. The ASIC vendors themselves are building farms, and they will always beat you on cost. Unless you fabricate ASICs, you will never beat them. You are flushing all your money down the toilet. Furthermore, unless your power is around $0.02/kW, the farm will not be competitive. There are select datacenters around the world that can source very cheap power, and they will out-compete you as well.

Secondly, what you are asking is illegal in the US in 2 ways: (1) It is not legal to solicit investments for a private business on a public forum, and (2) investors in a business must meet the sophisticated investor rule set by the SEC. Raising money in BTC does not change this requirement.

That guy must be a moron. People have been designing domino logic for 20+ years. It's has some special requirements, but those are not hard to meet if you know what you are doing.

I know eldentyrell, and this paper is legit. I'm proud of him, this is an excellent result for which he should be proud. This kind of thing is real engineering; it's so nice to see this kind of result vs. the uninspired standard-cell crapola that everyone else churns out.

This is absolutely a scam. These Xilinx parts are not yet available, and only offer a 2x gate density over the existing Virtex class FPGAs. Not to mention they are on the order of $10-20k each.

Don't fall for this crap.

1. Approx $10M from start to finish, but for something that is cryptocurrency related. It's closer to $5M if you have a team already selected and existing IP. This assumes a 28nm process target.
2. You can't reverse engineer ASICs anymore. There are 100 million transistors on there, and nobody is going to figure out what it's doing by looking at a mask layer. Besides, you don't need to reverse engineer anything. The algorithms are well-known already.
3. You can't make just thousands of ASICs. Volumes need to be in the 100k minimum, and it really needs to be in the millions for them to take you seriously. You can't just walk into a fab and expect them to make some for you anyways; you have to know what you are doing and have relationships with the fab companies. Most Bitcoin ASIC people don't have this BTW, and get really shafted on the  wafer prices.

Is this just idle speculation?

• They have extremely low liquidity
• They are constant victims of pump & dump
• They are created by non-programmers who have never read the Satoshi whitepaper
• They contain basic programming errors in emission rate, proof-of-work, or block verification
• They are instamined by a small cabal of assholes
• They are bad clones of other coins
• They don't actually improve upon any state of the art

Anyone who treats shitcoins as anything other than a playtoy is going to find out the hard way why Bitcoin is in the lead.

I have a question for the devs:

I'm trying to understand the potential security vulnerabilities of Electrum. I have read every resource I can find online, but I can't find a reference to one of my biggest questions:

1. Is the electrum.dat file vulnerable?
2. Does a user need to protect access to this file with the same degree of care as the bitcoin-QT's wallet.dat?
3. If an attacker were to access electrum.dat, would the attacker be able to transfer funds and impersonate the victim?

Thanks.

I can answer this question for the ASIC implementations.

I believe that many existing ASIC implementations assume the rest of the bitcoin header after the nonce to be a fixed constant. I cannot speak for Avalon specifically, but I'm aware of several ASIC designs that will fail to work if the header is extended with non-constant data after the "2nd round" 16 bytes.

Is this proposal being seriously considered, or is this a what-if question?

You won't get anything running on that board. Ambric went out of business in 2008, and none of the hardware is supported anymore. You can't get the programming tools for it.

Yes please do it.

I have already inquired about this. These parts are very very expensive, and not worth it. The $/MH ratio is worse than traditional FPGAs.

Looks legit!

Anarchy, I've sent you PM but I haven't heard from you. Please send me PM and I can help you with your project.

Parts are no longer available, thanks everyone.

I have an OEM tray of Virtex-6 FPGAs in a sealed bag. They were purchased a year ago from a parts broker in order to build an FPGA mining array, but I never used them. They are XC6VLX195T-1FFG784C-ES parts.

They are sealed in a static bag with a desiccant enclosed. They are new unused parts, and are ROHS compliant. I am only selling all 10 of them as a lot.

A photo from my supplier is here:


I want $900 USD or the equivalent amount in BTC. I will accept escrow, but we need to agree on some details first. Please send me PM via the forum in order to contact me.

This is outstanding, I love it.  The power connector configuration is really great, I love the mini-backplane.

This is the nicest and most compact Spartan-6 board I have yet seen.  Great job!

Higher than that actually.  1k parts isn't even close to being considered enough volume to get any real discount.

Even if every single Bitcoin miner were to participate in this GB, the volume doesn't justify any real discount.  In the industry, you have to have part volumes > 10-100k (depending on many factors) to get any real leverage, and that applies only to customers who agree to long term business relationships as well.  Bitcoin is a drop in the bucket compared to commercial designs.

Uhh, why?

I guess there is some appeal to not needing the FPGA software, but JTAG is ungodly slow.  It's not an appropriate means of communication between a mining host and the FPGA at all.  I don't think this idea is wise nor useful (except to save the step of FPGA programming I guess).

Jesus H. Christ, stop it with the damn gold discussion.  This is a mining thread, take your irrelevant arguments elsewhere.

Mods, cleanup on aisle 12.

That is very misleading.  That is only a pre-order.  These boards won't be available for at least a month or so yet, and the price IIRC is around $400.

Wait, I thought this statement isn't true.  My understanding is that potential forks in the chain are resolved according to whichever winning hash has the lowest absolute value (highest difficulty).  This scheme is at least deterministic.

Is this correct?