Question: Does a large pool have any advantage over a smaller pool (or a single person with a block erupter) for finding the next block?

Reason I am asking is this: If a large pool has found the last block, they know this before anyone else, and can start working on the next block. Meantime the guy with the BE does not know this and is whacking away on an invalid block. Small advantage, but with blocks being generated every 10 minutes it could add up.

Or is this totally wrong?

C

This is something I have been wondering: Does a big pool have an advantage in luck over a smaller one. Reason being I switched about a terrahash from Eliguis to Eclipse and the luck on eclipse has been bad. Right now it's back to back 1 day periods since a block was found.

Does a large pool have a skewed chance of finding the next block over a little pool or an individual with a CPU due to having more local info about the last block generated (ie: they made it)?

If not I'll stick with a smaller pool because variance should even out. If so then I'm being a "chump".

Well, how hard can it be?

Seriously: The BFL chips are probably using the same programming because why change it? Based on the board picture it looks like similar power needs/provides (1 volt, 3.3 volts, 5 volts with 3.3 volts running the logic, 1 volt running the engines), and the signaling to these things is remarkably simple (SPIO, basically unbalanced serial, low rate). All the clocks, details, and fun stuff is kept in the chip.

In theory one would need to supply it with power, read the signals, and get rid of the heat. An adapter board could be built with solder balls on the bottom to match the jalapeno board, then replace the trimmer resistors to set the 1 volt supplies to 1.3 volts or so, then either hack the Atmel code to provision the work or use the defaults and go.

Heat's tricky, but underclock it a bit and put a nice heat sink on top and it might stay cool. Getting it to all fit in a jalapeno box might be the challenge, but wouldn't it look cool?

C

I'll be honest: It's going to be a race to see if Mr. Teal gets the 500gh chili out before I deliver the 300gh Jalapeno. :-)

C

I understand the frustration, but that is the nature of difficulty. I keep saying that at this time mining is not a profitable venture, it's technically impossible to make long term profits on it.

As bitcoin's adoption picks up and transaction fees increase this might happen, we shall see.

I will say the pictures of the air cooling on the board look... cool. And the thought of a th in that form factor to replace what is a maze in my house is also... interesting.

Hm.

Pretty much all the failures I have run into have been power supply related. Did have one USB failure that was caused by someone shoving something into the USB port, but I don't think that is BFL's issue.

Overall the HW has been excellent, just the power supplies that are junk.

C

God, Gox, what's the difference.

Given that WK recently paid out over a million dollars worth of bitcoin to keep the wait times minimal, I'd trust him and not worry about it.

C

Another note: I did some power calculations, and it looks like the 8 chip jally pulls 5.2 watts per gh, while a standard single/30 pulls about 4.0 watts per gh. I'm guessing most of the difference is the cooling pump, but I think the newer boards are more efficient than turbo-charged jallies.

C

Very interesting little update: Last night my 6 miners out in the shed faulted out my Rpi at 4am. Went out at 6am to check on them, brought a laptop and after some analysis found that my 28gh air cooled jalapeno was screwing up the USB bus. Not sure why, but it's out of the loop for now and everything else (8 chip jally, chili, two single/30's and two single/60's) are running normally.

Unit was a factory good 2 chip December Jally that was upgraded to 7 chips with dual heat sinks. It tended to get quite warm but not insanely hot.

Now it is true the temps last night in the shed dropped under 15f, and this was a confirmed good unit, but it's still odd. I'll have to sit down and figure out what's going on.

C

Honest answer: I had them on my roof. 1800 watts of Siemens 75 watt single crystaline panels. With some shading around here I was pulling about 8-10kw a day. Not bad, but cute.

7 years later there was a hole in the roof shingles. Granted they were older, but it turned out that leaves had gotten under the panels in one spot and the acid in them burned a hole in my shingles. Cost $1,200 to have the panels taken off the roof (and a LOT of calls, the installers had long since gone and no one wanted to do it) and with the new roof on I figured "screw this, put them on the shed".

So they're all grid-tied right now, although the install does not meet NEC 2010 so it's somewhat renegade although the SB1800 and dual SB700's are fully certified for grid isolation and all that. So I can't put power back into the grid. But I can run my miners on the shed as long as they consume more than the panels can generate. So there you go.

C

Note: I have about 2,000 watts of solar on one shed and 900 watts on the other. They're finally putting out power now that spring is coming and I'm moving about 3,000 watts worth of miners out into the shed.

This is enough to balance out the load of 850gh of hashing power while the sun is shining right on the panels, maybe 4 hours a day. That's it. Going 24 hours it would barely cover 100gh with batteries supporting the load.

What you really need to do is this:

Find an abandoned dam
Enter it with a penstock turbine, miners, and a cell phone
Set everything up
Leave

The cell phone would provide the internet, and so forth. That would work.

C

Interesting. Where was the blown cap on the board? I'm wondering if it's a PFC modulating cap and the reason it doesn't blow up devices is because it goes to ground instead of neutral (on the jalapeno it goes to neutral which is beyond bad when run on 240 volt lines)

I have one myself, it's not as good as a Corsair power supply, but it's not too bad overall. Warmer than it should be though, less efficient than a Corsair 500 (which can power two singles)

C

Well, I'm having problems with my wife and girlfriend. Eligius should notify me when there is a schedule conflict in my bitcoin use keeping them all happy.

C

Eclipse doesn't have a fee for their notification and it's pretty good. However I've been noticing that Eclipse will sometimes reject a lot of shares (a couple of percent as opposed to <1%) which is a bit odd and I don't think they share block rewards.

Eclipse also has more short term variation because it's a bit smaller. Over time things will average out, but in the short term I go a bit bonkers when it takes 20 hours to find a block, followed by 1 minute to find another one. Whatever, luck averages out over time.

C

Hm. Who is selling gold? That could be nice.

And I just went into the payout queue with a 3 block delay. No problem...

My systems are mining as normal. I'm sure the stats page will come up at some point.

C

Lame. Those of us *in the know* have had our foil surgically implanted between the scalp and skull. It allows us to work unseen and undetected and provides a cool crinkly sound when we wear our fez hats.

C
:-)

By the way this is not unusual: Years ago at Defcon they released hardware based badges for hacking. I got mine a day early, reviewed the chips, and downloaded the spec sheets from motorola.

The next day (day one conference) I re-downloaded the tech sheet and my toolz told me there was a difference in the file from the one I downloaded the previous day. Fired up my hext editors and sure enough someone had hacked into motorola and replaced the spec sheet with a zero day virus. Nice....

Moral: Don't trust things.

C