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4621  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Altcoin Discussion / Re: Why not stıck to bıtcoın? on: September 02, 2013, 12:18:44 AM
A monoculture will eventually fail, that is reason enough to keep alternatives.




If if there were some innovation with new coins, and not just a copy / paste of the old coins Smiley
Nonsense. if someone hacks SHA256 and mines all the remaining BTC in a day, the value will plummet and the scrypt coins will take over.



If someone "hacks" (as inaccurate and unrealistic as that is) then every single Crypto-currency is screwed as they use SHA-256 in the address generation.  So you could find another public key which hashes to the same address and steal all the owned coins of every coin that exists.

There is no defense in diversity if all the codebase are 99% copied from one. 
4622  Other / Beginners & Help / Re: Question regarding paper wallet on: September 02, 2013, 12:15:22 AM
Thanks Gabi, I will search for that

To be clear to spend funds you need the private key not just the address (which is public knowledge).  So the command you are looking for is to import a private key.
4623  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Altcoin Discussion / Re: A RAM based fpga LTC miner on: September 01, 2013, 03:13:39 AM
As you can see, as memory exponentially decreases integer ops exponentially increase.  He was easily able to get the memory usage into the kilobytes and still crank out hashes.  I'd guess that exactly the same is true with N=2^10, r=1, p=1 too.  It's the same balancing act you run into no matter what value you use for N or r; at higher N you may increase the difficulty by a smaller constant factor, but overall I doubt increasing N or r will make scrypt much more FPGA/ASIC unfriendly when they finally iron out the FPGA implementation.

Yes that is the space-time tradeoff and they used it to reduce the memory requirements to roughly what LTC Scrypt requires EXCEPT to do so requires a 100x increase in integer performance.  If anything you just showed how weak LTC Scrypt is.   Another way to look at it is say you had a FPGA card with output of X kh/s using the full scratchpad size of 128KB.   Now trying to run N 2^14 you don't have sufficient memory or bandwidth but like the chart shows you could use the space-time tradeoff to reduce the memory requirement to 128KB.  Great the memory requirement is similar to LTC Scrypt ... EXCEPT you now need either a FGPA with 100x the integer performance (how much do you think that is going to increase the cost) OR you are going to have 1/100th the hashrate.   
4624  Economy / Economics / Re: Miner break even price points. Do you think this will effect the market? on: September 01, 2013, 01:20:30 AM
There is another question of the energy consumption for bitcoin: If bitcoin's total market value were really going to reach trillions of dollars, it means the electricity consumed will also be worth trillions of dollars.

Not exactly correct.  The total value of money supply is irrelevant.  What matters is annual miner rewards.


The money supply is 11.5M BTC worth ~ $1.65B USD; however miners collect only ~1.31M BTC worth ~$150M USD per year in mining rewards.   Annual electrical consumption isn't going to be more than that.   Would you spend $2 in electricity to mine $1 in BTC even if you had free hardware?
4625  Bitcoin / Hardware / Re: Do any of these ASIC's actually make a ROI? on: September 01, 2013, 01:09:12 AM
Well its silly to argue anyway I guess since I do want to mine and do still want my Klondike 16 boards built and so on and so on.

I should just jump on the bandwagon telling everyone hell yeah mining won't pay, mining is for idiots, forget mining, if you think crypto coins are good buy them but don't waste your time screwing around with this whole mining thing.

I am partly influenced personally by the fact I made far more CPU mining BBQcoins, a purportedly worthless coin, than I did on any other coin. So to me the ability to mine coins nobody is selling has proven itself to be the most profitable approach, historically.

Really it was all the actual time and thought I put in that paid, no turnkey buy it and plug it in magic box made me my profits, I profited by having the skills, time and equipment to work the outer edges the masses would not or could not.

-MarkM-


Which has absolutely nothing to do with the topic "Do any of these ASIC's actually make a ROI?"

There are lots of non-ecnonomic reasons to mine.  There is a difference between saying "if you don't make a profit you are stupid" and saying "the claim you are profitable even if you lose BTC (100 BTC to buy a miner which nets 99 BTC) because the exchange rate might go up is stupid".
4626  Bitcoin / Hardware / Re: Do any of these ASIC's actually make a ROI? on: September 01, 2013, 12:55:18 AM
Bitcoins are irrelevant though, if it is dollars, or geistgeld, or icecream cones or whatever that you are after.

Heck you could look at it all from the point of view of a person who has electricity to spend instead of a person who has fiat or bitcoins or geistgeld or whatever to spend.

I have a certain amount of electricity and I want to turn it into more electricity.

I could buy a device that can mine any SHA256 coin or even merge a bunch of SHA256 coins, and use it to burn electricity to produce stuff I can sell for more electricity than I put into it.

This fixation on bitcoins ignores the versatility of the device, heck I could launch a whole new SHA256 coin to mine with the device if I thought that would buy me more electricity than mining some already existing SHA256 coin...

-MarkM-


The value of those coins are essentially zero.  I know you are the merged mining champion and merged mining is the solution to all problems but it doesn't change the economics.

Currencies are fungible so anytime someone says x BTC just think of it is as BTC equivalent.  If you mine 5 coins and their combined value is x BTC then it is no different than mining x BTC.  If you don't like to use BTC consider the five coins as x DVC equivalent or x XYZ equivalent.  It doesn't change anything.

If you spend 100 BTC on a rig that will produce <100 BTC equivalent (even including the rounding error merged mined coins) then you have a negative ROI.  
It doesn't matter if your intent is to makes lots of USD or buy lots of porches with the proceeds.  If you want lots of USD then 100 BTC is better than <100 BTC.
It doesn't matter if you spend USD, BTC, ounces of gold, or DVC.  The unit mines produces (mainly) BTC so however you pay it has an equivalent price in BTC.


Saying I will spend 100 BTC to mine 99 or less BTC (including the value of the near worthless merged mined coins) and it doesn't matter because I only care about USD makes no sense.  It doesn't matter what the future exchange rate is. 

Future exchange rate drops to $10 per BTC
Hold 100 BTC = 100 * $10 = $1,000 
Buy miner for 100 BTc and mine 99 BTC = 99 * $10 = $990
100 BTC is better than 99 BTC
$1,000 is better than $990

Future exchange rate drops to $1,000 per BTC
Hold 100 BTC = 100 * $1,000 = $100,000 
Buy miner for 100 BTc and mine 99 BTC = 99 * $1,000 = $99,000
100 BTC is better than 99 BTC
$100,000 is better than $99,000
4627  Other / Beginners & Help / Re: Question regarding paper wallet on: September 01, 2013, 12:48:59 AM
1) Private keys are generated randomly.  It is possible although incredibly improbable that two people would generate the same key.  If that happens you have an address collision and either person could spend the funds.  This isn't unique to paper wallets as all private keys are a random 256 bit number.  It also doesn't apply to just Bitcoin, it applies to all asyemtric encryption.  You could in theory in just one attempt generate a duplicate of the key used to sign google's SSL traffic and impersonate google.     The probability is so low that it is essentially 0%.

2) There is no such thing as "introduce an address to the network".  You can send funds to any valid address.  A paper wallet address is a valid address you send funds to it like you would sending funds to any other address.  The Bitcoin network has no idea what private keys or addresses have been generated it only knows which addresses have received funds in the past.

4628  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Mining (Altcoins) / Re: Swedish ASIC miner company kncminer.com on: August 31, 2013, 10:45:26 PM
It isn't that the calculators are inaccurate the output is "accurate" relative to the inputs.  But like they say garbage in, garbage out.  So when people who "ROI projections" that have difficulty going to 1 trillion well that would be garbage in.

Why is difficulty 1 trillion garbage in.  Well because even if the most efficient (J/GH ) is used (and the company can deliver on that) and you get the hardware for free, 1 trillion difficulty = 33,405 kWh per BTC.  At $0.10 per Kwh that would mean it would require $3,340.50 in electricity to produce 1 BTC.  Do you think that is likely?

Garbage in -> Garbage out.  Some people have trouble with the concept of exponential growth not being able to continue forever.  The calculators are fine however they require the user to use some intelligence in selecting realistic inputs.

4629  Bitcoin / Hardware / Re: HashFast announces specs for new ASIC: 400GH/s on: August 31, 2013, 10:30:55 PM
HashFast's Golden Nonce GN ASIC successfully taped-out yesterday, Wednesday the 28th, and has been released for 28nm fabrication to a well-known, leading-edge foundry.  More details will follow in next week's joint press release.

-John

Congratulations John (and rest of HF team).  Big milestone.  I look forward to the joint press release. 
I assume this means you still anticipate meeting your delivery estimate?

Thanks D&T,

Yes, we are still looking good. Its exciting over here!

-John

Please share your schedule with us.  All of us are very skeptical that you will deliver systems in October.  Cutting glass, obtaining first silicon and packaging will take at least 2 months.  Not to mention system assembly and prototype test.  Even in tapeing out August 28th you're looking at LATE November easy or you're simply lying to everyone.  If you disagree please share your exact schedule with us.

-The Skeptical

Calling someone a liar is a little extreme.  Claiming chips can possibly be obtained in less than 2 months is also extreme.  There is a concept of a "rocket run" in the industry. 
4630  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Altcoin Discussion / Re: A RAM based fpga LTC miner on: August 31, 2013, 10:27:53 PM
You used a lot of double speak.  First I am aware of the space time tradeoff however rather than explain it in every single post it is useful to look at the max scratchpad size.   128KB scratchpad is going to require less memory and less bandwidth than a 16MB scratchpad regardless of what space time tradeoff is employed.  A device only has a finite amount of computing power and while you can trade time for space needing less space to start with always helps.

As for higher parameter value having no effect on the relative performance of CPU, GPU, and FGPA/ASICs that is just false.  Scrypt was designed to be GPU and specialized device resistant.   This is important in password hashing as most servers are using CPU and attacker will likely choose the most effective component for brute forcing.  By making CPU performance superior it prevents attackers from gaining an advantage.    You can test this yourself.  Modify cgminer OpenCL kernel to use a higher p value.  Around 2^14 GPU relative performance is essentially gone.  It is comparable to a CPU throughput.  At 2^16 GPU relative performance is falling far behind.  At 2^20 the GPU never completes.

You say one one hand that the memory requirement doesn't matter and on the other hand that FPGA are hard because they need lots of memory and wide buses.  Well guess what the higher the p value the MORE memory and wider busses that is needed.  At 2^14 roughly 128x the max scratchpad size is going to mean 128x as much bandwidth is necessary.   So the lower the p value the EASIER the job is for FPGA and ASIC builders.  They can use less memory and narrower busses that means less cost, less complexity, higher ROI%.   Sure one isn't required to use max scratchpad size because one can compute on the fly but once again the whole point to the space-time tradeoff is that the advantage to doing so is reduced.  

Lastly yes the 128KB is per core but so is the 16MB using the default parameters.   If 128KB per core increases memory, bandwidth, and/or die size per core then a 16MB requirement would maker it even harder.  So yes the parameters chosen by LTC makes it 128x less memory hard than the default.  You use circular logic to say the max scratch pad size is irrelevant because one can optimize the size of the scratchpad to available resources.  This doesn't change the fact that due to the space-time tradeoff you aren't gaining relative performance.  Using a higher max scatchpad requires either more memory and bandwidth OR requires more computation.  The throughput on the FPGA,  GPU, CPU is going to be reduced.  Now if they were all reduced equally it wouldn't matter all that matters is relative not nominal performance.  However the LTC parameters chosen are horrible for CPU usage.   CPU have a limited ability for parallel execution.  Usually 4 or 8 independent cores.   128KB per core * 8 = 1MB.  That's right today with systems that can install multiple GB for very cheap cost the Scrypt paramters chosen bottleneck performance on a CPU.  GPU on the other hand are highly parallel execution engines but they have limited memory and that memory is at a higher cost than CPU have access to.



TL/DR
Whatever the relative performance of this FPGA is to a CPU miner it would be WORSE if the p value was higher.   LTC decision to use a low p value makes what otherwise would be a nearly impossible task into one which is merely challenging.  
4631  Bitcoin / Hardware / Re: Break even difficulty by hardware efficiency (power cost = value of BTC) on: August 31, 2013, 09:45:59 PM
The cost to reach the "break even point" is based on current cost so I don't find it too useful, because cost will decline significantly.  The network will approach a small margin below the break even point.

I've always assumed that, in the short-to-medium term, the equilibrium point will be on the wrong side of breakeven, due to optimism bias in the purchase decisions.  It's true it wouldn't make much financial sense to continue to mine under those circumstances, but there are other reasons to hash than profit, and even the people who were in it purely for the money will find other ways to justify their purchases to themselves.

roy

That is a good point.  Another way to look at it is difficulty may overshoot before correcting.  We say this multiple times over the years with GPUs.  The trend is something like, exchange rate rises rapidly and then difficulty follows over a much slower timeframe as miners deploy new hardware prices, eventually prices peak and decline and thus pushes the most inefficient miners into a negative operating margin.  Maybe they hang on for a while hoping difficulty goes lower or prices rise but eventually they give up and difficulty declines back towards equilibrium.

If the electrical cost to mine a Bitcoin is slightly higher than purchase cost miners may continue to mine for some time.  One reason is that it is an easy anonymous way to "buy" Bitcoins from your power company.  However it is important to keep in mind that unlike the GPU world the efficiency between the least efficient rigs and the most efficient ones is on the order of 12x (possibly more if/when Bitfury produces a 28nm device).   So while electricity is still a small % of gross revenue for a cointerra miner it will be >150% of gross revenue for an Avalon one.  So difficulty can continue to rise far beyond the break even point of an Avalon miner to a level where even the most "stubborn" miner will admit defeat (Paying $5 in electricity for $1 in BTC).
4632  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Bitcoin 21 million limit and Zeno's paradoxes on: August 31, 2013, 03:57:59 PM
At some point, the division is not able to provide a rounded value above 0 so the halving stops in 0. At that point there will be 2,099,999,997,690,000 satoshis, and then no more will be added. The paradox is solved by binary computing and floor rounding.

I would just add the above value is with current precision.  OP was asking about increasing precision.  If precision is increased then we would get closer to 2.1 quadrillion satoshis (but never reach it).

4633  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Bitcoin 21 million limit and Zeno's paradoxes on: August 31, 2013, 05:31:48 AM
In other words, even with infinite precision, you might be adding fractions of a coin, and halving that fraction periodically, but you will never have a total more than some certain maximum, which is easy to calculate.

Yeah its 21M BTC.

Here is a simpler series that may illustrate the dynamic

1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 .......

The sum of the series with any finite number of steps will approach but never reach 1.  The more steps the closer you get to 1.

Bitcoin follows the same series.

1/2 of all Bitcoins will be mined in first 210K blocks
1/4 of all Bitcoins will be mined in the second 210K blocks
1/8 of all Bitcoins will be mined in the third 210K blocks.
etc

Due to the limit of the number of digits in the protocol there is a finite number of steps in the series (30 to be exactly).  This could be extended.  With a larger finite precision we could have 60, 90, 5000 steps but the number in this simplified series will never exceed 1.   Same thing with Bitcoin the, the number of bitcoins mined will always be <21M.  The more finite precision we have the closer we will get to but never reach 21M.  With infinite number of blocks and infinite precision the series converges on 21M.

4634  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Altcoin Discussion / Re: A RAM based fpga LTC miner on: August 31, 2013, 05:13:09 AM
all Bitcoin ASIC companies had to derive their works from existing the current SHA-2 ASICs, starting from scratch would have cost far more than the Bitcoin economy could have supplied, and far more than ASIC companies could afford to spend at their current price points.

That is not correct.  Bitcoin ASICs are essentially glorified SHA-2 calculators.  Input binary blob & target.  Output any nonces which result in SHA-2(SHA-2(blob+nonce)) < target.  Not to take anything away from what the Bitcoin ASIC companies did but the chips are just performing the "math" of the SHA-2 algorithm.  Most of the "smarts" is not the customs ASICs but in the cheap micrprocessor (Rasberry Pi or embeded computer).  Far more complex chips are made in universities every year as academic projects.    There was an ASIC in your hand calculator from the 1970s.  It didn't cost a billion dollars to design either and the tools were a lot more primitive back then.
4635  Bitcoin / Hardware / Re: BFL - The Monarch, Production Update & The 28nm Transfer Program LoLx on: August 31, 2013, 03:44:58 AM
I don't think anyone should buy it either but showing a projection at just short of 1 exahash in Jan 2015 is just silly.  With free hardware and 0.5 J/GH you would lose money mining at that difficulty.
4636  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Altcoin Discussion / Re: A RAM based fpga LTC miner on: August 31, 2013, 03:03:53 AM
I'm aware that this is a FPGA which is doable with Scrypt, however I'd like to go off in a minor tangent. People seem to underestimate how difficult it will be to create a Scrypt ASIC. SHA256 Asics have been used for many many years. They were not new technology, meaning the billions of dollars of research that others had done getting SHA256 ASICs working is not there already for proposed Scrypt ASICs. All the BTC mining ASIC companies needed to do, was make a product that would work for BTC specific hashing, rather than what they were and still are used for, encrypting and decrypting files. The company that decides to start making LTC Asics will need a whole lot more than a few hundred thousand BTC to get their products out the door.

Back on topic, LTC FPGAs actually aren't that difficult to make in theory. LTC's Scrypt hashing requires actually a much lower amount of memory than other scrypt implementations (I believe its 196mb/cycle although I may be off) at that point, or whatever it actually is, I remember the math behind it, but not the actual numbers, you can provide additional hashing power at 1/2 the memory required, and you can still end up with a higher hashrate over current GPUs, while still using fairly inexpensive FPGA technology. So rather than needing to create a new FPGA board that can handle uneconomical amounts of memory, you can just work on designing a chip that will hash fast, and lose performance based on how much memory you can actually supply.

I'll look back over my research tomorrow, and get all of the numbers and such down. I'm tired so I may have said something dumb, I'll correct it later.

LTC uses the parameters (2^10, 1, 1) which results in a token 128KB max scratchpad size.  That isn't a typo it is kilobytes.  The default Scrypt parameters (2^14, 8, 1) result in a 16MB max scratchpad size roughly 128x as "memory hard". 

To my knowledge no Bitcoin ASIC company used existing SHA-2 IP and modified it.   
 
4637  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: transaction time on: August 30, 2013, 11:36:22 PM
So how would bitcoins be adopted in irl stores given that their transaction time is like 20 minutes?
You'd be buying soda and chips at the store, pass your bitcoin smart card and then just sit and wait?

How do credit cards work when the confirmation can take 180 days?
4638  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Altcoin Discussion / Re: Ixcoin TODO on: August 30, 2013, 11:24:23 PM
500 million would render most gen 1 ASICS worthless so I hope you're off by 2-3 months.

Well many miners will likely never break even if they overpaid and delivery was delay.  Not breaking even isn't worthless a miner has some value as long as the value of the electricity used is less than the current exchange rate.  At 500 million diff it only takes an 8.5 J/GH Avalon rig,   202.8 kWh of electricity to mine 1 BTC.  At $0.10 per kWh that is an electrical cost of $20.28 for a coin worth >$120 today.  Numbers are better than hope.  It is very likely that >6PH/s of hardware has already been paid for.  

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=283820
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=281279
4639  Other / CPU/GPU Bitcoin mining hardware / Re: Mining with PCI Express 3.0 Videocards on PCI Express 2.0 motherboard on: August 30, 2013, 11:11:29 PM
The one issue I can think of that you might have it that the motherboard, being of an age that it won't have PCI3 slots on it... may not be able to supply the operating power over the PCIe slots for all the cards you use. (Difference between the communications power over the pins, and the actual hashing power supplied by the 6/8 pin connectors.) You MIGHT need to get powered riser cables if you run into problems of the system crashing under what otherwise should be valid working conditions.

There is no change in the power spec between any version of PCIe.

Is 3.0 have the same power specification as 2.0?

Yes.

The PCIe power spec hasn't changed since PCIe 1.0.
75W for 6 pin connector.
150W for 8 pin connector.
Up to 75W from motherboard (10W from PCIe x1 connector, 25W from PCIe x4 & x8 connector, 75W from PCIE x16 connector).
Max of 375W for dual slot card.

PCIe 4.0 may have some changes to power configuration.  It is still in draft form and not expected until 2015.
4640  Economy / Securities / Re: ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It on: August 30, 2013, 10:59:01 PM
Interesting hypothesis, this sounds plausible indeed. But gen2 is not expected before November, that would imply we will stay at 60TH/s until November/December, and hardware sells will need to be enormous to compensate the lack of mining dividends. 60TH/s in 2 months will be nothing, maybe 2%.

Agreed and maybe they have some excess capacity to expand marginally between now and then  but I don't see AM hashrate going to say 120 TH/s using 130nm tech.  That would mean doubling power to over a megawatt.  One other factor is that "something" happened in the farm over the last month.  Looking at the 3 day average ( http://asicminercharts.com/ ) on 8/23 the 3 day average rate peaked at 53 TH/s and then over the next 4 days declined to half that.   Now say you are FC and you have 60 TH/s of hardware deployed but are running into problems getting 60 TH/s out of your 60 TH/s of hardware and another 10TH/s of boards arrive does it really make any sense to install them and possibly compound your problems.   AM Blades somehow still sell very close to their expected net revenue so just sell the hardware (for roughly the same amount as you would get mining from them over the next couple months) while you can still get a good price.  

Having run a 10KW GPU farm for over a year, if FriedCat can successfully manage 50x the power AND has a plan to more efficient tech, well that is worth more than a stable dividend in the long run.  I think many of these other mining ops have no idea the complications that "real" power loads bring to the table.    Going from 200W to 1K of mining gear is pretty simple just plug it in and go; going from 100KW to 500KW isn't quite the same thing.   I would like to see the hashrate stabilize north of 50 TH/s for more than a week and some communication on the plan to migrate to 2nd gen.
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