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I have 2 pre-orders with order number 12xx. The reason I am selling them so high is because they should make ~$3,000-$4,000 the first week. More in First month of receiving them. Why are my pre-orders so valuable? 1. I am in the first 1200 orders 2. 120Gh/s total 3. July 15th Pre-Order date As many of you know, at this point, it is now how many GH/s you pre-ordered, but how early you pre-ordered. A mini-rig ordered 1 week ago might as well be 2 SC singles compared to a mini-rig pre-ordered in July. Proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-A_NlkGvbMVideo was made in October. I state that I have 2 pre-orders for ASIC SC Singles. Just testing out the waters here hehe. Given BFL's track record, i'll give you $5 for both of them |
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If you click on "buy now" button, it does not actually work. LOL
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Now that Avalon has made the first batch a reality, there really is no "unexpected" overhead cost and parts can be ordered easier than the first time around. So, my question is this: assuming Avalon has 100,000 orders for batch 2, why shouldn't they just accept them and deliver 100,000 boxes? Now it will take a week of mining to pay for the 1st unit delivered. In a month difficulty will shoot up and it will probably take up to 2 months to pay for the unit that the last guy gets/hooks up. With the confidence in their ability to deliver, what if Avalon gets 100,000 orders for 60GH boxes for batch 2? What if they decide to fill them all? Then the difficulty will shoot way up and most of the batch 2 boxes will take like a year to pay for themselves...
I know that in batch 1 thread they said they will do batches of 300, but with money in had for say 100,000 units, they can get a bigger shop etc. It would be good for btc network, not to flood it with 100,000 asic units, but from the seller prospective, why not just expand manufacturing capacity and do it?
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Congrats AVALON.
I was a pessimist, did not think that any one could deliver and for that i crown myself as a duchebag.
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You know that 1110 hours is only a month and a half, correct?
Yes i do, but by the time you add in the cost of electricity, occasional down time, the designers profit margin etc, you are talking close to 6mo to pay for your ASIC chip. Which is why BFL is selling ASICs (for an instant profit) instead of mining with them for months to recoup their investment. Congratulation for logically deducing that BFL's business actually makes financial sense, therefore is realistic! PS: will you promise me that you will write an apology, once I receive my ASICs from BFL in the next few months, proving that you were wrong?  Please specify what "few months" means in real numbers. I don't think you will get 4.5GH/s for $150 price tag at 1000MH/J as the Jalapeno is specced here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparisonDon't get me wrong, I don't want to be the "doom cryer" or a pessimist, I would LOVE to see ASIC products to be available for bitcoin. I just don't think it will happen. By ASIC i mean true asic, not FPGA conversion. |
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Give it a couple days.
EP
ROFL Give it a few days? They "shipped" 10 days ago! 10 days, and there is still no sign at all that they have units hashing! How many more days do you suggest we wait? Over 9000! |
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You know......
With so many f*** Crypto/Hash and ASIC experts in this thread... by now the planet should be flooded with bit-coin producing ASICS
Please just go buy an FPGA development board and build a demo engine ... or at the very least go do some research.
At the end of it.....you may even be able to have a decent conversation about clock buffers.........
Hold on a sec, I promise i will reply. Just give me a few moments to google what a clock buffer is/does. |
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You know that 1110 hours is only a month and a half, correct?
Yes i do, but by the time you add in the cost of electricity, occasional down time, the designers profit margin etc, you are talking close to 6mo to pay for your ASIC chip. |
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To build a real ASIC it will be $1-$2 million in startup costs. With current bitcoin design 25 coins per 10 min plus transaction fees, call it 30 coins per 10 minutes, 180 coins per hour at the rate of $20 per coin we are talking $3600 per hour for full network capacity. How long you think it would take to make $3million, which is what end user would endup paying for ASIC? We are talking about 1000 hours to pay for hardware development cost alone with free power. And this is assuming that the ASIC will crush all other network capacity, which in reality it will not exceed 75%-90% of. The market is too small, it will simply not be worth the investment.
Where in the hell are you getting your numbers? I've reread this paragraph a couple times and I still can't piece together your thought process... 1) You don't need $1 million to develop an ASIC...though I suppose it would help. 2) You calculated (poorly) the full output of the network in terms of $$ to somehow justify hardware development. Why would this even matter? 3) I can't even... And this is assuming that the ASIC will crush all other network capacity, which in reality it will not exceed 75%-90% of. The market is too small, it will simply not be worth the investment. No. Just...no. Users will buy hardware to make money. Would you buy $1000 chip if it did no good for you? The network capacity is relevant, because the only way a chip maker will comit to designing and making a chip is if they can sell enough of them to justify the R&D cost. Do some math: network btc is 150 btc/hr, which is $2700/hr. Your fraction of this would be based on your hash ratio to network total. Let's make the most favorable assumption that ASIC will drive all GPUs and FPGAs off the grid, so 100% of network hash rate is coming from ASIC. If total N asic units are made, the R&D cost per chip is X/N. Lets say that X is $1million, so R&D cost per chip is 1,000,000/N. When you buy 1 chip you get 1/N network capacity and so you are getting $2700/N/hr. Which means just to pay for R&D cost you will have to run your ASIC 370HR with FREE electricity. In reality ASIC will not have 100% of network hashrate, your electricity is not free and your actual cost will be at least 3x the RND cost since you need to pay for hardware itself. Which basically boils down to 370*3/F =1110/F Hours. F is the hashrate fraction of ASIC devices to the rest of the network. So in the most ideal case it will take you say 1110 hours of hashing with free electricity to pay for your ASIC chip. |
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Lets do some basic math:
For existing FPGA design the best can be had is 23MHps/J. There is no reason to anticipate an improvement in FPGA power efficiency, yes, there can be marginal reduction of overhead and the FPGA can be scaled up, but it's efficiency will not increase all that much. Based on existing designs we can anticipate 25MH/J for FPGA. There is nothing special abut ASIC, most ASIC vendors just use a custom programmed FPGA; this is called FPGA to ASIC conversion. So at best ASIC will be 50MHps/J;
You are wrong. A real-world SHA-256 130nm chip, non-optimized for Bitcoin, has already demonstrated 73 Mhash/J: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=95762.0 Merely scaling down this non-optimal design from 130nm to 65nm would multiply the Mash/J efficiency by 4 (because efficiency is linearly proportional to the transistor junction area), making it 292 Mhash/J. Then it is not hard to imagine that optimizing the chip for Bitcoin (ie. two SHA-256 with no high-speed I/O since the same data block is hashed over and over locally, merely incrementing the nonce) would improve the efficiency by a factor or 2 or 3, therefore making it 584 Mhash/J or 876 Mhash/J. These numbers are not far from BFL's claims (1000 Mhash/J), making them plausible. And with 2-3 years of design, prototyping as well as about $1-$2 million start-up cost you can do it. No. The SHA-256 part of the ASIC that I pointed to was designed in weeks, not 2-3 years. It is open source and just a few hundred lines of VHDL: https://cryptography.gmu.edu/athena/index.php?id=source_codesAlso, yes, BFL can, and probably did, spend about $1M developing their ASIC so far. They have received more than $1M of preorders (proven), plus additional venture capital (according to them). They can definitely foot the bill. Also, the Avalon team seems to have been able to do it for less than $300-400k (excluding salaries), based on their price quotes from TSMC with poorly obscured prices ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=120184.msg1381782#msg1381782 ). This validates anecdotal evidence of private wealthy individual engineers having designed their own ASIC for personal projects for only a few hundred thousand dollars. Bottom line, yes Bitcoin ASICs are definitely financially doable by teams with the funding of BFL and Avalon. If you doubt this, I encourage you to bet against the "BFL is real" bet (see link in my signature) - you would make a killing if you are right  Nice try. I can design a nuclear reactor in couple days, i really can; but it does not mean I can build one for less than $5 billion and faster than 5-10 years. |
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As a computer engineer (the kind of engineer that actually knows about the topic at hand), I call bullshit on pcm81 having any idea what he's talking about.
Sorry, pcm81, but the other camp's marshmallows are lookin' mighty tasty. I may have to head on over there to make sure they're not using any of my barn wood as fuel. That would piss me off. Look on the bright side: at least get some mashmallows, since we ain't getting ASIC past vaporware phase anyways... To build a real ASIC it will be $1-$2 million in startup costs. With current bitcoin design 25 coins per 10 min plus transaction fees, call it 30 coins per 10 minutes, 180 coins per hour at the rate of $20 per coin we are talking $3600 per hour for full network capacity. How long you think it would take to make $3million, which is what end user would endup paying for ASIC? We are talking about 1000 hours to pay for hardware development cost alone with free power. And this is assuming that the ASIC will crush all other network capacity, which in reality it will not exceed 75%-90% of. The market is too small, it will simply not be worth the investment. |
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Lets do some basic math:
For existing FPGA design the best can be had is 23MHps/J. There is no reason to anticipate an improvement in FPGA power efficiency, yes, there can be marginal reduction of overhead and the FPGA can be scaled up, but it's efficiency will not increase all that much. Based on existing designs we can anticipate 25MH/J for FPGA. There is nothing special abut ASIC, most ASIC vendors just use a custom programmed FPGA; this is called FPGA to ASIC conversion. So at best ASIC will be 50MHps/J;
You are wrong. A real-world SHA-256 130nm chip, non-optimized for Bitcoin, has already demonstrated 73 Mhash/J: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=95762.0 Merely scaling down this non-optimal design from 130nm to 65nm would multiply the Mash/J efficiency by 4 (because efficiency is linearly proportional to the transistor junction area), making it 292 Mhash/J. Then it is not hard to imagine that optimizing the chip for Bitcoin (ie. two SHA-256 with no high-speed I/O since the same data block is hashed over and over locally, merely incrementing the nonce) would improve the efficiency by a factor or 2 or 3, therefore making it 584 Mhash/J or 876 Mhash/J. These numbers are not far from BFL's claims (1000 Mhash/J), making them plausible. And with 2-3 years of design, prototyping as well as about $1-$2 million start-up cost you can do it. |
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SHA-256 is used to encrypt data
How does that work? Show me how to decrypt a SHA256 hash back to its original contents. Step 1, generate random contents Step 2, hash it Step 3, compare to a known hash. If matches and random contents makes sense you done, if does not match loop to step 1. I am going to say that you have made the most elegant comeback I have ever read in a long while. You are a rising star in my book! Last I checked, hashing and encryption are two different things. They only barely resemble one another on a superficial level. Hashing and encryption ARE two different things. In fact though, they are both used when you log into your online banking account. 1. Your computer gets the public RSA key of the server and encrypts the AES key with it. 2. Sends the key to the server together with your password, which is encrypted with AES. 3. Server decrypts AES key, using that key decrypts your password, it hashes your password and compares the resulting hash to its stored hash. If two match, you are authenticated. Server does not actually store your password, just its hash, this way if hacker steals the list of all password hashes, he still cant log in... |
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This thread is comedy gold.
I honestly can't see his guy being serious, he has to be trolling. If he is a P.Eng, he should review his licensing body's guidelines on consulting outside his area of expertise.
1. I said i am an engineer, i never said i was a PE. Even if I was a PE, this is internet forum small talk, this does not qualify as consulting. Nice try, but no cigar. |
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Isn't the guy(s) behind AvalonASIC the same people that delivered Icarus and Carismore FPGAs?
I'm probably confused with FPGA they we behind BUT... they still designed an FPGA that could hash the SHA-256 encryption algorithm that Bitcoin uses.
That had no issues from shipping out of china...
But did they actually program the FPGA in China? I seriously doubt that. |
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Seriously, to prove I ain't got no clue, I'm rooting for the guy, but seeing I may be on the wrong team.
I think you are pulling our leg... 1. 10,000+ posts 2. you are cheering for a guy with IQ 111 (above 110 is considered above average) ... and you say you got no clue... |
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SHA-256 is used to encrypt data
How does that work? Show me how to decrypt a SHA256 hash back to its original contents. Step 1, generate random contents Step 2, hash it Step 3, compare to a known hash. If matches and random contents makes sense you done, if does not match loop to step 1. In reality this is an infinite loop that produces no results. It is more likely that all of the oxygen in the room you are in is distributed poorly and none of it is near you. I feel generous, so i am going to teach you a little something about hashes. When you create a web account for you online banking, the banks server does not actually store your password. The banks server stores SHA-256 (being extremely optimistic) hash of your password. When you log in the web server compares stored hash to the hash of the password you provided. If the two match, you are in. Now imagine that I hacked the webserver and stole the file which has the hash value of your password. I still can't log in and take your money; i need to find a string which will hash to the same value as the hash of your real password, then use that string to log into the banks server and take your money. There are many strings which would match hash value of your password, but the only way i can find one of them is to start hashing all of the possible strings, until i find one whose hash matches the hash of your password. This is why SHA-256 is under export control. Imagine if i had a super computer doing 1PHps, it would take me less time to randomly find a string which matches your passwords hash. So, US gvt restricts export of SHA-256 to Export Licensed companies. It does not mean it can not be exported, it just means company doing the export/import needs export/import license. Sending SHA-256 cores to china for assembly would require export license. |
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Congratulations, you programmed an FPGA. This is not the same as designing a true ASIC implementation.
No, I actually produced fab ready images for a particular process that I had access to a cell library for, I was in fact specific about this in my post. Geesh. You're trying my patience 1. In regards to export license, see the link i provided above. SHA-256 requires export license to China. The link you provided is incorrect— or overly generalized. I have exported products to china commercially which implemented HMAC for authentication. It does not require a license. Step 1, generate random contents
Step 2, hash it
Step 3, compare to a known hash. If matches you done, if does not match loop to step 1. You have omitted step [2a] "Has the sun stopped shining yet?" ... what you are describing does not actually work in practice for the same reason that hashes are practically secure. Congratulations, you may have broken US law. See item #10 csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips198-1/FIPS-198-1_final.pdf If SHA algorithm you used was not for 256 bits, it may not have required license. |
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SHA-256 is used to encrypt data
How does that work? Show me how to decrypt a SHA256 hash back to its original contents. Step 1, generate random contents Step 2, hash it Step 3, compare to a known hash. If matches and random contents makes sense you done, if does not match loop to step 1. |
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when it gets to US u can burn the FPGA into ASIC  What? This doesn't even make any sense. ASIC just means Application Specific Integrated Circuit. So, a burned FPGA is ASIC. A very bad one, but it is still ASIC. If you want to design a real, clean ASIC then you need to take SHA-256 cores, or design your own, and wire them up manually on a wafer / pcb etc. To do this you would need to have SHA-265 cores in existence at one or more steps in the manufacturing process inside of the country you are outsourcing the manufacturing to. This is where the Export of SHA-256 to China comes into play. If you take an FPGA like spartan and have china make PCB for it and send the whole thing back, you do not need export license. If you decide to send the config file to engineer in china to burn on your FPGA or if you send him SHA-256 cores (physical chips or design schematic) to be assembled in china, you are in violation of export. EDIT: By violation of export i meant you are breaking US law assuming you have no export license. It does not mean you cant send it, but you would need to have US government grant you export license (Long and tedious process). |
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