Hello, I'm having trouble accessing devtome.com reliably. I can load most pages, but I am not able to log in without it timing out. Is anyone else experiencing this, or is it a local problem?

Defnetly interesting. maybe you come up with a concept to reuse old FPGAs as well. Like all those spartan boards out there (without memory) could be used in a chain to work with scrypt?! (Just guessing here, i don't know much about this)

>1. Do you think the market and community is ready for FPGA Litecoin?
Yes.

>2. Is there definite interest in FPGA Litecoin machines? Would you buy one if the price was reasonable? What is reasonable?
Would definitely buy some. Maybe $2k worth. And a reasonable price would be $1 per 1.0 - 1.5KH/s (If power use was low)

>3. Would you pre-order one to support first round funding for prototyping and first wave production?
Probably not. One month wait at most. Just cause I've already waited once with BFL, and don't care to do it again. If you're going to hold my money, I'd rather use that money to build a GPU rig and run it for a few months. Then sell off the parts for the money to buy a working one that is ready to ship.

Each core is basically a 7970. Take the speeds of a 7970, and double it. @ 1100MHz, expect ~1.3GH/s.

One of the best things about altcoins is they are mostly still "under the radar", for example how many miners even merged-mine namecoin, how many also merge devcoin, how many also merge ixcoin? Not a lot, right? Yet enoguh that all of those are a bit difficult for a newbie to mine at home easily.

But I0coin, GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld, aha, so few people include them in their merge that they are ridiculously low difficulty. Hopefully there will be some under the radar coins for years yet, so that newbies always have some coin that they can quetly mine at home for at least a few months before the big miners spoil the fun by driving the difficulty up.

However, a lot of those low difficulty coins are basically waiting for ASICs, they have been waiting a year for ASICs, they would have built huge FPGA farms if they had not constantly been told an ASIC would be shipped in four to six weeks.

So once people really can buy an off the shelf ASIC, shipped the same day you order it kind of off the shelf, maybe the main change will be people will no longer realistically be able to mine the easiest, under-the-radar coins using CPUs, GPUs or even (except litecoin type coins) FPGAs, and instead will need to buy themselves a $150 or so (cheaper than many/most GPUs) ASIC device for the fun at home tiny little hobby-miner experience.

By then the people who are mining BBQcoins, GRouPcoins, Tenebrix, CoiLedCoins, GeistGeld and such with CPUs right now might  well be quite well-to-do!

-MarkM-

well, has it sold yet?

Exactly - you are limiting your buying audience when you do that..

GL with sale and all, but don't get butthurt when not accepting escrow is pointed out..

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So I'd be very interested in the Litecoin mining gear - especially FPGA kit that consumes very little power. I have the risk appetite for this game as I've already shown, but the ASIC situation has me very wary of allocating further capital at Bitcoin mining equipment. I'm bored of GPUs and having my main house sweltering through winter at over 30 deg C with the windows open in winter (!!!!), and whilst a fancy rack of tens of GPUs can be used *right now*, I've also paid the electricity bills for a couple of quarters of constant use of such devices. They have very very substantial operating costs. A fancy FPGA assembly with 25-100 modular boards, whilst fun in terms of geek-appeal, also has the big benefit of not costing significant amounts of money to run.

Finally (phew...) - is there something genuinely innovative and unique to your approach that gives you no competition, so that I should be seriously starting the process of considering allocation in your direction? What is the barrier preventing my existing cluster of Spartan-6 FPGAs being repurposed with cheap plug-in auxiliary boards and a new assembly plus bitstream (I won't play Internet Engineer, I'll simply ask my old college mate who does this for real, at a senior level - but I assume there's *some* hack possible to give additional working memory to my Ztex 1.15x boards... my 1.15d boards already have more resources to begin with though).

Would your boards have fallback value too? Litecoin aren't worth much right now, so if your approach resembles the BTC experience where the FPGA units have around the same performance as a mid-range GPU but consume less than 1/10th the power, but cost more than the GPU up front, as a business case the time horizon is quite far away. This risk becomes more acceptable if the devices have intrinsic value (can be repurposed, or worst case, the chips recycled). Even better would be the ability to mine Bitcoin at low power, when transaction fees are the main mining income from *that* particular currency, if LTC doesn't work out.

I once had a couple of thousand LTC floating around before my pool arranged auto-trade for BTC, and now the pool has stopped merged mining I've renewed my interest in LTC and have set up a few test rigs for 400-500khash. However, with the price of electricity, I want to be 100% FPGA and ASIC by the end of Q2. It's only a small operation after all, and I don't want the significant ongoing cost, heat and noise of GPU rigs.


Seems though I have a choice - stick to Bitcoin, big risk, 'pre-order' nonsense with ASICs... or consider the first application of FPGA tech for the LTC blockchain. The fact that I've already lost on an ASIC 'pre-order' makes the BFL option rather unpalatable. But I'd like to keep mining - on a socioeconomic level, cryptocurrencies are a big deal to me philosophically, and part of me (less rationally) likes the 'silver to BTC gold' analogy of LTC. I'll be keeping an eye on this - when you're ready to take beta-level investors then I'd be interested. I'm no VHDL guru but I ported Stefan's (Ztex) toolchain to Mac OS X 64-bit 10.6.8 a while back, so am competent hacking the software side of things.