Test

test

Is there a node on the network I can connect to ?

When ghash.io just started, Alex one of the authors of the pool in Ukraine, created an account for us called "bioinfo". We have used this account only occasionally for prototype hardware and small batches of miners but over months a significant amount of BTC has been accumulated on the account.  The management of ghash.io accounts has been taken over by cex.io . Beginning of 2014 we have create an additional account "bioinfobank" with the same email address.

In June we detected that we can no longer login to the old "bioinfo" account that was still in use. On June 8th we got this reply from Daniel (cex.io support). "We have found that you have multiple accounts registered to the same email address, please use individual emails for most reliable account management. Your account has been frozen, please be patient while we investigate why your account was frozen." Few days later cex.io request personal KYC data from me even though it was not a private account and it was never created for a private person. I sent all documents but refused to send a picture of me holding a photo ID. In general I would never agree to provide my personal data to a dubious institution because of many potential ways to illegally exploit it and I would never mine on a pool that requires KYC but this was an old account. cex.io continued to refuse to provide access to the account so I went in person to the London Coinsummit conference that was sponsored by cex.io and talked with Jeffrey Smith (Chief Information Officer j.smith@cex.io) who promised to look at this issue. I emailed him after the conference again but I have never received a reply.

Did anybody else had his funds seized on cex.io ? Please send me private messages.

PicoStocks has decided to expand its shares portfolio and purchase shares from CoinTerra Inc. Users interested in evaluation and revenue sharing are invited to place bids on the PicoStocks platform until 2013-10-07 24:00 CET (today midnight, Central European Time).

About CoinTerra (http://cointerra.com/)

CoinTerra is at the stage of tape out of a 28nm chip for BTC mining (Global Foundries, 28nm HPP node, FCBGA Package, 1.4GHz clock frequency yielding a minimum of 500 GH/s per chip, operated at 0.765V). The first products based on this chip will be shipped in December. Current value of the company is estimated at 20M USD (pre-money valuation). The company has 16 425 293 outstanding shares. The company offers shares at 1.2176 USD per share, which was translated to 0.01 BTC.

IPO* page: https://picostocks.com/stocks/view/31

The original idea was to position the RasPI like this: http://imgur.com/TegDpOQ but we have problems to get connectors that are high enough above the board. To operate the board we rotated the connector and connected RasPI in an awkward way (http://imgur.com/jV1iis9). We will fix this later but even if You decide to use cables it would be better to reserve more space in front of the M-board for the RasPI.

=> put the fans on the opposite side.

So its $1k to cool this container. Sinks and fans will be cheaper. What is the business model for the fluid ?

What is the cost of a gallon ?

We wanted to send out samples this week but we ran out of chips too fast. It is crucial to estimate the yield of the chip production [number of bad chips] before we assemble mining boards with more than 1 chip. There is a huge difference between 1% broken chips and 3% broken chips if for example 16 chips are placed on 1 board. To assess the error rate we had to treat 1000 chips using the same procedure. This left only a very small amount of chips for independent testers. These were selected by bitfury in advance and will receive few chips in coming days (we start sending tomorrow).

We will have more chips in 2 weeks though and we are ready to sent samples after that. However we can not send the whole production lot as samples to all requests we get. We have to introduce restrictions / barriers for requests otherwise we spend our time packaging small packages and send them around the world. To cover our handling expenses and shipping costs we will provide 5 chips in exchange for 1 BTC, AND we will not ship more than 5 chips to 1 address. Users who present interesting results will receive more chips as part of a separate collaboration deal. We are mostly interested in:
1. getting high hash rates from the chips
2. producing low cost mining devices
3. operating the chips in daisy chain (string) to cut on power regulator costs. [this will be explained later by bitfury]

I will write more about the chip sample program in the next week.

The total hashing power in chips (1.5GH/s per chip) allocated to the mine that are currently being packaged exceeds 104TH/s. We don't know the yield, but we expect no problems with the chips. We have to collect the chips from 2 packaging companies though. We will either assemble everything in USA or 50% in USA and the rest in EU depending on the offers we get from PCB assembling plants. Chips will arrive after the 7th of July from one company and beginning of July ( ) from the other. PCBs will be ready before that. The assembly of PCBs can take more than a week though :-( So we may start mining in the 3rd week of July. The installation of the assembled PCBs will be fast (1-2 days) and the data center(s) will be prepared for this.
We hope to have a prototype version of the mining device beginning of next week (>1TH/s). This device will be assembled using the small amount of chips we got in advance. We will use it to tune the mining system. We plan solo mining.

We made a big mistake assuming that the packaging of chips will not introduce substantial delays. Instead of preparing the boards in advance based on simulated (guessed) parameters of the chips we have focused this month on implementation of contingency plans for the packaging delays. We hope the investors will be satisfied anyway with the results, due to lower than estimated competition (network hash rate).

however our installation costs are substantially higher than expected due to many express production contracts (expedited packaging, PCB production or assembly is many times more expensive than if prepared in advance).

=> we will sell shares next week (at market price) to get funds for additional expenses. I have no idea how many but most likely not more than 5000 shares.

We have also no plans yet for future exploitation of the chips. We will work on the plans when the mine is deployed.

VDD => lets's forget the IOREF line.

The current chips are in 7x7 QFN48 package and the die is 3.78x3.78. We are trying to find ways to reduce the inductance on (length of) the package bonds and going to a 6x6 package is an option. Another option would be to create a multi chip package or a chip scale package that would add more capacitance closer to the die. Your ideas on that would be welcome.

We will compile a list of tester early next week.

We will start sending chips beginning of next week. Probably Monday. I will try to give more detailed info about this tomorrow.

Sales price is irrelevant. Look at production costs per GH. Knowing chip costs You will see that the additional hardware cost is very important.

but You forget the cost of other components on the board. You can pay $4 per Watt in hardware. If You account for this , having a low power chip generates significant additional cost savings.

I mean hardware costs [BOM, PCB, PSU, cooling, ...]

...

Bitfury was talking about hardware cost per 1 Watt ($4 per Watt).

How do You get $0.1 ($0.4) per Watt ?

"198 megawatts of power."
"Microsoft (MSFT) will invest $500 million in the new data center in the Chicago suburb of Northlake, Ill."

You want to spend that much ? :-)

How much total power do You need for the 30 / 1000 PH ? Where do You think You can get this power ?
Most data centers I know are limited by power.

...

Currently ~100 MWatt is used for BTC mining [assuming only GPU exists and there are no FPGA and ASIC miners]. Powering 1000 PH with this would be difficult (impossible now, but possible with low voltage 28nm ASIC).

If You have SPI at 1.2V - 1.8V You can start communicating without shifter.