I have no idea about the FGPA miner apps out there, but Ill take your word for it. That said, it might actually be a good idea to make much smaller chips than X6500s and the like. Particularly if you can cram 8 or more on a board.


The fact that you are guaranteed to get a working chip and in relatively short time and with very little possible surprises when it comes to bugs, performance, power consumption, yields etc. All of that is very much unlike full custom designs. As for convincing VCs; they may not even care what a bitcoin is, all you need to convince them off is that there is a sizable market for energy efficient SHA2 hashing and you have a product that will outperform the established competition by triple digit numbers.


True that. Still, turnaround times Altera promises make this an extremely manageable risk compared to most semicon projects.  I also think the market is big enough for 2 or more players. IMO the real victims of a fierce competition here will be miners getting stuck with one generation after another of devices that are no longer profitable.

That sounds a whole lot better. Id encourage you to make things like that much more clear on the site before people are actually signing up. Ill look in to it, thx.

No, If you mine at a loss hoping bitcoin prices will increase then you are doing it wrong. The sensible approach is to buy bitcoins with dollars rather than with more dollars in electricity and hardware.

I doubt you can do that; but even if you could, if your goal is only bitcoin mining, you would probably be better served by taking open fpgaminer and 'hardcopying' that. Whatever BFL did to make their product more flexible is almost certainly at the expense of speed and power efficiency.

Honestly, if I had serious doubts about BFL's claims, Id be talking to some people right now to make a "hardcopy" for bitcoin mining.  (Oh, and then Id set up a rubbish website and accept preorders and bait goat in to a bet to finance half my production costs!)

If the numbers I hear left and right are only ball park accurate, its really a no-brainer and Im surprised some of the FPGA savvy people here are not investigating this course, or at least not talking about it. Unless you are wealthy, it will require VC funding, but that shouldnt be very hard as this is a really low risk venture.

+1 for a simple small splash screen. It often takes 5+ seconds on my machine before the UI shows up and Im never sure if its launching or not. Making it optional is fine by me, but set it on by default.

As for it getting in the way, it doesnt have to float on top of all other windows.

Surely you meant to say thats your Skycoin/buck address  

Not sure what the SHS list is.. but this is on their website:

5. Do your products fall under US encryption export control classification?

Yes, the BitForce SHA256 processor is properly classified under the US Bureau of Industry and Security export control.  Our export control restriction prohibits the export of our products to AT designated countries as specified by the US Department of Commerce.  If you need clarification on your ability to purchase our products, please contact us for review

Is that what you meant?

Inaba can you just ask them whats underneath the heatsink? FPGA, Structured asic or asic?
They may or may not answer it, but it doesnt hurt asking.

Some more info on means of deposit would also be welcome as its unclear to me. Is the only way transferring money to an Australian bank account? My bank (EU zone) charges me an arm and a leg for that, and on top of that you seem to charge another $15 for it (and then transaction fees obviously). Did I get that right?

Switching over to tiny small black boxes are you

Considering most people have trouble being operationally profitable with GPU mining, thats of course the proverbial sauropoda in the room. Unless have very cheap or free electricity, the choice is between spending $600 and losing more every month or spending $700 and being operationally profitable.

Disclaimer: I have no idea what Im talking about.

With that out of the way, would it be possible (or even a good idea) to have all clients store the most recent blocks + a random subset, say 5% of the blockchain? The entire network would still hold countless copies of the blockchain, and as the network (and blockchain) grows you could reduce the subset each client has.

So you are telling me its hard to believe a company would invest $200k in this while you would be willing to bet $100k that they did not? ROFL

For the money you claim you were willing to bet, BFL could almost produce those chip! Think about it, even if BFL had intended for this to be a scam, they could have accepted your bet and actually produced 1000 s-asics nearly for free!

Thats how clueless you are.

?
Its not rocketscience.  You just download some opensource fgpaminer for altera, you pick up the phone and call Altera. You send them the code and say you want x1000 Hardcopy chips. You pay their price. You receive s-asics. Im barely simplifying.

As far as "designing" chips go, it really doesnt get any easier. By far the hardest part is what several guys on this board have already done by designing fpga miner apps (not too mention PCBs, software etc). You will have to make some minor adjustments, but the bulk of the work implementing that in a structured asic is what altera does for you. Thats the hole point of a structured asic, its literally a "hard copy" of an FPGA app, and those already exist. It only costs money, no magic involved.

BTW, I suspect BFL didnt take this easy approach, I suspect they made their own FPGA design to allow flexibility for other applications besides bitcoin mining, but you could do it like that.

Next time you may want to read up before offering $100.000 bets.

BTW, found some info on timings for Hardcopy:
http://www.altera.com/devices/asic/hardcopy-asics/about/hrd-development-methodology.html

From FPGA to working silicon in 7 weeks. No bad.

Yawn. Pray tell Goat, what kind of "failed" chips could one use to achieve 1GH/s @ 20W? And what makes you think s-asic's could not?

Why assume $3? At current prices and difficulty it will take 9.5 months
http://bitcoinx.com/profit/index.php?hashrate=1050&cost=600&electricity=0.15&power=20&months=12.0000&decline=1.00&blockcoins=0

Of course difficulty is likely to go up if everyone starts buying these boxes, and BTC price, well who knows.

IMO if no one else comes out with a substantially better product in the next 12-18 months, you have a fair chance of making a profit, but it its not without risk and does require some assumptions. Unlike GPUs, you will have a hard time reselling these boxes if difficulty explodes due to asics or some other breakthrough.

The idea is that you wouldnt price your item as costing 10 BTC or $25, but 10 "basket" (someone pitch me a good name ).
If bitcoin price goes up or down by 50%, the actual price of your product would still fluctuate, but only by 25% since half of the basket consists of fiat currencies. So you wouldnt have to adjust your prices as frequently and/or you diminish the volatility risk by half if you dont adjust your prices. 

If your business likes to keep +- half the revenue in bitcoin or does a similar percentage of its purchases and expenses in bitcoin, you would almost never have to adjust prices. So its simply an intermediary step, something inbetween denominating prices in dollar and denominating  btc. If/when BTC prices become more stable and/or business start buying their goods more in BTC than $, you could drop it, but thats still a loooong way off.

BTW, its not only merchants Im thinking off, its all kinds of transactions, also person to person.

Looks like a problem with the block chain database. Same problem as here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=30729.0

On ubuntu, those files are stored in ~/.bitcoin
Try deleting everything there except your wallet.dat and redownload the blockchain.

Also, if the wallet.dat was encrypted with 0.5, I suspect 0.4 might not be able to read it, so do the above using 0.5.

unless you have free electricity, its still a pretty awful deal compared to the butterfly single board, which is looking more and more legit.

@Inaba
Can you try and make some pictures in macro mode that makes the print on the asics readable? Im curious to find out what they are, even though its probably mundane like IO and USB. Id just like to confirm there are no custom asics on there other than what is perhaps under those heatsinks (still standing by my structured asic guess).

@everyone wanting to buy truckloads of thees things
Fair warning; a few months ago almost no one believed this level of performance/w was possible. Do keep in mind its entirely possible in 6 or 12 months something else will be released that blows the socks of this bitforce box. If nothing else, an asic implementation could easily achieve another order of magnitude performance/w jump. You better be breaking even on your purchase by the time that happens. I can see why people would want to take the risk of buying one or a few of these (they do look sexy) , but think twice before you spend your retirement fund on a farm of these boxes.